Advice on components for a new 98SE/XP system

[Graz]

Hi,

I'm gonna soon ask my friend to build me a brand new computer which will have a dual 98SE/ XP pro boot. And not vista. Can't wait!

Can anyone reccommend the best possible processor/mainboard/graphics card/sound card that would be fine for 98se and also work great in XP. I know certain things like hyperthreading aren't supported in 9x, but it would be a bonus to have that for xp games and stuff. I don't want to stop using 98se as I still really like how fast, smooth and easy it is to use, so it would be great to have a new pc with XP and 98 both running lightning fast

Looking to have 1gb RAM and an 80GB HD too. Not that worried about cost but anything under $500 (£300) to spend on the components would be perfect.

Big thanks

[tonich]

No recommendations here – just buy what you can!

Have a close look at the “Important Topics” above!

[useroone]

I like to use New old stock that is still laying around on Shelves, like Athlon single processor CPU's with Motherboards that still have AGP slots. That way I know not going to run into Driver problems with 98.

[the xt guy]

You should read the topics on Motherboards (and Hardware) still working with 98 if you haven't already. It's getting pretty difficult to find current MB's and peripheral cards that will still work with 98. Lots of modern chipsets don't support 98 and for those that do, their onboard video and audio don't have 98 drivers available.

(I don't follow the recommendations in great detail, but I believe the P35, P45 and 915 chipsets don't support 98. I have read conflicting reports of 98 supporting SATA drives. You won't have any worries staying with IDE. If your HD is over 137gb you will have to use the patches offered on this site and even then probably have to divide the drive into partitions not exceeding 137gb. I don't think there are any drivers for PCI-e and Win 98. It's best just to stick with AGP if you're going to run 98).

Last year (August 2007) I bought a new motherboard (Gigabyte 8I865GME-775-RH) which was recommended in the thread "Motherboards still working with Windows 98". Even though I wasn't planning to build a new 98 machine immediately, I knew I should grab it fast as it was one of the last Intel chipset MB's that would run 98 without a problem.

Sure enough, in just a couple of months it had completely disappeared from all the online retailers.

Edited October 22, 2008 by the xt guy

[98Guy]

> I'm gonna soon ask my friend to build me a brand new computer

> which will have a dual 98SE/ XP pro boot.

You might want to consider formatting your hard drive totally as fat-32.

Yes, you can install XP-pro on a FAT-32 drive. If you do, then your win-98 OS will be able to access the entire drive and all partitions.

I've built one XP-pro system (a couple of years ago) using a 250 gb SATA hard drive formatted with FAT-32. I used a version of Disk Manager to make the cluster size 4kb so the usage efficiency would be the same as NTFS.

FAT-32 is faster than NTFS, and if you need to you can boot a win-98 floppy to gain total access to the drive. Drive recovery tools are more easily available for fat32 vs NTFS (but I've really never experienced a catastrophic drive failure with FAT32 either). Many people claim that NTFS is more stable, but I've never encountered a situation with a FAT32 drive where I needed or would have benefited from that hypothetical stability.

I've also run win-98 on a 500 gb SATA hard drive formatted as a single partition with 4 kb cluster size just to see if it worked.

PS: I recommend the ASROCK dual or 4-core VSTA motherboard - if it's still being made.

Edited October 23, 2008 by 98Guy