No reason really to build the "fastest" windows 98 system imho... fastest can mean many things.
Over the decades have seen multi groups of vintage types. Some want period/year correctness, some want to max a build to whatever they can, some just want a good stable build with maybe a few improvements over period/year.
I am sorta of a mix of the latter and do not care about running 98 on the fastest possible build (though I do have Win7 on a 8770k + i370, but it is easy to make 100% compatible with now deleted drivers <thanks MS and Intel 🤣>).

Probably a lot of it is a desire to hit LCD panel native resolutions or exact scaling variants thereof. Hence needing a lot of ooomph and GPU overkill to get high res modes working "at decent frame rates" meaning decent modern framerates.

You guys have given me a lot of food for thought. My blue themed Pentium III build sounds good in theory but it will probably not be fast enough for XP and 512MB of RAM is also going to be a limiting factor. I don't have any spare space right now, my desk is barely big enough for my main PC. All of my other toys are in storage. I will probably still do a P3 just for the heck of it. However, I also have an ASUS A7V266-E and a bunch of Athlon XPs to play with as well. It was my first Socket A board so nice memories 😀

The way I see it now is that a very fast Win98 build can definitely double for WinXP. Not sure how well Win98 compatibility mode works under XP?

Half-Saint wrote on 2024-03-08, 06:17:

The way I see it now is that a very fast Win98 build can definitely double for WinXP.

Isn't that going to be tricky on the GPU front? Even if you get, say, one of those near-unobtainium quad-core friendly i865 motherboards which will you more than enough oomph CPU-wise for almost anything on the XP side, what graphics card are you going to run that's got decent 98 support and isn't going to be... inadequate for most XP games, at least those past 2004 or so?

Half-Saint wrote on 2024-03-07, 12:45:

What was your reasoning behind it?

I would add one observation: a "fastest" Win98 system is likely to be cheaper than something period-correct. Period-correct 98 system, you're probably looking at a slot 1 or socket 370, 440BX or i815 board, with... who knows what video card. Those are starting to get fairly hard to find... to the point you're seeing a lot of people on YouTube doing socket 370 projects on lousy large-OEM i810 motherboards with no AGP!

If you go forward a few years, you're looking at socket 754, 939, potentially even AM2 (I have an AM2 AGP 98SE project...), socket 478, early LGA775, etc, all of which is much more plentiful and affordable. Runs better on modern PSUs. Might even be able to run on SATA drives, at least if you're lucky/patient especially on the Intel side.

So if you're like many of us and you tossed out your Win98-era systems 15 years ago, well, it's a lot easier/cheapest to build a 'fastest' Win98 system than to go and rebuild what you had (or wished you had) 20+ years ago.

VivienM wrote on 2024-03-09, 00:10:

Isn't that going to be tricky on the GPU front? Even if you get, say, one of those near-unobtainium quad-core friendly i865 motherboards which will you more than enough oomph CPU-wise for almost anything on the XP side, what graphics card are you going to run that's got decent 98 support and isn't going to be... inadequate for most XP games, at least those past 2004 or so?

One solution is dual GPUs.

While they'll still be some performance trade-offs, better compatibility can be obtained for each OS.

Half-Saint wrote on 2024-03-08, 06:17:

Not sure how well Win98 compatibility mode works under XP?

Generally I feel like WinXP is pretty compatible with Win9x games, I don't remember usually even needing any compatibility modes with the Socket A systems I had back in the day. Only one I remember having issues with is Fallout 2 (and probably FO1 too) that/they needed a new DirectX9 wrapper or they just black screened randomly.

There of course are games that do not like anything later than Win9x but there are community fixes for many if you don't mind using them. I've so far personally only found two games that I NEED to play on Win98SE, I wasn't able to make the original (not the Deluxe re-release) Hidden & Dangerous to work well on anything later than Win98SE, which could be a hardware/driver/WinXP service pack issue since I do remember playing it on WinXP SP0 or SP1.

The other is Colin McRae Rally 2.0, while the game works on WinXP at seemingly stable 60FPS it somehow loads the track assets in these uneven chunks which makes the 60FPS feel more like 20FPS. No such problem under Win98SE, butter smooth. I haven't tried CMR1 under WinXP, it seems to have some unofficial XP fixes but I don't know does it suffer from same kind of problems.

There's also the issue with A3D which doesn't work properly on anything newer than Win9x. Similarly, some early EAX titles like Baldur's Gate and Need for Speed III don't sound correctly when WDM drivers are used, which is the only kind that WinXP takes.

That said, people who build overpowered Win9x systems usually dual boot with WinXP. If nothing else, it gives you a more stable environment for performing maintenance tasks.

Was hoping this topic would help me solve my own dilemma. Still don't know what to do 😀 Maybe a good Win98 could still dual boot XP for early XP games. I know that SP3 makes XP much more hardware demanding. Lots of people saying there's no point in running XP on a Pentium 3.

Half-Saint wrote on 2024-03-11, 19:47:

Was hoping this topic would help me solve my own dilemma. Still don't know what to do 😀 Maybe a good Win98 could still dual boot XP for early XP games. I know that SP3 makes XP much more hardware demanding. Lots of people saying there's no point in running XP on a Pentium 3.

I would agree with no point installing XP on a P3
Even a P3 doesn't make much sense if talking pure Win98 (no dos)

S478 motherboards are much more common, cheaper, still have AGP and Win98 drivers.
Any game that doesn't work in XP is going to fly on a P4.
And while a P4 will struggle with later XP games I suspect your first bottleneck will be whichever Win98 compatible GPU you choose

Hi all. Long time reader, first time poster etc

This thread got linked in my discord. I've got a lot of skin in the game as I spent two years building the "Real Worlds Fastest 98 PC" which is currently kicking around on YouTube at a bit over 12,000 views https://youtu.be/YETxI4rA_gs

I'll also concede up-front that (depending on criteria) it's not the "worlds fastest" machine. I will plant a flag and call it the fastest machine *with driver support* since I know many users run i7's or modern Ryzen's with PCI-E to PCI adapters all 'round and no drivers for anything on the motherboard. But my machine does boast everything installed in it having driver support under Win98

Originally my machine was just to "prove" Youtuber MattKC wrong about his video. He built a 98 PC using a Celeron, a SATA Blu Ray drive and a Geforce FX 5200. He kept running into trivial issues and had bad performance in games such as Halo then simply declared it a bad idea, saying "there is no ultimate PC"

I complained in a group chat and a friend (likely jokingly) replied "well, you do better then!" and two years of covid lockdowns, reading Vogons, MSFN and other general "stuck at home" induced insanity later I had done just that. And I'm quite happy I did, I *enjoy* using the machine.

Coming up on two years now since I built the thing, I'd say I built it originally to prove it could be done. But I simply enjoy using it as a "distraction free" retro gaming PC. I'm also able to bring it to LAN parties and have an absolutely screaming fast "legacy PC" in order to work with other older machines in ways that Virtual Machines simply can't. Restoring my Cobalt Qube 2 with a 3.2Ghz Athlon 64 at the helm for decompression absolutely flew by as opposed to using something more era appropriate such as a Pentium II.

Contrary to popular belief, everything I throw at it generally just runs, with the exception of DOS software due to the lack of VBE support. Even a lot of software that arguably was written for XP just...runs! And of course it's era appropriate to run Windows XP on for the few games that do not. Crysis pumps out a "respectable" 7 FPS in its benchmark under XP 64-bit

VivienM wrote on 2024-03-09, 00:20:

I would add one observation: a "fastest" Win98 system is likely to be cheaper than something period-correct.

that's a good point! that period hardware costs more than a 15 year old machine often

its interesting to see 98 on some modern hardware in one sense, but i don't think I'd do it myself. i cant think of any games that really need 98 and the kind of performance possible only with a post 2002 system (when mainstream support ended), actually even before that time pretty much everything new ran on XP anyway.

I do have a Duron 800 with geforce 4 card and win 98, that modest specced machine is very much a speed machine for games of the late 90's anyway to me 😀 it would be faster if forced onto some more recent machine, but the big performance differences can be felt from a machine right at 98's launch to a machine at the end of 98 being included on new retail machines, a fairly short period really