A low clocked pentium 4 will do.

It all depends on what, exactly, you want to run.

Is there a specific "late win98 game" that you think will take advantage of "a little more horsepower" that you can't run perfectly well on a newer PC?

Where do you live? In the US you can easily get a brand new SE440BX-2 for $40, which would accept your P3-800 nicely (100MHz FSB version, I assume?).

P3-800 combined with a good graphics card (GeForce or better) is more than enough for all win 98 games (that's up to about 2002), practically speaking. Or an even better graphic card for higher resolution and FSAA maybe, but faster CPU isn't really needed for those old games.

Otherwise you can always look for a bargain P4 pick-up deals, esp. if turns out much cheaper for you. Intel 865PE chipset is a popular and reliable one.

So a SE440BX-2 will house a P3-800 with a 133mhz FSB? Wasn't aware of that, live in the US so shouldn't be a problem to find.

Currently have a Geforce 3ti 200 128mb AGP for the graphics. Looking to run 1998-2002 era games, Star Wars BF1, Madden 2001, Half-Life 2 and etc.

Locally there is a shop selling refurbished Dell GX260's and the like with low end P4's, figured it would be a cheap easy route to take.

buckeye wrote:

So a SE440BX-2 will house a P3-800 with a 133mhz FSB?

Well, just the 100MHz FSB is _officially_ supported, though technically any Coppermine ~1.7V would fit. I'm running a 800EB/133 with my ASUS P3B-F but of course being a BX board, the AGP is overclocked.

buckeye wrote:

So a SE440BX-2 will house a P3-800 with a 133mhz FSB? Wasn't aware of that, live in the US so shouldn't be a problem to find.

Currently have a Geforce 3ti 200 128mb AGP for the graphics. Looking to run 1998-2002 era games, Star Wars BF1, Madden 2001, Half-Life 2 and etc.

Locally there is a shop selling refurbished Dell GX260's and the like with low end P4's, figured it would be a cheap easy route to take.

Those seem like games that would generally work fine on newer systems. If you want compatibility, just about anything from the past 10 years with XP installed would likely run them better than a P3 and GF3.

If you're going for a period correct system, that's different I guess... but something like Half-Life 2 would be quite slow on a low end P4 and a Geforce 3. Battlefront is from 2004 as well and would certainly not run it's best on CPUs from 1999-2002. To put it into perspective, the Geforce 6800 series and the second wave of Athlon 64s (the more modern Socket 939 models) were the cream of the crop in 2004 and they are several times faster than any of the parts mentioned so far in this thread.

EDIT: Also, its worth noting that Battlefront was available for the original Xbox as well, which was powered by a Pentium 3 733 and a Geforce 4 equivalent... and it ran the game at 640x480, and I'd guess it wasn't too fast either.

Half-Life 2 is a 2004 game, well, it ran on xbox but that was a heavily optimized version, i tried to run it on a Pentium 3 Tualatin 1.4GHz with GeForce4 Ti 4200, it was playable but a 800 MHz CPU wouldn't be sufficient.

Also, keep in mind you'll be running the modern Steam client in order to play Half Life 2.

For those games just use a modern system they are all win 7 compatible

archsan wrote:

buckeye wrote:

So a SE440BX-2 will house a P3-800 with a 133mhz FSB?

Well, just the 100MHz FSB is _officially_ supported, though technically any Coppermine ~1.7V would fit. I'm running a 800EB/133 with my ASUS P3B-F but of course being a BX board, the AGP is overclocked.

It's an Intel board though. I don't think a 133FSB CPU will even POST, Intel slot-1 boards adhere strictly to specs.
On most boards you'd at minimum have the option of running it at 600/100FSB, but I don't think Intel boards will even concede that much. If the board detects the CPU requesting 133FSB it will simply refuse to POST.
They're totally solid boards, and definitely worth consideration at $40, but they don't entertain anything outside of official specs. The only workaround would be to pin mod the CPU to look like a 600/100, or get a different CPU.

^You're right of course, it's best to stick with 100 FSB esp with Intel BX boards (as for POST, I think it will default to 100 FSB even with 133 FSB chips -- or do they even still use jumpers...).

This is somewhat academic but fellow vogons member Kamerat did run a 866EB at 132.7MHz using CPUFSB:
Re: The All-amazing super-de-douper SuperPi thread!
Slotket was used though so FCPGA not slot 1 CPU.

However for OP, Star Wars BF1 and Half-Life 2 (both 2004 release!), as has been pointed out, are better run on a much faster machine (I would categorize them into XP territory). At least a 2+GHz P4 is in the right range, in terms of requirement and period correctness. 😀

Pentium 4 is a really cheap way to build a Win 98 machine ... lots of choices for cheap motherboards for Socket 478. You just have to be careful with the AGP slot if you want to put something like a Voodoo 5 in, as these require 3.3v slot and the P4 boards i've seen only supported 1.5v cards.

SBB wrote:

Pentium 4 is a really cheap way to build a Win 98 machine ... lots of choices for cheap motherboards for Socket 478. You just have to be careful with the AGP slot if you want to put something like a Voodoo 5 in, as these require 3.3v slot and the P4 boards i've seen only supported 1.5v cards.

Not all, I've seen a Voodoo 5 in an original 850 chipset board with RD-Ram.

You can buy Pentium III with 133 bus on Socket 370, for example some with 866, 933 or 1000 Mhz clock. Boards with i815 are good for windows gaming with SBLive!. But for some 1998-2002 games will be also good some Pentium Dual Core or Core 2 Duo, Morrowind will slowing even on good Pentium IV.

Tiger433 wrote:

You can buy Pentium III with 133 bus on Socket 370, for example some with 866, 933 or 1000 Mhz clock. Boards with i815 are good for windows gaming with SBLive!. But for some 1998-2002 games will be also good some Pentium Dual Core or Core 2 Duo, Morrowind will slowing even on good Pentium IV.

Morrowind is a terrible example, bethesda can make a great RGP right until it gets time to code the game engine. They are famous for poorly optimized game engines, Morrowind bogs down on modern I7 chips. Morrowind is the Crysis of RGP's except instead of killing video cards, it makes cpu's cry in pain.

I wouldn't worry about the need for 133 MHz. Stick with 100, it works great, is super stable and plenty of performance.

And like mentioned, you can grab a Pentium 4 system as a cheap an easy-to-find alternative. It can be down-clocked and P4 chips can be had as slow as 1.4 GHz on supported boards.

One thing not mentioned yet is Win98 doesn't support Hyper threading so don't bother getting a HT system or disable it if you do
Otherwise I see no problem using a P4 for a Win98 PC, 99% of games don't have speed issues and you'll always have extra speed if you need.

Slot based P3's are more like the ideal cross over between DOS/Win9x then the perfect 9x PC IMHO

HL2 was demanding with max settings 1024x768, you could use something like a 6800 or x800 for it, and a fast CPU (like A64 s754), and 1GB of ram...

and right now I would think the steam version is even more demanding than the 2004 version was (lots of updated stuff over the years)

but, if you lower settings... I remember having decent framerate with a Geforce 2 MX 400 64MB in it.

a fast P3 + GF3 ti could be OK, but... quite a bit behind what you get with hardware from 2004/2005.
(I had a friend playing in 2004 with a p3 1.1 Coppermine and GF4 ti and it was playable, the Xbox version I also played quite a bit, but the levels are split, resolution and detail is greatly reduced and framerate unstable limited to 30 max, when I played the game with a ti 200 + 2.2GHz AXP and 512MB of ram it was way better than the Xbox version, the Xbox main problem was lack of ram for this game)