1998 Retro PC PII

[alexondrums]

I recently got my old PC from 1998 set up for some retro gaming.

It all works pretty good, although some games don’t run as well as I remember them. This is probably because I was more used to playing certain games on my subsequent PC which was much newer and faster!

My question is regarding if it’s worth upgrading the CPU on the ’98 PC?

It’s currently a Pentium II 350Mhz. The fastest the motherboard can support is a Pentium II 450Mhz. I can’t really remember if 100Mhz was a big deal back then and made much difference?

Is it worth doing this for the sake of 100Mhz and about £25?

Motherboard: QDI P61440BX/B1

RAM: 256MB SDRAM

AGP: Matrox G400Max 32MB

 

[alexondrums]

Well, I think you better go with Windows XP on a more recent setup, for example Athlon 64 3700+ with 2GB RAM and something like the Radeon X1800 XT !

edit: ThatAGP: Matrox G400Max 32MB must look pretty awesome on an analogue CRT screen!
Crystal clear and clean picture quality. But in 2D, 3D no.

Many thanks! I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and thought I’d start with my old PII PC to see how it fairs. It’s probably perfect for DOS gaming, but perhaps a little underpowered for Windows gaming much after 1999. Most of what I want to play is between around 1993-2008 – anything newer is OK on my contemporary setup.

The PC I had after this PII was an AMD Athlon XP 1800+ which probably would be more suited for this. Unfortunately I didn’t keep it, but did wonder where the sweet spot for these CPUs was?

I think mine was a Palomino core (~2001), but for what I want, I can’t work out if a newer Thoroughbred, Thorton, or Barton would be best. I believe around the time the Barton 3000+ was released the P4 was back on top.

I was thinking it might be better to stick with 32-bit CPU – assuming the Athlon 64 is 64-bit – I’ve found older games don’t like this.

The G400Max was my pride and joy for a few years – coming from an intel i740 it was quite something.

Sadly I don’t have a CRT to run it on! I wish I did, but they are very difficult to find or very expensive now. Quite ironic as you couldn’t give them away 15+ years ago.

 

[alexondrums]

P2-350 is way too slow. Most top tier games from the current millennium will run very poorly on that. I had a faster CPU (Celeron 300A overclocked to 462.5mhz) and I replaced it in 2000 with a P3 to run stuff like Quake3. You might also hit driver issues with the G400 on more modern games.
However to answer your question I wouldn't upgrade on 440BX board. Just a waste of money to get something that's still too slow. Try and overclock the CPU if your motherboard and RAM permits (you will probably need PC133 RAM to handle the higher bus speed as P2 is multiplier locked). Keep in mind that motherboards from that era often had extremely limited overclocking options if any at all (not like modern era - I specifically bought an Abit BH6 because it was one of a few that could overclock).

That said there's maybe an argument that games from around 2004 onwards aren't really retro in the sense that you may as well just play them on a modern PC. 2004 means Far Cry, Doom 3 and Halflife 2. All excellent games and all take advantage of better hardware. I don't see any value in trying to put together a mediocre system to run those sort of games on.
In my mind the real niche for a retro setup would be running windows 98SE and DOS and playing the genuinely old games from the 90s that you can't easily get running on a Windows11 setup

Athlon64 supports 64bit but was also very good at 32bit so don't worry about that.

Thanks. I think i was looking at this PC through rose tinted glasses, as I remember it being an absolute beast when I got it – but that was upgrading from a 486/SX25!

I think i would be better off with the PC I had after this PII, which was an Athlon XP 1800+ but I don’t have that anymore.

I think this P2 will do for early Win98 stuff and DOS games up to around 2000, and I’ll look into building something more powerful for 2000+

Older games include:

DOS Games
NFS3
Midtown Madness (doesn’t run so great)
Carmageddon 2 (doesn’t run so great)
Driver
Thief

A few examples of more ‘modern’ stuff include

Breakneck (NICE2)
Quake 3
eRacer
Evolva
Megarace
The SIMs
Rally Championship Extreme

For the second list, I was thinking a later Athlon XP, although the 64 would be fine if not too expensive. I don’t want to spend 100’s on a retro rig. I’m not sure where the sweet spot for the Athlon XP was, but imagine something in the 2xxx+ range would be OK. Maybe a Barton or Thorton?

Any motherboard recommendations for Athlon XP or Athlon64’s?

 

[alexondrums]

Thanks for everyone's replies!

I started looking at Athlon 64s, but then realised a few years ago I put my old PC away in storage, which I forgot I had!

Would this be any good for the kind of retro gaming I want to do?

This was built in 2008

Intel Core2 Quad Q6700
4GB DDR2 RAM
AMD Radeon R7 240 1GB

My only concern is that it's a 64-bit CPU so wonder if this will cause problems with some games?