For the drivers on Win 95 OSR 2.1(withou IE4) I had to go for 1.03 Voodoo drivers. The latest 1.07 drivers seem to require IE4. However the build is very stable and pretty much all games of the era run smoothly. So far I have played Diablo 1&2, DeusEx, FIFA 98 RTWC, AoE 1&2 and had no issues. Also did not have any BSOD so far which is always a relief when you are dealing with Win 9x builds.

As for things I installed I ended up getting the XUSSB patch, RLOEW patches, Dx 7.0a, Via 4in1 3.5 drivers, Voodoo 1.03 and SB AWE 64 driver.

On the software side of things I only have Rain, Daemon Tools, Virtual Clone CD, 7zip, Total Uninstaller, Windows Plus here. Unlike my previous installation Windows Plus did not give me any crashes nor have I encountered any registry errors after nearly 2-3 hours of playing and rebooting the build. The build seems fairly stable and perfect. Also got some altec lansing speakers for the build.

Now I am going to take some time off from my retro hobby and balance my books before doing anything.

Congrats on reaching your goals, even if it took a couple of mobos and paying the Voodoo tax to get there!

sunkindly wrote on 2025-10-02, 05:50:

Congrats on reaching your goals, even if it took a couple of mobos and paying the Voodoo tax to get there!

Haha...yeah. Honestly I went a bit crazy with the spending. However I can finally play FIFA 98 RTWC and Dune as they were meant to be played.

Once again thanks to all the helpful forum members. This forum is truly one of a kind.

Is there any chance that the extra weight you have added to the Voodoo with heatsinks/fan could bend it and risk the solder joints?

RetroPCCupboard wrote on 2025-10-02, 07:25:

Is there any chance that the extra weight you have added to the Voodoo with heatsinks/fan could bend it and risk the solder joints?

I hope not. The cooler fan and the backside geek pi heatsink are not as heavy as the installed heatsink. I will probably keep an eye on the card and move things around if I see any distortion on the board.

Really cool build, especially with the Voodoo 3 and AWE 64 combo. Glad to hear it’s running stable. Looking forward to hearing how it holds up long term.

LaurenKelly wrote on Yesterday, 08:35:

Really cool build, especially with the Voodoo 3 and AWE 64 combo. Glad to hear it’s running stable. Looking forward to hearing how it holds up long term.

So far it is doing pretty good and is quite stable. I even played Dune, Diablo 1&2 and Fifa on it and so far no crashes or sudden freezing/shutdowns. In fact I would say Win 95 feels quite snappy even though my only tasks on the system are installing games or playing games. As for the games themselves, I am getting decent FPS and I have not yet gotten any stutters or problems.

Pairing the P3 700 and V3 makes sense but the ISA soundcard, even the AWE, is bit of a downgrade IMHO.
For this era I'd recommend a Vortex 2 for A3d support or SB Live for EAX (I'm not sure if Audigy work in Win95)
Not to mention PCI cards in general had a lot less crackle and hiss then ISA cards.
Keep the AWE for dos games though!

But hey that's just my opinion and the main thing is you have a working system!

chinny22 wrote on Today, 00:54:

Pairing the P3 700 and V3 makes sense but the ISA soundcard, even the AWE, is bit of a downgrade IMHO. For this era I'd recommen […]
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Pairing the P3 700 and V3 makes sense but the ISA soundcard, even the AWE, is bit of a downgrade IMHO.
For this era I'd recommend a Vortex 2 for A3d support or SB Live for EAX (I'm not sure if Audigy work in Win95)
Not to mention PCI cards in general had a lot less crackle and hiss then ISA cards.
Keep the AWE for dos games though!

But hey that's just my opinion and the main thing is you have a working system!

Once again thanks for chiming in. Actually I had never owned an ISA card before, so I got the AWE 64 to check out how an actual ISA card sounds. It was the AWE64 or the Pico-GUS for this system. I do have a few SB Live Cards(or maybe they are rebranded Ensoniq CT4740s) lying around. I might one day put that into the system and see how it fares.

I am taking a hiatus from retro-gaming but I might get a Vortex 2 someday. Actually I would like to see how different the audio feels in some of my favorite games by using a SB card and a Vortex 2 card.