Reply 40 of 45, by nd22
I do not tend to do 100% period correct machines but generally I follow 3 principles when building a retro system:
1. what components were available on the market in that particular year or period.
2. how much ram the motherboard can take.
3. what Windows versions were on the market when those components were launched.
The most difficult period correct items to get are the hard drives! Believe or not but I had drives that I personally purchased died on me even without being mistreated in any way! I expected the motherboards and the graphics card to go first but no, I still have 20+ years old mobos that are running perfectly fine! On the other hand the CPUs and the RAM last forever if you do not drop them or short circuit them! IMHO using new brand names PSU is crucial so I never use period correct ones!
As an example:
2005: Athlon 64 X2 4800, 4*1gb Corsair (3.25gb recognized), Abit AN8 SLI, WD 500gb, geforce 7800gtx*2 - Windows XP SP3 flies on this system!
2001/2002: Pentium 3 1400, 3*512mb Samsung, Abit VH6T, WD 120gb, geforce3 ti500 - Windows XP SP3 performs much more poorly however still usable but (I know this will be considered blasphemy 😀 )with better performance than 98SE on this system.
2001/2002: Pentium 3 1400, 512mb Samsung, Abit ST6, WD 80gb, geforce3 ti500 - Windows Me because of the small amount of RAM.
2000: Pentium 3 1000EB, 3*256mb Kingston, Abit BX133 raid, WD 60gb, geforce2 pro - Windows 2000 runs very well.