1998 High-End Gaming PC Build & Benchmark ( Early Slot 1 and 440BX ) 

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512MB of RAM is astronomical amount for the 1998, back then typically computers had 16 or 32MB. 64MB was considered as high-end.

My first PC was Compaq Presario 7360 with AMD K6-2 processor and 64MB RAM in year 2000. It was a gift from one of my relations because my family was poor and feeding duty was already hard for my parent. It is not the best one even at its time but has opened my eyes and gave me a whole new future. Before that I couldn't even imagine what a "mouse" is. Now I'm working in IT industry and can easily buy the most expensive PC. Still remember every memory of that old PC, and never forget their kindness.

The weapon to surpass N64.

There was a small computer store about a 45 minute drive away from where I lived back then that sold complete systems along with individual parts you could select to build. At that time, I think what I got help putting together was a PII 350, Soundblaster AWE 64, Diamond Monster - Voodoo II (3dfx and opengl), Riva TNT (Direct 3D), 128 MB SDRam, maybe a 32X CD-Rom or maybe a CD burner and maybe a 750MB or 1GB HDD - running Win98 SE. Back then, it wasn't so much about settings, but my mindset was that 640x480 was low, 800x600 was medium and 1024x768 was high. Over the next 2 years, we ended up with a couple upgrades like moving to the PII 400, replacing both graphics cards with a single Voodoo 3 3500 and a 19" flat-panel monitor that could run 1600x1200 @ 85Hz.

Late 90s was brutal for gaming hardware, in 3-5 years your pc was completely unusable.

Still using a I7 4770k after upgrading from Pentium90 to Athlon FX ...and from 3dfx voodoo2 to GTX 260 to GTX770 x2 SLI to AMD Radeon Sapphire RX 7600XT 16Gb. My PC story❤

I find this really fascinating, it just shows how 1998 gaming was on its peak plus the old hardware is very much alive! like your videos

I loved the 440bx era. I bought a BH6 and a celeron 300a, and then a few years later, when I bought myself a celeron 533 I bought a second BH6 and gave my little brother the 300a. That 300a overclocked to 464 performed better than a stock PII 450 in games, though people often were able to clock the 450 higher. I only ran a Voodoo 1 card at that time, but was mostly playing the "Total Annihilation" RTS which didn't really need 3d acceleration.

When watching your videos, it feels like I live in the 90s and it feels like RU-vid and video making was a thing back then.

God this takes me back. As a high school graduation present I got my very first “gaming rig.” Mobo was an Asus P2L97 with a Pentium II 333 and an ATI 3D Rage Pro AGP. The mobo only had a 440LX chipset, but eventually I got a Celeron 433 and OCed the mobo to 83 MHz, making the Celeron run at 541 Mhz, then I got Voodoo2 SLI. It was a pretty sweet rig after I upgraded it. Lots of fun playing UT, Q3 and Serious Sam.

I remember my very first build in the 2000s, it was a Pentium III @650 MHz with a Voodoo 3 with 16 MB and 128 MB of RAM, then I upgraded to 248 I believe and a GeForce MX with 64 MB VRAM, best times ever 🥲

Ah those were the days. My first computer was in 1997 at 16 years old bought myself for 2k.. pentium 166 with a 2gb hard drive, 16 MB of ram. This was my second computer Pentium 2 450mhz with 32mb of ram and a 10 gb hard drive? I can't quite remember. But back then speed of the cdrom and having a 56k modem and 64mb of ram was bragging rights. Amazing what 25+ years have done with computer tech. My PC right now has 32GB's of ram, 4.2ghz processor with 8 cores and a GPU with 16gb of memory... And yeah our iPhone and android phone's can run circles around what those giant board did back then.. What will the next 25 years bring?

Great vid! Was quite a nostalgia trip remembering my own days with the first couple family computers we had and was able to upgrade things here and there for better gaming. The hardware you got was pretty clean too, good finds.

Love your dedication

A very interesting and informative video, deffo gonna follow your future exploits

Very interesting. Thank you very much for this work!

You have only 2K subs? I was watching the video and thought it is some big channel because of the production quality. Keep up the good work man

Excellent and entertaining video. Our PIII 450 ran well Quake II in software.

I remember when I first got into PC gaming, the geforce 4 Ti cards were top of the line. The Ti 4600 in particular was an absolute beast of a GPU, with 128mb of DDR RAM on it. ATI didn't really have anything to compete with it until the Radeon 8500/9700 Pro (which were also amazing cards)

I can't remember what my PC was in 1997. It was a Pentium 166 I think. It had a Voodoo Banshee GPU. I left home though and ended up getting a Pentium 2 233Mhz. I didn't get another PC until 2004 when I got a Pentium 4, the a pentium D and ever since it's a rolling build. Current build is a 5700x with 6700xt 32Gb ram. I'm so happy to be living in this age for computers!

I Fell my 12 years old interior kid again, thank you very much!!

CREATIVE AUDIO! Hell yea! I got a Soundblaster with the DAC in my current build!

Ahhh StarCraft Brood War… What got me into PCs :)

Brooo you sent me to 20s'. My first pc was intel p3 800mhz, 128mb ram, 32 mb riva tnt2 and US robotics 33.6k black modem. then around 1 year or least i bought my best product ever, it is "64 mb Voodoo5 5500 Agp", ohh my.... What a lovely days.... Also i upgraded modem 33.6 to 56k 🤗😊

Still got that setup, boxed and packed away but ready to boot up if needed! 😄

That is a beast. Nobody ran Blood or Quake that smoothly in '98

I have this exact combination in the past!! was a beast!!! some later batches of Pentium 2 300mhz are overclock-able to 450mhz changing fsb from 100 to 133mhz.

Specs of my Ultimate 1999 Gaming PC that I just recently got up and running of which most if not all of the parts are from 1999. I even have not just a LITE ON 52x CD-RW Drive installed but also a Creative PC-DVD ROM Dxr2 installed. I even have a HP CD Writer Plus 8200e External USB CD-RW Drive plugged into the system. Looks simillar to the HP CD Writter 9200 Plus that was on my dad’s AMD K6-2 build which was clocked at 450 Mhz with a ATI 3D Rage 128. Motherboard: Abit BE6-II Revision 1.0 Processor: Intel Pentium III clocked at 650 Mhz (Originally I wanted to either go with a Pentium 3 clocked at 550 Mhz in order to have something that was close to what I had with a Dell Optiplex GX1 or a Pentium 2 clocked at 266 Mhz so that I could slow the system down significantly) RAM: 256 MB Hard Drive (had): 60 GB QUANTUM FIREBALL PLUS AS (Extremely loud) Video Card: 3Dfx Voodoo 3 3000 (AGP Varient) Sound Card: Creative Sound Blaster AWE64 Value CT4520 (Used this in a Gateway Essential ESS 450 SE from 2015 to 2017 that I used to have and even though I have Yamaha OPL3-SA as well as ESS AudioDrive this card being the only Sound Blaster 16 compliant card around makes it a really good choice) Network Interface Card (NIC): Linksys EtherFast 10/100 LAN Card Version 2.0 (I use this primarily for playing online video games) Re-enabled the HighPoint (LowPoint) HPT 366 Ultra DMA 66 controller that is onboard and hooked up a 2 TB Western Digital hard drive as the replacement for the Quantum drive. I am using a StarTech IDE to SATA Hard Drive or Optical Drive Adapter Converter that was not playing nice with the Intel i440BX chipset. I recommend at least a minimum of Ultra66 in order for this adapter to work properly. I used the Highpoint drivers on the Abit BX-1.67M Motherboard CD. Instead of using the Highpoint UDMA66 controller instead best thing to do is install a UDMA100 IDE controller such as the Promise FastTrack TX2000 or even a SCSI controller card like this Adaptec AHA-2940UW. This particular SCSI card does 50-Pin as well as 68-Pin SCSI. Just remember to not use that fourth PCI slot.

My 1st PC was an acer aspire with celeron 400 processor, 32MB RAM, 2GB HDD and a basic ATI graphics card, I used it since 1999 until 2007 and i can do almost everything on it including playing 3D games and doing 3D modeling and rendering, video editing, photoshop etc without lag... old time PCs are amazing

Ahh, the good days of computing. I had a Intel 440LX board with a P2-233 which I later upgraded to a celeron 500 on a daughterboard and FSB'd it up to 550mhz, mated to an AGP ATI Rage Pro and PCI-Voodoo2. Back in 1999 it was a thing to behold!

Wow, love this look back at the bleeding edge of 1998. Would have loved to see some Half life, Descent II, and Terminal Velocity benchmarks.

Great channel!

Damn PCs were moving so fast around the year 2000. Think of a 2020 PC vs. a 2024 PC. Such an incredibly smaller difference than 1998 vs. 2002.

such a good interesting video, and your voice is epic

Thanks

Nostalgia 200% 👌🏻☺️

I remember reading an enthusiast’s article about running a Tulatin Celeron on 440BX with a Slot A to socket 370 converter.

My first gaming PC had a Socket 7 Pentium 233 MMX w/32MB of RAM and a Voodoo Banshee 16mb PCI. That was enough to play Half-Life, Jedi Knight, NFS 3, Unreal, etc... Back in those days PCs became so outdated they could barely play new games after 2-3 years.

Honestly i miss these days!!! We couldnt afford a new pc so we always had hand me downs until i started building them in 2000

that motherboard was epic! Had one myself :D

beautiful motherboard!!

Looks Cool

Motherboard with an exploding cap. That brings back memories. Back in that era there was a problem with defective electrolytic capacitors that would blow out. It was industrial espionage. One component manufacturer stole the capacitor design from another company, but they didn't know the design was defective so they put it in production. There were lawsuits over this, I believe Dell was sued class action and they in turn sued their motherboard supplier. In 2002 my computer suffered from this just a few days before I started school.

Can you imagine being a 3D game developer before 3D video cards? When ID Software created Doom (and before that, Wolfenstein 3D), they only had a raw pixel buffer to work with. They came up with this groundbreaking idea of breaking the screen up into vertical slices and rendering textured walls/doors at different distances and angles.....viewing a wall at a 45 degree angle means the next vertical slice would be slightly closer or further away and, thus, drawn as such. And this was *all* done by the CPU and blitted right into video memory... all 64K of it.

About modern hardware, I recently upgraded from Ryzen 5 3600 to Ryzen 7 5800X and I was surprised how much I got more performance from my RX 6700 XT. Waiting for the next part to this video with a CPU upgrade!

My first proper PC that I built was a Pentium 4 2.4GHz Northwood overclocked to 3.0GHz, ABIT IC7, 512MB DDR500 and a GeForce 4 Ti4400. Brilliant days!

awesome moment❤

I learned back then the hard way that there is AGP and PCI for graphics card. So sad when I came home with my new card and couldn't plug it into the PC :D

This chipset rocked, I had a dual board P2B-D and it wasn't until the northwood came out did anything come close to beating it. I managed to get it to clock a 133MHZ with some hidden jumper settings. The big issue was finding a PCI card that could handle running at 43MHZ. With two 700MHZ CPUs running at 930MHZ it ran like a top fuel dragster...

ohh memory's, overclocking riva tnt to squeeze extra few frames on morrowind back in the days when on the budget haha

I envy the kids who got this from their rich parents back then. Meanwhile, I was playing with a bumble bee tied to a string...

Interesting to see how even 3-5 years in those times made so big difference.

My first build was a amd 64 3000+ and Radeon x700. Man that was a beast back then ❤

Best CPU of that time was the Pentium II 300 SL2W8/SL2YK, based on the Dechutes core able to clock to 450 MHz and with a little cooling even to 504. I had this one and it was much cheaper than the PII 450. And I had 2x Creative Labs Voodoo2 12 MB running in SLI mode with a Matrox Millenium as the primary card. Later I exchanged them for a Voodoo5

i remember in 1998 a friend let me use his computer for work and it was great becuase it ran everything faster than my own computer.

I had a similar build; but, opted for the Geforce2 MX400 32mb video card paired with the 3dfx Voodoo1, and a Soundblaster Audigy sound card.

I have had nearly the same system, only with 128MB SDRAM 133 Mhz, a Biostar mainboard, and a Geforce GeForce2 GTS back in 2000! In your tests did you had an upgraded Millenium G200 with more RAM or not?

The 1st time I experienced GTA III, not on my pentium 2 though 😅, it was on my friend's, an AMD Duron paired with GeForce 2 GTS. Those were the days...😊

I love this

440BX and 810e / 815e were the best gaming mobos for Pentium 2 and 3 for quake 3 arena, unreal tournament 1999 because of need of OpenGL api for those games. Build & Sold many P3s from 1999-2001.

At one time it was an incredibly cool computer. During these years I was still using my first amd k5-100 with S3trio 3D2X. On this computer I saw the release of heroes3, and they were terribly laggy. I had to turn off the sound and music in the game, and then I could play without lags.

My question is can you get that old gpu to work on a mordern motherboard? I dont think it will work.

Got 440BX MB thosetimes, but only Celeron 333MHz CPU, which was on 400 MHz, and only 128 MB RAM, but 12MB Voodoo2 card, and that was the best GPU.

terbaik....pernah pakai prosesor pentium II ni ...

Now you can run the entire project on a virtual machine. oh , I remember we had P ii with win 98 and Autocad 14 in Uni.

I just went straight from a 486 to a duron 800 in socket A. Then I started down the athlon route.. and loved nforce 2 boards.. I remember when I bought my first new GPU.. GeForce 4 mx 440. Ahh yeah I still play until tournament 1999 goty.. lol

Oohhh que de souvenir , j ai encore mon ibm aptiva avec son pentium 2 450mhz 😍😍 star craft et âge of empire … toute ma jeunesse

I'm relatively new to the retro PC scene but wouldn't it make more sense to go with the Pentium III instead of the Pentium ii? The P3 can go up to 1000mhz on a slot on I believe or even settling for 800mhz would be high end enough.

Back then everything above 13fps was butter smooth. Imagine that a 2002 PC was 5x faster as a 1998 PC. Its like the 4080 is 5x as the 2080.

Que nostalgia, cuando todo eran Megas

They marketed the G200 as a voodoo killer :D

Wow I really had to look up the specs, my mind played tricks on me... A year later (1999) was the release of Pentium 3, if anyone wants to feel old yet.

Still have my 2 voodoo 2 12meg diamond cards boxed in my spare room.

Slot 1 and BX440, yeah! I had ABIT BH-6.

I had a chaintech motherboard. Either it or the CPU was very, very picky with ram because I had to buy several kits (and so did my grandad) to even get it to boot. I was young at the time. Maybe 15 or 16 and I remember my grand dad felt bad for me and went to mr micro and got me some ram after spending days troubleshooting it. He snagged the board when I was at work and took it there and had them try several different sticks until it booted up, took it back and laid it on my desk without saying a word. R.I.P. to my pawpaw, he is the only reason I ever started building PC's.

I have a retro PC with a Pentium II 333 MHz and a Voodoo 2 in SLI. It was the fastest possible setup in February 1998. Yet, I have stuttering in Unreal and Unreal Tournament. I played with different resolutions and details but the bottleneck seems to be tge CPU. Technology was moving very fast back then. A CPU was too slow not even a year after its release.

i had plenty of the must have combinations of cpu, gpu and mobo's going back to that time. crazy seeing voodoo 2s selling for so much, i wonder if i still have one in a box of old pc junk

Back in 99 I had a P3 550mhz and a tnt 2 ultra. It chewed up anything I threw at it upon the arrival of Doom3. Had to upgrade.. tried to run the alpha tho it looked like a sideshow I remember 😂.

my P2 350 easily reached 466MHz with RAM overclocked too. Had a Matrox G200 with it.

If you tell kids these days that you needed a normal 2D graphics card in the beginning, and then added a 3dfx voodoo card to be able to watch a donut turning in the settings program. And ok, to play FIFA98! :D

The pentium II was not the "fastest" you could get. Believe it or not, the Celeron Slot 1 was faster due to its overclocking ability. The P2 had off die L2 cache, which ran at half the speed (if I remember correctly) and the Celeron had no off die cache, which allowed it to handle a huge overclock. If I remember correctly, guys were pushing the celeron 300 to 400 mhz and higher, blowing away the PII. The trick was finding the RAM and GPU that could handle the overclocked bus.

Most ppl back then bought a Celeron A processor, overlooked the jesus out off it. My 333 on 550 ate pentium 2 for breakfast:D

Great video! Should have included HL1 in your benchmarks for it :)

you sure this was 1998? I had a k6-2 333mhz back then and it was beastly for it's time. I remember equivalent intel chips being pentium socket ones. I bought a socket A mobo and athlon card processor a few years later, and intel then had a competing one. I don't recall those being available back in 1998.

Back ten there was another graphic API: Metal (not to be confused with Apples' Metal) supported by S3 Savage family... For example original Unreal supported it.

My first ever custom pc was in 1998 a Intel Pentium 2 MMX I think it was 300MHz, with an ASUS 4mb video card, can't remember how much ram but i had a 6GB HDD lol

oh man, you should have taken a step forward. I have a working Asus P2B-LS around with two 4,5GB 10k U2WSCSI drives. SCSI was a beast in that days, cause it was not cpu related as the old ide. When we talk about High-End, you should include Adaptec SCSI Controllers plus Drives.

And what about cache? Is this 512MB main memory fully covered by the 512KB CPU cache? If not, it can have a serious impact on performance.

I remember my pentium III celeron 566 running at 1200mhz just changing the bus speed, using an slot adapter with this motherboard

Damn, i still have my pentium 2 cpu and board. Dont know if it'll boot up though.

Ah. Win98SE. Abit mobo. Overclocked Mendocino Celeron. CAS/RAS 2 memory. Voodoo 3. Great games. What can I say?

I had a HP Pavilion and play Need for Speed on Windows 98, I was 18 years old had saved up for mowing lawns to buy the damn thing. I think it was integrated cuz I couldn't afford like the top tier stuff you know

Sad but true, I have all of this hardware AND software lying around, along with some H/W not mentioned, like a pair(2) of nVidia 5950U GPU, AND some true SMP server machines...

Very nice project, but you could have tested half life or counter strike, I was very curious about the performance on goldsrc engine

The Celeron 300A overclocked to 450 MHz was superior to the P2 450 MHz in gaming benchmarks do to the full speed L2 cache while also being approx 1/3 the cost if I recall correctly.

Nešto mi je poznat naglasak, proverim odakle je kanal, bio sam u pravu Srbija! :) Super je video, zanimljiv, dosta informacija. Da li možda imaš u planu da bude sadržaj i na Srpskom? Koliko znam, ne postoji ni jedan kanal ove tematike na našem jeziku.

Hi. Your PCI STB TNT card is missing an SMD capacitor at the back of the card next to one of the memory chips, marked "C47". There's a high chance that missing capacitor is responsible for the artefacting. Installing a new one is pretty easy if you have a soldering iron and some flux. Value wise it should be identical to the one higher up on the board, also in between a memory chip and the edge of the card.

good

You forgot another API that you might not have known. Apple had a proprietary API under Mac OS 8 called RAVE.