ya I wasn't expecting much either, that being said it barely runs quake so it's not really saying much. If you put a voodoo 1 in there it will probably run quake just fine. Turned out that it was pretty decent for Dos gaming though becasue the integrated sound turned out to be not actually bad at all.

Troll pc with heat spewing P4 and FX5950 is my fastest win98 pc and is stable as a rock. But it is noisy and hot.

Dual P933 i820 system based around an Asus P3C-D is the fastest, most responsive P3 system I've ever had.

A lot of that comes down to a monster of a Quantum Atlas V 15k rpm SCSI drive, but it even compares well to a single-CPU P3-1400S system with SSD or dual i440BX/Via 694D systems I've had. i820 had some awful bugs and shortcomings (Caminogate and MTH, plus the very high price and unconvincing performance of Rambus memory) leading to terrible press, but when you actually get a working board, it's pretty impressive.

Aside from the chipset this is literally the tenth P3C-D board I've had, and the first one that worked. No idea what happened with this board at Asus and/or HP (a lot were OEM boards) quality control, but I've never come across a failure rate that high for any board from any manufacturer, even at the height of the capacitor plague. So all the more amazing that it did actually work.

I actually have to say my 386 DX with 8MB of RAM, quick SCSI drive and a ET4000AX VGA card. Running Windows 3.11 I was amazed of the performance in Office applications. My memories using 386's back in the 90s were that they were SLOW in Windows.

A long time ago when I was much younger and stupider, I foolishly threw away a bunch of old gear. Many of us have such stories. In particular, I was cleaning out a shed, and roughly shoved some old Socket 7 gear into plastic trash bags. The bags also contained random rubbish and bits of dirt etc.

For some reason, one of the bags never made it out of the shed, but instead sat there in a dark, disused corner for about 10-15 years. Visited by many mice and spiders passing by, I'm sure.

Then retro came back, and at some point a lightbulb went off in my head as I remembered this bag. So with great trepidation I trawled through this rubbish and pulled out a fully populated Gigabyte 586ATX with P233-MMX and some SDRAM, dirty, various pins bent, some ugly gouges.

I restored it - surprisingly, very little needed doing! - then a machine was reverently built around it, and to this day that thing still runs like the day it was born - perfectly.

--

And another one I heard of recently - it's not my story to tell - but come and show them the Cono Box, Pierre!

I have a trash heap build with a 433MHz (or 466MHz?) Celeron, 256MB RAM, an IBM branded TNT2 M64, some kind of baby AT form factor socket 370 mainboard and generally a lot of random and budget part running Windows 2000. I had no consideration for anything when I threw it together, I just wanted a PC for a day that does one job, but I still use it for a sort of utility PC every now and then. It's loud and ugly, but it's going unreasonably well and proved to be very reliable.

I was surprised how well the S478 P4P800 SE motherboard (or any other 865 chipset board I suspect) works in Win98.
I knew SATA compatibility mode worked in XP for people too lazy to find the AHCI drivers but thought Win98 support may be a bit buggy.
Happily I was wrong 😀

What started as a parts build XP box is still serving as my primary XP build for over 5 years now.
M/B: Asus P5N-D (Purchased)
CPU: Xeon x3320 (Pulled from dead server)
GPU: GTX590 x2 (Purchased)
Sound: SB X-Fi Titanium (Purchased)
Everything else like RAM, HDD, etc is just stuff I already had. The plan is to move the purchased hardware into a dual socket motherboard one day but truth is this already plays all my XP era games at max settings and is probably my most reliable PC.

Shreddoc wrote on 2021-07-07, 08:24:

And another one I heard of recently - it's not my story to tell - but come and show them the Cono Box, Pierre!

As you wish 😁

Not so much a story of unexpected performance, but that it performed at all. This street find full of rain, mud and grass seemed like an obvious write-off when I found it. But after extensive cleaning and restoration it lives again, running all of its original components except the HDD. Full story: https://forums.overclockers.com.au/threads/th … treets.1299937/

Warlord wrote on 2021-07-07, 03:27:

ya I wasn't expecting much either, that being said it barely runs quake so it's not really saying much. If you put a voodoo 1 in there it will probably run quake just fine. Turned out that it was pretty decent for Dos gaming though becasue the integrated sound turned out to be not actually bad at all.

I tried a Voodoo 2 and it did run pretty well, but a Voodoo 1 would be a much better option. It's on my todo list.

DOS/Win3x on a Pentium 233 CPU. This is how it should run.
Compared to a 486 its like Night and Day.
DOS games and Windows 3x runs much better on a Pentium compared to a 486
The difference is very noticeable.

Pierre32 wrote on 2021-07-07, 09:25:

As you wish :D […]
Show full quote

Shreddoc wrote on 2021-07-07, 08:24:

And another one I heard of recently - it's not my story to tell - but come and show them the Cono Box, Pierre!

As you wish 😁

Not so much a story of unexpected performance, but that it performed at all. This street find full of rain, mud and grass seemed like an obvious write-off when I found it. But after extensive cleaning and restoration it lives again, running all of its original components except the HDD. Full story: https://forums.overclockers.com.au/threads/th … treets.1299937/

before-after.png

Ha! that's my old stomping ground, Kinda. My best mate while studying IT in Wollongong Tafe lived in Cono and would give him a lift on my way back down to Nowra and usually pick up some dodgy copy of a game for my trouble 😉

Love how that pic managed to capture the postie bike, such an Aussie shot.

This AMD K^-2 400AFD and mobo is better than than expected. It's load load time in half, a minute and a halt to the XFCE4 desktop now.Firefox is a lot quicker even with just 256megs of ram. The inteweb access in Dillo in awesome for a system built from components from 1997/98. Can bump up the cpu speed a bit as screenfetch is showing 375MHz in the current configuration.

By golly this Xwindows is slow nd needs an aweful lot of ram...😉

I once put together a S370 Celeron system and installed Win ME just for giggles... But it turned out to be a very stable and responsive system, much to my surprise.

gex85 wrote on 2021-07-07, 17:57:

I once put together a S370 Celeron system and installed Win ME just for giggles... But it turned out to be a very stable and responsive system, much to my surprise.

All the negitive hype about ME were over exaggerated. Like any operating system if you pick the rigth hardway it will function as designed. That not accessing real Dos thing was very easy enough to get around....😉

I like this thread. My example is more of a non-build, cheap old OEM PC. I picked up a little pizza box style, ca 1993 office desktop with 8MB RAM, 486slc25, no L2 cache. Made by Samsung. I know this thing was made to sit on a desk in an office somewhere running Wordperfect and Lotus 123. It has onboard I/O including WD90C VGA, PS/2 ports, and 3 ISA slots. Benches between a 386DX33 and 386DX40. With the cpu in slow mode it is about a 286-12. Added a decent sound card (PAS16) and an intelligent MIDI card, it is really useful for late 80's - early 90's games, which is an era that is of interest to me. Works great with an MT32.

My Dell Optiplex GX400.... I got the system really cheap from a recycler after I noticed it ran a socket 423 Willamette + RDRAM, as I didn't have a socket 423 or an RDRAM motherboard in my collection. It's pretty beat up, and the motherboard has 5 blown caps, so I wasn't planning to use it for long... that was 3 years ago. Since I only installed win98 on it for testing (knowing full well about the board's condition) I put it on my shelf after benchmarking and left it there. Until my main high-end 98 rig died... (Abit ST6 - capacitor rot - again). While waiting for caps to re-recap my ST6, I took the GX400 off the shelf (no time to configure another 98 rig), stuck a 9700 pro and a CT4810 in it and used it as my main 98 PC for five weeks straight - and it ran beautifully. It was five weeks because despite the fact that the caps only took 3 days to arrive, I could not find the time to recap the ST6. After I did, the GX400 had all my usual games and apps on it + the savegames from my main 98 PC. While using the GX400 I noticed the CPU is a bit more sluggish then the 1.4 GHz tualatin in my main 98 rig, but the faster ram and graphics card (9700pro vs gf4 ti4600) more then made up for it.

The second time I used the GX400 for an extended period of time was after I moved my wife and kid to the town I grew up in. They moved, I didn't - had to stick around for 3 months to settle some job related things. I moved lots of my retro collection to our new home, but they were all piled up in a corner of the garage and stayed there for the better part of 4 months. Meanwhile I kept some retro rigs - 4 of them at our old place, and would use the GX400 daily after work, and in weekends I'd use the Tualatin back home. Despite the cap rot, the GX400 was extremely solid - in both performance and reliability.

Last time I used the GX400 was up until 3 weeks ago, every weekend for the past year or so, as a guest computer during retro lan parties. It ran great, and still does - but after a clean-up three weeks ago I noticed the 4 of the 5 bulging caps had ruptured and leaked, so I decided to shelf the system until I find the time to do a full recap. After recapping I plan to keep the machine in active use. It's stability makes it great during lan parties. I also managed to build a backup 98 rig in case there's further problems with the ST6 based PC (although to be fair, that's been my main win98 PC for the better part of a decade - it's allowed to break down now and again) to avoid pressing un-restored PCs into service.

chinny22 wrote on 2021-07-07, 16:31:

Pierre32 wrote on 2021-07-07, 09:25:

As you wish :D […]
Show full quote

Shreddoc wrote on 2021-07-07, 08:24:

And another one I heard of recently - it's not my story to tell - but come and show them the Cono Box, Pierre!

As you wish 😁

Not so much a story of unexpected performance, but that it performed at all. This street find full of rain, mud and grass seemed like an obvious write-off when I found it. But after extensive cleaning and restoration it lives again, running all of its original components except the HDD. Full story: https://forums.overclockers.com.au/threads/th … treets.1299937/

before-after.png

Ha! that's my old stomping ground, Kinda. My best mate while studying IT in Wollongong Tafe lived in Cono and would give him a lift on my way back down to Nowra and usually pick up some dodgy copy of a game for my trouble 😉

Love how that pic managed to capture the postie bike, such an Aussie shot.

Haha, excellent 😀

My LGA775 Windows 98 SE system with a PCIe Radeon X800PRO is just crazy good, it basically invalidates all my Slot 1 and onwards systems.

I will throw one more of my builds in. I got a $20 Craigslist purchase with an AT Case, PCChips M572 Motherboard (Intel 430TX chipset), Pentium 133 CPU, 40GB IDE hard drive, 128MB SDRAM, ATI Rage XL 8MB PCI graphics graphics, and Sound Blaster AudioDrive PCI sound card. With a patched BIOS update I was able to turn it into an AMD K6-3+ CPU @500MHz (83.3MHzx6), 256MB SDRAM, 80GB IDE hard drive, 3dfx Voodoo3 2000 PCI graphics card, Sound Blaster AWE64 Value ISA sound card with a SIMMCONN 28MB memory upgrade, Intel Pro/1000 PCI network card, & Logictech Wingman gamepad. That thing really flies and is one of my favorite builds:)