PhilsComputerLab wrote:

I like testing with Wing Commander, Test Drive 3 and the benchmark pack on my website. For Dos mode I also made a easy to use ms-dos mode.

No msdos mode in Me 🙁 Vogons fooled me into giving it another chance and now I have no msdos 🙁 sigh

Opinions differ, but I use 98 for dos/ windows hybrid projects and only consider ME for pure Windows gaming.

appiah4 wrote:

I have no idea where this notion comes from either. It's probably due to some people using nForce chipsets and ATi cards messing their systems up with nVidia Gpu drivers or something, but I used a GeForce 3 with my Socket A system for a good while and it worked fine.

Vica versa was what I meant.... auto correct.
I use a nforce chipset in my athlon with a ATI and it's stabe even oc.

It might be due to that, but we know that that particular case has nothing to do with VIA, but more to do with nv & Ati 😜

Exactly how 1 spelling error can do so much....
Nvidia + intel
Ati + amd
That's how you build a computer from early 2000 till roughly 2007, I still don't use amd gpu with Intel. The problem was compatibilty and cooling. Geforce cards ran quite hot in the day and combine that with a athlon and you have yourself a heater for a computer.

Tetrium wrote:

Sounds like you want the Tualatin 😁

There is more out there than just the TUSL2-C. Here's a link to a list of s370 boards gathered by the Vogons community. It may come in handy as you search for a Tualatin compatible motherboard.

I will say it's tempting. :3 And thank you so much for that link. I was going crazy trying to track down info from google. I wonder why this page never showed up..? I'll do some more research, and perhaps get something that will satisfy what I need... Then the question becomes where do I find these? Ebay is limited (and bloody expensive, most of these seem to come from Russia)... when I find a board I think will work well, someone has bundled it with meh RAM and a questionable processor and pricing it well over 100$.

psycotrip wrote:

all those games listed will run under windows xp under a core 2 duo, are you looking to run older os such as windows 98 or dos?

I'm most comfortable on 98, ME, and sometimes 2000. It's what feels familiar. Also, it's just my philosophy about retro computing. No sense in using backwards compatibility when you can just get a system that meets the need where it is. I never really enjoyed XP like I did the 9x systems.

appiah4 wrote:

No msdos mode in Me 🙁 Vogons fooled me into giving it another chance and now I have no msdos 🙁 sigh

Was there not a real-mode patch made for ME? I swore there was... I remember trying it on an old laptop.

Richo wrote:

Exactly how 1 spelling error can do so much.... Nvidia + intel Ati + amd That's how you build a computer from early 2000 till r […]
Show full quote

Tetrium wrote:

It might be due to that, but we know that that particular case has nothing to do with VIA, but more to do with nv & Ati 😜

Exactly how 1 spelling error can do so much....
Nvidia + intel
Ati + amd
That's how you build a computer from early 2000 till roughly 2007

The problem was compatibilty and cooling. Geforce cards ran quite hot in the day and combine that with a athlon and you have yourself a heater for a computer.

No, it is not.

I've used 4 AMD + NV systems for several years, all 4 using AMD CPUs (3200+ and 3500+) and NV graphics cards (GF6800 and 7600GS) and all 4 ran pretty much rock-solid.

I've also build several other systems using both AMD CPUs and NV graphics in all sorts of combinations (mostly using those MX's and slower Athlon XPs and Thunderbirds).

There is no such rule that one shouldn't build a rig combining NV and VIA (or AMD) when it comes to building a 2000-2007-vintage rig, nor is there for Intel + Ati. There simply is none.....maybe except for the NV chipsets, but I never used those NV chipsets as I always happened to end up with boards using chipsets from other manufacturers.

The heat argument doesn't seem plausible as well, both NV and Ati cards had (across their entire inventory from low-end to high-end) roughly similar thermal dissipation (with very large difference when going from lowest-budget to highest-end) and netburst had even higher thermal dissipation compared to Athlon and Athlon XP. Compared to graphics cards, chipsets don't put out a lot of heat anyway, so that shouldn't really matter.

Cooling isn't as much of a concern these days as it was back in those days, as cooling solutions have vastly improved (HSFs and system cases in particular).

It might've been some compatibility issue, but I assumed this was when using Ati graphcs cards and NV chipsets. But all my systems which matched NV AGP and AMD CPU were pretty much not with more issues compared to AMD CPUs and Ati AGP. All of these rigs were roughly 2000 to 2007 tech.
So to me, rules such as "don't mix Ati + NV and don't mix Intel + Ati" seem kinda like rubbish to me.

Or maybe I'm missing some vital point here?

Richo wrote:

Exactly how 1 spelling error can do so much.... Nvidia + intel Ati + amd That's how you build a computer from early 2000 till r […]
Show full quote

Exactly how 1 spelling error can do so much....
Nvidia + intel
Ati + amd
That's how you build a computer from early 2000 till roughly 2007

The problem was compatibility and cooling. GeForce cards ran quite hot in the day and combine that with a Athlon and you have yourself a heater for a computer.

Your kidding right? I mean NVidia made AMD chipsets witch were widely popular back in the day. And the Pentium 4's ran just as hot if not hotter than the Athlons.

atariangamer wrote:

Tetrium wrote:

Sounds like you want the Tualatin 😁

There is more out there than just the TUSL2-C. Here's a link to a list of s370 boards gathered by the Vogons community. It may come in handy as you search for a Tualatin compatible motherboard.

I will say it's tempting. :3 And thank you so much for that link. I was going crazy trying to track down info from google. I wonder why this page never showed up..? I'll do some more research, and perhaps get something that will satisfy what I need... Then the question becomes where do I find these? Ebay is limited (and bloody expensive, most of these seem to come from Russia)... when I find a board I think will work well, someone has bundled it with meh RAM and a questionable processor and pricing it well over 100$.

yw 😀

Yes, it certainly does come in handy and that's the main reasons this list was compiled and put into a table 😀

There was to be a similar list of ss7 and s7, but the table never was build (these still is a list on vogonswiki, I guess I must've uploaded it and forgot all about it never having been completed).

atariangamer wrote:

I'm most comfortable on 98, ME, and sometimes 2000. It's what feels familiar. Also, it's just my philosophy about retro computin […]
Show full quote

psycotrip wrote:

all those games listed will run under windows xp under a core 2 duo, are you looking to run older os such as windows 98 or dos?

I'm most comfortable on 98, ME, and sometimes 2000. It's what feels familiar. Also, it's just my philosophy about retro computing. No sense in using backwards compatibility when you can just get a system that meets the need where it is. I never really enjoyed XP like I did the 9x systems.

appiah4 wrote:

No msdos mode in Me 🙁 Vogons fooled me into giving it another chance and now I have no msdos 🙁 sigh

Was there not a real-mode patch made for ME? I swore there was... I remember trying it on an old laptop.

There was some DOS patch for ME, but personally I wouldn't bother, it would give me a good reason to skip using ME and try 98SE for a change 😜

Everyone has their own reasons for building rigs this old.
For me it was mostly the fun of building them, and now I remember we probably already had a couple threads about why we build retro rigs 🤣!
Maybe I can find them, hold on 😜
edit: here it is Kind of missing the point of building machines.

Jade Falcon wrote:

Richo wrote:

Exactly how 1 spelling error can do so much.... Nvidia + intel Ati + amd That's how you build a computer from early 2000 till r […]
Show full quote

Exactly how 1 spelling error can do so much....
Nvidia + intel
Ati + amd
That's how you build a computer from early 2000 till roughly 2007

The problem was compatibility and cooling. GeForce cards ran quite hot in the day and combine that with a Athlon and you have yourself a heater for a computer.

Your kidding right? I mean NVidia made AMD chipsets witch were widely popular back in the day. And the Pentium 4's ran just as hot if not hotter than the Athlons.

Go ahead and try make 4 rigs with identical stats and you will notice a gap in performance on mixed builds.
In early 2000 I had a palomino + nvidia card which performed poorly compared to the same build with an Ati card (I swapped a card from a friend to test it as he had the same problem but with intel) in the end we swapped the cards sInce they were identical in performance and our systems both ran alot better.
Iirc this was due some 'agreement' by nvidia&Intel which was to discourage mixed builds.
The nforce chipset support was also quite poor and ran hot as hell.

sf78 wrote:

firage wrote:

It all depends on how well you can define the titles you want to run to their best quality. Why invest into a Voodoo3 machine if you can do these games better with a Voodoo5 (smoother performance, better filtering quality, etc.).

On the other hand, why pay a premium for a V5 when a similar performance can be had for a lot less with NV/ATI? In fact, you could pretty much buy all the early 00's GF/Radeon cards for the price of a one V5 and experiment a little. Also by 2000 most games were already made for the D3D so a 3Dfx card was becoming obsolete.

Yes, especially true if you can run all of your titles with an even later system that's easier to put together. But in most such cases running many Glide titles (and AA filtering options) in particular is going to mean emulation. (Wrapping, tomato potato.)

My Deschutes PII turned out to be multiplier locked as well and I have no DOS install on the machine so testing for L1/L2 disabled PIII at 66MHz FSB will wait until the weekend 😀

appiah4 wrote:

My Deschutes PII turned out to be multiplier locked as well and I have no DOS install on the machine so testing for L1/L2 disabled PIII at 66MHz FSB will wait until the weekend 😀

Looking forward to your report. 😀

You guys are forgetting to use the most valuable resource we have. The power to explore the past. Here is a super accurate, high end gaming PC build from Q4 of 2000

https://web.archive.org/web/20001110065900/ht … e/high_game_pc/

TL:DR version
CPU: P3 1.0 GHz or Athlon 1.2GHz
MEM: 256MB
MOBO: Asus CUSL2-C or Asus A7V (you will need to recap whatever you pick, no if ands or buts)
Video Card: Geforce 2 Ultra or Radeon DDR/7200 (183MHz with 64MB) or Voodoo 5 5500
Storage: 30GB HDD

The only things I'd change are:

• Bump memory up to 512MB (because why not)
  Swap the IDE spinner for a Sandisk Ultra compact flash card on an adapter (for speed)
  Instead of going era correct for the video card just get a cheap one that matches or is better than the ones above. (Because high end cards cost an arm and a leg these days)

I have only two "2000(ish) machines" in use - 1333MHz Athlon paired with a Radeon 8500 on an Abit KT7, and a 1.4GHz PIII with a GF4 Ti 4200+ V2 SLi on an Abit ST6.

The reason I went with newer video cards on both machines is that I like to play at as high a resolution as possible, preferably 1600x1200, and the 1.4GHz Tualatin + GF4 Ti barely cuts it in DK2 @ that resolution - but the blame lies with the CPU, not the video card (tried using a GF 6600GT - it actually ran worse).

tl;dr - my advice is - if you are building a machine solely for playing 2000ish games, get something a bit over spec so it can handle high resolutions and eye candy.

Gatewayuser200 wrote:

CPU: P3 1.0 GHz or Athlon 1.2GHz MEM: 256MB MOBO: Asus CUSL2-C or Asus A7V (you will need to recap whatever you pick, no if and […]
Show full quote

CPU: P3 1.0 GHz or Athlon 1.2GHz
MEM: 256MB
MOBO: Asus CUSL2-C or Asus A7V (you will need to recap whatever you pick, no if ands or buts)
Video Card: Geforce 2 Ultra or Radeon DDR/7200 (183MHz with 64MB) or Voodoo 5 5500
Storage: 30GB HDD
The only things I'd change are:

• Bump memory up to 512MB (because why not)
  Swap the IDE spinner for a Sandisk Ultra compact flash card on an adapter (for speed)
  Instead of going era correct for the video card just get a cheap one that matches or is better than the ones above. (Because high end cards cost an arm and a leg these days)

Now *that's* what I'm talking about. If I was to go off this spec, I'd get a Tualatin P3 and move to the Asus TUSL2-C. 512MB is a great idea. I'd also probably get a Geforce4 card, because it should handle any DirectX I throw at it. CompactFlash I would follow, too...

With a late socket A board (KT600 or better) you could start out with roughly the specs I listed earlier then if you needed more power you could drop in a Athlon 3200+, more ram, and a geforce FX card and keep on going. I'd recommend the MSI KT6V-LSR.

If you are dead set on a tualatin build just keep in mind it is a complete dead end in terms of power.

EDIT: Kinda misread your thread. Thought you were wanting a Y2K build.
You might want to flip though these when you get a chance.
Q4 2001 High end gaming build - https://web.archive.org/web/20021208193938/ht … icle.php/926141
Q4 2002 High end gaming build - https://web.archive.org/web/20021123014034/ht … cle.php/1492911
Q4 2003 Extreme build - https://web.archive.org/web/20040115053456/ht … cle.php/3102861
Q4 2004 Extreme build - https://web.archive.org/web/20041210074526/ht … 0721_3437441__2

As phil said earlier. The early 2000s saw a huge jump in performance and most games of the era scale well with more speed.

@Gatewayuser: No, a Y2K build is pretty much what I wanted. After looking into it more and refining things, most of what I want to play is from 2001 and under, so a Pentium III should handle everything fine. I've got some sort of reluctance to get back into Pentium 4 territory, and while I've always been interested in the AMD side... I just don't know enough to commit.

Also, when you say 'dead end'... basically, there's nowhere else to go, right? No upgrade path that doesn't include a full rebuild? I'm okay with this.

atariangamer wrote:

..the games that I really want to run at 75 frames or higher, 800x600 resolution (1024x768 would be great, but unnecessary): […]
Show full quote

..the games that I really want to run at 75 frames or higher, 800x600 resolution (1024x768 would be great, but unnecessary):

1. Unreal (not Tournament)
2. Deus Ex
3. Quake series (but maybe not III, I'm more interested in single player)
4. Doom (But probably on a source port, so don't worry too much about DOS performance)
5. Half Life
6. Tomb Raider series (era appropriate)
7. Dark Forces/II
8. MDK 2
9. Diablo 2
10. The Sims
11. Max Payne

All those games are perfectly playable with PIII/800 & ATi Rag128 Pro @ 1024 x 768/1280 x 1024. I speak from experience with all those games except for MDK2 and Sims. I can't remeber the FPS rates, but don't remeber any of those games being unplayable or slideshows (although they were probably in the 30 region, rather than 50+ ... 30 FPS back then was an accepted norm)... I was in fact impressed that the ATi Rage128 Pro could keep up with all these and remember being pleasantly surprised at the time, for a cheapish card which was a bit dated then, it was performing allright. o.0

Richo wrote:

Nvidia + intel
Ati + amd
That's how you build a computer from early 2000 till roughly 2007, I still don't use amd gpu with Intel. The problem was compatibilty and cooling. Geforce cards ran quite hot in the day and combine that with a athlon and you have yourself a heater for a computer.

This is the first I've heard of this. I haven't owned an ATi/AMD dedictaed graphics card since 2002 (Haven't owned an AMD CPU since 2010). I have had loads of Athlons/Durons/You-name-it-ons all with nVidia GPU's over that time in between, and I can't remeber heat ever being a problem, not saying they were good in regards to heat dissapation, but certainly not... omg I need a fire extinguisher or don't need to put on the heating in the room (and none of them ever died afaik from excesive temps). Maybe I'm cold blodded 😵

Richo wrote:

Go ahead and try make 4 rigs with identical stats and you will notice a gap in performance on mixed builds. In early 2000 I had […]
Show full quote

Jade Falcon wrote:

Richo wrote:

Exactly how 1 spelling error can do so much.... Nvidia + intel Ati + amd That's how you build a computer from early 2000 till r […]
Show full quote

Exactly how 1 spelling error can do so much....
Nvidia + intel
Ati + amd
That's how you build a computer from early 2000 till roughly 2007

The problem was compatibility and cooling. GeForce cards ran quite hot in the day and combine that with a Athlon and you have yourself a heater for a computer.

Your kidding right? I mean NVidia made AMD chipsets witch were widely popular back in the day. And the Pentium 4's ran just as hot if not hotter than the Athlons.

Go ahead and try make 4 rigs with identical stats and you will notice a gap in performance on mixed builds.
In early 2000 I had a palomino + nvidia card which performed poorly compared to the same build with an Ati card (I swapped a card from a friend to test it as he had the same problem but with intel) in the end we swapped the cards sInce they were identical in performance and our systems both ran alot better.
Iirc this was due some 'agreement' by nvidia&Intel which was to discourage mixed builds.
The nforce chipset support was also quite poor and ran hot as hell.

I'm pretty sure that if this were the case, this would've already been known to us. If something as substantial as you're mentioning would really be the case, wouldn't it have been picked up here? And wouldn't someone on the internet have already written some article about it, including bench results?
I'm sorry to say, but it sounds like you're just making this stuff up or something.

kanecvr wrote:

tl;dr - my advice is - if you are building a machine solely for playing 2000ish games, get something a bit over spec so it can handle high resolutions and eye candy.

I'd tend to agree here. Better to go a bit overspecced with the graphics card than to underpower it with something like a GF1 or a GF2MX (like atariangamer suggested in the PM he send me).

atariangamer wrote:

Now *that's* what I'm talking about.

As you listed DOS games you need ISA slots. The best DOS/late Win9x machine is P3 up to 1GHz on 440BX + GF2 or 3.
If you want 2002-.. things, - it's XP and P4 stuff.
You may mess with AMD and ATI, but it's potentially has more compatibility issues without having significant benefits, while 3dfx is for limited stuff and brand fans.

> CompactFlash I would follow, too...

HDD with SATA-IDE adaptor seems better.

New random question for the knowledgebase... It's been awhile since I saw a CRT. In fact, I just tried to see if anywhere around me sold any (secondhand shops, computer stores, thrift stores) and it seems like some sweep happened a few years ago where everyone collectively sent their tubes to the trash.

My favorite thing about CRT monitors was the ability to jump to 75hz, 85hz, 100hz as the resolution went down. Super quick response times, decent colors if you set it up right... Can any LCD monitor fill that gap? I was kinda looking forward to one but I can't justify paying 300$ for a trinitron and then 200$ to get it shipped to me.

Are there any display opinions?