Building a $3700 Alienware 1998 Complete Pentium III 3Dfx V2 SLI System 

The way you pronounce BIOS is triggering.

Back in 97 or so, a p2450, 256mb ram, tnt2 32mb with 12mb voodoo2s in sli was the holy grail. If I recall. It's been so long. Quake 2 was huge at this time and half- life was soon after.

I have a very similar system with SLI on the same motherboard. I upgraded the Pentium 2 350 to a Pentium 3 650 to better squeeze the Creative 3D Blaster Voodoo2's 12MB SLI. I replaced the Matrox Millennium G200 with a Riva TNT Asus (Your G400 MAX is a gem). Audio Sound Blaster 16 ISA. Very well done video.

Glad to see a bit of love for Heretic II! My favorite game from the era, and I feel like so few people know about it!

ochh dethkarz i love this game, it's such a modern arcade racing game in those time

I played Dethkarz an insane amount when it first came out and I definitely couldn't crank the settings very high back then. Until it was available on GOG sometime around 2019, it was quite difficult to get a hold of it, my copy having long disappeared. Glad you decided to play it. My CPU back then would have been a K6-III 400, a nice CPU and and rare these days too.

This series needs to get attention

90's technology progressed super fast. In 98 there was a Pentium III 400Mhz and by 99 the 600Mhz version was released. That's a 50% increase in performance in a year. Such up pick would never be seen today.

30:00, This game gave my spatial thinking a hardcore workout. Oh man, thanks for the trip down memory lane

I remember Screamer Rally being the closest thing to Sega Rally that you could have at home. And also POD looking completely next gen. Especially the rocky desert track. Those where the days!

My very first computer was a Gateway G6 350 with a Pentium 2 running 2 3Dfx Voodoo 2's also in SLI with a LS 120 drive. Thank you for the memories!

what a fun video, thanks for taking us a long for the build ride. love this AO!

Love retro build content. You have my sub👍

Good Stuff! This is a video after our own hearts here at K&M Projects. Subscribed!

man this takes me back, my first gfx card was a 3dfx and seeing that logo before game startup unlocked memories.

Epic build !

Nostalgia, hail the 440BX! This is how I got into PC gaming/building in the late 90's. Kids these days with their AIOs/"Just add water" setups... *goes back under my blanket on the porch*

Thanks for sharing the build, it was very fun to watch! A tip with the Aureal Vortex, install the software suite and in games try setting the music device to General Midi instead of Soundblaster. It will usually sound far better than the Vortex's soundblaster compatibility.

Gnarly rig dude! Really love this build.

Well done. Build and video.

The truly impressive thing is you were able to find working parts from 1998. This brings back so many memories, great job.

I've been enjoying the quake 2 remaster. They did a good job there (as you did with this video)

This brings back memories of me building one of my computers back then. Wow! how things have changed. I still have those ide hard drives in storage along with my apple IIe.

Stunning setup, the bx440 chipset from Intel was legendary, stable as f.... You could drive the celerons processor at insane speeds.

OMG i miss that time, this make me flashback

Nice video. It brought back some nice memories. So I actually owned the Imeron Intensor Chair back in the day. It was pretty decent but had one flaw - that flaw was that it could only support a maximum weight of maybe 180 pounds, which resulted the the chair literally collapsing under me. That said, I got some enjoyment out of it. Now the price I paid was no where near $600 US. I believe I paid $300 - $350 at Costco in late 1999. I remember playing a lot of Mechwarrior 3 at the time. The opening sequence was pretty awesome while sitting in the chair. I also rocked (2) Monster 3D II 8MB 3D cards run in SLI, but was not as impressed by that setup. I also purchased the Altec Lansing ADA 305 USB speaker/subwoofer system - and can confirm that it also sounded great with Diamond Multimedia Monster Sound A3D sound card. As for the SLI setup issue, the problem probably exists because the two video cards are not exactly the same. Take one card out and check to see if the drop down shows up. If it does show up, then try the other card alone to see if it shows up in the drop down. Then see if you can trade one card for an exact match of the other.

You should totally sign up for a dial up connection lol. Love the video!

as an avid gamer, its clear to understand why only the richest people played on PC back in the 90s. I was born in 82, so i know that era very well. my first personal computer i bought with my money was shortly after this time and it was a glorious EMachines PC that played some games but was otherwise a dog. i think i paid close to 1000 dollars for just the PC as well. for reference, this AREA 51 pc in 2023 dollars is a 7000 dollar setup. a lot has changed in 25 years definitely. i dont even think you could spend 7000 for the best of the best in todays technology for a setup similar to this. unreal and good video. thanks

That motherboard slot type had two little additional clips that you clicked in once the CPU was installed, that's why it feels so loose.

The internal Zip drive is a 90s flex for sure.

I'm sure them CPU sockets had some locking pegs that slotted in to lock them. I remember upgrading my 440LX board with its P2-233 to a Celeron 400 (with this weird daughter card) and overclocking the Front-side bus (with the freeware SoftFSB) to get 550mhz back in 1999. Can't imagine getting over double a speed upgrade today! (sadly).

I actually won a PIII 450 and an Intel Made 440BX Motherboard 2 months before launch at an Intel Event when I worked for Gateway :) Your build here is VERY similar to what I built

Nice. Thank you!

Amazing production deserve more subs.

Jugar con una 3dfx voodoo el tomb raider y quake 2 fue lo mas alucinate que vi en el 1999

this bring back memories of my old AMD K6 RIG with a ATI Rage video card for 2D and a Monster Voodoo 2 card... i remember picking all that stuff up at a Computer show and sale they would have usually had every other month... i miss those days... now just order everything off of AMAZON or NEWEGG

Have the same exact GPU configuration your using on my "RetroBox 2.0" (G400 & Creative Voodoo2 12MBs) except im running a socket 370 Talautin PIII 1.2GHz w/1GB SDRAM, Soundblaster Awe32, and Windows 98SE (Also using the fastvoodoo drivers) "Retrobox 3.0" is an Athlon XP 1500+ paired with an STB Voodoo3 3000 with the exact same supporting hardware configuration but running Windows ME. Im still working on 1.0. (Planned with a Voodoo Banshee, AMD K6-2 400 and Windows 95OSR2 2.5) My favorite games from the era are Half-Life, Unreal and the Quakes, played through them on 2.0 and the expansions on 3.0.

Спасибо брат! Ностальгия по прошлому))

That Ram crunch had me wincing.

You can probably revive that Matrox G200 by reflashing the BIOS. Those cards had flash memory instead of an EPROM and are notorious for having BIOS bit rot. There's a floppy image out there that you can boot from and having it automatically flash the card. If it doesn't boot with just the Matrox card installed, you can install a PCI card along side it. If it can't detect the Matrox card, you can try putting the PCI card in a different slot. Hope this helps!

Super sweet build

My first PC computer was a 1998 Compaq slot 1 PII 300.

Nice build!

I was a little late to the late 90s PC Gaming Scene, but when my family got the Compaq Presario 7000 Series sometime in 2000-2001, it was a game changer. It came with ME (later upgraded to XP), but specs were like - Pentium 3 @ 1 GHz, 128MB RAM (later upgraded to 512 for XP, I think), and I can't remember how much Video RAM. It was a great choice because it allowed me to enjoy the late 90s games and the future games as well (Believe it or not, the very last game I played on it was the HL2 Demo, which I don't even know how it managed, it didn't have a dedicated GPU, as far as I'm aware of).

my progression was a 356, then pentium 2 400, pentium 3 800, pentium 4 1200?? core 2 e6300 this year first upgrade in 14 years?! for a core 2 quad and now a new old system core i74790. So many good memories from the first 400mhz and the jump to the p3800mhz!

Why put the hard drive in the 5.25" bay when there is room for it beneath the Floppy and zip? And why connect the DVD and HD when it'd make more sense to have the DVD and Zip on the same IDE and then a separate for the HD?

I'm dead that is a classic we dreamed about it as kids 😢🎉❤😂

In my experience, Voodoo 2/3 cards have an 800x600 sweet spot. Plus with CRT you can usually get 120hz at that resolution.

Great retro build. Those games bring back a lot of memories. Your screamer rally is running like a dog though!

Very cool!

In 1996 you could build a PC with almost of the modern latest specs for around $1500-$2000, it was a no name PC but it ran everything at the time.

So much nostalgia.

Beautiful retro PC. 10:00 - the G400 was released in September 1999, almost a year after that magazine.

deathkarz was a superb racing game.

AMAZING...... I'm sad because years ago while working in a BIG Computer Warehouse before they closed the company we needed to clean everything and throw away what we can't sell....So behind some big shelves I found brand new a Vodoo 2 VCard in the box with manuals, cd.. etc also some old white PC cases and a dual CPU SLOT Pentium II motherboard and RAM modules ...and I built the PC the Boss told me that I can keep it and wanted to keep it as a vintage machine, but I lost everything when divorced......

You should try to run Jetfighter IV: Fortress America on that PC. It has been a pain to make it run on a "modern" PC and I'd like to know how this game would run on that PC. Nice video 😀

The one and only legendary multiplayer game: Quake 3 Arena.

That 240x320 res looks like 4k this days 😂 So Smooth 😀

Your g200 is most likely not dead, just needs bios reflashing. Just run it in parallel with another graphics card, it will probably get detected even if it does not output image, than just update the bios on it and voilla!

I used to work at college around 2001, dude you have no idea how much of this shit we threw away.

just need to correct, voodoo 2 was released in February 1998, and Quake 3 in December 1999, so lets say 2 years ;-)

very dope

I think the G400 was actually faster than the V2 SLI in some games

Dream PC in 1998

All I can say is cool 😎

Dang that's a powerful retro build

it's wild how we were just happy if the game could run and holding 20fps was "good"

The metal screws going into poorly threaded holes in the old school drives always made me nervous.

From what I recall from back in the day, single V2-12MB can render 1024x768 without Z-buffer enabled.

Amazing how this was over 2k back in the day. And thats not a maxed out system. . I just built a p3 550 slot 1 with 512mb sdram. Used a Asus board. Voodoo 2 and a classic sound blaster . If it weren't for ebayers calling most of the parts (vintage) the cost would be a lot lower.

Found memories of playing MW2 Glide.

Very cool system. It's easy to go overboard with the specs but you did it right. It seems to me like the HDD is giving you some in game stuttering maybe it needs defraging. Too many downloaded MP3 on the 56k modem? ;-)

You live like a king 💀

actually owned similar way into 2007! 700mhz athlon, 128mb + 64gb donated, tnt2 upgraded to gforce 2 and later mx4, 30gb drive.

Didnt even know about CPUs that connect like that

sweet powermachine :)

Could you do a video on the drivers for this build? I would like to do a similar build but Phil’s computer labs site has several Voodoo2 drivers and I am not sure what is what

Hi did you tried to reflash the G200?? I got my NOS and it had a dead bios. I reflashed it and it works. Ive read something about bitrotting ^^

Is the "modern bundle" what you a re using for NFS 3? that version is heavily modified

nice build!! i have made a similar late '98 build in the last few months with an Asus P2B, 400mhz P2, (new in box :O ) Asus TNT 16MB AGP and Diamond Vortex 2 - I cheated with an SD card for storage tho. I am seriously thinking about a Voodoo 2 to go along with it because I can't get Redline Racer to render properly with either a TNT or TNT2 M64, so Glide might be the winning factor there. Cheers

Sega Rally is on PC, i have it and played it back then.

you could play unreal on max settings with this puppy

That Hitachi DVD drive was the best of the era. If you are burning discs for it, use DVD-R media (not DVD+R). DVD+R is an abomination and not real DVD.

I think the V2 cards have different memory timings, A-Trend (if correct version) is faster 110Mhz/22ns while STB is only 100Mhz and 25ns...

I almost forgot about cases having speakers.

A Matrox Millennium to go with 2 Voodoo 2's, I always wanted to do that setup with those SLI Voodoo2's. Instead I went with a Matrox G200, which had issues, and by the time I could fix it, I switched to NVidia. Should have gone with the best sound card ever made, AWE64 Gold.

Im remember game Spec Ops... first game for first person...

😍

👍👍

He really got his moneys worth

wait Alienware exsisted in 1998 still in the Biege Era? No way

Maybe a "Submarine Titans" ??😊

What's the game at 10:08? It looks good.

How much did the build cost you compared to the original price though?

Why no use an ATA 66 (80 Pin Cable) on the HDD?

for pod, turn off the L2 cache, and use setmul in the dos prompt......

Did you tried SR 3dfx patch?

also want to add, the timeframe that this PC was relevant was so short, and at that cost...that was nuts to pay that unless you could just flush it down the toilet. kids these days flip when they dont get 100fps at 1440 with max settings. i wanna just tell them to sit the f down lol

Don't know why but in my mind I thought Alienware used Abit motherboards back than. I may be wrong ofcourse, but they were best for OC.

You should have cleaned the pins on the memory. You arranged the cards wrongly, the matrox will heat up, it's better to put the modem in the last ISA slot and move all the cards down. Cable management is horrible...