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