For where he's going, the obviously "better choice" doesn't matter. What would be better is an actual P3, or an Athlon pre-XP/tbird.

It's just that Williamettes have convenient 1999-esque bottlenecks for anything that doesn't use SSE2 (such as most games made before 2006) and their relatively greater "dump" availability 😀 The bad thing would be the availability of early motherboards that take SDRAM and AGP2x/4x though. A common dump salvage would be to wing it with the installed RDRAM and slap a PCI 3d card in there.

swaaye wrote:

Instead of a Live, I would find a Vortex 2-based card or a Philips Seismic Edge / Acoustic Edge (Thunderbird Avenger). Vortex 2 effectively doesn't support EAX but you get the only good A3D implementation. The Thunderbird chip is a hardware QSound implementation (which supports EAX) and is quite nifty if I might say so. Both do headphone/2 speaker vastly better than Live.

My appreciation of SBLive is pretty low these days because of noisy output that's annoying with headphones and frankly doesn't sound that great in general, and software/hardware stability issues. Audigy 1/2 on Win9x also makes me want to tear my face off with its software install and stability quirks but Audigy 2 in particular sounds a lot nicer than Live.

I bought the original SB Live! with the midi-daughterboard and gold plated jacks all round when it came out. I cannot remember it ever having noisy output, not even on headphones. But I guess there are so many Live! Value cards and similar out there with inferior DACs that helped give it a bad rep. It do remember EAX in Unreal totally blew me away though. It was truly creepy hearing monsters sneaking up on you when moving through tunnels and such. And headphones + EAX in the original "Alien versus Predator", when playing the human campaign... One of the most frightening gaming experiences I can remember. Hearing those xenomorphs all around you, seeing them on the motion scanner, but not being able to see on... Hating Creative Labs is the in thing today, but I think they have gotten a much worse reputation than they deserve.
Not criticizing Vortex 2 cards though, as I've never tried one, and so I'll take people's word for it that they are really good.

carlostex wrote:

An Athlon XP would still be a much better choice, though i'm not sure if boards for that are easy or hard to find.

Costs more, inferior cooler retention (and less likely to be compatible with more modern designs), and less common (especially if you're going for "dump finds"). Also if you go with an older K7 board/platform they can be 5V heavy whereas P4 will work better with modern PSUs (primarily 12V heavy). And Quake 3 still goes like the wind on NetBurst. 😊

P4 also has SSE2, and since there seems to be a perennial desire to run modern operating systems and applications on older machines, it will allow that to work where an AthlonXP will not. 😊

Finally, finding SATA on 478 boards isn't all that uncommon. Later AthlonXP boards may have SATA, but P3 and Athlon boards won't.

alexanrs wrote:

But if you're going NetBurst on Socket 478, wouldn't a Northwood be a better choice?

Willamette doesn't have to be 478, but yes early Northwood is fine too. So is Celeron D. Basically I would just avoid HT where possible (if you have a board that lets you turn it on/off in the BIOS that's also an option), assuming you're going to use Win9x (I've had HT give me grief with booting 9x; turning it off (if possible) solves that problem, but if you're purpose-building the machine for 9x it's easier to just get a chip that doesn't feature HT).

leileilol wrote:

For where he's going, the obviously "better choice" doesn't matter. What would be better is an actual P3, or an Athlon pre-XP/tbird.

More or less. P3 is probably the "right" choice here in terms of efficiency, era-accuracy, etc. But prices have gotten silly in recent years because of the "obviously better choice" nature of the P3. P4s, especially the older ones, tend to be available for next to nothing. And it's unlikely that a few retro hobbyists picking them up will have any impact on the prices, since Intel probably made billions of them. 🤣

There's also an advantage for Quake 3, which seems to be a consistent favorite. Some benchmarks for anyone curious:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel,264-17.html (note that they're using two of the slowest P4 SKUs; remember these scale up to 2GHz on Willamette, and ~3GHz on Northwood)
http://hothardware.com/Reviews/Pentium-4-18GH … -Review/?page=3
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2003/09/23/ath … _vs_pentium_4/5 (scroll for Quake 3; yes those really are Athlon64s)
http://www.anandtech.com/show/1117/10
http://www.anandtech.com/show/818/11
http://www.anandtech.com/show/661/16

Basically P4 is checking all the boxes for me:
- Cheap or free
- Easy to find
- Very serviceable platform, even with modern parts
- Good performance
- Potentially more compatible with multi-boot systems

I agree with obobskivich. The P4 would be the cheaper solution, but then you would have to be careful with the Voodoo 3 AGP. It needs a chipset that is capable of AGP 3.3v. That would be a few boards with some SiS and VIA chipsets like the P4S333.

Personally I would recommend a good 440BX Slot 1 System.

- wide range of CPUs from 233-1400MHz (Celeron, Celeron-T, Pentium 2, Pentium 3, Pentium 3-S, VIA C3 - of course to use anything but regular Slot 1 CPUs at 100MHz FSB you would need modding.)
- stable chipset and great compatibility
- cheap and easy to find
- PCI, AGP and ISA slots

This is my 440BX system:

Intel Celeron 1300MHz (Tualatin SL5VR)
Upgradeware Slot-T Rev 1.1 Adapter
Golden Orb? Fan (NoName)
640MB SDRAM PC100 2x256MB 1x128MB / CL2 2-2-2-8
Asus P2B Rev. 1.12 (BIOS Beta 1014.003)
ATi Rage Fury MAXX 64MB AGP
3Com Etherlink XL PCI 10/100 PCI
Maxtor 15GB HDD PATA 66
Fujitsu MPE3136AH 13.2GB PATA 66
Ensoniq Solo-1 PCI
Creative 3D Blaster Voodoo 2 (12MB) / 1898 PCI
Creative 3D Blaster Voodoo 2 (12MB) / 1798 PCI
Titan - System Exhaust Blower

For a 1999 build and nit a late90/early00 build. You really should look for parts released in 1999.
That said. I would recommend stuff like 440BX or 820 chipsets.
Keep in mind that the 820 chipset is more stable running RD-Ram and not PC-133.
For GFX I would recommend V3-3000 and for the CPU I would recommend P3-800 as it came out in Dec. 99.
In the quest for an 1999 soundcard, there is none really 99 from Creative.
For that you have to look for something like AWE64-Gold or something non creative.
Drives... Well... Nothing really to say, other than check out solutions like those prefered by phill's computer lab.
The case. Get one from 1999 and just use a new PSU in order to be sure that nothing bad happens.
The monitor is something that is up to whatever pleases you.

Hope this little input helps.

brostenen wrote:

In the quest for an 1999 soundcard, there is none really 99 from Creative.

SB Live on Liveware 2.0 is close.

sunaiac wrote:

I would say : - Athlon slot A - 256 MB RAM - GF 256 DDR - Voodoo 2 SLI - SB AWE 64 Gold […]
Show full quote

I would say :
- Athlon slot A
- 256 MB RAM
- GF 256 DDR
- Voodoo 2 SLI
- SB AWE 64 Gold

And yes, I have one like that 😁

It wouldn't be Athlon slot A, actually. The Slot A Athlons had only hit 750 mhz by the end of 1999 and they were the early ones with the external cache that ran slower than the CPU. Thunderbirds and anything faster than 750mhz wouldn't come out until 2000. The fastest CPU for 1999 would have been the 800 mhz Pentium III. The motherboard for the Pentium III were also less problematic than the ones for the Athlon. The Athlon had problems with nVidia video cards, so a GeForce might not even work with it.

Thank you for all the awnsers and sorry i didn't catch up sooner but as you will see i've been busy.

I've read all the posts and took a few things in consideration.
Yes i want a good performing machine, with more or less "era correct" hardware, but i doesn't need to be a beast of a machine.

I was able to get more hardware than what i initially started with as you can see:

Here i have two socket 370 ECS boards, and a total of 7 CPUs (Cyrix III 600Mhz, Celeron 600Mhz, Celeron 766 Mhz, Celeron 800 Mhz, Pentium III 733 Mhz, Pentium III 800 Mhz and a Pentium III 1000 Mhz).
The board on the left was recaped. From the two this was the only one that was able to post even before recapping. Please don't be too punishing about the replacement caps, i know they're a bit bulky but they were what i had avaiable in my parts stock (they're rated at 25 volts witch is never a bad thing, that's why they're a bit bigger). The board on the right might be dead because of one of those motherboard killers PSUs. I need to check the power regulators but if that doesn't work i'll throw it away.

So, with so many cpus i had to test them all 😁

I tested them with a Voodoo 3 3000, a Geforce 256 DDR and a Geforce 3 TI200. I know that only the two first cards are period correct hardware, and i think i'll stick with the Pentium III 800 Mhz and the Voodoo 3 3000. As expected Unreal and unreal engine based games run smooth as silk with terrific image quality so i guess that's what it's going to be.
Now i need to get a beige case (not yellowed), and a nice power supply.

sliderider wrote:

It wouldn't be Athlon slot A, actually. The Slot A Athlons had only hit 750 mhz by the end of 1999 and they were the early ones with the external cache that ran slower than the CPU. Thunderbirds and anything faster than 750mhz wouldn't come out until 2000. The fastest CPU for 1999 would have been the 800 mhz Pentium III. The motherboard for the Pentium III were also less problematic than the ones for the Athlon. The Athlon had problems with nVidia video cards, so a GeForce might not even work with it.

He was just asking what would a good 1999 system be, and to share specs if we have one.
Unless I can't read the title correctly, I think I answered to that.
And I stand by my answer, since it's a setup I'm using to play Q3, diablo 2, UT... currently.
(In 1999 I was actually using a 333MHz P2 + nVidia TNT, as I was so sure that "AMD sux 🤣", but I've grown up)

But yes, the fastest CPU of 1999 is a 800MHz PIII cumine on i820 with RDRAM.
If you don't mind paperlaunched CPUs, that is.

And if you consider that 1999 lasted only 10 days from dec 21 to dec 31, and that everyone was buying 800$ CPUs to play, it is actually a good gaming system for that year.

As for the FUD that forms the end of your post : "OK dude, whatever" 😊
(As if no Intel board ever had pb with geforces ... 😒 )