At the time of the GF3 and I think I tried it on a GF4 too, the nVidia driver control panel let you set overscan and position for the TV out, so you had some options to meddle with if the healthbar or something dropped out the bottom of the screen. One would hope they only improved on that over the next 3 years.

I dont understand the ultimate goal of your build.
The games given as example would run fine in a 2003 or 2004 system as well.

Like other already answered the most performant graphics solution would be a 7800GTX 512MB SLI. They came out in late 2005.
With the rest of the system being something like
Athlon64 Fx57 (Single cores still had the upper hand in games)
Asus A8N32-SLI
WD Raptor Raid
Sound Blaster X-Fi

I have a 2005 top system myself
(here), but i use it for games of that era. (F.E.A.R, Doom3, UT2004, Painkiller, Oblivion, ...)

By 2005 the kind of person who could afford this $3000+ system would also have an LCD monitor for sure !

Thank you all for your input!

acl wrote on 2024-12-18, 21:36:

I dont understand the ultimate goal of your build.
The games given as example would run fine in a 2003 or 2004 system as well.

I would go so far as to say that even a computer from the year 2000 would be fine for games like Civilization III and NFS: Porsche Unleashed. The former game was released in 2001 and the latter game was released in 2000. I actually have both of them installed on a Pentium III system with a GeForce 2 GTS, and they run very well. Back in the day, I played NFS: Porsche Unleashed on a GeForce 2 MX and it was...fine.

interflux wrote on 2024-12-21, 13:45:

acl wrote on 2024-12-18, 21:36:

I dont understand the ultimate goal of your build.
The games given as example would run fine in a 2003 or 2004 system as well.

I would go so far as to say that even a computer from the year 2000 would be fine for games like Civilization III and NFS: Porsche Unleashed. The former game was released in 2001 and the latter game was released in 2000. I actually have both of them installed on a Pentium III system with a GeForce 2 GTS, and they run very well. Back in the day, I played NFS: Porsche Unleashed on a GeForce 2 MX and it was...fine.

Was about to say the same! Just finished building a Duron900+GeForce2MX system from 2001 yesterday. I can run these games at 1024x768 at a pretty high frame rate. NFS PU was more than fine, trust me...

I guess I got a bit worried because I visited techpowerup which recommends you play 640*480 🤣

TechPowerup has generated slop articles on video card comparisons so I wouldn't hold their words with trust. They're the site with the disinfo one made me "have to remember" about (like nVidia Quadro's Jan 1 1999 launch date 10 months ahead of the announcement)

The games you mentioned would run just fine on a Pentium 4 with 1-2gb of ram if you want XP and a geforce 4 ti 4200. This combination would be easy to find and cheap.
On the other hand building a ultimate PC of any kind - best of year XXXX, best of socket 478, best of you name it - is prohibitively expensive because of the rarity of the components and because people want a lot of money for the "last of its kind".
Example of best of 2005 that I built and currently use:
Athlon 64 X2 4800
Abit fatality AN8 SLI
Corsair 4*1gb TWINX1024-3200XLPRO with leds - only 3.25gb recognized by XP
Ati radeon X1800XT 512mb
WD raptor 74gb + 500gb
modern PSU: Corsair RM850i
Antec titan case, some DVD-RW, some fans.
All of the above are collectible so I hope you have deep pockets or unobtanium (fatality board from Abit) so I hope you have lots of luck!
Regarding the monitor I would never use a CRT TV for gaming/office work; the image is simply horrible. Much easier to find and cheap are 19 inch LCD with a 1280*1024 at 75hz resolution which would provide a comfortable experience with all the games you mentioned. Or you can try to find one of those 21.3 LCD monitors with a 1600*1200 resolution but they are limited to 60hz as far as I know.

One important thing about CRT TV's is that they are most often locked to 60 Hz, which will give you a headache before too long due to the flicker.

A proper CRT monitor, even with a tiny bump to 70-75Hz, will go much easier on your eyes.

DOS may be bearable, just, on a svideo-connected CRT, but there is no way you would want to use Windows 95/98/XP over such a connection - the UI, text etc will be just about unusable. Games may be okay (though heavily blurry) at low res 640x480/720x576.

Even at the time of the 16bit home computers most of us (in lands where it was available) were using RGB connections (via scart) in preference to svideo. I would hate to think my only way of using a PC (with all of the text navigation that goes hand-in-hand with it) over such a poor display.