> 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.

Thanks a lot for your reply and the recommendations. I have also asumed that I am going to play games mainly from the Windows area. But concerning DOS I need to double check. The DOS area is grey horse for me I do not know much about. I did not got into PC game gaming until the windows area but I cannot rule out the possibilty that there some games from the DOS Area that are worth checking out.

theiceman085 wrote on 2023-03-06, 07:45:

are some vendors preferable over the others are is it more a matter of personal preference?

Both. There are certain models and manufacturers that are preferred, but aside of some well known bad parts with serious performance deficit and/or compatibility issues, the advantages of the most desirable parts are generally blown out of proportion.

theiceman085 wrote on 2023-03-06, 07:45:

Is a intel pentium or amd cpu the better choice?

Generally they are equal if you buy them to do the specific things you want them to do. AMD Duron/Athlon CPUs are just as good for what you want to do as Intel Celeron/Pentium III.

theiceman085 wrote on 2023-03-06, 07:45:

Which gpu would be a good bet? ATI; 3dfx or NVDIA?

That's much more circumstantial. The ATI Rage series were a mess with all sort of weird OEM variants. The good ones are good, but without researching the exact model, they are a mine field. With the Radeon cards, they became as consistent as Nvidia.

Nvidia was generally faster and more consistent, with only some low-end manufacturer cheaping out on components and manufacturing cards with worse image quality. You can safely pick up any TNT/TNT2/GeForce from known brands.

3dfx is almost exclusively desired because of Glide and their historical significance as one of the first mainstream (non-industrial) 3D accelerators. For your target period they have a practical use, but getting one is not likely to work on a tight budget. You can consider yourself lucky if you get one for $100 unless you hunt for weeks or months for a deal or risk getting a faulty card in hopes that it's not actually faulty or you can fix it.

theiceman085 wrote on 2023-03-06, 07:45:

So I would to be curious hearing a few suggestions for the specs for my the personal needs I have mentioned above.

And this is where we come to the question: What's your budget?
Also, do you have any special desires? (Glide, A3D, ISA option, etc.)

I like kolderman's suggestion cheap and plentiful and shouldn't be too tricky to setup if its your first PC.

While you can hack some PCi-E cards for Win98 for simplicity your better off with a motherboard with AGP. Personally I'd go with either a Socket 478 or 775 board based on either the i845 or 865 chipset as drivers are bug free. Below is a link for suitable LGA775 boards.
LGA 775 Motherboards with AGP Slots

For graphics drivers is what lets ATI down, which is a shame as they have some nice cards but I like to keep things simple and stick with Nvidia for the most part. Any of the GF 4Ti range would be fine, The FX range is a bit messy so double check if looking at one of those.

With all that said I'd double check your games though. Alot of Win9x era games run fine in XP which gives you alot more options.

kolderman wrote on 2023-03-06, 07:54:

> I want to cover the area from late 1997 to late 2000 if possible. […]
Show full quote

> 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 😉

@RandomStranger The special desire is a tricky question. Actually, I have and at the same time, I haven't. I never had a 3dfx machine back then but I would be quite interested in getting a gliding machine with a decent Vodoo card. But voodoo cards have recently got quite high so I am not sure if is worth it. Getting cards from ATI or NVIDIA based on Direct 3d and open Gl would be more versatile.

I really like glide look of some games but the glide is way too specific to be really useful for me. I am looking more for around solution that is more API agnostic for later period games of the latter half of 2000 or maybe even 2001 games.

Max Payne is quite a mess on modern-day machines without lots of tinkering. So being able to Play Max Payne on contemporary hardware would also be plus.

@dionB Thanks for your answer as well. Mentioning the ATI 8500 or the 9800 seems good advice. I hever had one of these but I can remember they had good reputation.

I was also quite happy with later peroid Ati Cards. I had radeon 1800xt and then lalter the Radeon 2900 pro and was very happy with them.

theiceman085 wrote on 2023-03-06, 07:45:

I want to cover the area from late 1997 to late 2000 if possible. There many possibilites to build the system but are some vendors preferable over the others are is it more a matter of personal preference?

There are a lot of different system builds that can cover that period of gaming.

Along the lines of what kolderman posted, my own build for this period consists of the following:

CPU: Athlon XP 2000+ (Socket A)
Motherboard: ASUS A7V600 (VIA KT600 chipset)
RAM: 512MB
GPU: GeForce4 Ti 4200
Sound cards: Diamond Monster MX300 (Vortex2) and Creative Labs Audigy 2 ZS (for EAX4)
Storage: 250GB SSD with SATA-to-IDE adapter
Removeable Storage: 3.5" disk drive and DVD-ROM drive
PSU: Sea Sonic Focus GX-1000
OS: Windows 98 SE

The intent of this system is to run Windows 9x era of games ranging from mid 90s to early 2000s. It's mostly components from about 2002 intended to play that era of games with good performance while maintaining good compatibility. For this reason I specifically used a motherboard with the VIA KT600 chipset since it also allows for compatibility for PCI sound cards with DOS games. I have used this system with games as old as the original Doom (1993).

You also don't need dual sound cards like I have. If I had to pick one, I would just use the Diamond Monster MX300 for its A3D support. You can't really go wrong with any Vortex2 based card or any of the Creative Labs Audigy cards.

I also use some modern components including a modern ATX case, fans, modular ATX power supply and SSD drive. Main reason is I want to run this computer cool and quiet, which is more easily achievable with modern components.

One more note regarding power supply: at 1000 watts it is overkill for a build like this. I chose it specifically because of the available amps (25A) on the 5V rail which is more necessary for older computer systems. If you were to use a more period-correct PSU, you could use one with lower overall wattage.

@Shponglefan Thanks for recommending your build. And I am aware that there are many potential build. I just made the thread to get some ideas in which direction I could go because I am new to it.

Everything recommend sounds really good sepecially the Geforce 4 4200. On poster recommend the Geforce 4 4600 which also seems good but the 4200 is cheaper as far as I have seen online and the slighy worse peformance the 4200 has compared to the 4600 does not really matter in the enviroment I want to use the card with. The games I want to play with should work fine with the 4200.

I might also take a look at the readeon 8000 or 9000 series too.

My variation for most of the same period:

CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2800+
Motherboard: MSI KM3M-V
RAM: 2×256MB DDR333
GPU: Geforce FX5700
Sound card: Creative Sound Blaster Live! SB0100
Storage: 120GB SSD with SATA-to-IDE adapter
Removable storage: 3.5" floppy drive, DVD-ROM
PSU: currently an old Ever Power SFX PSU, soon to be replaced with a BE QUIET! SFX Power 3 300W

For me early DOS compatibility aren't all that important, though most games aren't too picky. The motherboard uses the KM266 Pro chipset. The benefit of the board is that it has the 4 pin power connector which makes it less 5V rail heavy and it can be used with low-power modern PSU-s that normally can't run high-end Socket A systems. This reduces expenses on the PSU front without sacrificing quality.

Same as with Shponglefan, this has all the power late W98 era games need, though the graphics card, because it needs newer drivers, sometimes has issues.

RandomStranger Thanks for your recommendations as well. A good driver point is also a very valiant point to make the card run. But I think it should be possible to find some of the old Nvidia drivers on the net after a deep search.

It is also intriguing that Geforce Fx 5700 has been mentioned for the second time already. my memory could fool me it has been a long time but I believe the Fx Series had a very bad reputation when it was brand new. It is cool that such a card is good from the retro gaming perspective. I am not bashing the card though. Never had one of them so I cannot tell if I also would have been disappointed having one of these. Maybe I might have even liked it.

But never mind thanks for the recommendation. I will look into the Fx5700 as well.

theiceman085 wrote on 2023-03-06, 11:56:

I never had a 3dfx machine back then but I would be quite interested in getting a gliding machine with a decent Vodoo card. But voodoo cards have recently got quite high so I am not sure if is worth it.

Imho, considering your target timeframe, if you have no nostalgia for the way Glide looks then it's not worth it at the current prices. Most of the games that I can think of that absolutely require Glide are earlier, DOS based titles, the later/Windows ones also support more generic APIs (D3D, OpenGL) just fine.

For your first build, IMHO it's a good idea to stay a bit cheap until you decide that you really want to go more high end. You don't want to spend hundreds on parts only to have it sit in the closet all the time. For an example, here is my build that does that era extremely well and can even go a bit beyond.

- Pentium 4 2.0GHz Northwood. Many of them on ebay from 1.7 to 2.4ghz for only a few dollars.
- ASUS P4P800-VM (its a bit pricey normally but I lucked out on this board). I would highly recommend sticking with Intel chipsets for a least trouble free experience, even if it costs a bit more.
- 256MB DDR400 set (2x128mb). Not very many things for that era needs much more and it avoids Win98 memory troubles. You could go to 384mb or 512mb if you want more. Dual channel isnt a big deal for 98 and I'm not even sure it even does anything.
- GF4 Ti4200, very powerful for that era and extremely compatible. Can be pricey but I've seen them for extremely cheap at times. A cheaper option is a 128bit GF4 MX card, avoid the crippled 64bit cards. If you want more power and don't care about DOS any, Radeon 9800 Pros are incredible.
- 80GB IDE HDD, just had this laying around. With a P4P board like this, the sata ports works just fine in compatibility mode (and a good reason why I stick with Intel chipsets). If you want to go real cheap, a $20 modern 120GB SSD will do. They have quite a bit of endurance these days and are rock bottom in prices.
- Audigy 2 ZS, works decently well if you use the VXD drivers and follow this guide for DOS sound. A SB Live is a bit more period correct.
- Modern EVGA 600w PSU that has 24amps on both 3.3 and 5v. Not the highest but it covers the components I have in atm. My 'good' more period correct supply went bang the other day 🙁 need to source a better one.

I have an extra x850 Pro, Northwood 3.0C, and a 2GB RAM kit to turn it into an early XP rig if I want to (they all still work in 98 with a bit of extra work for the extra RAM). I mostly have it in this config because I wanted to run some older stuff for a while. A build like this should not cost very much at all and it'd be a good first foray into retro computers.

IMO, avoid voodoo cards unless you get extremely lucky or decide that you really want one. They cost way too much for a first build. 🙁

I think you really need to determine whether DOS is in or out, as gen_angry points out, keeping it cheap is a very good idea and part of that is being crystal clear about what you're trying to achieve.

His suggestion is excellent if DOS isn't required, but even though you can more or less get the Audigy 2 ZS to make noise in DOS, it's far from the ideal DOS card, not even the ideal PCI DOS card. If DOS is required, at the very least go for a trouble-free PCI DOS card (you can run it alongside an Audigy, Windows is happy to have multiple cards installed, and if you don't install drivers in DOS, DOS has no idea there's another card there). I'd recommend the ESS Solo-1 for as trouble-free DOS sound as PCI can deliver (card tip: Terratec Solo-1), or the Yamaha YMF74x chips for best DOS sound (including real Yamaha OPL3) and still decent compatibility. But tbh, pretty much any SBPro2-compatibly ISA card with real or 1:1 clone OPL3 will give you similar sound and far better compatibility. So I would really recommend a platform with an ISA slot there, even if it gives you slightly lower performance (although Athlon 1.4 >> P4 2.0)

So if you are into a late 90s and early 2000s machine running either Win98 or maybe XP you should go with a Pentium 2 something with already AGP slot preferably so you can get a more advanced graphics card and not be confined to the PCI/ISA bus for graphics choices
In that era there is a lot of quite cheap hardware around you can get a transition motherboard from AT to ATX or a early ATX mobo
there will be plenty of choices for pci sound cards, lan adaptors etc

good luck with your build!

theiceman085 wrote on 2023-03-06, 21:35:

my memory could fool me it has been a long time but I believe the Fx Series had a very bad reputation when it was brand new.

It did have bad reputation. It wasn't a good DirectX 9 card, ATI have soundly beaten them and back in 2003 people bought them for the current and future games. Today their appeal is that these are the last cards that support all the legacy features 90s games may need, including some of the more obscure ones.

Also Nvidia made questionable choices with cards at lower price points which absolutely destroyed their performance. Not to mention the low-end being a mess. The FX5200 and FX5500 are the same cards and they are beaten by cards like the Geforce MX 440 and 460. The FX5600 is not awful, but you are still better off with a Ti4200. It's the FX5600 Ultra and 5700 where the FX series really starts to be appealing.

I would recommend Audigy2 ZS over MX300.
Aureal Vortex 2 cards tends to become as expensive as 3dfx for graphics. There are also very few Vortex2 specific games iirc.

On the other hand, Audigy2 ZS is a great card that you can find sometimes as low as 10/15€ (in France).

Athlon64 could also be considered as it could perform better for later games (since DOS is not a requirement)

@RandomStranger Thanks a lot for the background info about the FX series. That's interesting. But you are right a Geforce 4 4200 sounds like the better solution for me. I am already quite certain that I am going to go that route but just for the sake of complition I also check out the Readeon 8500 and the 9800.

@gen_angry Thanks for your advice as well. Yes going cheap for a first build sounds like good advice I am going to do that.

@dionb I have thought about DOS again and have done some further research. My main time frame of interest is the Windows 98 area but it would also be tempting to play some old DOS games as well like Wolfenstein 3d, the early Wing Commander Games or mabye play some old games for the first time I completely missed back then.

In case a multi card build is possible wihout comppromising the 3d acceleator power needed for the windows 8 games and without breaking the bank of course I would go for it maybe.

If this not possible I go the Windows area only.

elszgensa wrote on 2023-03-06, 21:54:

theiceman085 wrote on 2023-03-06, 11:56:

I never had a 3dfx machine back then but I would be quite interested in getting a gliding machine with a decent Vodoo card. But voodoo cards have recently got quite high so I am not sure if is worth it.

Imho, considering your target timeframe, if you have no nostalgia for the way Glide looks then it's not worth it at the current prices. Most of the games that I can think of that absolutely require Glide are earlier, DOS based titles, the later/Windows ones also support more generic APIs (D3D, OpenGL) just fine.

That's a good point. As I have mentioned I never had a 3dfx card so I do not have nostaliga for 3dfx. I find the 3dfx quite interesting though. Many games I have played back then on the Playstation 1 really looked way better on a 3dfx PC.

I would lie if I say that I am not curious to play some of these games again but this time on a pc with better specs.

But in the bigger picture a 3dfx PC is not what I want. I want the best compability for the windows 98 area. So getting Geforce 4 or a Radeon 8000 or 9000 is the most sane solution.

For revisisting some old games of the 3dfx area I will try to get Nglide or dgvodoo running on my modern rig.

I think that's the best solution for me.

Does anyone here has experience with the glide wrappers? Is nglide better than dgvodoo or is it the other way round?

theiceman085 wrote on 2023-03-08, 07:38:

But in the bigger picture a 3dfx PC is not what I want. I want the best compability for the windows 98 area. So getting Geforce 4 or a Radeon 8000 or 9000 is the most sane solution.

Since you specifically mention compatibility, 3DFX cards are the king there, but I simply cannot justify a purchase at their current prices. Nvidia's compatibility is decent too, while Radeon cards are missing some features which can make a difference in a couple of games. Check the Vogons wiki articles on Table Fog and Paletted Textures for more details. Still, that's not really a deal breaker, in my view.

However, if you really do want the most compatible non-3DFX card for a Win9x system with excellent performance and a reasonable price, go for a GeForce4 Ti4200. Use driver version 45.23 or older, since newer Nvidia drivers have compatibility issues with some Win9x games.