Windows 98 Gaming PC: The Beige Build

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I've decided to take the harder route and make it a solo rebuild as my first build not counting making a modern computer as to be honest my i5 4690k with nivdia geforce 970 8gb of ram was easy to build.

Am doing it because I think it take longer but be more satisfying in the end game.

I'll start with taking the advice of almoststew1990 and clean it and take it apart put it in bags and try turning it on in its simplest form to see if it will boot. But a new psu is a must so ill update with my findings very excited.
 
Soldato
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Today marks the end of my Windows 98 PC, the board / RAM / CPU has been sold on eBay as I ended up using a c2d windows 7 32bit PC for a my retro gaming as it is so much more gosh darn convenient! Farewell bootable floppy disks, jumpers and IDE cables!
 
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Windows 7 is what I'm currently playing brutal doom on my laptop at my folks came to see them for a few..... now i cant go home with out a game or to so this is my portable retro gaming rig lol an old dell laptop.
 
Soldato
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Today marks the end of my Windows 98 PC, the board / RAM / CPU has been sold on eBay as I ended up using a c2d windows 7 32bit PC for a my retro gaming as it is so much more gosh darn convenient! Farewell bootable floppy disks, jumpers and IDE cables!
thats a shame mate but most of us reach that eventually i think. My retro system is just too loud and a bit too much effort every time you come upon an issue. Shame tho as you had a nice set up there.
 
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I've still got my midi Chieftec Dragon. Bought it in 2004 because of my love for Alienware back then. Had the Abit NF7-S 2.0 with Athlon Barton 3200+ with that build. Think I replaced the northbridge fan with the spiky blue heatsink for it.

Lots of old hardware/cables I should maybe get rid of... All pieces and accessories intact in boxes somewhere. Lots of old black CD/DVD re-writers, heh!

1 Chieftec Dragon Grey Midi tower + all 4 fans.
1 Thermaltake Xaser III in blue, fan controller and 7 fans with thermal sensors.
1 AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1.4Ghz boxed away in foam sponges.
1 AMD Athlon XP 1800+? Not sure which it was. Think it was 1.8Ghz boxed away with foam sponges. Heatsink and fan as well.
2 AMD Athlon Barton 3200+ stored away in foam sponges with Akasa heatsinks/glowy fans.
1 AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ with stock heatsink and fan. Still in the motherboard/cleaned.
2 Abit NF7-S Rev 2.0 nForce 2 Ultra's in boxes. Loved those boards. Mmm, Soundstorm.
1 Asus A8R32-MVP Deluxe SKT939 RD580 CrossFire with box and stuff...
1 Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
1 Elsa Gladiac 920 reference GeForce 3 OEM
1 Leadtek Winfast GeForce 3 OEM
1 ATi Radeon 9800XT cannot remember if there is a box. I remember it was a Half-Life 2 promo...
1 ATi Radeon X850XT in box.
1 NVIDIA GeForce 7800GS+ AGP in box.
1 BFG NVIDIA GeForce 5800 Ultra in box. Was only used a few times as it was a gift.
1 Sapphire ATi Radeon X1950 XTX PCI-E Master CrossFire Edition with box.
1 Sapphire ATi Radeon X1950 XT PCI-E regular/slave with box.

Not sure what else is in storage...

Think there is a Windows 98 OEM disc and manual. Windows Millenium upgrade pack and Windows 2000 + booklet. All genuine hologram stickers.

My barton 2500+ (1.83ghz so maybe you had the same) in an NF7-S (awesome board, first hardware dolby encoding on the fly available) was taken all the way to 3.5ish ghz under phase change in a chieftec dragon case I shoehorned a vapochill PE into, back in the day :p
 
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I've been contemplating building some kind of windows 98/xp box for playing old games on/general nostalgia lately.

Would something like a Dell Optiplex GX260 be a bad idea as a starting point? It's not the one with the bad capacitors (that's the later GX270).

Basic spec looks fine in terms of driver support:

Pentium 4 2Ghz Northwood
Intel 845G
DDR memory
Half height AGP 4x (most of what's available cheaply on eBay seems to be halfheight FX5200s and GeForce 4 MXs/GeForce 2s anyway)

I originally was looking for a Pentium 3 machine but they've gone up in cost now with everyone trying to do this, so I'm looking at early Pentium 4s instead - something with 1GB ram max as Windows 98 can't handle more than that. My plan is to dual boot 98SE or ME with XP.

There is the older GX150 too but they're rarer and more expensive. Come with a Pentium III, SD ram, AGP 2x.

Thoughts?
 
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I would say that if you're not going to change much of it and it is cheap or free then sure, it will be 'fine' for an XP build. OEM PCs, and especially Dell, use proprietary cooling, motherboards, power supplies and possibly even GPU limitations. Also remember that the PSU in that will be engineered to be a cheap as possible whilst surviving a certain amount of time (which will be well overdue!).

A custom PC build with a retail rather than OEM motherboard and BIOS will allow you use modern (quiet and reliable) PSUs, easily swap out CPUs, upgrade the BIOS, possibly put in more RAM, maybe allow a greater range of GPUs, allow you to use a modern (quiet and reliable) PSU. ANd you can easily change bits of it.

I would say build a Windows 98 PC for very old disk games and a Windows 7 x86 PC for all other old games as Windows 7 has great compatibility (and if you're limited in budget, space or enthusiasm, the Windows 7 x86 can do double duty to be honest!). I say this as XP is young enough to be unexciting (for me) whilst also being very inferior to Windows 7. The same applies to S478 / P4 kit; they are not old and slow enough to be interesting and worth running with Winodws 98, but not fast enough to be bearable day to do. Also they're very loud as both GPUs and CPUs didn't have fan profiles back then!

I have a Core 2 Duo (any will do to be honest but I would go 7 or 8 series and entry level for noise and power reasons) on a basic 775 motherboard with a modern low power GPU (Nvidia 440) and 3GB of DDR2. All my old games run at 60fps 1080p, pretty much silently. I can use my big stash of SATA HDDs and DVD drives. It is so much more convenient that a P4 build, and S775 parts are dirt cheap!

I say this as someone who had that P2 build and made several P4 builds, all of which only lasted a few days before getting too fed up with them.
 
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In that case I might aim for just a Windows 98 machine, as like you say most Windows XP era games work just fine on Windows 7, and Windows 10 which my machine is now running.

I've found a Pentium 3 500MHz machine that comes with what appears to be a GeForce 2 GTS, 256Mb SD RAM, MSI Intel 440BX motherboard, and 20GB IDE HDD for what I think is a reasonable price, without spending the time trawling through charity shops, car boots, etc - I'm actually surprised at how few machines of this age there are for sale now on eBay. I suppose the people that want them have got them by now and the ones that aren't wanted are thrown away rather than being sold.

The main attraction to buying a whole PC of this era rather than just the parts is purely cost. For just a 440 motherboard, it would cost more with shipping than the whole PC I'm looking at. The case is fairly knackered, so transplanting into something a bit newer is probably worth doing and I do have an ATX case spare.

I get what you're saying about it being a pain, but tbh I love fiddling with PCs. I remember when I first started using PCs and throughout my teens doing it all the time, where as now my main PC sits and just does everything I need it to and has done for the past 5 years with no upgrades so I hardly ever touch it.
 
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I've managed to 'get in there quick' and over this year built up my:
MS DOS 7.1, WFW 3.11
MS DOS 6.22, WFW 3.11
Windows 98SE
and Windows XP PC.

Along with my trusty upgraded Amiga 1200.

Due to electrical legislation, you're unlikely to find this kit in a UK charity shop.

Your best bet is to befriend someone at a dump / recycling centre, strike gold with helping at an office or home clear-out.

But, surely there's a small cohort who appreciate 386/486 and early Pentium tech. As we move on, people will be nostalgic for Core2Duo or Turion.
 
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I'd love to do something like this. I've got 2 old socket 478 machines gathering dust too, one is a P4 2.8Ghz and the other is a Celeron 1.8Ghz both with various DDR SDRAM sticks all ranging from 128mb to 512mb.
 
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I have a small update to the Beige gaming machine!

I decided I will paint the case as something to keep me out of trouble in the evenings this week. So far I've sanded down the old beige paint.

Before:

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After:

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This was going from 240 to 400 and then 600 grit level (not sure what the scale is called). I could probably spend twice as long again sanding but, I kind of can't be bothered.

Not sure how to tackle this though, it instantly shredded the sandpaper.

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Next up will be priming and then painting. Not sure what sort of colour scheme to do, maybe an Oblivion based one. So, I'll be painting it beige then? :rolleyes:
 
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So to spur forum members on over this..

This is the first PC I ever had access to. A Dell Dimension Pentium 90. It was only a loan from my Dad's work of the time.

I managed to find this one on ebay. I've installed 32 MB of memory, an 80 GB HDD, a Yamaha ISA Soundcard with WaveBlaster S2 daughterboard. The monitor was something that my parents had held onto in a storeroom.

As I remember, the CD Drive of the time was a 2x Speed.

I also managed to track down the original graphics card I had, the Hawkeye #9 PCI GXE 64 with 2MB.

And you can see the floppy drive is a bit newer but meh..

The original unit had a Dell 14inch CRT.

It has a modem and working ethernet over TCP/IP in Windows 3.11.
 
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Today I started off the painting process with some primer, so I now have a very brown PC.

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The primer seems to have overcome the rust really well! Not sure what colour(s) i will paint it but but it will have the following components in it:

Slot A Motherboard
550MHz (potentially a 750MHz CPU offered to me)
Riva TNT2 Pro OR Geforce MX440 OR 4200ti OR 9600XT OR FX5700

I particularly want to do a good job painting the inside (white or off-white) as I think having a painted inside of case (which is not black) will look classy! This is my first time painting anything decently so I don't have high hopes for a perfect finish.
 
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Calling knowledgeable people to this thread who helped me before @Armageus @mmj_uk @V F @agw_01 !

I now have a Slot A build on the go and I have taken the heatsink off. Do I need thermal paste between the heatsink and the cartridge, as this would cover a very large area, and the heatsink does not directly touch the CPU lid?
 
Don
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Can't say I've ever owned a Slot A CPU, but assume once you remove the heatsink you have a square CPU package with an exposed core (like the Socket A athlons used to?) - if so then I would just apply to the die only.

If there are any cache chips on the Slot A package (non-Thunderbird I think?), then not sure if these would have thermal pads or paste to contact the heatsink?
 
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