1000 MHz Pentium III Windows 98 Retro Gaming PC Build 

The race to 1ghz was such an exciting time. Hasn't been anything that's had me so interested in hardware since.

Remember how exciting sound and graphics cards were back then?

I really like how old BIOSes look, so clean ...

I miss slot CPUs, it felt like you were getting more for your money

Sleep? Nah, Phil posted!

Thanks for vid Phil. I know how time consuming it must be to put together a build and make a vid out of it. But as a retro lover myself, I love seeing old hardware put to purpose. Got a few retro systems myself (always better than emulation) and for anyone learning and wanting to do the same, this is the place to come.

If there was a retro hall of fame, Phil would have his own shrine. Thank you for helping many us rediscover our old joys!

How are you still not at 1 mil subs great content

That's gotta be one of the cleanest and newest-looking Pentium III motherboard. Sexy!

I am passionate about 90s and early 2000s Hardware so keep it coming Phil! That's the reason i've subscribed to you in the first place.

Your 4K output is great, it's so clear that when you were showing the BIOS and Windows install screens, it looked like it was being produced by my own PC, love the funky wipes too.

Great video thank you it is always nice to see the older tech in action. I used to have a Pentium III Tualatin 1.4 ghz that OC'ed to 1.6GHz which for it's time was pretty fast and creamed the P4's that replaced these P3's. I think if memory serves me right I had a ATI Radeon 9700 card in this system in 2002 and it also supported DX9. Yep those were good times and things were so much simpler back then to deal with.

thanks for this great retro video :-) I would love to see detailed soundcard reviews again. It is a great journey to investigate old cards with you, cards which we or i cant afford or doesnt even know back in the old days. Keep going your awesome vids, best regards, Axel

My Pentium III 1000 build is paired with Voodoo5. What a beast!

I could watch such videos all day. I really like the PC tech. from 1998-2002. The technology was improving so fast at that time.

Found your channel from LGR, love seeing the retro hardware!

Hello there! As you requested, here are my thoughts: I love this kind of videos with retro hardware and they are the reason I watch your videos. Please keep going, there is many ppl like me who enjoy retro hardware.

Yeahhhh! P3 was and still is my favorite era of computer gaming! Thank you Phil, as usual, excellent content! :)

Awww yeah, Phil is back with the content I actually subscribe for! Nice.

Thanks for another great retro video Phil, your videos are the highlight of my week!

Phil! These retro builds (DOS, 98, XP) are the best videos on Phil’s Computer Lab hands down. Not to mention that’s what you are known for - a legend in the scene as far as I’m concerned. Retro computer gamers have a lot to thank you for. I personally have learned nearly EVERYTHING I know from watching your videos. Keep these retro videos coming - they are loved and will continue to be loved decades from now. Thanks again for being a leader in the scene.

Thank you so much Phil for this new video, enjoyed it a lot ! Can't wait for the next one :-)

PHIL!! I missed this and just caught it on Sunday! Another most excellent video my man! 🤘 AOpen... now that’s a name I haven’t heard in awhile!

I always prefer the retro content. The DOS and Win 95/98 content is what made me sub to your channel. There's thousands of channels doing modern content but that's just my opinion. You always do such awesome content Phil. Really appreciate your videos! :)

Great video and great timing. I'm working on a pentium III pc this weekend.

Thanks a lot Phil, and yes, this is exactly what I like - retro stuff below 1ghz, and of course everything with soundcards :-)

Good stuff. I can't wait until spring & I can get to all my retro stuff. Going to do an inventory of what I have & maybe even sell some things, I have a lot of Piii Era stuff.

Nice video Phil, a slot 1 P3 1000 is just beautiful.

I love the retro stuff! I got a complete old pc second-hand that happens to have this same CPU/GPU combination, plus a SB Live. Works great for those late 90s to very-early-2000s games!

Another very enjoyable video, Phil. I appreciate your comments at the end and I suppose older (!) subscribers may not comment as much, resulting in a slight skew of the data. For the record then; myself, and doubtless many others, really like the older 90s/early 00s builds and reviews you do. Even if the viewer stats aren’t as impressive, the content is brilliant and it’s our passion just like it is yours. 👍 Hopefully making these retro videos doesn’t wear too thin for you over time, because it would be a real loss the the channel/community if they took a back seat to the newer hardware. As a side, I just picked up a Terratec Sonicxplosion (basically the same card as the Turtle Beach) and will now have another play around with it!

I'd like to see more retro hardware videos, and this one was excellent as well.

Great vid, nice to see more retro stuff here! I'd love to see more sound card reviews - one I'm particularly interested in is for the Compaq Business Wavetable Sound Card. It uses a similar ES1869 chip to the one in your ESS AudioDrive video, but also includes a rather obscure ES692S chip for wavetable synthesis. It's a very similar setup to what I have in my Compaq Armada 7800, which I've been very impressed with the general MIDI quality on.

Phil forgot to say .. Thanks for this video! What a great way to start the weekend!

great video, its given me a push to build an old system and im very lucky i guess to have kept about a dozen mobos and processors as well as boxes and boxes of old cards..thanks

It's really nostalgic seeing the system becoming gradually more usable as you go through the driver install and reboot process.

You do you Phil, Love the content either way!

Great to see a new retro related video. Never tried a Turtle Beach soundcard either, but I do remember the days when that name was synonymous with super high-end. Turtle Beach Multisound and such. It's kind of sad to see how far they've fallen over the years. Today, gaming headphones... Back in the day, studio grade sound cards with lots of insane hardware on them (FPGA chips, Motorola MC68000 and more).

I think it's great to get this true retro content every now and again Phil, keeps things changed up and atm I've been watching alot of ur older win98 videos to help with an IBM T42 Thinkpad, mainly drivers and how to actually use win98 and msdos (I haven't used either since I was about 12 years old lol- edited coz I just did the math lol)

Another great video. Nice job mate.

I could watch these retro builds to no end, so I really appreciate when you redo old videos but with a tweak here and there or only a slight improvement. Here a little story for maybe some video ideas: So what I did was going backwards with my projects, meaning I started with ddr2 because my latest build is a maxed out ddr3 system, so I build the fastest ddr2 build with Intel possible. Your videos about the modded Xeons inspired me to do that. So I got the ultimate Asus Board, one of the Xeons, a ssd, gamer ram, noctua fans etc. All the shit I couldn't afford back then, for literally peanuts. And I made different benchmarks with different videocards up to my fastest the 1080ti. And now I am working on the fastest xp build. So a dual core 64 bit on socket 939 with the famous Asrock 939 dual board I got back in the day and had still in a box somewhere but I did not have the fastest cpu, now I do :) . You also featured this board in a video. I also got all the best cards from back in the day, around 2006/07. And I want to do every system twice of each Era one with Intel and one with AMD and make benchmarks with different graphics card's and let them compete. I find that really entertaining. You inspired me to do all of that. I got a lot of stuff in the last few years, learned soldering and had a lot of fun and I am far frome done! I want to go back all the way to socket 1, because that's when I started gaming on pc, around 1998. So I would really like to see another series about the ultimate systems possible, optimized for gaming, moving backwards from ddr3 with Intel and AMD. Optimizing everything to the max with SSds, the best 4/3 Monitors and making everything the quiet, compact and/or good looking as possible. But also giving options like you did in your Xeon modding series. I did not end up buying the latest and greatest and most expensive cpu but the valueking you proposed and I was able to overclock the heck out of it because of my kickass Asus board and it's lower tdp. And now it is faster then the latest and greatest. Never would have thought about that option without your charts and Infos. My ddr2 system now runs windows 7 with the msi gtx 580 lightning 3gb edition and I play games on it like witcher 1, everything from around 2008 to 2012. I want to own one day a kick ass setup from Intel and AMD next to each other hooked up to the same monitor for every good windows version. I extra cleared a room in my house for that.... My wife was thrilled xD.... So may be this got you some inspiration. Oh and if you need cheap parts, because it seems that getting parts in Australia is really expensive. I live in Germany and the used market for example on apps like eBay Kleinanzeigen is full with cheap parts, and way cheaper than everything you are buying. You are paying at least 50% plus shipping more for your parts then I do here. And sometimes even more. So if you would need something or can't find it, you can contact me anytime and I will check if I can get the parts here and send them to you. I was really surprised in the beginning how much less I was paying then you for the same parts or I had no problems getting parts you mentioned but you could not get at all or for a reasonable price. OK that's it. Thanks a lot and keep up the good work.

Nice video, love the retro stuff.

Man this bring back memories.When i upgraded to my P4 i had my P3 lying around.My friend made me a bet that it is scientific impossible to run elder scrolls 4 oblivion on a P3.I had to make him eat his words.The cpu was slot A 833mhz.They were not known for being good overclocker.So i took the stock heatsink off and mounted the biggest heatsink i could find with a huge ass fan.The heatsink was so big i had to lay my pc down cause it would pull the cpu out.I did all the chipset with heat sinks.I clocked her just over 1ghz.He said i should run it not on what specs.So i ran it at 640x480 low to medium and got around 30ish fps.Not bad for a P3 :D.Man the shit i did just to shut people up lol. Now im old i build pc's but no custom jobs anymore

My first config had a Sound Blaster AWE 64 ISA sound card. In the volume settings under the Special button there was two magical slider "Bass" and "Treble" I think... I can't explain, but these two slider made my ears melt. When I set the sliders to max, it sounded very very good. When I try to do something similar with a mixing pad or something it's just makes certain frequancies louder and overshadows the other parts. While my soundcard highlighted those frequancies and the music sounded more clear actually. I miss the good hardware sound...

G'day Phil, I am more interested in XP as a Retro Platform for gaming, but I still find older Machines & Software interesting, so watching these videos are enjoyable & definitely better than what is on 😁

Old guy here that doesn't like to comment often. I enjoy all of your videos, no complaints here. I've built a machine using various parts you recommended over the years (asrock board with LGA 775 and AGP, Celeron 450, radeon 9600 pro, and one of those "Cobra" sound cards for the good DOS support - setmul lets me play even my old favorites - also got a vortex 2 and an Audigy 2 ZS to play with). Keep up the great content, modern or retro, and I'll be watching every week. One request: an updated video on which monitors are worth pursuing? Short of hunting down CRTs (I keep getting them with blown caps) I'd like to have some idea which LCD screens are better at scaling low res DOS games. I hate stretching!

Nice work Phil!

Love the classic P3 win 98 content. Reminds me of my celaron 533mhz I had back then. Told myself I would never buy another celaron as I had so many issues with it.

Ahhh the good old days!! :D 486 SX/DX video next.. wait ya did one 5yrs ago, bummer. Keep up the great vids!!!

Great as always, I just build a machine with Celeron 433, Riva TNT2-M64 on ECS P6BAT-A+ mainboard and I use also 98SE there. I even ran there for some time S3VirgeDX, SiS6326. SiS6326 have some weird colors in some dos games like I saw on Matrox cards.

Found your channel through OZ, you should give him a shout back. Any way, growing up my highschool friends dad had a Pentium III 650mhz OC'd to something crazy using a Cryotech case w/ a refrigerant system in the basement of the case. I remember it being the coolest things since sliced bread.

Great video, Phil. I love these old machines. I just dug an old Tyan dual P3 Tiger 230t out of the closet and put it together. It's a dual processor rig with 896MB of ram, but should run Win98 on a single CPU w/ no problem. Now I'm off to find drivers lol. Hopefully they exist for Win98. Cheers!

Love the retro hardware vids!!. What I want to see you do is the different 486 upgrade chips. The pentium over drive 83 , vs the amd 133, vs the cyrix 5x86 133 which supposedly had some Pentium features. Sorry that my comment makes the perfect 486 comments 487

I like Phillday. Great Video Phil!

I have this cpu and motherboard in my parts. Makes this a great retro Friday

Back in the days I loved my Pentium III with Intel BX chipset and I still do. I have used it as my daily driver for years and today it is my retro build. My setup is: ASUS P2B-F, Pentium III 1Ghz, 512MB Ram, 40GB Seagate HDD with 7200 rpm, Geforce 4 TI4600, Soundblaster Live, 3Com PCI network card, DVD-Rom and CD-RW. Thanks for your videos and best wishes from Germany!

Great retro content, #Phil. Thank you! :-)

amazing if you really love old windows and part, IM amaze all the things u need to know to get everything going, good job

This is almost the same as my old system, I have the same CPU, but with ATi 9800 Pro, Aopen AX63 Pro. Thanks for the video.

Always loved the pentiums 3. I remember telling my mum about it and how no computer would need that kind of power

Finally a real retro build. A worthy opponent.

This is the type of video that I enjoy most from you. I love the retro and Pentuim 3 was a my second favorite period (Dx4100 486/early pentium being my all time fav). Please keep up the good work sir. Love your videos.

Tanks for this Phil!!

The 90s was the Golden Age of PC gaming. Especially from 1996-2000. So many good titles, and hardware innovation was epic! At that time we went from a Pentium 200 MHz to an Athlon 1.4 GHz, plus real 3D accelerated graphics and AA processing. What has happened during the last 4 years? Most exciting is 8-Core CPUs has gone Way down in price! 20 years ago we could game with less than 100W usage and have a blast. Today our 300W+ usage on our high-end gaming rig is best used during the winter (and do we really have a better gaming experience?) ;)

Thanks again Phil! Hope you'll ever get to benchmarking an RDRAM-based P4 1.4/1.5 vs the highest clocked P3s :) personal interest lol

Makes my PII 266Mhz look crap haha. Keep the retro videos coming!!

I had that sound card with my p4 machine back in the day, it was amazing !

I loved my 1000Mhz Pentium 3, it was a socketed version iirc. It held up strong against the frist Pentium 4 chips!

Hi Phil! Love your videos and have been watching all of them for quite some time. I'm missing some old portables on your videos. I just bought a Toshiba Libretto 70CT (120MHz Pentium MMX) and will overclock it to 200MHz and was wondering if you'll ever make a review of it. Thanks and keep doing the great job you've always been doing. Cheers from Brazil!

Great video Phil! I also have great respect for Intel 440BX chip-set - the best Slot 1 platform. Maybe you can do a future video with this platform and 133FSB processors: stability, compatibility with video cards and performance relative to 100FSB at the same frequency. As a side note I got 2 Radeons 9250 and the funny thing I don't know how I got them!

you are definitely a PC enthusiast

Hey man, nice video. The maximum drive size for Windows 98 SE is 127GB or something like that. Maybe you left a lot of bytes on the table when you set it to 32 GB when you have 200 GB available. Keep it up!

Yesterday, I found a box in my stash with an Aopen AX6BC and a 1Ghz Pentium III in it.... ... Today, i'm watching your video.... X)

Great video as always! I wish you could do an XP benchmarking with the same computer! It could run GTA3, Morrowing , Max Payne, Age of Mythology and maybe some games from 2003. I am not saying that it would be fast, but I was playing these on similar specs. I was using a 1200Mhz Duron from 2001 to 2006, going from 128 MB 133 Mhz to 256 MB 233 DDR, and from integrated Savage to 5200.

OMG Slot 1 I remember those! came and went pretty quick from what I remember.

Thanks for the video. It's a shame that the prices have been jumping up. I've noticed on eBay that there are some sellers putting things up for exorbitant prices seemingly just to inflate the market, I doubt they care when the products aren't sold. I get the most enjoyment out of retro computing by spending very little and seeing what was fun in its day.

"IDON'TCAREWARE". I like the way you think, Phil!

The kind of computer I would have KILLED for back in my Windows 98 days!

I bought that in the 733 mhz version in 2000, and if I remember correctly with 256 MB RAM and a nvidia geforce 2 gts with 32 MB memory. A beast of a computer 😎

Great video as always Phil! Have you ever thought about making a Windows Vista "retro" PC? I always wanted to build something totally overkill from that era with several GPUs in crossfire/SLI.

I totally prefer your retro PC content, all the socket 7, Super 7, Slot 1, socket 370 up to socket 462 and 478 stuff, as well as the period correct graphic and sound cards. But as a suggestion for a future video, if you happen to have some AM1 platform parts around, it could be interesting to test them as an inexpensive Windows 98/XP era retro machine. Maybe also (why not) to test how far it can be pushed in regards to relatively more recent titles (Windows 7 era). Have a wonderful weekend! Greetings from Uruguay.

I never owned a slot 1Ghz, but had plenty of FPGA 1Ghz machines back in the day. But I did have a bunch of dual CPU P3 550 slot machines by Dell. Huge cases, amazingly well built, toolless design internals and onboard SCSI. Those were awesome machines. Came with Viper V770's (TNT2 Ultras) and a second SCSI adapter card and each machine I had came with two Quantum SCSI HD's. I kept a few of them for a couple of years and remember having the chance to upgrade them to 700Mhz dual SLOT CPU's, but by that time flipchips were far easier to get and I ended up selling the Dell's (except one).

Hello from Brazil. Thanks to your videos I realized a dream of seeing unreal on a 3dfx. I got a P4 m266 asrock motherboard. After months looking for I got a many times overpriced 3dfx 5500. All on my local marktplace ( ebay is not a thing in Brazil). Some ram, even got a soundblaster live but i think its a fake/faulty one because ! . Now on the look for a branded proper power supply. However back in the day I never understood all this MIDI thing, even worse knowledge now. I wish one day you could do a vídeo "MIDI for Dummies" to make Doom sound like some of your other videos with all its suberb sounds.

Wow ! Brings back memories, I had plenty of slot 1 motherboards, but they all died . It would be good to put a sata Hdd using Sata to IDE adapters

Phil, regarding the high power usage during idle - what you said about the CPU not throttling down is true, however there’s another factor causing this. Win9x doesn’t issue the CPU a HLT instruction when idle like WinNT-based OS do. There are programs to enable this however. This is a good reference that compares them: www.benchtest.com/cooler.html

I would love to see a video on things like upgrading systems like the Packard Bell line of computers and their strange motherboards. I had one and used overdrives and Gpus and other things to get it to be great. Also, maybe do a video on DOS UIs that make playing dos games easier with a visual aesthetic to choose them from. Thank you for all you do.

I have a PCI 9250 and it's very stable and reliable and compatible. A GPU for the ages!

Since you asked for feedback. What I'd like to see more of is games outside of the 10 biggest and most useful for benchmarking (doom, quake etc) running on period minimum, recomended and lastly actually decent hardware. There's two ways to go with this; one is to have something like a k6-II+ that you can dial down to whatever speed, the other is to invert the process and find games that suit the system you have chosen instead of suiting the system to the games. Then you can bang out like 50 games for each system before you move on to the next system. I also think you'd want to start with a 486DX2-66, pentium mmx 166 and 386DX-40 if you go this route; those were so unbelievably common systems there is no trouble finding games targeted to those. It is also a good idea to not just run 20 second snippets but actually play a few minutes on each system so you get a whole video out of each game. You can ask your viewers but there are lots of fondly remembered games that are never played on this channel because it focuses more narrowly on the hardware side of things and only on the minimum set of games required for a decent benchmark which neglects a long line of games which are fondly remembered but not so industry defining as Doom, e.g. Daggerfall, Duke 3D, Magic carpet, frontier - first encounters ("elite 3" basically) and Strife. This will also have the side effect of you having to play old unintuitive DOS games that you maybe didn't grow up with and that's a good thing; it is impossible to see an old unintuitive DOS game that you've played way too much with fresh eyes unless you see someone else play it.

Please do more retro videos like this!

Hey Phil, here is a video idea I think would be a hit: graphic card reviews for late 3D accelerated DOS titles. Matrox Mystique (MSI), Voodoo 1, Apocalypse 3DX, etc. Quite a few late DOS games were 3D acceleration capable (patchable).

Awesome channel

This is probably my favorite 9x platform. Not so fast that it feels out of its time but faster than what 98 was originally specced for.

In my P3 1GHz with Voodoo 5500 and SB64AWE gold soundcard, I use an M.2 64GB ssd to IDE 44-pin adapter with 40-pin to 44-pin IDE converter. It is splitted into two 32G's drives, works like a charm.😊 Have stored every game-cd I have as ISO's on the other drive and run them with a win98 compatible Daemontools. No more gaming from rare fragile cd's needed.

are you kidding?! i ve been following exactly the same way during install, since post to clic to "auto arrange" , approved ;)

One of my favorite accomplishments from this era was overclocking my Pentium III 700 MHz CPU to 933 MHz. It ran stably at that speed for 2 more years before selling it.

I really wanted one of those turtle beach cards back then but had to re-use my SBLive for years. After seeing this I wish I had saved up and bought one! Hmm... may have to watch ebay.

Awesome stuff. Slot CPUs are something special and very easy to setup. My only critique would be that if you are only going to use 32GB out of a 2TB HDD, might as well use a cheap 32GB SSD.

Retro rig day! Woohoo!

Love the retro content. Really interesting to see how the hard drive was used. Any reason to not use an ssd with that ide adapter? Keep up the good work.

Great video, nice to see an old platform for a change! Did you ever make a video about the Slot A platform?

Nice build Phil. I use a Radeon 9250 in my HP5720 thin client. The Pentium III 1 ghz is paired with a Voodoo 5 5500.