Retail ones came with a fan right on the heatsink.
OEM ones usually had big heatsinks and pushed air through it with ducts or well placed fans.

I'd be sure to have some airflow through it to keep it cool.

I would attach a small fan on side of heat sink.

I see you've got a VIA 693 board. That will give you terrible performance with PII. If you care just about DOS then I would recommend getting a cheap early 440BX board with 3x ISA (100Mhz FSB only, no PIII support). If you want run Windows 98 on it then get at least mid 440BX board with 2x ISA. Mostly late 440BX boards are stable at 133Mhz FSB. Those usually have 1x ISA.

AlexZ wrote on 2022-11-20, 18:09:

I would attach a small fan on side of heat sink.

I see you've got a VIA 693 board. That will give you terrible performance with PII. If you care just about DOS then I would recommend getting a cheap early 440BX board with 3x ISA (100Mhz FSB only, no PIII support). If you want run Windows 98 on it then get at least mid 440BX board with 2x ISA. Mostly late 440BX boards are stable at 133Mhz FSB. Those usually have 1x ISA.

I mean, if you are running DOS, you're not hawking the difference in performance between a 440BX and a VIA chipset on a Pentium 2. You already have overkill performance.

This hobby of ours doesn't require absolute convergence on VOGONS' members collective preference for 440BX. It's all about experimenting. I love that people are messing around with other stuff.

smtkr wrote on 2022-11-20, 19:33:

AlexZ wrote on 2022-11-20, 18:09:

I would attach a small fan on side of heat sink.

I see you've got a VIA 693 board. That will give you terrible performance with PII. If you care just about DOS then I would recommend getting a cheap early 440BX board with 3x ISA (100Mhz FSB only, no PIII support). If you want run Windows 98 on it then get at least mid 440BX board with 2x ISA. Mostly late 440BX boards are stable at 133Mhz FSB. Those usually have 1x ISA.

I mean, if you are running DOS, you're not hawking the difference in performance between a 440BX and a VIA chipset on a Pentium 2. You already have overkill performance.

This hobby of ours doesn't require absolute convergence on VOGONS' members collective preference for 440BX. It's all about experimenting. I love that people are messing around with other stuff.

Thanks for the info. I'll make sure to put a fan in there. I have to get some standalone pwm thermal controllers as there is little worse to me than a tiny fan running at full speed all the time.

Performance wise, thanks for the tip, but I think it is useful to quantify "terrible performance". From what I read we're talking about at the very worst 35%.

For the purpose of a late DOS, early Windows 98 games and various other non-performance intensive software this is perfectly fine. In fact I had an almost exact same setup back in the day with the exception of running a Celeron and a pretty cheap gpu(so it was even worse). However, having said that I do want an option to push this machine faster that's why I was trying to get a coppermine cpu running on it, but the highest this motherboard will go is 6x multiplier. So I'm getting a P3 600/100 (in all likelyhood it will sit in the drawer for the most time).

Also a big requirement for this build was an AT format (no atx) and isa slots due to wanting to use my NOS great AT tower case. Perhaps if I see a bx motherboard that fits those requirements I'll get it. For now I'm really happy that this p2 turned out to have an unlocked multiplier. So far I only could run it at 100mhz fsb so the lowest it went was 200mhz. If I do manage to get 66mhz working I woukd love to hook up the turbo button and the frequency display to switch between let's say 350mhz and 132mhz (not without reboot of course). That would be really cool.

If someone knows of a really good motherboard for slot1 in AT form factor that will run p2 as well as P3 coppermine (no longer than 5 slots). Please do let me know.

Later DOS games that can run 640x480 or higher will usually benefit from faster CPUs. A Pentium 3 is actually an excellent choice.

Sure there are also oldies that will run too fast but DOS is quite a mixture of games.

swaaye wrote on 2022-11-21, 01:07:

Later DOS games that can run 640x480 or higher will usually benefit from faster CPUs. A Pentium 3 is actually an excellent choice.

Sure there are also oldies that will run too fast but DOS is quite a mixture of games.

I have yet to receive the one I hope will work. BTW, could you suggest some good games from the (late dos, early win98) era? I really only know the classics(quakes, doom, Duke 3d, fallout 1&2, starcraft). However, most are really windows games so any that I felt were too slow on my win98 build should run "blazingly fast" on the winXP build (I havent decided between an early p4 or athlon 64, gts 250 as graphics as I happen to have one).

I built the win98 pc mainly for other software, but I would live to play some games (especially, good ones I don't know - my favourite genre is anything fast paced).

How about:

Build engine games like Duke 3D, Blood, Shadow Warrior, Tekwar.
Quake was originally DOS
Cybermage
Bioforge
Terra Nova Strike Force Centauri
System Shock
Strike Commander
Wing Commander 3
Wings of Glory
Pacific Strike
EA / Janes flight sims
Mechwarrior 2 was originally DOS
TIE Fighter Collector's CDROM edition (SVGA support, expansions included, MIDI music)
Star Trek TNG A Final Unity
Carmageddon
Crusader No Remorse / No Regret
Need For Speed
Screamer
Magic Carpet
Master of Orion
Master of Magic
XCom / XCom Terror From The Deep

Turn based strategy games get slower as the campaign develops so CPU helped there.

I suggest you go here and do an archaeological dig. 😉
https://cgwmuseum.org/

NVidia gts 250 can't run Windows 98 games well as it requires a driver that is too new. You need a GeForce 4 or FX paired with PIII or Athlon. Running Windows 98 games in Windows XP is not a good option at all. PIII AT boards tend to be quite poor - usually VIA 693 chipset with inferior performance and poor AGP stability.