Been a while and after moving, getting married and a bunch of other things, I'm looking at putting an old machine back together again. It's been a while since I've put a 98 box together and I've got a ECS K7S5A board with a AMD 2k Athlon chip in it. Looking around the net, it looks like this will work for both the V3 and V5 AGP cards. Has anyone run into problems with this board at all?

I'm really not looking at having to buy a new board if I don't need to however, I will if this isn't going to work.

I've got a ton of memory laying around the house, along with a 500w PS, and a couple of 160 gig drives which does bring me a question. What's the largest drive that Win 98 will recognize and will I potentially run into problems with larger drives? I seem to remember that fat 32 drives would only see so much but I can't remember with being at work right now. Any other issues that I should check before putting everything together? Figured I'd put new thermal paste on everything as I don't know how long everything has been sitting. A good couple of years for the board. Should I worry about doing that on the vid cards? It's probably been 6 or 7 years sitting in a box since they've been used.

Windows 98 doesn't like more than 512 MB of RAM, it will simply crash with a blue screen. There's a patch that will fix this problem, but it will only support 1 GB.

I found this the hard way back in 2001 when I upgraded from 512 MB to 1 GB, then to 1.5 GB.

Hard drive - I don't think that should be a problem, FAT32 limit is 2 TB/partition, 160 GB will be fine, you shouldn't need so much anyway (unless you plan to install a lot of games)

Thanks, I really don't need all the space, it's just the smallest drives that I have laying around that are IDE drives. Most of the games I'm going to install probably aren't much more than 100 or 200 megs. All the games going on it are 95/98/2K era games so they aren't going to need much space. I remember having 2 and 4 gig drives back then and thinking "who's ever going to need that much space?!"  :P  The 160 drive will be over kill.

jandarsun8 wrote on 18.09.13 at 15:46:14:

I remember having 2 and 4 gig drives back then and thinking "who's ever going to need that much space?!"  :P  The 160 drive will be over kill.

Well, I also remember that I upgraded from 2 to 4 GB and it wasn't enough for me (I had both drives inside the omputer). Later (much later) I bought a 40 GB drive and it was ok, but from time to time I had to write CDs with all kind of stuff to free some space.

One more thing: I had a lot of computers after 99 and I noticed that everything non-Intel was unstable in Windows 98. Cyrix, K6-2, Athlon slot A on AMD chipset, Athlon socket A on VIA chipset -all crashed at least once a day.

I even had one PIII, but on motherboard that used VIA chipset - it was also a little unstable. But PII on BX440 and PIII on i815/810 were much better, they weren't "rock stable", but that's because Windows 98 isn't quite the best OS, but overall Intel was much better, crashes were rare.

So I would recommend a PIIIS 1400 on I815EPT, it's an awesome retro setup.

Really? I don't remember having a whole lot of issues with it. My first PC was a Intel 133, then went to the 233 but after that I used AMD after the original Athlons came out in the slot A chips. I didn't seem to have to many problems with 98. I still have my slot A Athlon 700 meg sitting in a box. Don't have a motherboard for it but...

I do remember the Cyrix chips though. I had a friend that had one and it was a pain in ass to do anything with and then with certain games, you had to have the Cyrix patch in order to run it because of how it did the instruction set at the chip level. Might and Magic 2 or 3 being one of them. I remember that because of how much it sucked trying to play and how hyped we were to play it only to find out that we couldn't right away.

I didn't have a lot of different configs at the time but I did have a couple, about a new board/cpu every max core speed, 1400+, 2200+, 3200+ but I had time back then to game a whole lot more than I do now and it was on pretty much 24/7.

Maybe it was how I had it setup, I don't know but I don't remember having that many issues with 98 at all. Win ME and Win 2K were both a totally different story. Win 2K wasn't stable for me at first until after SP1 hit. Once it hit, then I was in gaming heaven with that. More memory, stable as hell, games worked pretty smooth on it for the most part. I loved it after that.