Building a Pentium 2 Retro Machine

Something struck me a while back: I don’t have a working Pentium 2 machine! The horror! Well, that is to say I have plenty of P1 and P3 systems, but considering I spent a lot of time on my P2 300 back in the day, I found it a bit odd I didn’t have one ready to go.

Looking then at parts, over the course of at least a year I collected everything I’d need. This included the top P2 CPU, the 450 MHz. Couple this with a Riva TNT card and an Aureal Vortex 2 sound card, and we had a killer machine on our hands for basically top tier gaming in 1998. What really set it all off though, was me picking up a new old stock desktop case, this one black. Putting everything together yielded a really compelling combination, and a setup that looks like a high class/performance system we’d drool over. Mostly stemming from the fact that most systems around this era were beige (the iMac excluded of course, a topic for another day), so a black one would have stood out completely.

The end result is a killer system from 1998 wrapped in an appealing, and different skin. Check out the video on the build below!