smtkr wrote on 2025-04-03, 01:27:
I would like to suggest something a little different. See if you can find one of those little Shuttle PCs. You said you want to potentially do LAN stuff. The shuttle would be great for that and you should be able to pick some cool hardware into that case. They look cool too.
I like that idea a lot.
However, it comes with two caveats:
1) Shuttle PCs are getting a little hard to find now
2) Virtually all of them need a recap at this point - both the motherboard and the PSU. This probably is the biggest downer, as not everyone wants to take on such task. Even with really good soldering equipment, they still take a lot of time to do and aren't a piece of cake exactly (especially the PSU!)
They do make really cool LAN boxes, though.
Unknown_K wrote on 2025-04-03, 07:24:
A PCI only P4 isn't great for gaming, those machines were meant for offices (same with their P3 PCI only models).
Indeed.
PCI bus limitation is quite bad on GPUs... though given the games the O/P is trying to play, perhaps it might not matter much. I suspect something like a "common" GeForce FX 5200/5500 will be plenty fine for late 90's games and a few early 2000's games (at least on AGP slot, it is - even the 64-bit memory FX5200, I've tested it.)
Greywolf1 wrote on 2025-04-03, 07:05:
I got myself some dells if I knew how much of a pain in the butt they were I would have never bought them I got a dell dimension 3000 p4 and dimension 3100c p4 the first one had millions of issues installing w98 and driver conflicts and only has pci available so very restricted on graphics cards available for reasonable price. The second one hates w98 with avengeance crashes if you even look at it I’ve resigned myself to making it a dedicated xp machine which both are quite happy with and also quite restrictive with graphics cards as it only has 2 pci and a pcie x1 slot and low profile at that too.
Just so you know what you’re getting into if you get a dell.
Thanks for sharing this.
I have a Dimension 3000 as well. It's a pretty good (early) XP machine for office tasks. I've tried mine with a GeForce 6200 PCI, and it's a lot better than the onboard i865 graphics (Intel "Extreme" Graphics 2), but still quite disappointing as soon as you hit games from the mid 2000's. Half-Life 2 / CS Source @ 800x600 and medium graphics would be about as good as it gets while still allowing decently playable FPS. I have a 2nd Dim. 3000 board that is faulty that I was hoping to repair and setup as a W98 machine... but now that you mention this, I guess it would be moot. (Then again, I don't think I can really fix that board either - the NB is shorted and ate a 3.3V line trace, so probably not possible without replacing it.)
As for the Dimension 3100, I believe that's socket 775 -based, so not surprised Win9x doesn't like it.
Really, Intel i865 chipset is about as late as one might want to go in regards to W98. As someone mentioned in another thread, though, i845 is probably even better, because it doesn't have SATA and therefore a lot of the "hardware" that might make W98 difficult to run on.
I briefly tried a WinME install on a i845 Intel mobo with a 2 GHz CPU and 512 MB of RAM, and everything installed right on the first try - no driver shenanigans, nothing problematic.
chinny22 wrote on 2025-04-03, 05:44:
RD Ram is interesting and maybe the convenance of a complete system makes it worth the money.
Good point. RDRAM systems will indeed likely have even higher re-sell value in the future due to being rare... so if that also matters to you, then a slightly more pricey RDRAM system might indeed be worth it.
