Building a vintage PC with some modern abilities

[lam3ro1d]

Yo-vovich. Right now I'm building a Windows 98-based PC from the hardware dated around 2000-2001. Some components are older, some are newer, but the main components are typical for that particular era.

P.S.: I don't really know in which category I should post this thread since it's both hardware- and software-based, I'll just post it in the Windows 9x category. If I'm incorrect, just move this thread to another category, I won't mind it frankly.

The main components are:

Motherboard: Acorp 6A815 ver. 1.0 based on a Intel i815 chipset. Dated ca. 2000.
CPU: Pentium III, 933 MHz, 256 KB L2 cache, 133 MHz FSB. Dated 2001.
RAM: 160 MB PC133 /128 MB NCP stick + 32 MB Twin stick/. Date unknown.
Video card: ATI Radeon 7500, 128 MB, AGP x4. Dated ca. 2001-2002.
HDD: Western Digital WD400, 40 GB, IDE. Dated 2004.
OS: Windows 98 SE.

Some secondary components:

Spoiler

CD drive: TEAC 552E, 52x speed, CD-RW support. Dated 2003.
Sound card: Diamond Monster Sound MX300. Dated ca. 2000-2002.
Network card: Some PCI-based 10/100 Mbps card I'm going to get from Avito, I don't really know its name and model though.
Power supply: Cooler Master HP-P4017F5P, 330W. Dated ca. 2002-2003.
CPU cooler: GlacialTech Igloo 2510 Pro. Dated ca. 2003.
Case fans: DeepCool XFan 80L/R. 80x80mm, red LED backlight, Molex connection. Dated 2017 /probably the only new component in the whole machine/.

Peripherals:

Spoiler

Monitor: GVC M1566P, 15" color CRT, 1280x1024. Dated 1995.
Keyboard: BTC 5107, PS/2. Dated ca. 2000-2002.
Mouse: Compaq dual-button PS/2 mouse. Dated 1996.
Speakers: Arowana Sound 2000 acoustic system. Dated ca. 1998-1999.

This PC is primarily intended for nostalgia purposes and old or anything pre-2006 games, but I'm also willing to optimize it for some light modern tasks to see how would the nearly-two-decade-old machine would be doing nowadays in the late '10s. For example: install KernelEx to run versions of some apps that are a bit newer than officially supported; set a page file to add some memory over the physical 160 megabytes; enable DMA to avoid the CPU overloading and some others.

BTW, which page file size would you folks suggest to set for a 160 MB RAM Win98SE machine?


Feel free to discuss. 😉

 

[ragnar-gd]

I'm a W98SE-User as well, although i use much newer hardware, to make sure all games run as good as possible (AMD FX 4GHz/GTX 7900 PCIe/1GB Ram), which usually is also less hassle with the hardware, as newer hardware is simply in better shape, and cheaper as well.
But, that is a matter of taste.
What would bother me, is that there are DX9-games on W9x, and/or games that make use of EAX 2.0, and need more RAM, which your GPU and soundcard and system don't support. So you are limiting yourself artificially to games or features from before August 2002 (technically speaking, August 2003, when the first Games with DX 9 support, i.e. Freelancer, came out.
ATI cards support DX 9 since the ATI 9700 Pro (August 2002), NVidia since the 6800 (April 2004), EAX 2.0 since Soundblaster Live PCI (1998).
Think of Stalker, and HL2.
If you ignore that (and you may!), you machine is a fine selection of hardware, none the less.
For W9x, the pagefile-size was always at least the size of RAM, so 160MB ok-ish, although I'd say anything up to 512MB doesn't hurt, either (512MB Ram is the maximum of RAM that is supported by W98SE on any MoBo available. Most newer boards run stable with up to 1.5 GB of RAM on W98SE, but with your board, I'd not count on that).