athlon xp 3200+, set multiplier by software down to 600 MHz, or piv ee 3.7, unlocked multiplier.

I never really use my P4 for DOS games except for the late ones where it can benefit from the CPU for high resolution performance, and where loss of a proper ISA card with decent MIDI is no big deal.

Geforces are often recommended because of the fog table emulation and some Geforces have paletted texture support, though they have their own issues like fullscreen palette hitches

I have a VIA KT133A Socket A build that is an excellent platform for 98SE and demanding DOS games. I have an Athlon XP 2400+ (2.0 GHz) in it, and you can go even a little higher than that. 98SE drivers work well for me.

The main benefit of this platform as I see it is an ISA slot for sound cards. I don't know of any P3 Tualatin boards that have an ISA slot and run a 133MHZ FSB without running the PCI and AGP buses out of spec. P4 boards with ISA may not work properly with 98SE and can be pricey if they do.

boxpressed wrote:

The main benefit of this platform as I see it is an ISA slot for sound cards. I don't know of any P3 Tualatin boards that have an ISA slot and run a 133MHZ FSB without running the PCI and AGP buses out of spec. P4 boards with ISA may not work properly with 98SE and can be pricey if they do.

P3 motherboards based on the VIA Apollo Pro 133T chipset should be able to fit that role... 133A boards will need a pinmodded Tually, but should be fine.

BoKnowsRetro wrote:

If there is none, would be better for me to purchase those 2GHz+ machines as they can emulate WinUAE (Amiga emulator, for Amiga gaming I use real hardware now) and MAME much better and also some more modern stuff (Doom 3, Thief III for instance) can be played on them.

WinUAE, MAME, and a lot of modern stuff will run quite happily on the latest whizbang i7. There is no need at all to use Windows 98 for that.

Most likely the Pentium-3 boards you're getting will have ISA slots on them, but the P4 and Athlon boards will not. However, if this machine will only be used for late 90s Win98 and later stuff, not booted into DOS, then you might not care about ISA support.
Depending on the particular boards, you may find that some have bad caps.

If speed is an issue, then the Athlon board might have convenient underclocking abilities via software. I've had almost no experience with those utilities for the Athlon so I don't know what wrinkles there might be with different chipsets or whatever.
It might also be easy to change multipliers inside the BIOS, but that's not a given, some boards have that feature and some rely on jumpers. Also, not all Athlons are unlocked but a lot of them are.
You can pretty much assume the P4 will be multiplier locked and probably not as easy to slow down.
Plus with the P4 is SSE2 support, which makes it more usable with modern software.

I guess the tradeoff is this:
If you use a faster board, you can potentially run newer software on it. If you use an ISA card with a P3 board, you can potentially boot it into DOS games without needing to use one of your other machines.
As far as whether Win98 games ever have problems with a CPU being too fast - I don't know.

I've built all sort of Windows 98 machines, including Pentium 4 based ones. There are a lot of benefits and I made a YT video documenting my findings:

10 Reasons for Pentium 4 Windows 98 DOS Retro Gaming PC

The Problem is often to find Drivers for Mainboards of P4 Era.

I have 2 Mainboards who do not support Win98se.

But it runs stable with the included Drivers.

After googleling Drivers from Chipset Vendor i found a driver which supports the onboard sound in win98.
And it emulates a SB16 soundcard too in the dosbox of win98.

For the other Mainboard, there are no win98 drivers to find...

That's interesting. The boards I have are from Asrock, MSI and AOpen. The drivers are on their website, but the latest Intel chipset driver also works.

Windows 98 chipset support ended at i865 (PE/G) for Intel, and a little later for VIA/SiS etc.
That's about half way the Pentium 4 road. So, generally socket 775 P4 will not have full driver support, but most of the s478 stuff will most probably have.

There are exceptions though, one of which I took advantage of: Win 98, XP & 8.1 fully supported on one dual core PC? Here is my retro approach!

There are many pros for P4/AMD Athlon 2xxx+ so I will give these setups a try. I will get few motherboards, cpus and cards from the guy selling these PCs and will test properly Win 98 drivers, software underclocking and choose one or two complete setups which will suit me best.

Thank you all for your replies and help! 😀

The Athlon XP systems have a possible disadvantage when it comes to finding a PSU for those (as most motherboards draw power for the processor from the 5V line). P3 doesn't draw enough power to have issues with that, and P4 motherboards draw power from the 12V lines, like current PCs (so they are fine with modern 12V heavy PSUs). If he is selling the full system odds are they already have PSUs, though.

My ASUS P4R800VM has no Windows 98 drivers either, but it turns out the Windows ME drivers seem to work fine in 98SE.

At some point, I did have a P4 build, running Win98SE. I dismanteled it, yet it ran fine and good.
It was build from Asrock P4vm88, 1gb Ram, 3ghz P4, Radeon9600 and SB-Live.
I think it was about a year ago, that I had that build running. It was just too... Well... Borring.