UPD 12/24/2025: I've taken a decision to make vast changes on this one. Images will be updated later.

“Y2K Fuckup”

CPU: Intel Pentium III 600 MHz (Katmai)
GPU: 3DFX Voodoo 2 12MB SLI
Sound: Aureal Vortex 2
Motherboard: Any Slot 1 motherboard with an Intel 440BX chipset

The years between 1996 to around 2001 were an interesting period for PC gaming as new, more powerful hardware kept coming out at near lightspeed pace.

So, picture this: you pick up your new Pentium MMX with a Diamond Monster 3D, it wasn’t cheap, but a year later lo and behold - Pentium II comes out, Voodoo 2 comes out, and the new games such as Quake 2 or Unreal a year later just don't run as well as on the Voodoo 2, two of which can even be interconnected for even more performance.

While a friend of yours runs off to buy a new PC yet again, you then make a seemingly wise decision to stick with what you have right now and upgrade in 1999, which you do. Come October '99, and Nvidia starts dominating with its Geforce cards. You upgrade to a Pentium III with a Geforce 256, only to keep finding out a year later, then two, that Geforce is here to stay, ATI Radeon is also a thing now, and CPUs are now pushing past a whole gigahertz!

Either way, you are getting left in the dust. Welcome to the year 2000 jamboree of fuckups - if you were trying to go for the bleeding edge, you wouldn’t have made the right choice no matter what! Hence the name.

Picking the right CPU was a tougher choice than usual for this one. At first I was considering either a 933 MHz Coppermine or a 1.266 GHz Tualatin for the Voodoo 3 I was planning to use, both of which are more than good enough for it. However, that changed when I came across a second Voodoo 2 on sale at an actually reasonable price that I am currently in the process of buying - for now I have stopped at a Slot 1 Pentium III Katmai 600 MHz.

When it comes to the motherboard, any with an Intel 440BX chipset will do just fine. Though, truth be told, I am also considering an 800 MHz Coppermine, but it depends on if I don't find a Slot 1 motherboard and instead come across a Socket 370 one, for example, or if I get the Slot 1 and then buy a Slotket adapter, whichever comes first. I'd rather not clutter my hardware like last time, so if I find a Socket 370 mobo, it better have a Tualatin support.

Oh boy. A debatable subject, I’m sure. Initially I was thinking of the Voodoo 3 3000 due to it being the last affordable card with Glide API support. But honestly, my last experience with this card had left me rather disappointed. Sure, it's got 16-bit color and a texture size limit of 256x256, but other than that, did it look all that different from OpenGL or DirectX? Not really, and with the later cards the difference was even more lacking.

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”). If one is so inclined to see how 32-bit color Glide looked like, the nGlide wrapper can easily take care of that. Thought, not gonna lie, it is tempting to eventually get a Voodoo 5 5500 or its modern reimplementation, the Changeling by zx-c64, but one sobering 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... Since I've got a second Voodoo 2 coming my way, I figured that I might as well use both of them in SLI (3DFX did SLI before it was cool) instead of the Voodoo 3 3000. Thanks to PhilsComputerLab's benchmarks I've learned that the performance difference between V2 SLI and V3 3000, while not marginal, isn't very significant either, since I'm aiming for 60 fps anyway. The Voodoo 2 is also more historically significant for being among the first to run games in 800x600 (1024x768 in SLI), as well as it has that "cool" factor that can't really be denied. Granted, most Voodoo cards only have that running for them, because otherwise almost any cheap Geforce of that approximate time period can easily give it a run for its money. It's also the same justification I have for even using Voodoo at all. Or maybe it's buyer's remorse...

Voodoo 2 was also the last one to support Glide in DOS, albeit a lot of games would require patching to support Voodoo 2, and some still (like Dreams to Reality) wouldn't run at all, until some absolute madman managed to trick them into believing that it's a Voodoo 1 back in 2023. Testing these games is also a priority of mine, so that's another reason why I picked Voodoo 2 for this build. Besides, being able to play more games is better.

One more thing - as this benchmark shows, the Voodoo 2 has a bottleneck starting from somewhere around Pentium III 500 MHz (Katmai) at 1024x768, with further performance enhancements at 800x600 and below until 900 MHz Coppermine. As long as I get around 60 FPS on games like Unreal, Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 with no issues, that's good enough for me. 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 the lack of a cooling solution on the Voodoo 2 ain't gonna fly in my book. I am planning to outfit both cards with radiators, and hopefully they'll feel better in a case with good airflow and a fan near them. 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. But I don't think I'll be putting a Sound Blaster Live! into this build, if only for the sake of convenience. EAX will be covered in full by a later build.
Thief II: How it runs on a 1998 PC