epicbrad wrote:

Hi Fellow retro techies :) […]
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Hi Fellow retro techies 😀

I want to build a high end retro gaming desktop. I want it to cover XT-486 era games as well as Pentium classic era stuff, up to some windows XP based games.

Parts I have found so far in my garage that I purchased a few years ago on eBay at good prices

MS-7021 Ver :1 Mainboard which has KT6V next to the pci slot printed and it has 512MB DDR400 installed, as well as An Athlon 2800+ CPU (AXDA2800DKV4D) the board seems to support up to 200 FSB so I could probably upgrade to a 3200+ but I don't think this would be of huge benefit. It has AGP and PCI Slots.

The other board I have as an Abit AA8XE which appears to be socket 775, this has 4GB DDR2 dominator memory installed. It's a PCI Express board.

Getting either down to the level of XT might be a challenge, with all caches disabled you'd probably not go lower than 486-level.

considering I want to install Windows 98SE and XP in dual boot configuration - would this be possible for the Abit board? As this would be my preferred choice. I don't know what CPU it has at this point but the person who sold it was big on gaming, and there's a giant zalman cooler strapped to it. It would be really nice to get a modern AIO Watercooling solution and a new modern case that will work with this.
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I couldn't find drivers for either board for 98 OR XP (Yet, I haven't spent much time looking yet as this is just the very start, ie - the inception of my desire for this project)

Don't look for the boards, look for the chipsets. Win98 on PCIe isn't impossible but it can be a real pain in the arse. For that reason the KT6V (with Via KT600 chipset) is probably the better choice.

Other parts I have

Various PCI sound cards (I think I have the ESS1371 Compaq / SB PCI Card, which I really like the 8MB Wavetables on)

OK, then you're set for DOS.

I have an AMD R5 240 low profile 1GB card unsure of performance.
I also have a GF 9600 GT
I don't think I have any AGP cards around........

You're not going to find Win9x driver for that lot, so either way you'll need an older card. Also, newer cards don't have decent VESA support for DOS anymore. I'd suggest looking for an AGP card to go with the KT600 board. Personally I'd go for a Gf4 TI 4200 or similar, but you can go up to a 6-series nVidia on AGP. Note that the ATi HD3xxx and 4xxx series AGP cards are not supported in Win98.

[...]

I have plans to put a little bit of storage in it and connect it to my home network. 😊

Not bad. Gaming is fun but these old boxes can do a lot more. Note however that power management on older systems is nowhere near as good as on Core i-series onwards. Keeping an AthlonXP online 24/7 will significantly impact your electricity bill (and with the Australian summer coming: heat up the space significantly), using maybe 10x as much as a simple Core i3 (which drops down to almost nothing when idle).

epicbrad wrote:

I want to build a high end retro gaming desktop. I want it to cover XT-486 era games as well as Pentium classic era stuff, up to some windows XP based games.

The only reasonable way to do it is with a semi-modern system running Windows XP natively and the DOS stuff inside DOSBox. At that point you might forget about pure DOS and DOS sound drivers, and just focus on WinXP (possibly with Win98SE/WinME dual boot to run 9x games natively).

If the plan is to run a retro OS as well as retro gaming, then the Athlon would be best. However, you're going to struggle/possibly fail to get that down to XT-486 performance levels and on the flip side it's a bit too slow to really utilise DOSBox properly.

XP drivers should be fine for both boards as XP will run on hardware going right back to the Socket 5/7 era. But 98SE on the 775 - that's where you might hit problems.

Personally, I'd go with what has been suggested above - the socket 775 with an XP install + DOSBox and then it leaves you room for playing later games too, potentially with releases up to the mid-2010s, depending upon the CPU & GPU combination.