via https://hackaday.com/2025/03/22/the-fastest-ms-dos-gaming-pc-ever/
After [Andy]’s discovery of an old ISA soundcard at his parents’ place that once was inside the family PC, the onset of a wave of nostalgia for those old-school sounds drove him off the deep end. This is how we get [Andy] building the fastest MS-DOS gaming system ever, with ISA slot and full hardware compatibility. After some digging around, the fastest CPU for an Intel platform that still retained ISA compatibility turned out to be Intel’s 4th generation Core series i7-4790K CPU, along with an H81 chipset-based MiniITX mainboard.
Well, you would be surprised how much really good software from back in the day (especially games) can run on quiet modern hardware. I have an old Thinkpad with a Core2Duo running FreeDOS that I mostly use for gaming and most of the DOS titles of the late 80s to mid 90 are running quiet well.