Gazirra wrote:

I have a ga-n650sli-ds4l MB, and I was thinking of making it into an overpowered Windows 98 build. I've done some research into how others have built such machines, and it doesn't seem all that complicated. Mind you, my experience is somewhat limited. I've only built a single Windows 98/DOS system recently and a Windows 7 system some years ago.
I'd like to have a 2.5+GHz CPU, 1+Gigs of RAM, a fairly powerful GPU, and 128 GB of solid state drive. A built log I found said that the builder's specs were about these numbers. I do know that Windows 98 doesn't support multiple CPU cores, so I'm looking at single-core CPUs. The MB has both PCI and PCIe slots.
What I really need to know is that since this MB has both SATA and IDE, could Windows 98 use SATA components, or would I need to deal with IDE? What would be a good GPU to use? Do I need a separate sound card? Could there be complications that a novice wouldn't see normally?

Generally, you'll want a GPU (PCI) that has a Win98 driver. As for the seperate sound card, it really depends on what games you'll want to play. MS-DOS games don't play well with certain cards, if at all.

My current retro system is a WIN98/DOS system already. This one would be strictly WIN98

Alright, then any sound card should work just fine, as long as Windows 98 supports it.

-It doesn't look like your board has SATA drivers for <Win2000, so I'm guessing you'll need to stick with IDE.
-Sound Blaster Live! is pretty common and easy to find. That would be a safe bet.
-As for GPU, you are limited to PCI as you know. A voodoo 3 2000 would be nice, if underpowered compared to the rest of the rig. I'm not too familiar with which Geforce / Radeon cards were offered in PCI and how easy they are to find. I'm sure others will chime in.
-There really is no reason to have more than 512MB of ram if this is going to be a Win98 only rig. You just introduce complexities and potential compatibility issues.

Alright, I'm gonna abandon the WIN98 idea for now. I'm gonna go for a Windows XP build, instead

The best PCI graphics you can get for windows 98 is probably the fx 5500. PCI graphics in general are not going to get you the best performance, even a cheap AGP card will perform much better. A voodoo card is another good choice, but at the ebay prices these days I think you are better off using a glide wrapper instead. A fx 5500 under glide emulation will perform roughly the same as a voodoo2.

I would say that a SB live! sound card is a good intersection of compatible and affordable. You want a creative sound card that supports EAX 2 and has drivers for windows 98, which is not all that hard to find.

Windows 98 can address a maximum of 768mb of system memory, with 512mb being the maximum recommended.

A 128gb SSD drive is perfect, but you will need a SATA to IDE adapter. I have been able to get windows 98 to boot on a SATA drive when the SATA bus is configured for IDE mode, but on my machine I cannot get a SATA drive to install windows 98. Without proper SATA drivers I would say that IDE, even at only 33mb/s, is better. At least on my machine, I can only get 4mb/s write speeds using SATA, but I can get 33mb/s with IDE and DMA.

The Quadro FX 600 PCI is faster than the FX 5500 PCI

Still uses the NV34 GPU, but has 2 vertex shaders instead of one, 128MB RAM instead of 64MB, and higher clocked RAM to boot.

I've got this motherboard https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-VM900M-rev-10#ov and it's working very well under 98SE except for onboard audio that's not supported. My PCIE 6600GT also works very well. CPU is intel pentium dual core @2.2GHz (Conroe based CPU iirc)