Yeah, they were kind of "in-between" the AT and the true ATX format, betraying them as the early ATX form factors. I honestly despise these cases, as it forces you to take the panels as a whole.
@Dmetsys To me personally "era correct" is s bit overstated, but that's just me. One to three years is not a big deal even if you're talking about hardware from back then. Actually my dream computer back then was something like a Pentium III 600 to 1000Mhz with any kind of Geforce 2. It was leagues above my AMD k6-2 450Mhz with a 3dfx Voodoo Banshee PCI.
@@totalrandomtechnolog True. There are several parts of this system that stuck out to me as a budget game build, upgraded two or three times with the best components they could afford, ending with that Ti.
Do keep in mind that there were a lot of different GeForce 2 MX versions available out there. They differ from versions with DDR or the slower SDR memory, a 64bit or a 128bit memory bus, an MX(100), MX200, MX400, of which the MX400 would be the fastest due to the higher clocks. Also the memory size could vary between 32 and 64MB. So the card everyone on a “budget” wanted was the GeForce 2 MX400 with 64MB DDR memory and a 128bit memory bus.
I have that same motherboard. It has a Pentium 3 550mhz cpu , 384mb of ram, 2 x 40gb hard drives, a Geforce TI4200 128mb card, a 3DFX Voodoo 2 12mb card and a Sound Blaster Live in it. Running Windows 98SE, it's my favorite retro PC. Love the first MotoRacer.
My first own computer was Pentium III 1Ghz and GeForce 2 GTS 64MB, since then I am retro pc hardware enthusiast and collector. Thank you for excellent upload
So many memories from the PIII 500 that I used to have two of them back in the day with Gigabyte Motherboards and so many good memories playing various racing games with mates
I always liked the Pentium II's with the full passive heatsinks. They made great Linux servers with very little noise. PIII's, yep I liked those as well, just not as much. I also had some PIII Xeon's back in the day with the big weird Slot 2 cart.
@@A-BYTE64 Yeah that’s great as you could dual boot 98 SE and XP flawlessly on it as the Pentium III was made in the Windows 98 era, also that was a very high end PC in its time as that PC probably used to cost at least 2500$ when it was new considering it has two high end Pentium IIIs and a dual socket mainboard.
7:41 One gig on a consumer board of that vintage, sounds pretty hefty! Of course, very few people must have maxed it out from the get-go for a home computer, it would have costed a fortune, but many years later with those modules being cheap it's nice to have the possibility of doing so.
I always enjoyed installing those old operating systems and all the drivers and when I tell the grandkids how it used to be it's like the new version of "I used to walk 10 miles to school in the snow....uphill."
Got a GF2 Ultra that I saved off a shop a couple of years back, anyway the Pentium 3 is one of my long time favorites and hell in the mid 2000s I daily used them because I was too poor to afford anything newer.
The geforce 4 mx is the best choise for a cheap gpu of this era I think (if you don't care about Directx 8). It is actually a very fast geforce 2 and cheap as chips
Well, the GF4 MX460 is actually quite rare these days because of the fact that it was simply too expensive for a card that didn't have full DX8 support. But I managed to get one for free ^^
I remember being so stoked because my voodoo GPU meant I could run unreal. We always upgraded our own stuff when it got dated. My PC started off as a pentium 486 and just slowly evolved as the years went on.
XP is not so very odd for a P3. I got a new IBM Thinkpad in Feb 2001 with a P3-700 in it. It came with 2K installed and got an upgrade to XP end of the year.
I remember that my very first gaming PC that I built in early 2001 had these similar CPU and GPU. It had a 1 ghz Intel Pentium III cpu with 256 mb pc133 ram with a 20 gb hard drive, floppy drive, CDRW and DVD drives, creative sound blaster sound card, and a 32 mb nvidia geforce 2 graphics card, and for the operating system, I originally had Windows ME on it, but then later upgraded it to Windows XP in 2002. One game I liked playing on it was the original game of Deus Ex.
I HAD A P3 THAT HAD BAD CAPS it was on most boards, capacitor plague was a problem related to a higher-than-expected failure rate of non-solid aluminium electrolytic capacitors, between 1999 and 2007
The bad caps plague started to act at start of 2000s. I have some slot1 that still have their caps ihtact but at least one or two have some bad caps and I would say they probably suffered of unproper bad cooling inside of the PC case as there is only one fan blowing ar out of the case and one fan installed on the cpu heatsink blowing hot air to the caps. Other reason was the bad PSUs. PSus with bad caps feed abnoxious power to the board and the caps were the first to die.
Yep, absolutely. It was the Caps that were bad at the time. Slot Boards went around that with an array of Caps. You often See Slot Boards with 10-20 Caps near the slot... But yeah, the reason for the caps are 2fold: a) misuse and abuse as the VRM area gets very hot and they use 1000-2000h Caps there. b) high water contents of Ultra Low ESR Capacitors (Nippon Chemicon KZG, Panasonic FJ an similar)...
I've been wanting to upgrade my Windows 98 machine. Currently it's running a PIII @ 600 MHz with 256 MB RAM and an ATi Radeon 7200 series with 32 MB of vRAM. The video card is what I was wanting to get, and was looking at a GeForce 2 series card. But, out of curiosity of how my machine compared to yours, I ran 3D Mark 99 with the same settings. I've got 3541 3DMarks and 9059 CPU.
I remember I had ATI Rage Pro card and it was not so crappy for these days. I mean it was good for Pentium II or Celeron 233MHz, 300 or 366 and you could play Quake 2 kind of games with ease. Pentium III is a later generation CPU and should not be paired with ATI Rage Pro. GeForce 2 was definitely its generation and it's a good choice. I also remember nVidia Riva TNT2 was pretty good as well, games like UT or Quake 3 was definitely playable on this. Probably not as good as GeForce though. GeForce was then Voodoo Banshee of its times - horribly expensive, but you could play everything on this... Ahh, nostalgia :) Thanks for this movie. You brought me back a lot of nice memories :)
I am using Windows95 and DOS 6.2 lately on a VM a lot for uni and also feels really comfy. There is something about those old OS that won't translate to modern ones, and I don't know what it is.
Aw, I used a P3B-F with a Celeron 300 and Geforce 256 at that time. Lots of memories. Those Promise cards were included with Western Digital hard drives for a while when they got to be too large for most BIOSs to recognize. Larger than 13GB, I think? I used them to run two drives in RAID0 for video capture.
I remember there being a 32GB limit on some BIOS in the mid to late 90’s but updating to the latest BIOS should sort it. Celeron 300’s were great for their cost and overclocking ability!! Some older mobo’s BIOS’ were had HDD capacity limits before along with the 32GB limit such as 2.1, 4.2, 8.4 and a bit more recently, a ~128? GB limit. The work around in earlier BIOS’ were to enter the HDD parameters manually using ‘user mode’ I think it was and then enter the parameters manually or update BIOS.
Reviving an old pc is fun and satisfying I also have a Pentium 3 450 slot 1 which I acquired from my neighbors trash unfortunately the ide hdd is already undetectable and nowadays it is very hard to find an ide hdd, good thing Ive acquired an 8G cf card and cf to ide adapter and I installed windows xp 😅
This is reminiscent of my Pentium III HP Pavilion which has a similar configuration of the PSU being side mounted and vertical. This was a 1999-2000 era desktop PC. When that Pavilion came out the GeForce 256 was the hot GPU of the time and Creative Labs had their own version of the card that was advertised everywhere.
I use side cutters to get rid of those little thumb scabs, stops you from picking 'em. :) Very nice board with that ISA slot for a awe32 or something similar for DOS.
I don't think the GeForce 2 and WinXP are too modern for the Pentium III. Both were released in 2001, and iirc most people were still buying PIIIs in 2001!
geforce 2 mx when introduced was quite advanced with true hardware t&l support, 2 pixel pipelines with 2 textures units each and consumes only 4 watts. By the way it was priced at around 120 $. It packed more power and was in the same time way cheaper than most of the competiting products
Yes you are right but I had the g-force 2 mx/mx400 with 128 gigs of RAM in 8x AGP I'm not remembering exactly how many watts but it did have an additional four pin power supply on the card that was required
@@cgriggsiv geforce mx with 128MB of vram is a rare version. I happened to have one too. Mine does not come with an extra molex connector. I assume the 4-pin connector on your card was added to make it look more powerful... geforce mx itself does not need that much of power at all and was very popular in low power consumption comouters: laptops, imac g4, powermac g4 cube...
Back when Nvidia had competition, before they bought out everyone, they used to offer great generational leaps at decent prices. ATI was breathing down their neck long after 3Dfx folded, and kept Nvidia honest, but as soon as Nvidia won hearts and minds with their dodgy PhysX nonsense and paying off tech channels, they turned into their true form : VAMPIRES!
Get well soon buddy. I have recently got over a nasty case of the flu and UA-cam were on my butt because I hadn't uploaded a video for 2 weeks. I have now. (Not a self plug, I'm happy where my channel is going)
13:53 I believe that these old Pentium 3 systems mostly use the 5 volt rail, so that would probably be better to monitor than the 12 volt rail in future.
My best advise is unless you plan to dos game, just throw in the best 3D card you can get your hands on. I have a PII 333 with a crappy FX5200 AGP and even it chews this system alive with 3D games. I’m almost done with my PIII 450 gaming rig, just waiting for my Motherboard to arrive 👍
I don’t see anything odd about XP on a Pentium III, unless you meant specifically at 333 MHz. If anything, the 320 MB of RAM is rather skimpy for XP though, as it swaps too often with less than 512 MB.
@@talvisota327 Weren't those what the later Pent4 architecture was based off of? If my memory is correct the first Pent4 cpus were actually slower than Pent3 systems despite the difference in clock speed.
I bought an AGP GeForce 2 Ti (I think it was a Chaintech) in the fall of 2001 for my Abit KT7A and it was a dramatic step up from the Pine PCI TNT2 (a holdover from my first computer which only had PCI and ISA slots) I had been using.
Motherboard: Asus P3B-F Ports: 2 PS/2, 2 USB 1.x, 2 COM, 1 LPT External ports: Video card: 1 VGA, 1 TV out Sound card: 3 Jacks, 1 MIDI/Game Network card: 1 LAN BIOS languages: English
The PCI 128, a not so great version of the soundblaster family. I’ve got that card in my Pentium 2 system and it sadly lacks is good DOS compatibility. It’s fine for Windows games, but it’s use for DOS games very limited as it lacks the OPL chip. Also the limited DOS support only seems to work in the context of Windows 95/98 with some driver magic and only with software that use digital sound in my experience. I never got it to work in real mode DOS. If I had the chance, I would want to replace it with an SB 16 or a decent clone.
An old Katmai based PIII, cool! that 512K of cache ran at 1/2 the processor speed. I also found that the cheap/bad cap issues were 2 fold: 1 cheap caps from budget board manufacturers. The other was that early 2000 counterfit/knockoff capacitors that ended up on a bunch of boards. I have 2 P4 boards, and a P3 board that need to be re-capped because of this.. Cheers!
I remember my old Pentium 2 (400mhz), with 128MB of RAM, and a 16MB of video, ran perfectly smooth Quake 3 Arena, it was like 35fps, but your machine runs too low even with the graphic card. That card was lower than 16MB video? I dont remember the exact model of my old card. Good video bro!
Unreal Tournment runs best at 160 mb sd-ram and above - with lower amount of ram you can edit the ingame cache (file) for smother gameplay but I guess it depends on game resolution and videocard , I used 32 mb videoram (tnt2 and mx )
I had a PIII with 450 MHz on a Gigabyte BX2000 board. With the DIP switches set correctly I could run it at 550 MHz with a 120 MHz FSB. I think it only worked cause I had a good quality Riva TNT2 M64 and 133 MHz SD RAM installed. I miss that machine, lugged it to many LAN parties. I remember playing Battlefield 1942, Quake 3, Diablo 2 and Star Trek Voyager Elite Force on it. I still have the hard drives from the machine somewhere, a 30 GB and a 80 GB Seagate. At some point it upgraded it to a Geforce 4200 I think which helped a lot in terms of game performance.
Nice build, my current windows 98 is a Pentium 4 northwood 3.2ghz, 512mb DDR, ati radeon x850 pro, sound blaster audigy 2zs, I used a modern antec case that looked like its stuck from the mid 2000s and I painted it beige.
@@lordterra1377 Yeah it run UT99 with no frame drops, and runs Serious Sam the second Encounter with like 70-90 fps maxed out and the res at 1280x1024.
I got my W98, Pentium 2 400Mhz 128mb RAM for free from a dude who just had it in its pile of stuff. It was free to get, but it is costing my soul to work on it. Now I'll have to burn a Linux thingie on a CD so that: >double/triple booting may be possible >booting from a USB may be possible >moving files to the computer may be easier (I tried 4 methods to move the USB driver to the PC, and when I managed to IT WAS INCOMPATIBLE) My goblin brain tells me that I NEED to try and run games like TF2 on it, but I know very well that it is IMPOSSIBLE. On the other hand, before setting the PC on the side again for awhile I managed to transfer the Quake directory on the PC. WINquake lacks drivers, but the original version... it ran on Software Mode perfectly, nothing was missing, the performance was smooth and the music was there. At least I managed that... the original plan for the W98 PC was to run oldass games on real hardware to then maybe post the proper results online for archival purposes, and the origin of that plan was my intrigue with all Quake ports...
I don't know why you didn't mention higher-end ATI cards such as the Rage 128 and the Radeon series. You could throw a Radeon in there and get performance comparable to the MX, based on my own experience with a Pentium 4 Dell that I have with an OEM Radeon card in it. I tried an MX 400 in there and performance is basically the same.
In 1999 I got myself a Celeron 466 with a TNT2 Ultra card, within a few years upgraded to a Pentium III 800MHz but kept the same card, and that's the system I gamed on until ... 2007. Oof.
Really enjoyed your video! I have a few retro PC's myself that were gifted. Getting my feet wet with the hardware and installation procedures. One question though, where is a reputable place to source drivers? Awesome video, thanks for showing.
Pentium 3 did come at 333mhz but it was a later low end varient marketed to home business. The theory is that having a underpowered PC saves money because the people whom would have bought this PC would be using software like quick books and basic word processing. Back in the day people would not have know the difference between pentium 1,2,3 they just need a computer so it was easy to sell them outdated junk.
I’m surprised the GF2ti performed so much better than the MX cards, I thought a 500MHz CPU would bottleneck them all (so they’d all be roughly the same speed)
Asus P3B-F! The best Slot1-motherboard ever made. I have two ot those, one with 2 ISA slots and one with 1 ISA slot. Pentium3 Tualatin 1,4GHz, overclock it to 140MHz FSB and then it's one fast all-arounder.
It's a little unfair to compare a Rage 3D pro card that came out in 1997 with a Geforce card that came out in 2001. That being said the Geforce would certainly be a better choice for a later Pentium III. The Rage card is more appropriate for a Pentium II or even OG Pentium machine. It kind of boggles the mind that stuff like this is actually bringing money. Slot 1 machines were seen as particularly undesirable. Everyone I knew who could afford to, had abandoned them by the 2001-2002 timeframe. I still have my Asus P2B and overclocked Celeron 300 setup. I should dig it out...
Thing is that these Rage Pro cards were used by a lot of vendors (even in P3 systems). "High-end" cars for 1998 / 1999 are getting pretty expensive. Think you easily pay 30 EUR for a TNT2 card nowadays. (excluding the vanta's and m64 models)
@@RetroSpector78 Not completely disagreeing, but I think our current silicone shortage is starting to warp people's perception. Particularly some of the younger folks who were very young or not born at the time. Twenty years ago a 4 year old graphics card was considered hopelessly outdated, and you'd spend a reasonable amount to get a new one. I had a Rage Pro card in my Celeron rig circa January, 1998. By 2001 I'd gone through three other cards. Today, you get companies installing 7 year old GT730's due to a lack of supply for anything better on the low-end and folks are starting to see this as "normal. Yes, Rage Pro cards were still being installed circa 2000-2001, but there was no expectation that they'd be doing anything other than spreadsheets. Then again, time marches on and things become more rare. I remember arguing on the Vintage Computer Forum back in around 2005 whether or not 486 machines were really "vintage".
@@dennisp.2147 It was also a different time. There were massive gains with every iteration unlike nowadays. You still can use a 5 year old GPU nowadays with modern games. Try that in the late 90's / early 2000's.
@@mxmaverinho8115 That's the point I'm making in my first comment. Moore's law was still in full effect both for GPU and CPU. AMD released the K6 at 166 and 200 mhz in 1997. in 2001 you had Athlons and P4's at 1.5 ghz.
I had this, the problem is to get an AGP4X motherboard. Otherwise DRAM Mhz will be divided by 2. All "e-poly" (enemy, models, etc...) will hugely drop your FPS
Seems like a twin system of my rig with the P3-500 and the GF2Ti, nice! :) Unfortunately my P3B-F seems to have a faulty multi IO chip or at least some broken traces, because IDE is flaky and Floppy is simply dead. No time to troubleshoot (and potentially replace the onboard part) in sight though. When I do get to it, I was thinking of trying to make a video of it. Anyone would watch that? ;)
Those PIII were great overclockers! The slightly later Celeron were absolute overcloking beasts. I had a 667Mhz that easily run on 1100MHz. I had almost exactly the same computer back than, same case, slightly different motherboard, also with a GeForce (different brand). WinXP on those machines was fine, just with a bit more RAM.
To be fair, you're not really comparing graphics cards from the same generation. The ATi Rage Pro series was meant to compete against the Voodoo or nVidia Riva 128 chips, while the Rage 128 series was meant to compete against the nVidia Riva TNT or the Voodoo 3 chips. The nVidia GeForce2 Ti was meant to compete against the ATi Radeon 7x00 or the Voodoo 5 chips. So of course the GeForce2 Ti is going to beat the snot out of ATi - it was about two graphics generations apart!
Yep, although he does mention that the GeForce2 Ti is comparable with a Radeon 7500 at 11:19 but that point does start to get lost when he goes on about "crappy" ATI cards. In my Pentium III 500 MHz setup I have a Gigabyte ATI Rage 128 Pro Ultra which works quite well on Windows 98 and only cost me $25 CAD from eBay.
Me personally I had the AMD k6-2 650 MHz with a G-Force 2 mx/mx-400 with 128 MB of RAM and the in a 8X AGP Some of the Intel processors at the time were okay but AMD outclassed them in my opinion then somewhere along the line and tell outclass AMD for a good long while then it was a back and forth shootout until again AMD later on in years I think it was 2013-2014 took hold strangled the hell out of AMD and said this is my turn and now we have AMD which took the stranglehold back and knocked Intel to the curb even knowing that Intel now has that 12th gen CPU which is still pretty good but it's causing a lot of headaches only because of Microsoft I think
Nice. Got almost the same build. Perfect card for this system would be a nvidia tnt2 but i replaced it with a Geforce 3 Ti 200 since im playing in higher resolution as 1024x768 and some dx8 games
Pretty much the same config I had in the year 2000, except my parents couldn't afford the Ti, so I had an original GeForce 2MX 32MB. Was pretty decent, though.
I think you're really choking the geforce 2 ti. It would do much better with a more period accurate fast thunderbird / slow athlon XP and moderate resolution (like 1024x768 or even 800x600 in newer games). You want to match the refresh rate of the monitor as often as possible. On a CRT which effectively is a rolling shutter BFI monitor (in modern language) this gives you extremely good motion clarity that LCDs still cannot come close to matching, even with strobing backlight/BFI. A CRT is really worth the back pain and space requirement for older games but a pain to record properly with a camera. Quake III would typically run > 100 FPS on a geforce 2 ti unless the screen is drowning in smoke trails.
I still have the first video card I've ever bought, a GeForce 2 MX 200 32 MB PCI card. The Walmart HP computer that I paid $800 for couldn't even run Plus! for XP. This card made that possible, plus I was able to play Hunting Unlimited 3 on it. 😉
Absolutely. For a 500 MHz CPU, anything faster than a TNT2 Ultra is kind of a waste, that GF2 ti needs a 1 GHz CPU at least and as you say, those things are expensive! 😖 Edit: Of course, TNT2 Ultra’s are quite expensive too so a GF2MX like in this video, is a great solution.
Asus P3Bf - used to have a PIII/500/Riva_TNT-16mb based on it, when PIII was "actual". Though have such machine now, too - play REd Baron II and JEdi knight on it)
I wonder why the price is much higher than 5 Euros when I look for the cheaper alternative GeForce cards. I live in the USA and many of them are going for about $25.
It is not called "cold" any more. It is called "covid" nowdays :p Windows 98 is really fast, customizable and lightweight. Antix Linux is one Linux distro that can run with similarly low system requirements.
Hello I have a Question, I have a Motherboard ECS P6ISA ATX, Ir runs Windows 98SE but i don't have a Vídeo Card for Play Games. What Vídeo Card is the indicated for My Motherboard? Thanks
The same cards that were shown in the video also work with your motherboard based on the information I have Googled! If you're going for Nvidia, you should probably get a GeForce2 MX400 if you want a budget card, or a GeForce2 GTS/Pro/Ti if you want it to be a bit more special.
Yeah, that USB driver you should alert people of the internal changes that thing can do, especially if you are running a Non-English Windows 98 system... If that's the case DO NOT install that driver since It's not official and you can have more instability than you already have for Windows 98...
Those were top specs and everyone's dream computer when I was in high school. Also those case covers were a hassle to put back together.
Yeah, they were kind of "in-between" the AT and the true ATX format, betraying them as the early ATX form factors. I honestly despise these cases, as it forces you to take the panels as a whole.
@Dmetsys To me personally "era correct" is s bit overstated, but that's just me. One to three years is not a big deal even if you're talking about hardware from back then. Actually my dream computer back then was something like a Pentium III 600 to 1000Mhz with any kind of Geforce 2. It was leagues above my AMD k6-2 450Mhz with a 3dfx Voodoo Banshee PCI.
@Dmetsys We didn't care about being "era correct" back in the day.
@@totalrandomtechnolog True. There are several parts of this system that stuck out to me as a budget game build, upgraded two or three times with the best components they could afford, ending with that Ti.
I was gaming on a Power Mac G3 with a Radeon 7000 in it around that time, and that thing kicked ass. Played a LOT of Unreal Tournament on there :)
Do keep in mind that there were a lot of different GeForce 2 MX versions available out there. They differ from versions with DDR or the slower SDR memory, a 64bit or a 128bit memory bus, an MX(100), MX200, MX400, of which the MX400 would be the fastest due to the higher clocks. Also the memory size could vary between 32 and 64MB.
So the card everyone on a “budget” wanted was the GeForce 2 MX400 with 64MB DDR memory and a 128bit memory bus.
Yeah, MX400 was the best. The basic MX was also fine when it was a 128-bit one.
I may be wrong but, I think the OG MX is actually better than the 200. Assuming the manufacturer set it up correctly.
I had the MX400, it sucked. No hardware T&L. Need at least a geforce3 to be as good as an xbox.
@@televiciousgoober or as cheap alternative today you can use something like gf4 mx440. it's essentiality gf2 with hardware t&l
@@gorjy9610 had that too, it actually only has T no L. So most shaders do nothing.
I have that same motherboard. It has a Pentium 3 550mhz cpu , 384mb of ram, 2 x 40gb hard drives, a Geforce TI4200 128mb card, a 3DFX Voodoo 2 12mb card and a Sound Blaster Live in it.
Running Windows 98SE, it's my favorite retro PC.
Love the first MotoRacer.
My first own computer was Pentium III 1Ghz and GeForce 2 GTS 64MB, since then I am retro pc hardware enthusiast and collector. Thank you for excellent upload
So many memories from the PIII 500 that I used to have two of them back in the day with Gigabyte Motherboards and so many good memories playing various racing games with mates
I always liked the Pentium II's with the full passive heatsinks. They made great Linux servers with very little noise. PIII's, yep I liked those as well, just not as much. I also had some PIII Xeon's back in the day with the big weird Slot 2 cart.
I remember my first computer had dual socket 370 motherboard, 2x Pentium III 1.3GHz, 512MB of RAM, ATI Radeon 9800 and Windows XP and I got it in 2006
@@A-BYTE64 Yeah that’s great as you could dual boot 98 SE and XP flawlessly on it as the Pentium III was made in the Windows 98 era, also that was a very high end PC in its time as that PC probably used to cost at least 2500$ when it was new considering it has two high end Pentium IIIs and a dual socket mainboard.
this is one of the best computers ive seen on your channel, more videos with it please
Maintenance mode - that one was brilliant! Goes onto my list!
7:41 One gig on a consumer board of that vintage, sounds pretty hefty! Of course, very few people must have maxed it out from the get-go for a home computer, it would have costed a fortune, but many years later with those modules being cheap it's nice to have the possibility of doing so.
Hope you feel better soon, and I'm glad it's just a cold, and not the plague.
I always enjoyed installing those old operating systems and all the drivers and when I tell the grandkids how it used to be it's like the new version of "I used to walk 10 miles to school in the snow....uphill."
GRANDkids? Well, you weren't exactly a young dude anymore when you were using WIN98 then.
@@BilisNegra
Sad but true!
Got a GF2 Ultra that I saved off a shop a couple of years back, anyway the Pentium 3 is one of my long time favorites and hell in the mid 2000s I daily used them because I was too poor to afford anything newer.
I’ve got a GF2 Ultra I saved a couple of years ago from being scrapped, a superb card that I’m proud to have in my collection 👍🏻
Well, back in 2000 and 2001, my go-to video card was Voodoo5 5500 AGP, combining with Athlon 650 Mhz, it was super awesome!!
Excellent review! Walk down memory lane ☺️
The geforce 4 mx is the best choise for a cheap gpu of this era I think (if you don't care about Directx 8). It is actually a very fast geforce 2 and cheap as chips
Well, the GF4 MX460 is actually quite rare these days because of the fact that it was simply too expensive for a card that didn't have full DX8 support. But I managed to get one for free ^^
@@eddiehimself yeah never seen one of those, probably was an oddly priced product from the get go
I remember being so stoked because my voodoo GPU meant I could run unreal. We always upgraded our own stuff when it got dated. My PC started off as a pentium 486 and just slowly evolved as the years went on.
A Pentium 486? Sure about that? 😅
@@looks-suspicious Perhaps he meant a Pentium Overdrive?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_OverDrive
XP is not so very odd for a P3. I got a new IBM Thinkpad in Feb 2001 with a P3-700 in it. It came with 2K installed and got an upgrade to XP end of the year.
13:40 The beeps just mean that you should call an ambulance
I remember that my very first gaming PC that I built in early 2001 had these similar CPU and GPU. It had a 1 ghz Intel Pentium III cpu with 256 mb pc133 ram with a 20 gb hard drive, floppy drive, CDRW and DVD drives, creative sound blaster sound card, and a 32 mb nvidia geforce 2 graphics card, and for the operating system, I originally had Windows ME on it, but then later upgraded it to Windows XP in 2002. One game I liked playing on it was the original game of Deus Ex.
I was most surprised how well the Rage Pro performed.
Been playing around with a 8mb PCI Rage Pro. I finished Max Payne on it lol. A few rough areas and missing textures but amazing how smooth overall
I HAD A P3 THAT HAD BAD CAPS it was on most boards, capacitor plague was a problem related to a higher-than-expected failure rate of non-solid aluminium electrolytic capacitors, between 1999 and 2007
I've recapped numerous Pentium iii and 4 motherboards as well as some Macintosh motherboards because of it
The bad caps plague started to act at start of 2000s. I have some slot1 that still have their caps ihtact but at least one or two have some bad caps and I would say they probably suffered of unproper bad cooling inside of the PC case as there is only one fan blowing ar out of the case and one fan installed on the cpu heatsink blowing hot air to the caps. Other reason was the bad PSUs. PSus with bad caps feed abnoxious power to the board and the caps were the first to die.
Yep, absolutely. It was the Caps that were bad at the time.
Slot Boards went around that with an array of Caps. You often See Slot Boards with 10-20 Caps near the slot...
But yeah, the reason for the caps are 2fold:
a) misuse and abuse as the VRM area gets very hot and they use 1000-2000h Caps there.
b) high water contents of Ultra Low ESR Capacitors (Nippon Chemicon KZG, Panasonic FJ an similar)...
I've been wanting to upgrade my Windows 98 machine. Currently it's running a PIII @ 600 MHz with 256 MB RAM and an ATi Radeon 7200 series with 32 MB of vRAM. The video card is what I was wanting to get, and was looking at a GeForce 2 series card. But, out of curiosity of how my machine compared to yours, I ran 3D Mark 99 with the same settings. I've got 3541 3DMarks and 9059 CPU.
I remember I had ATI Rage Pro card and it was not so crappy for these days. I mean it was good for Pentium II or Celeron 233MHz, 300 or 366 and you could play Quake 2 kind of games with ease. Pentium III is a later generation CPU and should not be paired with ATI Rage Pro. GeForce 2 was definitely its generation and it's a good choice. I also remember nVidia Riva TNT2 was pretty good as well, games like UT or Quake 3 was definitely playable on this. Probably not as good as GeForce though. GeForce was then Voodoo Banshee of its times - horribly expensive, but you could play everything on this... Ahh, nostalgia :) Thanks for this movie. You brought me back a lot of nice memories :)
don't know why but working on that pc looks so comfy, everything from the motherboard to the os glitches
I am using Windows95 and DOS 6.2 lately on a VM a lot for uni and also feels really comfy. There is something about those old OS that won't translate to modern ones, and I don't know what it is.
@@Vlad-1986 Perhaps it’s the simplicity of the file system, less bloat, efficient UI, and full control of processes in use, among other things.
Aw, I used a P3B-F with a Celeron 300 and Geforce 256 at that time. Lots of memories. Those Promise cards were included with Western Digital hard drives for a while when they got to be too large for most BIOSs to recognize. Larger than 13GB, I think? I used them to run two drives in RAID0 for video capture.
I remember there being a 32GB limit on some BIOS in the mid to late 90’s but updating to the latest BIOS should sort it.
Celeron 300’s were great for their cost and overclocking ability!!
Some older mobo’s BIOS’ were had HDD capacity limits before along with the 32GB limit such as 2.1, 4.2, 8.4 and a bit more recently, a ~128? GB limit.
The work around in earlier BIOS’ were to enter the HDD parameters manually using ‘user mode’ I think it was and then enter the parameters manually or update BIOS.
Some good memories. Greetings from Karachi, Pakistan.
Reviving an old pc is fun and satisfying I also have a Pentium 3 450 slot 1 which I acquired from my neighbors trash unfortunately the ide hdd is already undetectable and nowadays it is very hard to find an ide hdd, good thing Ive acquired an 8G cf card and cf to ide adapter and I installed windows xp 😅
This is reminiscent of my Pentium III HP Pavilion which has a similar configuration of the PSU being side mounted and vertical. This was a 1999-2000 era desktop PC. When that Pavilion came out the GeForce 256 was the hot GPU of the time and Creative Labs had their own version of the card that was advertised everywhere.
Ah yes. The Creative Annihilator. Had that one as well.
I use side cutters to get rid of those little thumb scabs, stops you from picking 'em. :) Very nice board with that ISA slot for a awe32 or something similar for DOS.
I don't think the GeForce 2 and WinXP are too modern for the Pentium III. Both were released in 2001, and iirc most people were still buying PIIIs in 2001!
Good ol 440BX chipset is a great platform to build off
My first computer back in 2000…didn’t have any graphics card but was still able to play midtown madness
geforce 2 mx when introduced was quite advanced with true hardware t&l support, 2 pixel pipelines with 2 textures units each and consumes only 4 watts. By the way it was priced at around 120 $. It packed more power and was in the same time way cheaper than most of the competiting products
Yes you are right but I had the g-force 2 mx/mx400 with 128 gigs of RAM in 8x AGP
I'm not remembering exactly how many watts but it did have an additional four pin power supply on the card that was required
@@cgriggsiv geforce mx with 128MB of vram is a rare version. I happened to have one too. Mine does not come with an extra molex connector. I assume the 4-pin connector on your card was added to make it look more powerful... geforce mx itself does not need that much of power at all and was very popular in low power consumption comouters: laptops, imac g4, powermac g4 cube...
Back when Nvidia had competition, before they bought out everyone, they used to offer great generational leaps at decent prices. ATI was breathing down their neck long after 3Dfx folded, and kept Nvidia honest, but as soon as Nvidia won hearts and minds with their dodgy PhysX nonsense and paying off tech channels, they turned into their true form : VAMPIRES!
Get well soon buddy.
I have recently got over a nasty case of the flu and UA-cam were on my butt because I hadn't uploaded a video for 2 weeks. I have now. (Not a self plug, I'm happy where my channel is going)
13:53 I believe that these old Pentium 3 systems mostly use the 5 volt rail, so that would probably be better to monitor than the 12 volt rail in future.
My best advise is unless you plan to dos game, just throw in the best 3D card you can get your hands on. I have a PII 333 with a crappy FX5200 AGP and even it chews this system alive with 3D games. I’m almost done with my PIII 450 gaming rig, just waiting for my Motherboard to arrive 👍
I don’t see anything odd about XP on a Pentium III, unless you meant specifically at 333 MHz. If anything, the 320 MB of RAM is rather skimpy for XP though, as it swaps too often with less than 512 MB.
Long as you keep it pre-SP3 all that extra junk really slows down a computer. I remember XP felt so sluggish after updating from Sp2.
on my pentium 3 tualatin with 1.5 gb of ram, xp runs great even with sp3 installed
My first laptop was a Sony VAIO R505 - Pentium III - 850MHz w/ 384MB. It shipped with XP and ran great.
@@talvisota327
Weren't those what the later Pent4 architecture was based off of? If my memory is correct the first Pent4 cpus were actually slower than Pent3 systems despite the difference in clock speed.
@@lordterra1377 pentium m and later core 2 duo were based on the pentium 3. pentium 4 had its own architecture
I bought an AGP GeForce 2 Ti (I think it was a Chaintech) in the fall of 2001 for my Abit KT7A and it was a dramatic step up from the Pine PCI TNT2 (a holdover from my first computer which only had PCI and ISA slots) I had been using.
Motherboard: Asus P3B-F
Ports: 2 PS/2, 2 USB 1.x, 2 COM, 1 LPT
External ports:
Video card: 1 VGA, 1 TV out
Sound card: 3 Jacks, 1 MIDI/Game
Network card: 1 LAN
BIOS languages: English
The sound card is actually a Creative PCI 128, not a Live! card.
The PCI 128, a not so great version of the soundblaster family. I’ve got that card in my Pentium 2 system and it sadly lacks is good DOS compatibility. It’s fine for Windows games, but it’s use for DOS games very limited as it lacks the OPL chip. Also the limited DOS support only seems to work in the context of Windows 95/98 with some driver magic and only with software that use digital sound in my experience. I never got it to work in real mode DOS. If I had the chance, I would want to replace it with an SB 16 or a decent clone.
Oh I remember working on those old age machines
An old Katmai based PIII, cool! that 512K of cache ran at 1/2 the processor speed. I also found that the cheap/bad cap issues were 2 fold: 1 cheap caps from budget board manufacturers. The other was that early 2000 counterfit/knockoff capacitors that ended up on a bunch of boards. I have 2 P4 boards, and a P3 board that need to be re-capped because of this..
Cheers!
I remember my old Pentium 2 (400mhz), with 128MB of RAM, and a 16MB of video, ran perfectly smooth Quake 3 Arena, it was like 35fps, but your machine runs too low even with the graphic card. That card was lower than 16MB video? I dont remember the exact model of my old card. Good video bro!
Your power box wattage is maxxing out. Your GPU not getting enough flow. This causes those display patterns. New power box will sort it out
I love the phrase “power box.” I think that’s what I’ll call it from now on. 😅
Cheers mate great video as usual. You got a new sub...
at that time pentium 3 era, when a gpu card have fan in it , you know you r good
I still have a few GeForce 2's around as well as a few Pentium 3's & motherboards. Now all I need to do is to build a rig for them, heh.
Unreal Tournment runs best at 160 mb sd-ram and above - with lower amount of ram you can edit the ingame cache (file) for smother gameplay but I guess it depends on game resolution and videocard , I used 32 mb videoram (tnt2 and mx )
Slot 1 PIIIs always have CPU speed, cache and FSB clearly visible written along the top of the cartridge.
@ch282 in my experience non like having the FSB messed with such an increase. I'd just get a p3 with 133 FSB.
I had a PIII with 450 MHz on a Gigabyte BX2000 board. With the DIP switches set correctly I could run it at 550 MHz with a 120 MHz FSB. I think it only worked cause I had a good quality Riva TNT2 M64 and 133 MHz SD RAM installed. I miss that machine, lugged it to many LAN parties. I remember playing Battlefield 1942, Quake 3, Diablo 2 and Star Trek Voyager Elite Force on it. I still have the hard drives from the machine somewhere, a 30 GB and a 80 GB Seagate. At some point it upgraded it to a Geforce 4200 I think which helped a lot in terms of game performance.
Of course there is/was a 333 MHz Pentium II. The last Pentium to use the 66 MHz FSB. I happen to have one.
Nice build, my current windows 98 is a Pentium 4 northwood 3.2ghz, 512mb DDR, ati radeon x850 pro, sound blaster audigy 2zs, I used a modern antec case that looked like its stuck from the mid 2000s and I painted it beige.
That thing must really scream. My best 98 machine is early Pent 4 at 1.8 ghz. It handles every game flawlessly.
@@lordterra1377 Yeah it run UT99 with no frame drops, and runs Serious Sam the second Encounter with like 70-90 fps maxed out and the res at 1280x1024.
@@purpasmart_4831
What motherboard do you have?
@@lordterra1377 Asus P4P800-VM
I got my W98, Pentium 2 400Mhz 128mb RAM for free from a dude who just had it in its pile of stuff.
It was free to get, but it is costing my soul to work on it.
Now I'll have to burn a Linux thingie on a CD so that:
>double/triple booting may be possible
>booting from a USB may be possible
>moving files to the computer may be easier (I tried 4 methods to move the USB driver to the PC, and when I managed to IT WAS INCOMPATIBLE)
My goblin brain tells me that I NEED to try and run games like TF2 on it, but I know very well that it is IMPOSSIBLE.
On the other hand, before setting the PC on the side again for awhile I managed to transfer the Quake directory on the PC. WINquake lacks drivers, but the original version... it ran on Software Mode perfectly, nothing was missing, the performance was smooth and the music was there.
At least I managed that... the original plan for the W98 PC was to run oldass games on real hardware to then maybe post the proper results online for archival purposes, and the origin of that plan was my intrigue with all Quake ports...
I don't know why you didn't mention higher-end ATI cards such as the Rage 128 and the Radeon series. You could throw a Radeon in there and get performance comparable to the MX, based on my own experience with a Pentium 4 Dell that I have with an OEM Radeon card in it. I tried an MX 400 in there and performance is basically the same.
Try to avoid the geforce 2 MX 200 though, it has a 64bit memory bus thus pretty slow. Geforce 2 MX or the MX400 is great value.
In 1999 I got myself a Celeron 466 with a TNT2 Ultra card, within a few years upgraded to a Pentium III 800MHz but kept the same card, and that's the system I gamed on until ... 2007. Oof.
Really enjoyed your video! I have a few retro PC's myself that were gifted. Getting my feet wet with the hardware and installation procedures. One question though, where is a reputable place to source drivers? Awesome video, thanks for showing.
Phils computer lab has some on his website
@@Jonen560ti okay cool I'll check em out. Is snappy driver reputable? A lot of mixed information in regards to their site..
@@tylerstarkey9141 never heard of snappy driver
Pentium 3 did come at 333mhz but it was a later low end varient marketed to home business. The theory is that having a underpowered PC saves money because the people whom would have bought this PC would be using software like quick books and basic word processing. Back in the day people would not have know the difference between pentium 1,2,3 they just need a computer so it was easy to sell them outdated junk.
I’m surprised the GF2ti performed so much better than the MX cards, I thought a 500MHz CPU would bottleneck them all (so they’d all be roughly the same speed)
I had a couple of the Promise IDE controllers, back when I had 6 or 8 hard drives in my gaming system. Ah, all those rotating platters. Hehehe...
Asus P3B-F! The best Slot1-motherboard ever made. I have two ot those, one with 2 ISA slots and one with 1 ISA slot. Pentium3 Tualatin 1,4GHz, overclock it to 140MHz FSB and then it's one fast all-arounder.
It's a little unfair to compare a Rage 3D pro card that came out in 1997 with a Geforce card that came out in 2001. That being said the Geforce would certainly be a better choice for a later Pentium III. The Rage card is more appropriate for a Pentium II or even OG Pentium machine.
It kind of boggles the mind that stuff like this is actually bringing money. Slot 1 machines were seen as particularly undesirable. Everyone I knew who could afford to, had abandoned them by the 2001-2002 timeframe.
I still have my Asus P2B and overclocked Celeron 300 setup. I should dig it out...
Thing is that these Rage Pro cards were used by a lot of vendors (even in P3 systems). "High-end" cars for 1998 / 1999 are getting pretty expensive. Think you easily pay 30 EUR for a TNT2 card nowadays. (excluding the vanta's and m64 models)
@@RetroSpector78 Not completely disagreeing, but I think our current silicone shortage is starting to warp people's perception. Particularly some of the younger folks who were very young or not born at the time. Twenty years ago a 4 year old graphics card was considered hopelessly outdated, and you'd spend a reasonable amount to get a new one. I had a Rage Pro card in my Celeron rig circa January, 1998. By 2001 I'd gone through three other cards.
Today, you get companies installing 7 year old GT730's due to a lack of supply for anything better on the low-end and folks are starting to see this as "normal. Yes, Rage Pro cards were still being installed circa 2000-2001, but there was no expectation that they'd be doing anything other than spreadsheets.
Then again, time marches on and things become more rare. I remember arguing on the Vintage Computer Forum back in around 2005 whether or not 486 machines were really "vintage".
@@dennisp.2147 It was also a different time. There were massive gains with every iteration unlike nowadays. You still can use a 5 year old GPU nowadays with modern games. Try that in the late 90's / early 2000's.
@@mxmaverinho8115 That's the point I'm making in my first comment. Moore's law was still in full effect both for GPU and CPU. AMD released the K6 at 166 and 200 mhz in 1997. in 2001 you had Athlons and P4's at 1.5 ghz.
@@dennisp.2147 You can do spreadsheets on a 486 :)
""a cold"". :P Haha kidding, hpoe you are well. Awesome video, as always! Thanks :)
I had this, the problem is to get an AGP4X motherboard. Otherwise DRAM Mhz will be divided by 2. All "e-poly" (enemy, models, etc...) will hugely drop your FPS
Correction the sound blaster is not a live! it's sound blaster pci 128 or sound blaster 16 pci , not live
I know i thought I corrected it everywhere :) guess I missed a spot. Thx for correcting it.
You are right - it is most probably SBPCI 128 utilizing ES1371 chip
My first pc was pentium IIII 1Ghz with Geforce 2 GTS 64mb and eizo crt monitor. I played a lot of games. Amazing pc it was
Seems like a twin system of my rig with the P3-500 and the GF2Ti, nice! :)
Unfortunately my P3B-F seems to have a faulty multi IO chip or at least some broken traces, because IDE is flaky and Floppy is simply dead.
No time to troubleshoot (and potentially replace the onboard part) in sight though. When I do get to it, I was thinking of trying to make a video of it. Anyone would watch that? ;)
Those PIII were great overclockers! The slightly later Celeron were absolute overcloking beasts.
I had a 667Mhz that easily run on 1100MHz.
I had almost exactly the same computer back than, same case, slightly different motherboard, also with a GeForce (different brand).
WinXP on those machines was fine, just with a bit more RAM.
Dark age of Camelot ran great on that setup
To be fair, you're not really comparing graphics cards from the same generation. The ATi Rage Pro series was meant to compete against the Voodoo or nVidia Riva 128 chips, while the Rage 128 series was meant to compete against the nVidia Riva TNT or the Voodoo 3 chips. The nVidia GeForce2 Ti was meant to compete against the ATi Radeon 7x00 or the Voodoo 5 chips. So of course the GeForce2 Ti is going to beat the snot out of ATi - it was about two graphics generations apart!
Exactly. 4 or 5 years apart. If you bought a Rage Pro card in 2001 you were going to be using it to do spreadsheets.
Yep, although he does mention that the GeForce2 Ti is comparable with a Radeon 7500 at 11:19 but that point does start to get lost when he goes on about "crappy" ATI cards. In my Pentium III 500 MHz setup I have a Gigabyte ATI Rage 128 Pro Ultra which works quite well on Windows 98 and only cost me $25 CAD from eBay.
Funny seeing a ct4810 Soundblaster, I have one that seems to be dead, except I haven't found anything wrong with it
Me personally I had the AMD k6-2 650 MHz with a G-Force 2 mx/mx-400 with 128 MB of RAM and the in a 8X AGP
Some of the Intel processors at the time were okay but AMD outclassed them in my opinion then somewhere along the line and tell outclass AMD for a good long while then it was a back and forth shootout until again AMD later on in years I think it was 2013-2014 took hold strangled the hell out of AMD and said this is my turn and now we have AMD which took the stranglehold back and knocked Intel to the curb even knowing that Intel now has that 12th gen CPU which is still pretty good but it's causing a lot of headaches only because of Microsoft I think
Nice. Got almost the same build. Perfect card for this system would be a nvidia tnt2 but i replaced it with a Geforce 3 Ti 200 since im playing in higher resolution as 1024x768 and some dx8 games
Pretty much the same config I had in the year 2000, except my parents couldn't afford the Ti, so I had an original GeForce 2MX 32MB. Was pretty decent, though.
@0:28 did you use a chopstick as pointer?
I have a PC with this motherboard I am glad that it would take a P3... currently has a P2 300Mhz
i still remember the pc i bulid in 2000 with pentium3 1g and geforce2 gtx in it
13:40 I hate when my PC turns into an ambulance
I had a pc as a kid that had a Pentium 3 running at 333mhz.
I think you're really choking the geforce 2 ti. It would do much better with a more period accurate fast thunderbird / slow athlon XP and moderate resolution (like 1024x768 or even 800x600 in newer games). You want to match the refresh rate of the monitor as often as possible. On a CRT which effectively is a rolling shutter BFI monitor (in modern language) this gives you extremely good motion clarity that LCDs still cannot come close to matching, even with strobing backlight/BFI. A CRT is really worth the back pain and space requirement for older games but a pain to record properly with a camera. Quake III would typically run > 100 FPS on a geforce 2 ti unless the screen is drowning in smoke trails.
I remember my first computer had dual socket 370 motherboard, 2x Pentium III 1.3GHz, 512MB of RAM, ATI Radeon 9800 and Windows XP and I got it in 2006
i had a p2 450 on a p2b-f and a gf2. i remember it as the best system i owned
man I hated those style cases, was next to impossible to get the panel on correctly the first time
I still have the first video card I've ever bought, a GeForce 2 MX 200 32 MB PCI card. The Walmart HP computer that I paid $800 for couldn't even run Plus! for XP. This card made that possible, plus I was able to play Hunting Unlimited 3 on it. 😉
i think this motherboard and gpu combo deserves a much faster cpu. sadly those faster slot 1 cards are really expensive these days.
Absolutely. For a 500 MHz CPU, anything faster than a TNT2 Ultra is kind of a waste, that GF2 ti needs a 1 GHz CPU at least and as you say, those things are expensive! 😖
Edit: Of course, TNT2 Ultra’s are quite expensive too so a GF2MX like in this video, is a great solution.
Asus P3Bf - used to have a PIII/500/Riva_TNT-16mb based on it, when PIII was "actual". Though have such machine now, too - play REd Baron II and JEdi knight on it)
Wow I had a pentium III with a GeForce 2 Ti too, good times
13:32 This beep indicates that problem with CPU (overheating or malfunctioning).
I wonder why the price is much higher than 5 Euros when I look for the cheaper alternative GeForce cards. I live in the USA and many of them are going for about $25.
I remember those mobos. Had a love hte relationship with them
Great video 🎥
Brings back memories
Great review..I loved it :-)
It is not called "cold" any more. It is called "covid" nowdays :p
Windows 98 is really fast, customizable and lightweight. Antix Linux is one Linux distro that can run with similarly low system requirements.
Hello I have a Question, I have a Motherboard ECS P6ISA ATX, Ir runs Windows 98SE but i don't have a Vídeo Card for Play Games. What Vídeo Card is the indicated for My Motherboard? Thanks
The same cards that were shown in the video also work with your motherboard based on the information I have Googled! If you're going for Nvidia, you should probably get a GeForce2 MX400 if you want a budget card, or a GeForce2 GTS/Pro/Ti if you want it to be a bit more special.
I think around that time I had a 700MHz Pentium III and a GF2 MX400. I think I paid around 150 or 199 for the video card.
1995 / 1996 case .. motherboard and other stuff look more upgraded case doesn't though
Yeah, that USB driver you should alert people of the internal changes that thing can do, especially if you are running a Non-English Windows 98 system... If that's the case DO NOT install that driver since It's not official and you can have more instability than you already have for Windows 98...
My 32MB MX was how I managed on a Celeron-A 466 to play UT99 online decently.
Got a p3 600 with a creative soundblaster a creative Nvidia 256 and 3 256mb of ram for 15 bucks super stoked