“Y2K Fuckup”

CPU:
Option 1: Intel Pentium III 933 MHz (Coppermine)
Option 2: Intel Pentium III 1.266 GHz (Tualatin)
GPU: Voodoo 3 3000
Sound: Aureal Vortex 2 + Sound Blaster Live!
Motherboard:
Option 1: Either a Socket 370 or a Slot 1 motherboard (if latter, pick one with an Intel 440BX chipset)
Option 2: A Socket 370 motherboard with Tualatin support

The years between 1998 to around 2001 were an interesting period for PC gaming. Picture this: you pick up your new Pentium II with a Voodoo 2, it wasn’t cheap, but a year later lo and behold - Pentium III comes out, AMD Athlon comes out, Nvidia starts dominating with its Geforce cards while 3DFX lies dead due to poor management decisions. Some other poor schmuck instead upgrades to a Pentium III and a Geforce 2 MX400, and boom! Pentium 4, Geforce 4 and ATI Radeon are now the hot new thing. Either way, both of you are left in the dust. Welcome to the year 2000 - if you were trying to go for the bleeding edge, you wouldn’t make the right choice either way! Hence the name.

Picking the right CPU was a tougher choice than usual for this one. A 933 MHz Coppermine is more than good enough for the ol’ Voodoo 3, and there’s a much wider choice of motherboards. However, I also feel like going for the overkill and squeezing every frame I can out of the GPU, for which the 1.266 GHz Tualatin would be a good pick, even if it wouldn’t really be period-correct.

Though, truth be told, the range of motherboards for that one is much more limited, so it really bogs down to which motherboard will be immediately available at the time I’m going to build this PC. One interesting note is that Socket 370 Pentium III’s could also get MacGyver’d into a Slotket adapter and work just fine on a Slot 1 motherboard, so that is also a choice I can make.

Oh boy. A debatable subject, I’m sure, but I can confidently say that the Voodoo 3 series were essentially 3DFX’s last hurrah. The fourth and fifth series would get utterly trounced by Nvidia’s smaller, more affordable and more powerful GPUs (I mean, have you looked at the size of the V5 5500? It’s like if 3DFX looked at the Bitchin’ Fast 3D parody and said “Yeah, let’s do this”). They also weren’t as vastly available to customers as the Voodoo 3.

While it’s tempting to eventually get a Voodoo 5 5500 or its modern reimplementation, the Changeling by zx-c64, one look at the current prices for either of these makes me want to shoot myself. Nah, miss me with that shit, bruh - cocaine is more affordable. And fun.

Anyway… The Voodoo 3 3000 is a very solid card for Glide games - it’s more powerful than two Voodoo 2’s in SLI (3DFX did SLI before it was cool), it can be overclocked a bit (just make sure your cooling’s good), and under a right processor, it can run games like Unreal, Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 at stable 60 FPS with no issues, which is good enough for me. Maybe also Deus Ex, but I’m not sure about that one. Diablo 2 is also a good pick for this build. Oh yeah, it is a Glide game - we wouldn't have modern wrappers for that game otherwise.

One other note I should make that the Voodoo cards run quite hot, so that passive cooling the 3000 has ain't gonna fly in my book. I have already outfitted it with a small fan, and hopefully it'll feel better in a case with good airflow. Regardless, note to self - invest into a thermal camera sometime. Yeah, old cards didn't have thermal sensors...

Aureal Vortex 2 is an interesting and ambitious soundcard. It came out at a time when there were no unified standards for videogame sound and there was a gold rush towards 3D sound, something which we’re only nowadays are crawling towards, now that VR and raytracing are a thing. Sadly, Aureal got sued into oblivion and bought out by Creative, who hasn’t made any advancements in sound technology to this day. Quite a few games support A3D, so it’s essential for the build.
A3D Demo: Aureal Vortex A3D Demos Headphones Surround

That being said, Creative’s EAX standard lived on for much longer, and more games support it than A3D. For that reason, there’ll be a second soundcard in this build, namely Sound Blaster Live!, which is quite perfect and period-correct for a Windows 98 system.
Thief II: How it runs on a 1998 PC