First post, by misterjones
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I have a machine that's slated to be my retro gaming rig.
Dell Optiplex GX200
P3-933MHz
512MB RDRAM
onboard Nvidia TNT2-M64 w/8MB
Aopen AW744-Pro Sound card (IIRC Yamaha 744-B chip)
Quantum 10GB drive (same drive the machine shipped with when it was new)
My original thought was to simply build a Win98SE machine to play some old-school games. One thought was to use one of my 64MB Radeon 7000 PCI cards instead of the on-board neutered TNT2, but then I looked in my parts bins and realized I could build something a bit faster:
Iwill KV200R Motherboard
1.3GHz AMD Athlon Thunderbird
512MB Crucial RAM
assorted AGP cards
assorted sound cards
likely the same Quantum 10GB drive.
Now, the obvious build would be the AMD machine, however the AMD Thunderbird processors don't support SSE extensions. For some dumb reason, AMD included SSE support on their Duron processors instead. Should I even care about this seemingly insignificant thing and roll with the Athlon? The video card I'm leaning more towards is a 64MB Geforce2MX AGP card. I DO know that when I tried to run this board with my Geforce 6200 card under XP, the Nvidia driver installer complained about the processor's lack of SSE and refused to install.