Vintage Builds

What was your dream build back in the day? Now that the parts are relatively cheap, have you ever been tempted to build it?

Pic related, my Windows 98 gaming machine.

I remember looking at those $10,000 Gateways in ads in PC Magazine back in the 90s. The thought of 128 mb of RAM was boner inducing.

512MB RAM
HOLY SHIT

it still is desu

Fuck, that's pretty much what i used around 2000
Good Times with Voodoo.
I really should build shit like that again, could be fun

>have you ever been tempted to build it?
I'm working on it.

The problem is, I have a couple of very specific systems I would like to build. I miss my old 486, and I have a spare motherboard but need an IDE/Floppy controller for it.

Really would enjoy another Pentium 2 system though, not gonna lie. You don't know what you've got until it's gone. Kicking myself for trashing that case it was in too.

One of my favorites was the P3 733 Mhz Slot. Had a weird amount of ram at 96MB, 20GB hard disc with Win2K

Are there any SSDs that you can rig to work with Windows 98? I feel like it'd be beautifully fast with one.

I wanted a 600Mhz processor, but the computer I got only came with 450.

any of them. They make adapters for this sorta thing.

I don't think so but there is an alternative. I have a Sintech SD card to IDE adapter. With a Class 10 SDHC card or higher it has pretty nice read and write performance for both large and small file sizes. Plus it's completely silent and you don't have to worry about defragging it.

But what are you going to do with a computer you built that runs on '98 and has no real power to it?

OC the living shit out of it.

Run old software of course. Especially Glide supported games. I don't have to worry about compatibility aside from some speed sensitive DOS games.

well I had 2 dream systems. 1st was when I was 12 and I was in the magazines section of a crown books. it was around xmas 1992, and I was just flipping through magazines. I saw this ad in PC magazine, and for whatever reason it was mouth-watering. I didn't know squat about computers then, except you could play red baron, king's quest, or wolfenstein 3-D on it.
of course I never got this, but it was a dream machine for a while.

gateway 2000 had very appealing ads imho. never mind the costumes and sets (which are creative in their own right), but the way they laid out hardware specs and prices really told you what was relevant about the product.

in HS I studied really hard so that pile of PC magazines went by the wayside. when I got to community college, I went to the library to catch up on the many missed years of tech news.

so I wanted another dream machine now, the G6-200 they had over at the workstations lab at another university nearby. had zip drives and gorgeous 17" vivitron screens. SCSI hard drive and SCSI CD-ROM. was running ROCK-SOLID with windows NT workstation 4.0 (like NEVER crashes)

needless to say all that was unaffordable, as was the EISA system in .

the irony in all this is all the systems I wanted died pretty quickly. Pentium Pro, EISA, SCSI, ZIP. the price of the G6-200 (pentium pro 200, $6999 when it first came out) plummeted very quickly the following year when the pentium MMX became popular and the pentium II came out (down to about $2500, still unaffordable for me anyway).

It's the max Windows 98 SE can take without encountering stability issues.

If I bump it up to quad Xeon 500/1Ms, 2 GB of memory, an 18 GB Cheetah boot drive and two 50 GB storage drives this box would probably be the fastest thing you could buy in 1999 that could run Windows. Too bad Slot 2 heatsinks are impossible to find and the only source I've found for the storage drives gapes your ass on shipping.
Anything's powerful, if you know how to use it. People didn't blow five figures on a top-end workstation just to look at it.

How old are you?

Why does this happen?

...

that's the case they had at uni. but they also had an internal scsi zip 100 drive