First post, by Voodoo Rufus
Hello,
I've had a bit of fun building some machines the last year or so to run some older games of mine, and learned quite a bit along the way. Phils Computer Lab gave me most of the nudge to go down the path. Most of my builds revolve around Intel 4th Gen / Haswell to take advantage of the DDR3 I had on hand and cheaper PCIE GPUs, and the fact that it was the sweet spot for compatibility for drivers and raw speed. I built a "peak WinXP" machine, and a "peak Win7" machine, and learned some lessons on both. Now I'm contemplating using some remaining Socket A hardware I had and have acquired to go ahead and build a Win98 machine, but I'm not sure if it serves me much purpose besides the fun of the build (possible main driver).
Here's what I have built:
WinXP:
Asrock Z97 Anniversary
Intel G3258 (re-lidded with Conductonaut) @ 4.8GHz
4GB DDR3-2133
Old yet fast SSD
GTX960 4GB and Geforce Titan Blacks
Auzentech X-Fi Prelude
Lessons learned: super easy to build, dual cores runs WinXP faster than I ever experienced on Socket A, blows the doors off benchmarks and game FPS, and I have the nice EAX from my old Prelude audio card.
Win7:
eVGA Z97 Classified
4790K (re-lidded as well) @ 4.6Ghz (hoping for 4.đ
32GB DDR3-2133
1TB MLC SSD (my old big speed demon pre-M.2)
dual 1080Ti's in SLI
Audigy Rx PCIE audio card
Lessons learned: I have two games that play in Win7 that don't in Win11 (Dirt 2 and Crysis). I found work around to make Dirt 2 work in Win10 to get around "Games for Windows Live". Crysis seems to work fine, and I have the Remastered version as well. Hence, building the rig for Win7 was useless and I upgraded it to Win10 anyway. And since neither game uses hardware audio, the Audigy is irrelevant, yet nice anyway. Oh well. This also means any of my Win10 machines with a decent GPU would let me these anyway. Sigh.
Now, I have the following hardware (some hoarded and some found), and am trying to figure out what route to go for Win98 / 2K, if it makes any sense at all. The main question is if the games will work in WinXP, then maybe I shouldn't do it.
Abit NF7-S V2
DFI Lanparty NF2 Ultra 400 Rev. B
Various Socket A CPUs - Tbreds, Bartons, etc
2x512MB and 2x1GB DDR-400
Geforce 3 Ti200 64MB
ST Micro Kyro 2 64MB
some random budget Geforce AGPs
One SATA HDD, some other SSDs
Doesn't look like my XFi or Audigy PCIE will work in Win98, so no EAX audio that way without another card purchase. The Nforce chipset does support EAX 1 and 2, so that might get me close enough. Games I can think of playing in Win98 would be Return to Castle Wolfenstein, the original Unreals, NFS Underground 2, Painkiller, the original Serious Sams, Jedi Academy, Descent series. Mainly FPS and racer games I never got to experience in their full glory as a kid. I don't know which would overlap with WinXP, and I haven't even considered trying the 3DFX/Glide route with some of these.
Thanks in advance.