What's the latest DOS and latest Win98 game you are looking to run? Base your system off that, considering all your other systems as well. If you are looking to get rid of redundant PCs, then that may be a different outcome.

That 550 is probably good enough. I mean it depends what kind of gaming you're going to be doing. A Voodoo3 limits you to about mid 2000 before you have to start running everything on low.

Why do you want to upgrade? A voodoo 3 with a k6 3+ performs basically the same as a pII 450mhz in most games.A p3 500mhz will be maybe 30% faster, but only in games that make use of a lot of floating point math.

If you are going to go p3, I would get a 1ghz processor and a fast AGP card. Addon a SB live! or an Aureal Vortex 2 and you have a system that can definitely do things the k6 3+ system cannot. Otherwise, a slower p3 is basically the same except more difficult to slow down for DOS.

I wouldn't rule out a pentium 4 or athlon 64 either. If you already have a p3 setup that is one thing, but if you are going to buy parts socket 478 and socket 754 parts are easier and cheaper to come by and they perform better. In particular 845 and 865 intel chipsets which are know to be stable and well supported on windows 98.

Me personally though, I would keep what you have and just cobble together whatever you have for an XP machine. Anything you can't run on a voodoo3 will run just fine in XP, with the exception of Foresaken and maybe one or two other notable games.

I'm a bit masochistic and sometimes use the K6-3+ system to do some light browsing when looking for old software to download. It would be faster on a better machine with more RAM 😀 I already have a motherboard, CPU and RAM combo, mind you it's a Tualatin Celeron 1.3 GHz. I'd just have to put everything in a case and install Windows...

I don't have any specific games targeted. Just interested in making a system as fast as possible while still keeping the ability to play some old 286/386 adventure games such as Space Quest III, Gabriel Knight, Monkey Island, Full Throttle and similar. I also don't want to mess with any slow-down utilities, turning off cache or whatnot.

EDIT: I figured I could simply install all the games that I can think of and see how they run on what I already have 😀

Tested the following games so far in DOS mode:
- X-Wing Collector's CD-ROM - runs fine now
- Gabriel Knight CD - runs fine including sfx and music
- Police Quest 2 - runs fine now, intro animation too fast
- Heretic - runs fine including sfx and music
- Discworld (1995) - runs fine including sfx and music