kolderman wrote on 2023-03-06, 07:54:> I want to cover the area from late 1997 to late 2000 if possible. […]
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> I want to cover the area from late 1997 to late 2000 if possible.
So you are pretty much in the Windows only era, which simplifies things a lot, but covers a good deal of Glide games like Quake 2. I would probably build something like this:
Pentium 4 Northwood / Athlon XP (former is probably cheaper, latter allows for Voodoo3/5)
Geforce 4 Ti 4600/FX5900 (latter allows for better AA at higher res)
Audigy2 ZS (best quality and fewer issue compared to Live/Audigy), could also consider Vortex2 (if you care about A3D)
Voodoo2 (possibly in SLI) for quirky Glide games from 97/98
Win98 (XP wasn't out until 2002)
You could step down to Pentium3, which would still be fast enough, and allow for ISA sound cards, but if you are sure you won't be playing games prior to 1997 then it will be cheaper and easier to build a P4 system.
The kind of games you might be playing by end of 2000 that require pretty beefy specs include games like NOLF, Elite Force, Thief2 and Deus Ex. I played Elite Force on a FX5900U and a 3400Ghz P4, and it coped well but did slow down with AA pushed up.
In general I'd say this is sold advice, but certainly for a first build, I'd suggest lowering VGA requirement from Ti4600/FX59000 to Ti4200. Performance is slightly slower, but there's not much that will be playable with the Ti4600 and not with the Ti4200. That will save you a LOT of money though, Ti4600 or FX5900 go for multiple times the price of a Ti4200. If it were meant to be the 'ultimate AGP' or something, but if it's a first foray into retro gaming, it makes sense not to break the bank.
As for ATi vs nVidia, if there's no DOS involved it doesn't really matter and I'd say a Radeon 9800 would be a very good option (in fact, I'd say a Radeon 8500, or indeed a GeForce 3 would also be better than the vast majority of stuff people actually had in 2000). With DOS at least being considered, nVidia and 3dfx had by far the best DOS VESA support, so in a build like this the GeForce 3Ti/4Ti makes most sense.
Regarding CPU/platform, P4 is cheap and does the job, but no ISA. P3 could solve that, but might be a bit underpowered for 2000. Solution: go for an Athlon Thunderbird on a KT133(A) board with ISA slot. An Athlon 1400 is faster than a P4-2000, and runs rings around anything P3 short of a Tualatin-S, and they are more expensive, particularly if you want a motherboard with ISA to run it on. Abit KT7A and Epox 8KTA3 are the classic boards here, but they are also notorious for bad caps. Look for FIC or Gigabyte for a better chance of working stuff - although any electrolytic cap on a 25-year old piece of hardware has had a long life and should be considered suspect. This is not a 'plug and play' hobby unfortunately. In fact, looking for boards with bad caps can actually be an advantage: they are dead, so cheaper, and you know how they died, so - assuming you are capable of re-capping - chances of having a fully working board are higher 😉