It kinda depends on the games you want to play no?

Yea what games are you trying to play? Also specify what video cards you have in these rigs. The PII would be a nice high end DOS and early 9x rig.

PII is still old enough to work with DOS, since they usually still have ISA ports. But you might run into some problems with games that depend on CPU speed for timing. That manifests in either the game running too fast, or problems with audio, crashing, etc.

IMO, if you want a good span, keep a Pentium and a Pentium III, and something modern. If you have, say, a Pentium 166 and a PIII 850, that's good for a huge span of games. You will still run into some oooold DOS games that don't work right on a Pentium, but for those you pretty much need exactly the machine it was meant to run on (like a 4.77MHz 8088 or a 286).

The one advantage of having the PII and PIII is a little bit of diversity with the graphics cards. E.g., maybe you want to use a Voodoo for GL in the PII, and just a run of the mill Direct-X card for the PIII. I use a Matrox Mystique (because I love the textured special edition of Mech Warrior II it came with) in my Pentium with Win 95. My PII with Win 98 has a Voodoo 5, and my PIII with Win ME has a Radeon 8500. Overkill for the average retro gamer, but I just like the hardware.

For sound, you probably want an ISA SB16 for DOS, unless you have something specific in mind. For Win 98, a Sound Blaster Live! is good -- it'll get you EAX, which can be fun -- but really it's a lot less critical once you're in Windows and have driver abstraction.

oeuvre wrote:

Yea what games are you trying to play? Also specify what video cards you have in these rigs. The PII would be a nice high end DOS and early 9x rig.

I would mostly play RTS games and more "advanced" 3D games like Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, or 2D games like Grand Theft Auto and Mega Man X3, DOOM, Shadow Warrior etc.
Do you mean if the motherboard has any intergrated video card?

Nick_Arrow wrote:

oeuvre wrote:

The one advantage of having the PII and PIII is a little bit of diversity with the graphics cards. E.g., maybe you want to use a Voodoo for GL in the PII, and just a run of the mill Direct-X card for the PIII. I use a Matrox Mystique (because I love the textured special edition of Mech Warrior II it came with) in my Pentium with Win 95. My PII with Win 98 has a Voodoo 5, and my PIII with Win ME has a Radeon 8500. Overkill for the average retro gamer, but I just like the hardware.

Would a Voodoo 3 card be a good choice in the PIII computer or would it be better to put it in the PII?
What 2D card would you recommend?
Or is a NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 a even better card than the Voodoo cards for the PIII computer?
I guess 512 mb RAM is enough for this computer.

To get a feel for things, you can hit up wikipedia and look at the release dates for the various bits, and imagine how they would have been used when new.

Pentium 2 was '97-98, with your 333mhz model being from '98. Then you can look at the graphics side and see what was current in 98, which will have been either the Voodoo2/Banshee or a TNT.

Pentium 3 started in '99, and the Voodoo3 was released around then.

Ofcourse, you can fit a Voodoo3 to a Pentium 2 machine, afterall back in the day people will have done exactly that. But it kinda makes sense to keep things roughly "right", a Geforce 4 in a P2 machine is a bit pointless as the CPU is a huge bottleneck for the graphics. Its a better fit for the P3 machine, still a bit later being a 2002 card, but it'd be fine. Some people might buy one of the cheaper Geforce 4 cards like the MX440, as they perform like a more period correct Geforce or Geforce2 card, while being a lot cheaper than those original cards.

Personally I'm aiming for "Christmas 2000" for one build, which has an Athlon 1100 and a Geforce 2. I've also got an Asus TX97 board so plan to build something a bit earlier with that, thinking along the lines of a ~2-300mhz Pentium/K6 and Voodoo2 card.

Are you shooting for only period-correct setups?

For computer 1, I think it's a great system for a single Voodoo2 and TNT2 to GF2 (depending on how period-correct you want to be). SB16 or AWE32 would go well with that. I'm guessing because you have Win98SE on computer 1, you're not a stickler for period correctness.

For computer 2, a GF2 to GF3, or a Voodoo3. For sound, a SB Live! or Audigy.

clueless1 wrote:

Are you shooting for only period-correct setups?

For computer 1, I think it's a great system for a single Voodoo2 and TNT2 to GF2 (depending on how period-correct you want to be). SB16 or AWE32 would go well with that. I'm guessing because you have Win98SE on computer 1, you're not a stickler for period correctness.

For computer 2, a GF2 to GF3, or a Voodoo3. For sound, a SB Live! or Audigy.

Voodoo2 is a 3dfx card right, but what about the glide support?
It has 8 mb video memory, is that really enough?
No, my point is not to be period-correct. I just want to get the best possible/powerful setup for my computers.
Thank you very much for your advice!

Nick_Arrow wrote:

Voodoo2 is a 3dfx card right, but what about the glide support? Is it enough with the 12 mb version? No, my point is not to be […]
Show full quote

Voodoo2 is a 3dfx card right, but what about the glide support?
Is it enough with the 12 mb version?
No, my point is not to be period-correct. I just want to get the best possible/powerful setup for my computers.
Thank you very much for your advice!

For a ~300Mhz PII, a single Voodoo 2 is plenty. Due to cpu bottleneck, SLI won't get you anymore performance, but it will get you 1024x768 with speeds comparable to a single V2 at 800x600. The Voodoo will let you play glide games.

clueless1 wrote:

Voodoo2 is a 3dfx card right, but what about the glide support? Is it enough with the 12 mb version? No, my point is not to be […]
Show full quote

Voodoo2 is a 3dfx card right, but what about the glide support?
Is it enough with the 12 mb version?
No, my point is not to be period-correct. I just want to get the best possible/powerful setup for my computers.
Thank you very much for your advice!

What CPU is more compatible with the Voodoo 2 SLI? Correct me if I'm wrong here, but the SLI is two Voodoo 2 cards in the same computer right? 8 mb each?

Nick_Arrow wrote:

clueless1 wrote:

Voodoo2 is a 3dfx card right, but what about the glide support? Is it enough with the 12 mb version? No, my point is not to be […]
Show full quote

Voodoo2 is a 3dfx card right, but what about the glide support?
Is it enough with the 12 mb version?
No, my point is not to be period-correct. I just want to get the best possible/powerful setup for my computers.
Thank you very much for your advice!

What CPU is more compatible with the Voodoo 2 SLI? Correct me if I'm wrong here, but the SLI is two Voodoo 2 cards in the same computer right? 8 mb each?

Yes, two V2's connected with a cable inside the case. 12MB V2s work too. I think there are complications with trying to mix an 8 and a 12, so try to keep the cards configured the same.

You want a minimum of 400Mhz PII before you start seeing a noticeable benefit with two cards. Once you hit 800-900Mhz PIII, you've pretty much saturated SLI.

Here's a good page with lots of this info on it:
https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/3dfx

Thank you clueless1!

First I had a RIVA 128 4 mb card in the PII computer. I tried to install another card RIVA VANTA 16 Mb but after the installation every game I play plays very slow and choppy compared to the 4 mb RIVA 128. That shouldn't be the case, right or was the VANTA 16 mb a very unstable card?
Anyone has the correct drivers for the RIVA VANTA 16 Mb card for W98SE by the way?

If I recall, the VANTA is a budget, castrated card and the Riva 128 should be much faster than it desite having less memory.

clueless1 wrote:

If I recall, the VANTA is a budget, castrated card and the Riva 128 should be much faster than it desite having less memory.

Thats very useful info! So I guess I can put the VANTA card to the trashed and put back the RIVA 128 again?

Whether you trash it is your choice. I personally like to keep emergency spares around.

I believe the Vanta is still fast and quite compatible for DOS titles.

Do you want these systems to be period correct? Do you want to give them balls to the wall performance? Do you need flexibility for speed sensitive games?

the vanta would provide quite an... adVANTAge for DOS gaming

ok i'm going to go hide now

Nick_Arrow wrote:

Would a Voodoo 3 card be a good choice in the PIII computer or would it be better to put it in the PII? What 2D card would you […]
Show full quote

Nick_Arrow wrote:

oeuvre wrote:

The one advantage of having the PII and PIII is a little bit of diversity with the graphics cards. E.g., maybe you want to use a Voodoo for GL in the PII, and just a run of the mill Direct-X card for the PIII. I use a Matrox Mystique (because I love the textured special edition of Mech Warrior II it came with) in my Pentium with Win 95. My PII with Win 98 has a Voodoo 5, and my PIII with Win ME has a Radeon 8500. Overkill for the average retro gamer, but I just like the hardware.

Would a Voodoo 3 card be a good choice in the PIII computer or would it be better to put it in the PII?
What 2D card would you recommend?
Or is a NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 a even better card than the Voodoo cards for the PIII computer?
I guess 512 mb RAM is enough for this computer.

I use a GeForce3 TI 200 in my 98 build. You probably will still have a little slowdown with Unreal 1 engine games but that's because that engine was never that stable.

My ideal cpu and videocard combinations would be...

1: Pentium3 500mhz / Voodoo3 2000 16mb / 256mb pc133 - for early to mid 90s windows/dos gaming (win98)

2: Pentium3 1ghz / gf2 ultra 64mb / 256mb pc133 - for mid to late 90s windows only gaming (win98)

3: Pentium4 3.4ghz northwood / gf6 6800gt 256mb / 3gb pc3200 - for early to mid 2000s windows only gaming (XP)