Benchmarking the cheap Windows 98 Gaming PC

# Building a Retro Gaming PC: A Deep Dive into Windows 98 Setup and Performance

Welcome back, everyone! My name is Phil, and today we’re diving deep into the world of retro gaming PCs. In our previous video, we explored how to shop for cheap Windows 98 retro gaming computer parts. However, we received a lot of feedback that some of the parts I used were hard to find or expensive. So, this time around, I decided to build something that’s readily available and doesn’t cost a fortune. We already covered shopping for parts and putting everything together in the previous video. Now, it’s time to get our hands dirty and see how well this machine performs. Let’s take a closer look at configuring Windows 98, installing drivers, and running some benchmarks to compare the onboard GPU with the dedicated Radeon 9550. We’ll also explore power efficiency and other fun stuff.

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## Hardware Setup and Configuration

Before diving into benchmarks, let’s talk about setting up our machine. The first thing I noticed was that the battery was flat, so I had to jump straight into the device manager to set the correct date and time. This is crucial for Windows 98 to function properly. Speaking of hardware configuration, the CPU was running at 1.6 GHz with an 8x multiplier, and the memory was clocked at 200 MHz by default. I decided to tweak these settings to get better performance out of my system.

One thing worth mentioning is the SATA hard drive compatibility. Some users have trouble getting SATA drives to work with Windows 98, but as long as your motherboard has a legacy or compatibility mode option, you should be fine. In this case, I disabled the floppy drive and serial/parallel ports in the BIOS to keep things clean.

For those planning to use a USB keyboard and mouse, don’t forget to enable legacy USB support in the BIOS. Without this, Windows 98 won’t recognize your peripherals during installation.

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## Installing Windows 98 and Drivers

The installation process was straightforward—I popped in the Windows 98 CD and followed the on-screen instructions. After setting up the operating system, I installed the chipset drivers from the motherboard’s driver disk. These are a goldmine; they often include drivers for other hardware components as well. In this case, I had to install the SATA controller driver to get my hard drive working properly.

I also installed the VGA drivers for the Radeon 9550 graphics card and the Ethernet and audio drivers. By the time I was done, everything showed up in Device Manager without any unknown devices. The sound card, ethernet port, USB controller, and even the joystick port were all recognized seamlessly.

For extra peace of mind, I installed an unofficial service pack for Windows 98 version 3.5. While it’s not strictly necessary, it gives me confidence that my system is running as smoothly as possible.

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## Benchmarking: Onboard GPU vs. Dedicated Radeon 9550

Now, let’s get into the fun part—benchmarking! I ran a series of synthetic tests to compare the onboard GPU with the dedicated Radeon 9550. In Final Reality’s Robot Test, the integrated graphics scored 145, while the Radeon delivered a much higher score of 194. The trend continued in other benchmarks like 3D Mark 99 and 3D Max 2000, where the dedicated GPU outperformed the onboard solution by a significant margin.

For Direct3D performance, I tested games like Quake and Quake III at 1024x768 resolution with 32-bit colors. The onboard graphics struggled, delivering just 18 FPS in Quake, while the Radeon soared to an impressive 128 FPS. Even more demanding titles like MDK2 ran smoothly on the dedicated card, hitting 158 FPS compared to the onboard GPU’s abysmal performance.

OpenGL results were mixed. While games like GL Quake and Quake III performed better with the Radeon, there were some graphics errors when using the onboard solution. It seems the integrated GPU isn’t ideal for OpenGL-based titles, but with proper driver configuration, most games ran smoothly on the dedicated card.

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## Power Efficiency: Cool ‘n’ Quiet and Beyond

One of my primary goals was to explore power efficiency using AMD’s Cool ‘n’ Quiet technology. Unfortunately, enabling this feature in the BIOS didn’t work as expected. After some research, I discovered that only certain CPU models (like the Athlon 3000+) support Cool ‘n’ Quiet. To test it further, I swapped the CPU with an AMD Sempron 3300+ and tried again, but it still didn’t activate properly.

Despite these setbacks, I measured power draw under idle and load conditions using a power supply connected to a power measurement device. At idle, the system drew around 57 watts, while running Quake II at 1600x1200 resolution without VSync turned off increased power consumption to 85 watts. Even with more demanding games like Expendable, the system stayed relatively efficient, pulling just 77 watts under load.

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## Hard Drive Performance and Upgrades

I spent a good amount of time benchmarking the hard drive speed. Initial tests using ATD showed some strange results, but switching to Roadkill’s Disk Speed test gave me more realistic numbers. The SATA controller delivered an access time of around 14 milliseconds and read speeds of about 30 MB/s—more than adequate for gaming.

To see if I could improve performance further, I cloned the hard drive onto a 120GB Blitz Volt SSD. While linear read speeds improved slightly, the random read numbers were inconsistent and sometimes exceeded linear rates. After updating to the latest storage drivers from the SAS website, things smoothed out a bit, but there’s still room for improvement with the SATA controller.

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## Final Thoughts: Performance and Future Plans

Overall, I’m impressed with how well this retro gaming PC turned out. The dedicated Radeon 9550 card is a steal at just $10, and it delivers fantastic performance in most games. Even titles like Quake III ran smoothly at higher resolutions, which was a pleasant surprise.

The onboard GPU, however, left a lot to be desired, especially for OpenGL-based games. That said, with proper driver settings and anti-aliasing tweaks, you can still enjoy a decent gaming experience on the integrated solution.

One area where I stumbled was enabling Cool ‘n’ Quiet. Despite my best efforts, it didn’t work as expected, even after swapping CPUs. If anyone has insights into configuring this feature for older systems, I’d love to hear from you in the comments below!

In future videos, I plan to dive deeper into actual game testing, hooking up this machine to my capture box to see how it handles more demanding and modern titles. Stay tuned for that!

Thanks for sticking around, and as always, feel free to drop your thoughts or questions in the description. Until next time—gamers, out!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey guys how's it going my name is Phil welcome to another video previously we had a look at online shopping for cheap Windows 98 retro PC gaming computer parts I get a lot of comments that I use parts that are how to find and cost a lot so this was an attempt to build something that is readily available and doesn't cost a lot so in the previous video we shopped for some parts we put it all together on a test bench and in this video we're going to do a lot we can have a look at the device I'm going to talk a bit about configuring windows we'll talk about the drivers we're going to have a look at a lot of benchmarks comparing the onboard GPU as well as the dedicated Radeon 9550 we're going to have a look at Andy's cool and quiet to save some power we're going to measure power draw under idle and under load and we also did a benchmark the hard drive speed and maybe a few other things that I'm forgetting right now so without further ado enjoy this video let's have a quick look in device I had to replace the battery it was flat and then you just enter the current date and time in the CPU configuration section it actually supports cool and quiet so that's something I will have a look later does that actually work in Windows 9 head and also by default the memory was running at 166 so I changed it to 200 I noticed a lot of comments about using a SATA hard drive with Windows 98 and that's not an issue at all you're just going to make sure that if the bus has an option for a legacy or compatibility mode to enable that it basically runs in re mode I'm not using the floppy drive so I'll just disable it in the boss and usually I disabled the serial and the parallel ports that's not something you really have to do it's just a habit of mine I'm used to doing this so I'm doing this with this machine as well and I've got another comment about using a USB keyboard and mouse it's not an issue however you have to turn on the legacy USB support because otherwise you won't have a working Mouse endorsed or when you try to install Windows 98 let's start straight into some benchmarks we've got the synthetic tests first in final reality the robot test we're getting 145 for the integrated graphics and haven't you one for the radion in the city benchmark we're getting a hundred and ninety-four for the integrated graphics and 185 for the radium moving on to 3d mark and 99 we can see a much bigger difference between the on board MV dedicated Radeon 7680 2 improves to 13,000 483 in 3d max 2000 the trend continues 3159 for the onboard graphics improves to ten thousand seven hundred sixty three for the Radeon and finally to 3d mark 2001's II we've got 1721 which improves to seven thousand seven hundred and forty three next up we're going to have a look at direct3d benchmarks they'll run at the 1024 by 768 resolution in 32-bit colors first up with go to dragon 18 FPS for the onboard and 128 for the Radeon so that's a massive boost in performance expandable goes from 28 to 167 and also incoming gets a message boost from 25 all the way to 268 so we can see a massive difference in performance with the dark 3d benchmarks and next up we're looking at OpenGL results also run at the 1024 768 and 32-bit colors we've got 32 FPS for GL quake which improves to 233 with the Radeon in quake - we're getting 23 FPS with the onboard and 238 with the Radeon and in quake 3 we're going from 37 FPS to 187 with the Radeon we had two issues with GL quake there are some graphics errors with the onboard graphics and the mdk2 benchmark which was crash the machine the dedicated red young graphics gets 158 FPS in the mdk2 benchmark because the performance of the Radian was so good at 1024 by 768 I did another realm of the benchmarks at 1600 by 1200 now that is basically the 4k resolution of back in the day so let's have a look what results we're getting we're getting 81 FPS for expandable 63 for Dragon Angele quake we're getting 109 in quake - we're getting 73 in quake 357 and in mdk2 getting 51 so this machine is powerful enough to run all these games at the 1600 by 1200 resolution which is very recommendable that's actually a really good performance result I'm trying to benchmark the hard drives with the ATD of this benchmark but we're getting really strange results of up to 500 600 megabytes per second so I'll not have to try a different benchmark and see if that one actually works ok back with another benchmark roadkill's disk speed access time around 14 milliseconds that we're getting around 30 megabytes per second so that sounds a lot more realistic now this might be a limitation of the hard drive so to really find out if to find out what the controller can do I'm going to clone the hard drive onto an SSD and see how that all works out okay we've got our 120 gigabyte blitz vols SSD are the results they look interesting the linear read speeds improved somewhat but look at the random read some some of them are higher than the linear rates that's really odd as well as a last-ditch effort I updated the latest storage driver from 2007 from the SAS website what we're getting the same with results the good news however is that the performance is really snappy it's mostly to do with the fast processor and the other thing that's worth pointing out is that these are the controllers are compatible compatible with SATA 3 hard drives that's not the case with a lot of via chipset motherboards I've also got some power tour results so the entire machine that's basically the power supply plugged into the power measurement device at idle on the desktop we're getting 57 watts in quake 2 running at 1600 by 1200 and vsync turned off we're getting a power draw reading of 85 watts and in expandable at 1024 by 768 which we think enabled we're getting a power reading of 77 watts this is kind of my power efficiency test how much power does it take to run expandable at 60fps locked I just want to briefly talk about installing windows 98 and all the drivers and stuff so basically I installed Windows 98 straight off the installation disk and then I installed the chipset driver and this is the driver disk that came with the motherboard and these are a goldmine very often you get drivers for other motherboards as well now we've got the one of the SAS 760 GX so there's an 8gb driver which are installed as all our server driver and initially I had issues with the hard drive performance it would basically have little skips and pauses but after installing the another driver which very likely activated the DMA mode as well everything was fine I also installed the VGA VGA graphics card for the SAS video card and there are some drivers for the Ethernet and there's also some where and audio driver and let's have a look in the device manager so here's the SATA hard drive that shows up here's the Radeon 9550 we've got the SAS ID rate controller that's the SATA controller and we've got the monitor here also the ethernet card is working we've got a sound card with a joystick port and also the USB sparking so all devices are detected there are no unknown devices so everything works pretty smooth here we have some CPU set information such nice temper on twenty eight hundred plus for the socket 754 is running at 1.6 gigahertz with an 8 X multiplier and the memory arounds at 200 megahertz and we've got the timings here so it basically took the SPT values of the stick and configured the bars I've also installed the unofficial service pack for Windows 98 version 3.5 sorry I'll do this on most of my machines it's not really necessary but it gives you peace of mind basically with the Radeon card we're getting some nice driver options now I use custom settings basically to disable the virtual synchronization that's recommended for benchmarking however we also have anti-aliasing and texture filtering options to make our games look nicer so that's really where you can assign some of this role performance not just for getting higher frames per seconds but to make your games look nicer so I do recommend that you play around with these settings on it can make quite a big difference especially the texture filtering is something I usually what I have turned on when I play some games let's have a go at enabling the coolant quiet option this is basically a technology to save energy when the computer is not doing anything so the first thing you have to do is turn it on in the BIOS and then restart our machine unfortunately when I try to install the software it's telling me that Amy's cooling core technology is not enabled on this system so I had a quick look on the internet and apparently only Anki simple processes with the model number 3000 plus all higher support cooling quite so I really wanted to keep this a joke so I swap the CPU and we now got an AMD sempron 3300 plus so this one runs it quite a bit higher at 2 gigahertz let's see if we can install it now without any errors looks fine let's restart the machine and see if cool and quiet is actually working unfortunately that also didn't work it seems to have made things worse it's now down clock the CPU to 1.8 gigahertz so maybe there's more going on I had a quick look in the in the power management options and change the profile but that didn't do anything so if you've got an idea of how to configure the f1 64 or the sempron with cooling quiet on the windows 98 let me know down below in the description so let's wrap up this project performance is fantastic especially with the radium with the onboard GPU performance is rather limited but I was surprised that actually that most of the games actually ran fine there were some issues with OpenGL but really the dedicated graphics card is only $10 so you don't want to save there in terms of performance look you can play at 1024 by 768 it will basically run any windows on it game and you can play around with the eye and the optional anti-aliasing and texture filtering and all of that or you can choose to run games that be higher 1600 by 1200 or 1280 by 1024 resolution the build was very smooth I didn't have too many issues having the driver CD definitely helped or have initial issues with the storage device but installing the SATA driver six steps we got some odd performance readings with the SATA controller but performance in general was very snappy and high so it's not something I would be too concerned about and the cool acquired technology didn't work either but everything else worked fine all the drivers installed and I'm generally very pleased with the performance and this is a lot faster then I would have thought this machine would end up being and that's it for this video but there will be another one where we're going to focus on running actual games I'm gonna hook this up to my capture box and try out a few games all the ones not so all the ones and something more demanding and newer and seeing how this machine will cope the big guys thank you so much for watching and I'll see you soon with another videohey guys how's it going my name is Phil welcome to another video previously we had a look at online shopping for cheap Windows 98 retro PC gaming computer parts I get a lot of comments that I use parts that are how to find and cost a lot so this was an attempt to build something that is readily available and doesn't cost a lot so in the previous video we shopped for some parts we put it all together on a test bench and in this video we're going to do a lot we can have a look at the device I'm going to talk a bit about configuring windows we'll talk about the drivers we're going to have a look at a lot of benchmarks comparing the onboard GPU as well as the dedicated Radeon 9550 we're going to have a look at Andy's cool and quiet to save some power we're going to measure power draw under idle and under load and we also did a benchmark the hard drive speed and maybe a few other things that I'm forgetting right now so without further ado enjoy this video let's have a quick look in device I had to replace the battery it was flat and then you just enter the current date and time in the CPU configuration section it actually supports cool and quiet so that's something I will have a look later does that actually work in Windows 9 head and also by default the memory was running at 166 so I changed it to 200 I noticed a lot of comments about using a SATA hard drive with Windows 98 and that's not an issue at all you're just going to make sure that if the bus has an option for a legacy or compatibility mode to enable that it basically runs in re mode I'm not using the floppy drive so I'll just disable it in the boss and usually I disabled the serial and the parallel ports that's not something you really have to do it's just a habit of mine I'm used to doing this so I'm doing this with this machine as well and I've got another comment about using a USB keyboard and mouse it's not an issue however you have to turn on the legacy USB support because otherwise you won't have a working Mouse endorsed or when you try to install Windows 98 let's start straight into some benchmarks we've got the synthetic tests first in final reality the robot test we're getting 145 for the integrated graphics and haven't you one for the radion in the city benchmark we're getting a hundred and ninety-four for the integrated graphics and 185 for the radium moving on to 3d mark and 99 we can see a much bigger difference between the on board MV dedicated Radeon 7680 2 improves to 13,000 483 in 3d max 2000 the trend continues 3159 for the onboard graphics improves to ten thousand seven hundred sixty three for the Radeon and finally to 3d mark 2001's II we've got 1721 which improves to seven thousand seven hundred and forty three next up we're going to have a look at direct3d benchmarks they'll run at the 1024 by 768 resolution in 32-bit colors first up with go to dragon 18 FPS for the onboard and 128 for the Radeon so that's a massive boost in performance expandable goes from 28 to 167 and also incoming gets a message boost from 25 all the way to 268 so we can see a massive difference in performance with the dark 3d benchmarks and next up we're looking at OpenGL results also run at the 1024 768 and 32-bit colors we've got 32 FPS for GL quake which improves to 233 with the Radeon in quake - we're getting 23 FPS with the onboard and 238 with the Radeon and in quake 3 we're going from 37 FPS to 187 with the Radeon we had two issues with GL quake there are some graphics errors with the onboard graphics and the mdk2 benchmark which was crash the machine the dedicated red young graphics gets 158 FPS in the mdk2 benchmark because the performance of the Radian was so good at 1024 by 768 I did another realm of the benchmarks at 1600 by 1200 now that is basically the 4k resolution of back in the day so let's have a look what results we're getting we're getting 81 FPS for expandable 63 for Dragon Angele quake we're getting 109 in quake - we're getting 73 in quake 357 and in mdk2 getting 51 so this machine is powerful enough to run all these games at the 1600 by 1200 resolution which is very recommendable that's actually a really good performance result I'm trying to benchmark the hard drives with the ATD of this benchmark but we're getting really strange results of up to 500 600 megabytes per second so I'll not have to try a different benchmark and see if that one actually works ok back with another benchmark roadkill's disk speed access time around 14 milliseconds that we're getting around 30 megabytes per second so that sounds a lot more realistic now this might be a limitation of the hard drive so to really find out if to find out what the controller can do I'm going to clone the hard drive onto an SSD and see how that all works out okay we've got our 120 gigabyte blitz vols SSD are the results they look interesting the linear read speeds improved somewhat but look at the random read some some of them are higher than the linear rates that's really odd as well as a last-ditch effort I updated the latest storage driver from 2007 from the SAS website what we're getting the same with results the good news however is that the performance is really snappy it's mostly to do with the fast processor and the other thing that's worth pointing out is that these are the controllers are compatible compatible with SATA 3 hard drives that's not the case with a lot of via chipset motherboards I've also got some power tour results so the entire machine that's basically the power supply plugged into the power measurement device at idle on the desktop we're getting 57 watts in quake 2 running at 1600 by 1200 and vsync turned off we're getting a power draw reading of 85 watts and in expandable at 1024 by 768 which we think enabled we're getting a power reading of 77 watts this is kind of my power efficiency test how much power does it take to run expandable at 60fps locked I just want to briefly talk about installing windows 98 and all the drivers and stuff so basically I installed Windows 98 straight off the installation disk and then I installed the chipset driver and this is the driver disk that came with the motherboard and these are a goldmine very often you get drivers for other motherboards as well now we've got the one of the SAS 760 GX so there's an 8gb driver which are installed as all our server driver and initially I had issues with the hard drive performance it would basically have little skips and pauses but after installing the another driver which very likely activated the DMA mode as well everything was fine I also installed the VGA VGA graphics card for the SAS video card and there are some drivers for the Ethernet and there's also some where and audio driver and let's have a look in the device manager so here's the SATA hard drive that shows up here's the Radeon 9550 we've got the SAS ID rate controller that's the SATA controller and we've got the monitor here also the ethernet card is working we've got a sound card with a joystick port and also the USB sparking so all devices are detected there are no unknown devices so everything works pretty smooth here we have some CPU set information such nice temper on twenty eight hundred plus for the socket 754 is running at 1.6 gigahertz with an 8 X multiplier and the memory arounds at 200 megahertz and we've got the timings here so it basically took the SPT values of the stick and configured the bars I've also installed the unofficial service pack for Windows 98 version 3.5 sorry I'll do this on most of my machines it's not really necessary but it gives you peace of mind basically with the Radeon card we're getting some nice driver options now I use custom settings basically to disable the virtual synchronization that's recommended for benchmarking however we also have anti-aliasing and texture filtering options to make our games look nicer so that's really where you can assign some of this role performance not just for getting higher frames per seconds but to make your games look nicer so I do recommend that you play around with these settings on it can make quite a big difference especially the texture filtering is something I usually what I have turned on when I play some games let's have a go at enabling the coolant quiet option this is basically a technology to save energy when the computer is not doing anything so the first thing you have to do is turn it on in the BIOS and then restart our machine unfortunately when I try to install the software it's telling me that Amy's cooling core technology is not enabled on this system so I had a quick look on the internet and apparently only Anki simple processes with the model number 3000 plus all higher support cooling quite so I really wanted to keep this a joke so I swap the CPU and we now got an AMD sempron 3300 plus so this one runs it quite a bit higher at 2 gigahertz let's see if we can install it now without any errors looks fine let's restart the machine and see if cool and quiet is actually working unfortunately that also didn't work it seems to have made things worse it's now down clock the CPU to 1.8 gigahertz so maybe there's more going on I had a quick look in the in the power management options and change the profile but that didn't do anything so if you've got an idea of how to configure the f1 64 or the sempron with cooling quiet on the windows 98 let me know down below in the description so let's wrap up this project performance is fantastic especially with the radium with the onboard GPU performance is rather limited but I was surprised that actually that most of the games actually ran fine there were some issues with OpenGL but really the dedicated graphics card is only $10 so you don't want to save there in terms of performance look you can play at 1024 by 768 it will basically run any windows on it game and you can play around with the eye and the optional anti-aliasing and texture filtering and all of that or you can choose to run games that be higher 1600 by 1200 or 1280 by 1024 resolution the build was very smooth I didn't have too many issues having the driver CD definitely helped or have initial issues with the storage device but installing the SATA driver six steps we got some odd performance readings with the SATA controller but performance in general was very snappy and high so it's not something I would be too concerned about and the cool acquired technology didn't work either but everything else worked fine all the drivers installed and I'm generally very pleased with the performance and this is a lot faster then I would have thought this machine would end up being and that's it for this video but there will be another one where we're going to focus on running actual games I'm gonna hook this up to my capture box and try out a few games all the ones not so all the ones and something more demanding and newer and seeing how this machine will cope the big guys thank you so much for watching and I'll see you soon with another video\n"