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Which PC config for vintage gaming?

I'll try to do "the dance" (do we still say that or did that die together with Falcon 4.0 install procedures?) to get a USB 2.0 PCI card to work under W98SE. It has been done many times, it's just not really trivial.
 
If I would up the FSB to 75MHz (future MMX project...), would this cause issues regarding PCI and ISA speeds? PCI would run at 37.5 instead of 33, and ISA at 9.375 instead of 8.33 as this motherboard does not have a documented jumper to alter the PCI divider and defaults at 66MHz FSB. So I assume it will run a bit too fast at a 75 MHz FSB. Does this tend to be stable? And if not, is there danger of actually destroying hardware?
 
Motherboards of the era tended to cascade all system clocks off the FSB, so running a 75 MHz FSB is going to throw everything off. PCI and ISA will run faster, as will memory. Memory from that era was much less forgiving of being overclocked, and it being 25+ years old isn't going to help matters. Asynchronous DRAM like EDO further complicates matters because it doesn't run at FSB clock like later SDRAM does, but the timings are still faster when the FSB is overclocked and can cause memory errors.

The likelihood of hardware destruction is pretty low, but just keep in mind these parts are decades old. If they were abused/misused in a past life, pushing them too hard can cause them to fail. Heat is another issue, these old components do not tolerate being overheated, so make sure that everything is properly cooled.

Nobody can give you a blanket answer if the parts you selected will work fine overclocked, you'll have to test that yourself. In my experience, PCI and ISA cards are generally fine with minor overclocks, but there are those few that don't tolerate it at all. AGP on the other hand is generally very intolerant of being overclocked, which is why many boards gave the AGP bus its own independent clock separate from the FSB.
 
None of the in the manual listed processors at the time (it does claim to be future proof) of this mobo need 75MHz, but it is documented as a possible setting. What would have been the use case for that if it (I assume) can't set the proper PCI and memory speed for that?

If it doesn't kill hardware I might try it after establishing a stable, cool system at 66; so many people ran 75 back in the day to create a 262MMX and I doubt they all had a mobo with a proper pci divider for that. Now 83, which I can't do anyway, would get things so far out of spec that nobody suggests to really do this. But for 75 there is no explicit answer.
 
CPU development was advancing so fast at the time that motherboard manufacturers were having a hard time staying relevant. Chipset manufacturers as well, which is why the higher FSB speeds existed, they were trying to stay relevant. But just because a specific speed was available, doesn't mean that it would work. There were many motherboards that had certain faster speeds available, but weren't stable for one reason or another. I have two FIC PA-2013 boards, one of which was an earlier revision that had a buggy VIA chipset and wouldn't work with CPUs over a certain speed.

Very few CPUs actually used a 75 MHz bus, the only two vendors off the top of my head that I know used it were Cyrix and IDT (Winchip C6 & Winchip 2.) Cyrix especially had a penchant for using weird bus speeds like 75 and 83 MHz, which caused a ton of problems with running everything alarmingly out of spec. I still remember one of our lab computers in high school that had a Cyrix MII-333GP with the 83 MHz bus speed. That thing was always unstable and tended to overheat because the CPU consumed so much power that it would overload the VRM. The only way to make them run right was to have a very late Super 7 board that supported every known bus speed and put overspecced RAM in it and prey the PCI and ISA devices didn't crap out.
 
That sounds a lot like what I read. If you want to run 83, get a super socket 7 and a rosary. :D

So my best and safest bet for my current socket 7 system (in the sense of maximizing safe performance for little money, so not converting it to a different motherboard and all that) would be putting a 233 in it, which runs at 66 so will work certainly and perfectly within spec like that. And then perhaps try if the system is still stable at 75 for 262MHz, if not fall back to 233. The worst "damage" I have read about trying 75 was corrupting files/file system on the hard drive, which would just mean a clean reinstall. And someone who might have damaged their network card, but that was an unclear report. It might just have not worked while at 75.
 
IDE and network controllers not working with overclocking was a common problem. Since it changes the timings, it tends to cause data corruption. Some network cards had their own oscillators to provide a fixed clock and not have to depend on a variable input clock to derive timings from.

On some Apple machines with integrated network controllers, overclocking them would cause the controller to stop working. My Quadra 605 that I have overcooked to 40 MHz (from stock 25) has problems with the SCSI controller at that speed.
 
Being that this is old hardware and at 233 it will already be over 10% faster than the system I had as a kid (so I can revisit the games I played back then but with slightly better performance), I might better just stick to that. Let it all run as intended, in spec, not overclocked.

I'll see what I can do to add some extra cooling to the PC as well, to give the old toys a nice cool home for the rest of their (or my) life. Nothing over the top, perhaps just something side mounted to blow on the graphics cards.
 
The beige whale will be cut in half: this 200mmx/S3 Virge will be the DOS & finicky Windows 98 games machine. Due to the nature of the PC Chips motherboard, we'll keep the workload and value inside low.

A more recent, high quality pc will house the voodoo2 sli. I'm thinking about a mid Pentium iii with an ok graphics card. No graphics beast as I have an xp machine for that and the focus here is on the voodoos, but enough for direct3d games that I used to -barely- run on a p2 233. So that will be the Glide beast and early direct3d W98 machine.
 
Goofy suggestion but one thing you may consider is spin up some representative games of the type of stuff you'd be playing in either DOSBox or a VM and tinker around with the peripheral settings until you really like what you see. Now you've just specced a machine out and can use your emulator configuration as a punch list of features for your ideal vintage gaming PC.
 
And one thing to remember is that -at least without some trickery- you can't win them all. Make a PC fast enough for a 2003 game, and Warcraft 2 will scroll at the speed of light.

Anyway, I have gone for a P3 733 (still W98) for the Voodoo2 SLI. It runs every DOS game that the 200MMX ran and the newer stuff far smoother -I haven't even gotten around to the Voodoos yet- so I'll keep that PC and give the 200MMX a new home. The P3 has a nice quality motherboard, USB ports that work with optical mice and flash drives (at 1.1 speed). I'm turning it into a year 2000 dream machine without going for overly exotic stuff.

It's nice to rediscover the games I used to play, but this time at a far more playable framerate. And even the games that ran well on my youth PC just look smoother on this 4 times faster machine. I can't wait to get to rediscover the Glide games, but this time on a 4 times faster CPU and with twice the Voodoo.
 
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