First comes to mind games like System Shock 2, Ultima IX and Quake 3. Simcity 3000 too perhaps.

As i remember after 1997 you wouldn't find many CPU sensitive games, one comes in mind Motoracer, which run too fast on 200MHz and above. So IMHO PII-233 is straight replacement for regular Pentium MMX with some benefits like AGP and better RAM speed, if you want faster system you may use PIII up to 800MHz and it would be not only sufficient for most 1998-2000 games, but also have SSE, which not used by many games, but by DirectX 6.x and GPU drivers. Also if you have no plans to touch games earlier than 1996 in general (few exceptions like DOOM/QUAKE/BUILD perfectly coded to work properly on fast CPUs) you may use your PIII-550 with Riva TNT 2 and even slap single Voodoo 2 for even better compatibility for some titles. Also i remember playing Unreal and HOMM 3 cause crashes sometimes on 300-350MHz CPUs (both PII and K6-2), and it was related to timings defined in scripts, once upgraded to 450MHz it went away. And Total Annihilation, playing this title on anything less than 300MHz + 128MB RAM in skirmish with lots of units is a dog slow, but campaign is allmost fine on 200MMX + 64 RAM.

P2 400 (1998) or almost identically performin Celeron 400 (1999) seemed to be a target for developers. Lots of stuff seemed to be aimed for something like that paired with a Voodoo2 (1998) or TNT2 (1999).

Everything from P2 400 area should run fine on the PIII system.
Think going to build an PII 333 class system. If the system needs to being slower then always could swap it out on a II 233 / 266 class processor.

For a P2 system, try finding an unlocked 333, 350 or 400 cpu. Then you can downclock it to 133mhz if needed (66 x2).
As for games, Half Life is a demanding one, on my P2 400 I get about 20-30fps, with occasional dips below 20. On a P1, it's probably a lot worse.
Unreal Gold runs in the 40s, but thats in Glide mode. With a TNT it might be slower.

But since you already have a P3, that should cover 1996 - 2000 games no problem, so I don't see the point of a P2, unless trying to consolidate different builds.

Many manufactures had low-endish or OEM oriented 440LX/EX with Onboard Rage Pro Turbo graphics (wired through AGP) and some sort of half-decent onboard audio, for example:
Gigabyte GA-6LMM7 (LX, Socket 370, with YAMAHA YMF-740)
MSI MS-6159 (LX, Socket 370, with SoundBlaster PCI128, also known as Packard Bell Suma)
MSI MS-6126 (EX, Slot, with YAMAHA YMF-715)
Intel MU440EX (EX, Slot, with YAMAHA YMF-740)
AOpen MX3ZA (ZX (woohoo 100FSB), Socket 370, with ESS Solo-1)
and probably more from the usual big OEM manufacturers (Acer (for Acer and IBM), FIC, Trigem (for HP) and so on.

One of these with a, say, 266-300MHz Klamath or a Mendocino Celeron could be a good, if a bit boring, all in one turn-key solution.
Also because of the general Meh-ness of these boards I think they should be cheap to get (if they haven't all been WEEE'd already).

andrea wrote on 2020-11-01, 21:48:

Many manufactures had low-endish or OEM oriented 440LX/EX with Onboard Rage Pro Turbo graphics (wired through AGP) and some sort of half-decent onboard audio, for example:
Gigabyte GA-6LMM7 (LX, Socket 370, with YAMAHA YMF-740)
MSI MS-6159 (LX, Socket 370, with SoundBlaster PCI128, also known as Packard Bell Suma)

Suva, not Suma. PB also used the MU440EX, which they called 'Maui'.

I can thoroughly recommend the latter for an early Win98 or Win95 system with decent DOS support too. Getting hold of one that works is a challenge - I've found two so far that were as dead as doornails, which surprises me given the general good build quality of Intel OEM boards at the time.

Best of the onboard-boards by far, but very hard to find, is the Asus P2B-VM. Why best? Well, BX chipset aside, the huge difference is that they realized that an ATi Rage Pro doesn't perform significantly better on AGP, so they hooked it up to PCI instead. Result? A board with onboard ATi Rage *and* a usable AGP port. Audio is a decent ESS Solo-1, which is good enough for most things, and an ISA slot for whatever it isn't good enough for.

andrea wrote on 2020-11-01, 21:48:

Many manufactures had low-endish or OEM oriented 440LX/EX with Onboard Rage Pro Turbo graphics (wired through AGP) and some sort […]
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Many manufactures had low-endish or OEM oriented 440LX/EX with Onboard Rage Pro Turbo graphics (wired through AGP) and some sort of half-decent onboard audio, for example:
Gigabyte GA-6LMM7 (LX, Socket 370, with YAMAHA YMF-740)
MSI MS-6159 (LX, Socket 370, with SoundBlaster PCI128, also known as Packard Bell Suma)
MSI MS-6126 (EX, Slot, with YAMAHA YMF-715)
Intel MU440EX (EX, Slot, with YAMAHA YMF-740)
AOpen MX3ZA (ZX (woohoo 100FSB), Socket 370, with ESS Solo-1)
and probably more from the usual big OEM manufacturers (Acer (for Acer and IBM), FIC, Trigem (for HP) and so on.

One of these with a, say, 266-300MHz Klamath or a Mendocino Celeron could be a good, if a bit boring, all in one turn-key solution.
Also because of the general Meh-ness of these boards I think they should be cheap to get (if they haven't all been WEEE'd already).

The board isnt really the problem here.. Have a lot of choice to fullfill what i want to reach. The question is more about the processor speed.
I dont really need anything faster then 333 / 350mhz. Also didnt care if the FSB is 66 / 100 mhz. For me a 66FSB would be more special, because i never had one.

Would it make any sense to put an Voodoo 2 SLI inside such a system? Id really like some kind of voodoo2 setup here.
And i might consider SCSI as well, because i dont like that UDMA 33 controller. Should really be UDMA 66 at least. An Scsi U160 36gb will probably do 80MB/sec on such a board.

Robin4 wrote on 2020-11-02, 00:19:

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The board isnt really the problem here.. Have a lot of choice to fullfill what i want to reach. The question is more about the processor speed.
I dont really need anything faster then 333 / 350mhz. Also didnt care if the FSB is 66 / 100 mhz. For me a 66FSB would be more special, because i never had one.

Would it make any sense to put an Voodoo 2 SLI inside such a system? Id really like some kind of voodoo2 setup here. And i might consider SCSI as well, because i dont like that UDMA 33 controller. Should really be UDMA 66 at least. An Scsi U160 36gb will probably do 80MB/sec on such a board.

Why go to so much trouble to get exactly the period CPU you want and then go completely overboard on video and I/O?

Robin4 wrote on 2020-11-02, 00:19:

And i might consider SCSI as well, because i dont like that UDMA 33 controller. Should really be UDMA 66 at least. An Scsi U160 36gb will probably do 80MB/sec on such a board.

You overestimate CPU and RAM speed capabilities in saturating PCI bus and not fully understand how SCSI work, besides the fact that U160 drives have near the same transfer speed from plates as early 80GB IDE drives. The only benefit of SCSI - independence of possible UDMA compatibility between early IDE controllers and later drives.