Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

The original halo was awesome the ending with the worthog was the best. I hated the flood though.

The flood was annoying, though I did like the way it intertwined when considering the storyline.

I've never ran it faster than a Pentium IV Northwood 3.2GHz. It's great and stable there

Might as well post my rig again:
ASRock K8Upgrade-NF3
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Venice OC to 2,4Ghz
2x512MB DDR400 RAM
Point of View's NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT 256MB AGP (a black PCB version of the Leadtek 6800GT AGP, even uses the Leadtek's BIOS) with a ghetto cooler
80GB Samsung SP0822N IDE HDD connected via a 40-pin IDE cable
Enermax EG365AX-VE(G) 365W PSU
SONY SDM-HS53 15" LCD monitor
NO case, I power this PC with scissors!

Runs Need for Speed: Carbon under Windows 98SE well. Tried to run GTA IV on 98SE as well, got an Out of Video Memory error after initial screen pops up.
NVIDIA's LAN drivers for 98SE are terrible, slow speeds 😒

fastest PC i ran Windows 98 SE was on a Core 2 Duo E6300 with an ASUS P5VD2-VM, 1 GB RAM and the onboard video

Fastest I've done it was on a Pentium 4 socket 478 around 2.0 ghz. At one of my old jobs (circa 2004) we used to (unofficially) install it on the machines sold.

Fastest I have it running now is on a K7SEM board with and integrated Duron 1400 and 512 MB ram. I use it for windows gaming and for document scanning (Canon N640pEx).

Time to show off my retrogaming rig again!

-BCM BC875PLG industrial motherboard (875P chipset, has a single full-featured ISA slot)
-Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.2 GHz SL7AA
-2x1GB DDR-400
-eVGA GeForce 6800 Ultra 256MB AGP

-Auzentech X-Fi Prelude (only used when booting into XP)
-Turtle Beach Montego II (98SE card of choice, I don't use the Aureal Vortex SB Pro emulation though)
-no more DOS-dedicated sound card at the moment since I just sold my AWE64 Gold and my AWE32 won't fit in the case without modification

Having this particular set of hardware means I can cover all the late-1990s games I want under 98SE, as well as XP-based gaming up to around 2005 or so before I want to reach for my Q6600 or 4770K builds, all while having full-fledged ISA for better DOS sound options. I do have to patch 98SE for it to work reliably with 2 GB of RAM installed, though.

It's really convenient to have it all in a single computer, too. I get enough complaints about having too many desktop computers in this house as is.

Some games do run too fast, possibly becoming unstable and crashing because of it, but a quick run of the THROTTLE utility clears that up nicely since it underclocks via hardware multiplier.

^Nice build, how many points you have in 3DMark2001 SE, and 3DMark03?

I am almost done with my fastest win98 machine, just needs installation in a case:

Motherboard: Asrock 775i65G R3.0
CPU: Pentium Dual Core E5800
RAM: 2x twinMOS m2g9i08a-tt 256MB PC3200 CL2.5
Videocard: Geforce 6800 ultra AGP
Soundcard: Aureal vortex II
HDD: 128GB SSD sata
Monitor: Dell Ultrasharp 2007FP

My original Windows 98 PC, rebuilt on the cheap with what used to be expensive components back in the day.

Motherboard: ASUS P2B BX440 Revision 1.02
CPU: Intel Pentium III "Katmai" 600MHz, 100MHz FSB, 512KB L2 Cache, SECC2 Slot 1 cartridge
RAM: 256MB (2x 128MB) PC-100 SIMM ECC (disabled in BIOS due to lack of necessity)
Video card: Diamond Viper V770 (nVidia Riva TNT2) 32MB AGP
Additional: 2x STB V2-1000 12MB Voodoo2 PCI cards in SLI
Sound card: Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE64 Standard ISA
Primary IDE: 40GB Western Digital ATA-100 PATA
Secondary IDE: IOMEGA ZIP 100MB ATAPA, Panasonic CD-RW 32x
Monitor: Samsung 26" 720p TV @ 1366 x 768 native resolution
Operating System: Windows 98 (First Edition)

I'm not a fan of Win98, and try to run as much in DOS/XP/Win8/OS2 as possible. Fastest machine it's on is the PII 300 retro PC. If I could find a reason to run anything that needed more power, there's always the P4 3GHz system that should be fully compatible.

Fastest machine was a C2D when I had a P5PE-VM. Now I run it in my hybrid 2002 project, a 2,8GHz P4.

Fastest I did was a Gigabyte 865P 775 board with a Pentium 4 3.6, Geforce 6800 GT

motherboard gigabyte ga-z97m d3h (intel 9 series)
8gb ddr3
i5 4690 3.5 ghz
pcie msi 750ti ovc v1 2048 mb
sound blaster live ct 4830

win98se installs with the help of himemx,exe with parameter /max=64000, from freedos. since modify these (with any value) didnt help
[386Enh]
MaxPhysPage=30000
[vcache]
MaxFileCache=393216
everything is working ok. the only problem is that command.com makes computer beep and late a bit to open.

Oh my... so fast computers...

I run Win98 on a Pentium III-s at1400 Mhz (Not overklocked) and 1 Gig of ram, 512MB as ramdisk.

Sempron 64 AM2 - 1.6Ghz @ 2.1Ghz
3Gb DDR2 800Mhz
Samsung 830 SSD 64GB
GeForce 7300GT 512Mb PCIe
Asrock NF6G-DVI - Nforce Mainboard

Runs like hell.

I ran 98SE on an XP-M 2400+ @ 3000+ (2.24 GHz)/512MB/A7N8X-E/Radeon 9700 Pro in 2004-2005, for competitive multiplayer gaming, and switched back to XP the rest of the time.

My retro 98SE system is based on Tualatin: PIII-S 1.4 GHz/256 MB/CUBX-E/Voodoo 5 5500.

NM I see I already anwsered doh

The fastest 98 mashine was my second pc almost 20 years back.it was a celly coopermine 633 mhz on an manli intel chipset mobo savage 4 vga and 64 mb of ram. The 98 lived exactly two weeks. Then i inatalled win me and i stayed with it. I never vent back to 98 and i probably never will.

Since my last post, officially this:

PC Chips M861G v1.6a motherboard
Athlon 64 3400+ Venice
1GB DDR400 RAM (Limited to 512MB in Win9x)
GeForce 6800 GT
Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS

I've started dual booting this system with WinXP using PLOP boot manager. It works really well and is my favorite multi-boot manager. I recommend it.

While I did this to gain some backwards compatibility, it isn't as awesome as I had hoped. Because of the Audigy 2 ZS, DOS support is very limited. Still, if any Windows games give me grief with WinXP, Win98SE should be able to handle them and DOSBox can handle the rest. I've also got all the usual GLIDE wrappers available as well. A 1st-gen SBLive would have been a better choice for this system, but I've already got WinXP and Win98SE images built for the Audigy 2 ZS. I'm not rebuilding them.

I've found that gameport joysticks under WinXP don't work right in DOSBox. I had to connect my ThrustMaster X-Fighter to a RockFire USB adapter to get it working right in DOSBox. (X-Wing and TIE Fighter. Woohoo!)

Win98SE is the direct opposite. It works fine with my X-Fighter when connected to the gameport, but doesn't work right with the RockFire USB adapter. It disconnects constantly with the RockFire.

Also, Win98SE doesn't like my TRENDnet TEW-424UB v3.1R USB WiFi adapter with the official TRENDnet drivers. I had to download an older version of the RealTek 8187B drivers to get it working without BSODs and lockups. Under WinXP, it works just fine.

It works well enough as a "do it all" system. A CT4620 would have given me good DOS support, but then I would lose all of the more advanced features of the Audigy 2 ZS. Pick yer poison, I suppose: Good DOS support or better sound system. Can't have 'em both, I guess.

Edit/Update: Win98SE hates my Logitech G300 USB mouse. There is nothing I can do to get Win98SE to play nice with this mouse. With the G300 plugged in, it takes over 4 minutes to boot when it normally would take less than 60 seconds. If/When it does finally boot, the system lags and runs incredibly slow. With a regular PS/2 mouse, Win98SE works fine. If I have both PS/2 and the G300 connected, it also works fine. There's just something about this G300 that makes Win98SE highly unstable when using it by itself. Very strange. I've gone back to single-booting WinXP. I've got other PCs which are much better for running Win9x.

I was going to say "Probably one of the machines set up for my in-law's Windows 9x LAN setup" but then I remembered I went ME on all of them.

That said, probably a Sempron 1.8 or P4 3.06 with 512MB of RAM and either a Radeon 9550 or Geforce FX 5600 would be the best of those machines, running a "9x" series OS.