I take it that the "recent" dos games mean the last breed of dos games. All will run nicely in a basic Pentium 166 or even a P133 (one of my classic systems). Add in a S3 Virge DX and a Voodoo 1 card. That will be more than enough.
Of course, when it comes to tweaking, a Pentium III 450 or 500Mhz, 2 x Voodoo2 in SLI, a Riva TNT2 Ultra AGP, AND with a PCI Rendition V2200 or PCI S3 Virge 4MB GX and AWE64 Gold will be one of the "dream machines" of the dos era. (You need to have a KVM switch or manually switch the vga cable to the PCI or AGP output.)
The advantage of a Pentium P54c or P55c is the ability to fall back into a "AT" mode with the internal cache disabled using ICD.EXE (which may not work on higher systems or cause crashes), to bring down the speed to play older games. And most of these boards have the Turbo switch headers to disable the turbo to a 486 DX2 class speed.
And the PIII system can double-up as a very good and stable Win98SE/WinME/Win2K based machine, in addition to running the dos games at max speed. The Verite or Virge card can make use of the propietary engine in supported games (not for performance, but just because the games support these, and you wanna see them anyway. 😀 )
A lot of good things have been said about Voodoo3. It's a definite yes, if you have only one choice in terms of graphics card.
