For Windows 98 this machine will be somewhat slow, depending on the games you want to play. You can install the Voodoo2 in there, but if you're hoping to run later 90s/9x games you're probably better off with a Pentium 3 or similar. Everything else should be okay. The motherboard may not like an 80GB hard-drive, but I'd probably take a newer disk over an older one (it should be faster and quieter); just limit the size to 32GB if needed, and go from there.

What you might do, if you want a more powerful Voodoo2-equipped machine, is put the 3DRage in the MMX, and then build a P3 (or whatever) with the Voodoo2 (for reference on "or whatever" - I have my Voodoo2s in a 3GHz Xeon machine, and I've read of some people here putting them in Core 2 systems - so there's certainly some wiggle room "going forwards").

Well id get an ATA controller card for faster ATA speeds and guranteed support for all IDE drives.

I have a Voodoo2 on a very simiar system, and it is fine, especially for DOS-based Voodoo games. You won't extract every last bit of performance out of it, but it will be great for games that aren't limited by the processor. IMHO I'd check if the BIOS supports big drivers and, if you plan on using one of those, get an ATA controller. If it does support, or you're happy with a smaller drive, I wouldn't bother. Some controllers grab conventional memory, others don't have working Win9x DMA support, so if it works with the onboard one I'd just use that.

Oh, and for Windows only, PCI NICs usually support higher speeds (100mb), but for DOS my 3COM NIC's packet drivers uses a lot less memory than the ones for my cheap Realtek PCI NICs. If you plan on using it on Windows only, go PCI, if you want to use it on DOS, 3COM ISA all the way.

OK, thanks for the suggestions!

Looks like I didn't think this through enough ...

It seems I'll need two computers to cover everything I'd like 😉

I looked over my stuff and found a Pentium III motherboard, taken from some IBM netvista or similar PC, don't remember correctly. It is a little limited with only 3 PCI slots, one shared with AGP, luckily the network is on the MB. No ISA slots, though. PIII is a 933MHz one.

So how does this look:

PC1, mostly DOS stuff:
- pentium 200 MMX
- S3 Virge DX
- Soundblaster AWE 64
- 3com 3c509 ISA network card
- any disk that works with the motherboard (although I have a Promise Ultra100 controller card, I could use that ...)

PC2, mostly Windows98 stuff:
- pentium III 933 MHz
- Some AGP graphics card (I have a Matrox G400 and some cheap Nvidia MX200)
- Voodoo 2
- Soundblaster Live!
- onboard network, I think it is from 3com also

How about memory - I guess for the Pentium3 system, as much as I can find, but how much memory should I put in the Pentium1 system?

Thanks!

You don't need really need more than 256Mb for a P3 machine of that era in my opinion.

I think the two systems will work very well; memory-wise 256MB is probably bang-on for a P3, but if you have more laying around, why not install it?

For the Pentium MMX, don't go over 64MB. Googling for that MoBo, apparently it uses an Intel chipset, and those are usually limited to caching 64MB.