The fastest processors of Q4 1999 were the Athlon 750MHz and the P-III 800MHz, IIRC.

Is a Duron the same as an Athlon?

^Duron is to Athlon as Celeron is to P3.

If it's 1999 and you're really trying to fit that year, PIII 800 or Athlon 750 as mentioned above. Geforce 256 was 2000*, and a SoundBlaster Live would be a good sound card.
I'm pretty sure 10-20 gigs was as big as they got in 99, and ATA-100 with either super high spec new or not available yet. Just get what works really- trying to find dated hard drives is hard due to failure rates and data security trashing a lot of them.
I suggest you try and find a PIII over 700, and then a TNT2 (Not an M64) and if you can pair it with a Voodoo 2 (pref SLi, always owns) you'll be set. You can always lower the clock to better fit the time but honestly you're best just finding what you can and using better dated parts as you come across them. Trying to build a whole dated system on the spot requires either insane luck or a lot of money.

*Launched in late 1999 but that was the SDRAM model, the DDR model didn't come out until 2000 and it's better to see it as the start of the generation of Geforce-Geforce 4 cards starting in 2000 and then the TNT2 as the end of the Riva-TNT-TNT2 lineage.

Ok sweet I got an ass load of 20GB HDD Drives that work really well.

archsan wrote:

^Duron is to Athlon as Celeron is to P3.

So theirs less cache then and clocked low?

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

archsan wrote:

^Duron is to Athlon as Celeron is to P3.

So theirs less cache then and clocked low?

Except that Duron didn't suck and were a good buy back in the day, people absolutely loved overclocking them.

Yes, much less cache and lower clocks. For low-wattage servers and entry level computers.
They also first shipped in 2000 :p

E: That's why people loved Celerons too silly.

If you find a motherboard from 1999, the speed of the IDE channels will give you an idea of interface speeds during that time. Do your 20GB drives have manufacture dates on them? That will give you another clue...if you're really intent on keeping your parts from 1999, that is. 😉

edit: Ultra ATA 66 was introduced in 1999. Read first sentence here and look at article date:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/543

Now what was the fastest fsb at the time was it 133fsb for the p3 and 200 for the Athlon or 100fsb?

133 was the fastest universally as of 1999 I think. It wasn't until DDR/RDRAM that you got faster. (Except overclocking.)

I picked up a Diamond Viper V770 which is a 32MB AGP card running the nVidia Riva TNT2 chip. It's in an older ASUS P2B motherboard, but it rocks pretty hard for this Windows 98 build (which I'm actually typing on right now using Firefox 2.0!). I got it off of Ebay for $10 USD. CRAZY! The Voodoo2 SLI cost me $76, and that's just the cards. I had to cough up another $10 for the SLI cable and around $15 for the VGA pass-through cable. So $100 out the door just for the Voodoo2 setup. And since I tried to swap out with an existing Diamond Monster 3D II 8MB card, I can't get the STB cards to work stable and consistently. I just put the Monster back in and it works flawlessly. Then agian, I AM only running a Pentium II 350MHz in mine. It was originally ordered for me back in 1999 while I was in college. I got the minimum processor that would get me 100MHz bus and RAM speeds because I knew it would help performace in games without me spending a small fortune at the time.

So if you want a build, let's list the stuff you want. Motherboard, Processor, RAM, Hard Drives, Optical Drive (CD-ROM), Case, Power Supply, Graphics Card, Sound Card.

For me, when I spec'd my system in 1999 in college, I knew motherboards still had ISA slots and that's where your money is for old legacy DOS games. It would have been a fight to get a PCI sound card to work right in those games and my MB only came with 4x PCI slots anyway. That gave me 2x ISA slots open to use. Might as well, right? I had no idea at the time that the Creative Labs AWE64 Gold ISA card I bought at the time would be such a beloved sound card among audio enthusiasts for doing music work including MIDI. It had 8MB of onboard memory for soundfonts. I honestly never used it, but that card was a BEAST with any DOS or Windows game. I never had problems. In my current re-build, I had to get the closest thing to avoid spending $150+ to get another one....I got an AWE64 4MB version....like a step down. But it's ok. Works like a champ too.

You probably don't need to bother with a floppy drive unless you really have a need for reading disks. Once I flashed my BIOS to the latest version, I removed the floppy drive from my system entirely. Everything I need is either stored on my 40GB D: drive or can be copied to the system via my home network from my Windows 10 PC (doesn't work the other way, unfortunately). I even copied the contents of my Windows 98 CD to my D: drive. It's really just copying the Win98 folder off the CD. Since I only had the C: installed in the system when I installed Windows 98 on it, it assigned D: as the CD-ROM. Now that the 2nd HDD is in, IT has D: and the CD-ROM drive gets E:. This way, any time I have to do a driver install - you know how they always ask for the Windows 98 CD....now it doesn't. It automatically looks for D:\Win98, finds it, and loads whatever the hell it wants without bothering me or wasting my time. It's very handy, actually.

Just giving you ideas for your build. Especially wanted you to know what I paid for my video cards for my Win98 rebuild.

Eh, someone just posted before I could post mine. Hmmm. If it was me, I'd go with the Coppermine P3 with a 133 MHz bus. That's really going to smooth out data swaps from the CPU and the RAM. Plus the Coppermines had 100% speed CPU Cache, not like the slower Katmai P3 versions. Find PC-133 RAM...256MB would be a LOT of RAM for a Win98 build and the games at that time really only asked for 16MB or 32MB of RAM at the time. I'm running 256MB PC-100 in my rebuild here and it's smooth as silk, doesn't run out of space, even THIS WEB PAGE works properly in Firefox 2.0! WOOT!

Happy hunting!

Ebay gets a little pricey on some of the stuff, i got this guy that i buy old computers off of and he's got 20+ computers that are all p3, 486 and a lot of p1's so ill wait and see what i can get, he sells all of the xp and under machine for $10 and if i buy a few from him he throws one in for free.

As for the voodoo stuff i have a few cards in other builds that i like.

I want to get two matching Geforce TNT2 cards and put the Athlon 750mhz up against a Pentium III 800EB

So far i don"t have anything except two 30GB quantium fireball lm's, so i will be collecting slowly, but surly.

I highly suggest Amibay, it's where I got my Geforce 256. Put up an ask post for your specific parts.

So TNT2 ultra is 16MB with 128 bit and the 32MB is a 64 bit, is that right?

SRQ wrote:

If it's 1999 and you're really trying to fit that year, PIII 800 or Athlon 750 as mentioned above. Geforce 256 was 2000*, and a […]
Show full quote

If it's 1999 and you're really trying to fit that year, PIII 800 or Athlon 750 as mentioned above. Geforce 256 was 2000*, and a SoundBlaster Live would be a good sound card.
I'm pretty sure 10-20 gigs was as big as they got in 99, and ATA-100 with either super high spec new or not available yet. Just get what works really- trying to find dated hard drives is hard due to failure rates and data security trashing a lot of them.
I suggest you try and find a PIII over 700, and then a TNT2 (Not an M64) and if you can pair it with a Voodoo 2 (pref SLi, always owns) you'll be set. You can always lower the clock to better fit the time but honestly you're best just finding what you can and using better dated parts as you come across them. Trying to build a whole dated system on the spot requires either insane luck or a lot of money.

*Launched in late 1999 but that was the SDRAM model, the DDR model didn't come out until 2000 and it's better to see it as the start of the generation of Geforce-Geforce 4 cards starting in 2000 and then the TNT2 as the end of the Riva-TNT-TNT2 lineage.

I'd go Pentium III 800, Geforce 256SDR (its 1999 and smokes Voodoo 3/TNT2/Rage 128 Pro, 256mb PC133, Windows 2000, 40gb SCSI Raid 0 10k drives.

This would have been the fastest system possible at the time. And would have blown everyone's mind 🤣.

All of those parts existed in 1999 on December 31st 1999

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

So TNT2 ultra is 16MB with 128 bit and the 32MB is a 64 bit, is that right?

no if your dead set on TNT2 you want a 32mb TNT2 Ultra.

Everything but the M64 is 128bit memory, but honestly get a 256 SDR

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

So TNT2 ultra is 16MB with 128 bit and the 32MB is a 64 bit, is that right?

There are some 32mb Ultras but they are not the easiest cards to find except for the Viper 770 being the most common 128bit card and it is a good one. The 64bit cards are ok but they are clearly slower as they only got half the bandwidth, at least they are cheap the pci models don't cost an arm and a leg.

Just look for a viper 770 and you might get lucky with one costing less than $10 shipped.

I dunno see if you can find this

Falcon Northwest Special Edition Maxi Gamer Xentor 32 SE.