The real questions are: what's the sound card, and do you have an ISA slot for a good one? For 9x, this is more important than most 😀

also there's not much internet info about this particular computer, eventually this thread will become the google terminus like that other thread telling to dispose of this thing.

In device manager it doesn't mention a specific sound card, but it's something called crystal audio codec. Also, there are no isa cards. There are only 3 pci slots, one of which is populated by a fax-modem card that comes with the system.

600 MHz celery and 64MB RAM should be OK for Win 95, depending on what support hardware you have. What is the integrated graphics? Would you be willing to add a graphics card if need be?

debs3759 wrote on 2020-10-19, 01:12:

What is the integrated graphics? Would you be willing to add a graphics card if need be?

The integrated graphics is the intel 810 chipset graphics, but I could take out the modem card and add a geforce mx4000 pci card.

That will be better for gaming. Integrated graphics are usually pretty low end. I don't know the 810 graphics personally, but I'm sure someone will be along later who does.

Upgrade the hdd that's for sure.

kolderman wrote on 2020-10-19, 01:30:

Upgrade the hdd that's for sure.

Upgrade it to what though? Also, I also have no idea on how to access the bios

debs3759 wrote on 2020-10-19, 01:24:

I don't know the 810 graphics personally, but I'm sure someone will be along later who does.

If it's the I751, then it's good enough for a lot of things before 2000. It's certainly not in the SiS IGP tier. Doesn't have the best 16bpp rendering though (no dithering IIRC, so overbright/gamma'd up stuff like Q3A is going to look ugly). You could do worse (there's many i810s with an ATI Xpert@Work which has the terrible slow alpha blending, which can be pretty unsuitable for a lot of the 97/98 stuff that just toss out alphas in your face for Virge/PowerVR/Mystique 3d reasons)

though given the 64mb RAM and the kinds of games the Geforces are made for, and the potential PSU risk, i wouldn't bother throwing one in at this point.

I think it would be decent gaming pc with a voodoo 3 pci card and perhaps yamaha ymf744 or aureal vortex 2 sound card.

How good it is depends on the games you want to run and desired resolution.
The hardware is typical for a low end year 2000 PC meaning you get the authentic average joe's year 2000 PC gaming experience with authentic suck.
A computer like yours is by design not a gaming machine but aimed more towards text editing, web browsing and 2D multimedia applications. Still a lot of old games will run fine but more demanding stuff, especially titles relying on hardware 3D acceleration will suffer from the slow i810 integrated graphics. Not having AGP will limit your choice of 3D cards and apparently even the avaliable GeForce 2 MX cards are bottlenecked by PCI.
That said why not try and see how you like your gaming experience?

Regarding HDD upgrades you are probably limited to a maximum capacity of 128GB by BIOS. If you're unlucky the BIOS has a lower limit still and you need to patch it.
However personally I would not invest any money into this PC to make it a better gaming machine. Your money is probably better spend building a new system that's designed for gaming right away rather than doing limited upgrades on this system.

retrogamerguy1997 wrote on 2020-10-19, 01:42:

kolderman wrote on 2020-10-19, 01:30:

Upgrade the hdd that's for sure.

Upgrade it to what though? Also, I also have no idea on how to access the bios

120gb ssd is the gold standard. Use a sata adapter if needed.

Doornkaat wrote on 2020-10-19, 02:32:

How good it is depends on the games you want to run and desired resolution.

Yes, this, a thousand times this. It is "worth upgrading" if there is something specific you want to play that you cannot easily play otherwise. If there is nothing specific you want to play, then no, it is probably not worth upgrading.

Is there a big graphical boot screen when you turn the computer on? If you press Escape when that appears, you should see a more typical boot screen with instructions on how to access the BIOS. (Not that you really need to access the BIOS for anything in particular at this stage.)

As it's from your childhood does the PC hold any sentimental or nostalgia for you?
If it does that's twice as important as any technical consideration.

Google seems to think this is your motherboard
http://www.motherboards.org/files/manuals/125/cognac.pdf
Which says onboard sound is a Cirrus CS4299-JQ Just a generic AC97 sound chip. OK for Windows but nothing special.
Same with the onboard Intel Graphics, If your more into RTS's it'll be fine, 3D stuff you'll probably want to upgrade.

Doornkaat wrote on 2020-10-19, 02:32:

How good it is depends on the games you want to run and desired resolution. The hardware is typical for a low end year 2000 PC m […]
Show full quote

How good it is depends on the games you want to run and desired resolution.
The hardware is typical for a low end year 2000 PC meaning you get the authentic average joe's year 2000 PC gaming experience with authentic suck.
A computer like yours is by design not a gaming machine but aimed more towards text editing, web browsing and 2D multimedia applications. Still a lot of old games will run fine but more demanding stuff, especially titles relying on hardware 3D acceleration will suffer from the slow i810 integrated graphics. Not having AGP will limit your choice of 3D cards and apparently even the avaliable GeForce 2 MX cards are bottlenecked by PCI.
That said why not try and see how you like your gaming experience?

I mean I used to play Midtown Madness 2 on it, so it couldn't have been that bad.

Doornkaat wrote on 2020-10-19, 02:32:

Regarding HDD upgrades you are probably limited to a maximum capacity of 128GB by BIOS. If you're unlucky the BIOS has a lower limit still and you need to patch it.
However personally I would not invest any money into this PC to make it a better gaming machine. Your money is probably better spend building a new system that's designed for gaming right away rather than doing limited upgrades on this system.

Yeah, but buying retro hardware can be just as expensive as new hardware.

chinny22 wrote on 2020-10-19, 08:51:

As it's from your childhood does the PC hold any sentimental or nostalgia for you?
If it does that's twice as important as any technical consideration.

Yes.

chinny22 wrote on 2020-10-19, 08:51:

Google seems to think this is your motherboard http://www.motherboards.org/files/manuals/125/cognac.pdf Which says onboard sound […]
Show full quote

Google seems to think this is your motherboard
http://www.motherboards.org/files/manuals/125/cognac.pdf
Which says onboard sound is a Cirrus CS4299-JQ Just a generic AC97 sound chip. OK for Windows but nothing special.
Same with the onboard Intel Graphics, If your more into RTS's it'll be fine, 3D stuff you'll probably want to upgrade.

If it was a cirrus chip, then why wouldn't it show up in device manager as such?

retrogamerguy1997 wrote on 2020-10-19, 11:17:

If it was a cirrus chip, then why wouldn't it show up in device manager as such?

In a word, branding
From Cirrus Logic's own web page

For more than three decades, Cirrus Logic has built its reputation as an expert in audio IC innovation. In the early 1990s, through the acquisition of Crystal Semiconductor, the company pioneered the creation of audio converters that helped to spark the digital audio revolution in professional audio and consumer home theater.

As the PC has sentimental value then yes it's worth upgrading. I keep going back to PC's I owned growing up even though I have much better machines sitting right next to it. I simply get more joy using the same PC I used 20 years ago.

CPU: The C600 should be ok for majority of games, one's that wont work in XP or later OS's anyway. Maybe not at full detail but its a fine entry point into retro computing.
Going from my link above doesn't look like you can upgrade anyway

RAM: 64MB is ok, See you you go before spending money, You don't want more then 512MB in Win9x

Graphics: This is your main bottleneck at the moment. The PCI GF4 MX is a good choice and would be my 1st upgrade

Audio: That AC97 chip will play sound but that's it and mostly software based. Fine while getting into the hobby. Something like a SBLive is cheap and will give enable EAX in games that support. Aureal Vortex 2 is another option for A3D titles but not as cheap or available.

HDD: I'd keep the 10GB for now just while you try out the hobby and work out how much disk space you really need. Spinning rust is fine, it's what I use on all my 9x PC's and have free supplies. SSD would be nice though and the faster performance may squeeze another game or 2 into the playable list.

But don't think you should spend any money yet. Give it a clean install of Windows, play a few games and see how you like it then you can decide how much money you really want to spend on this.

retrogamerguy1997 wrote on 2020-10-19, 11:15:

I mean I used to play Midtown Madness 2 on it, so it couldn't have been that bad. […]
Show full quote

Doornkaat wrote on 2020-10-19, 02:32:

How good it is depends on the games you want to run and desired resolution. The hardware is typical for a low end year 2000 PC m […]
Show full quote

How good it is depends on the games you want to run and desired resolution.
The hardware is typical for a low end year 2000 PC meaning you get the authentic average joe's year 2000 PC gaming experience with authentic suck.
A computer like yours is by design not a gaming machine but aimed more towards text editing, web browsing and 2D multimedia applications. Still a lot of old games will run fine but more demanding stuff, especially titles relying on hardware 3D acceleration will suffer from the slow i810 integrated graphics. Not having AGP will limit your choice of 3D cards and apparently even the avaliable GeForce 2 MX cards are bottlenecked by PCI.
That said why not try and see how you like your gaming experience?

I mean I used to play Midtown Madness 2 on it, so it couldn't have been that bad.

Doornkaat wrote on 2020-10-19, 02:32:

Regarding HDD upgrades you are probably limited to a maximum capacity of 128GB by BIOS. If you're unlucky the BIOS has a lower limit still and you need to patch it.
However personally I would not invest any money into this PC to make it a better gaming machine. Your money is probably better spend building a new system that's designed for gaming right away rather than doing limited upgrades on this system.

Yeah, but buying retro hardware can be just as expensive as new hardware.

Hey man, I hope I didn't come across as trying to take a dump on your system.
It is capable of Win9x gaming and it isn't a bad machine. After all it is representative of the authentic mainstream year 2000 new PC experience and far from all Win9x games are aimed at owners of high end gaming hardware. You said it yourself: You were fine with playing Midtown Madness 2 on it back then. If your games run satisfactorily there's no need for an upgrade.
I was mostly trying to put things into perspective. For what it is this system is good. But what it is is not a gaming focussed machine, so anyone expecting high frame rates, resolutions above 800x600 and high settings in demanding 1999+ games is going to be disappointed.

When I say that personally I wouldn't invest any money into a system like that to make it a better gaming machine I mean you will get comparatively little return on your investment. The missing AGP bus and being stuck at 66MHz fsb are two major bottlenecks.
There are some sensible upgrades: An SB Live! is a decent card and they're still cheap. Plus you can use the card in a faster Win9x PC if you so desire. PC-66/100 SDRAM is also cheap and not requiring a paging/swap file on your HDD speeds up Windows quite a bit. Even a faster Celeron may be had for a few bucks.
But all of those are not going to improve the performance of the integrated GPU by a lot. RAM and CPU upgrades beyond what you already have may make the system feel more responsive but if your computer can't handle a game it is likely due to GPU limitations. Possible PCI based GPU upgrades have become pretty expensive for what they are. If you find a decent PCI GPU for a couple of bucks then go for it! But don't expect it to perform similarly to the AGP variant. I really don't think spending 30-80$ on putting the castrated variant of a low end Nvidia or ATi GPU in there is a wise investment. Price/performance for 3Dfx stuff is even worse. That money is better spent on building another retro PC.

That's why I personally suggest leaving the system as it is to preserve your original childhood PC and enjoy it for what it is. At the same time be on the lookout for cheap offers of retro PC parts and slowly build a second more powerful PC from scratch if you feel you need more performance. If you find some cheap upgrades for your childhood PC along the way that's great. But my focus would be on building a faster system.

Did a fresh Win98 install and I need drivers for the graphics card and the onboard sound. It seems nvidia doesn't have the drivers on their site anymore and I can't figure out where to get the sound driver.

retrogamerguy1997 wrote on 2020-10-19, 15:34:

Did a fresh Win98 install and I need drivers for the graphics card and the onboard sound. It seems nvidia doesn't have the drivers on their site anymore and I can't figure out where to get the sound driver.

Did you already have the MX4000? That changes things. 😁 Try those drivers: http://vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=1405&menustate=0
Edit: Attached driver says it is for CS4299. Can't say wether it works; give it a shot!