** Acme's [Akagi's] Retro Odyssey! From Apple ][ to Pentium 4. Repair, modding, and more! **

[Akagi]

what a ***end.... i know its a big step down, but i have a GTX260 somewhere

A core 216 GTX260 isn't actually that much of a step down I don't think, but I was looking to do 280s in SLI. And I did already buy one 280 separately, to pair with the pair I've been conned out of.
But I will never say no to unused hardware people have sitting around...

The bundle I bought included 2x GTX280s, 1x 8800GTX, 1100W Tagan PSU (really wanted that...), a bunch of DDR2 including some OCZ NVIDIA SLI stuff, Ballistix, and OCZ Reaper, a Soundblaster, and some random CPUs and chaff I didn't want. "untested, been in storage, must go together, collection only", I was very keen.

Pretty bummed out about the whole thing but it could be worse. I wanted to show you all my haul...

Its especially hard to find old high wattage PSUs for reasonable prices. (reasonable prices I consider to be anywhere from £0 to £20 because of their age...)

 

[Akagi]

P180 for the X58 build arrived. If it were a case of lesser stature the woeful packaging would probably have seen it destroyed in transit, but luckily it is built like a tank.
It was just in card with no padding... I had to re-attach the door, straighten the side panel, and clean off water spots from the rain... I asked if they'd offer a token partial refund, we'll see.

Anyways... It has a system inside it, a Core 2 Duo on a decent Gigabyte board, 4GB of Kingston DDR2, a Radeon HD 6570 (1GB single slot low profile, so may come in handy someday...), a firewire card (great...), a DVD-RW (sadly an IDE one, I could use a SATA one around here!), and a hopeless 300W FSP PSU. It doesn't even have a 24pin power connector. But it will be useful for an older retro project in the future.

Still no word on my missing parts that I got scammed out of. Working on it, but sadly don't think they will be coming my way. Annoyed is an understatement!

 

[Akagi]

The first of my three GTX280s arrived!

Tested and verified that it works!

Fitted the Brocken 3 and the RAM to the motherboard! (I know that isn't how triple channel is meant to be arranged, but all of the sticks are identical bar colour)

Got hold of an IO plate for a UD3R and cut out the extra hole to make it the same as a UD5 IO plate.

The guy who I think was/is scamming me replied finally after I guilt tripped him from another account... So hopefully I will be getting those parts somewhen, but I'm still not holding my breath.

 

[Akagi]

I have a well documented soft spot for the first and first-ish gen i7 so I look forward to this build! Overclocked they're quite happy on games up to 2021 or so, until you run out of instruction sets.

The tri 280 will be weird as even one 280/285 is a) running out of VRAM and b) is limited by lack of DX11 (ie it flies through dx9 and 10 games) so I'll be interested to see your results!

Few reasons why I decided to go with the 280s! First one was I've never played with them before, I went straight from 8000 series to 400 series. Second one was that the 280, the i7 920, and the motherboard all came out within a few months of each other so it is all period correct hardware. And the third (and primary) one was that it was proving difficult to find GTX480s that were reasonably priced and still alive.

I do however have one working GTX480, and one "sort of working" 480, so if the "sort of working" 480 functions as a secondary card in SLI, some 480s might find their way into here at some point.

 

[Akagi]

I accidentally bought some stuff... This represents £70 total.
I couldn't resist the bargains... I am going to have to have a sort out at some point!

Some junk in here, but some nice scores too.

We have:

Gigabyte GA-8IPE1000-G Rev.4 (Socket 478) with a 3.4GHz Pentium 4 Prescott, 2GB of DDR, and a Scythe Katana 2
Asus P5Q-L Pro (socket 775) with a Core 2 Quad Q8200 and 8GB of DDR2 (including 2x 4GB of XMS2)
ECS MCP73VT-PM (socket 775) with a Pentium Dual Core E2100 and 2GB of DDR2

Pentium 4 Cedar Mill 3.2GHz (775)

Sapphire X1950 Pro AGP with some kind of dual fan copper cooler
Passive 9500GT PCI-E

Hiper (explosive) Type-M 580W
Winpower '750W'
OEM FPS 250W

2TB Hitachi HDD
250GB Seagate HDD

Various fans and cables including a brand new set of IDE + FDD cables in purple.

 

[Akagi]

Think I have a x5650 somewhere if you want it

I wouldn't say no!

That would be a nice little upgrade for the X58 system (which I haven't built yet...)

 

[Akagi]

What are going to do with all these bits? Home museum?

I currently have absolutely no clue...

 

[Akagi]

The ECS board will get sold or given away, the Gigabyte 478 board will probably find its way into my Pentium 4 build along with the 3.4GHz Prescott.

I might build a system to try and overclock the Cedar Mill P4...

 

[Akagi]

OK I believe I have formulated a plan, since I still don't have the parts needed to finish the X58 system.

I am going to use my Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3 to try some overclocking on the Pentium 4's last hoorah, the Cedar Mill.

I have a Pentium 4 651 D0, the 3.4GHz 65W chip. I think I should be able to get it to around 4.5GHz with a modest air cooler. We will see how I do!

I also have a Core 2 Duo E6750 which was a popular chip, and a Core 2 Quad Q8200 which is a reasonable clocker... But both are getting ignored in favour of the P4.

And then perhaps I will pair it with an 8800GTX (if it ever materialises) and see how that goes compared to a much lower clocked Core 2. I think it should be fine for games of the period, but I'll see!

I think I may also try to build it inside my T5400 chassis, which should be interesting!

 

[Akagi]

Started to strip down the T5400 so I can make any necessary modifications to it, so it can house normal hardware.

Firstly, a standard ATX power supply screws straight in, which was an unexpected blessing!

I will cut the IO area out with a dremel so that an IO shield can be inserted for a different motherboard:

Inside the chassis, these bits will also be removed with the dremel. The remainder of the motherboard standoffs are correct.

The final order of business will then be obtaining the pinout for the front IO, so I can connect it to the motherboard headers.
If this proves impossible, I can just use a 3.5" bay doohicky.

 

[Akagi]

I am not sure I can even explain how I came up with this functional mess... But in essence, proprietary front panel PCB and LED passthrough lens, remove the PCB, stuff a generic power button in the middle, stick the LEDs above the LED passthrough for the power button, cable ties...

The stock 150MM 1.2 amp fan is a chongus, this thing will take your fingers off.

Compared with a regular 120mm fan.

Jammed a regular fan in here (because even the fans have proprietary connectors in this thing...)

Rear IO cut out.

IO shield pressed in.

Problematic standoffs removed.

Starting to cobble it together...

It fits! (it did need another quick tickle with the dremel first though)

Where we are at currently.

Just awaiting my CPU cooler, and I will install it, and a SATA cable, and test it...

 

[Akagi]

I also have something very special and very stupid planned for the boot drive.

 

[Akagi]

I'm intrigued now.

Window modded hard drive ala Raptor X? (That reminds me I still have one kicking about somewhere that's probably climbing in value)

Ahh not quite as special as that I guess!

A pair of WD Velociraptors in RAID 0.

I'm trying to find out if the onboard RAID controller can support 4 drives in RAID 0...

 

[Akagi]

This is where the raptors are going to be.

Going to make a bracket... Here is some cardboard aided design.

I haven't done enough bodging in this project so far, so I got some motherboard standoffs, cross-threaded them into the ones on the Dell chassis (x4, can't see the 4th here), and then stacked them all three high. This will mean that cables can pass underneath!

I'm holding it up here just because cardboard isn't as strong as metal...

Will get a right angle 24 pin adapter also.

 

[Akagi]

And its done (bar painting the wooden plate)

Thanks again to @rare this time for the CPU cooler!

And yes it does indeed work!

 

[Akagi]

Set up the drives in RAID 0, at first I installed XP.

Put the RAID drivers on a USB stick for the install... Nope... Needs to be on a floppy disk...

OK no problem, I gotchu...

Nope... Needs to be on an internal floppy disk drive...

OK... Uh... No problem...

This worked!

However XP did not work particularly well on this setup, so I ended up installing Vista anyway which could install the drivers from USB...

Spent some time overclocking, got the P4 to 4.42GHz, no matter what I tried I couldn't get it to go beyond this. Even pumping another half a volt into it wouldn't yield 50MHz, so I left it here.
I think the motherboard may be the limitation.

And this is how those two Velociraptors perform in RAID 0. Pretty pleased with that!

 

[Akagi]

Had to bump the voltage up another couple of ticks, it seems happy now.

I wonder how a 4.4GHz solo core dual thread Cedar Mill P4 compares to my Core 2 Quad Q8200 2.33GHz quad core quad thread.

At the time I bet overclocking the snot out of a P4 was a good budget alternative to a Core 2.

 

[Akagi]

Will dig it out tomorrow

Was about to ask Slither if he found that CPU, and it seems he's been permabanned...

F

Well, thanks for the thought!

 

[Akagi]

Done done.

 

[Akagi]

Starting to stretch the definition of retro a bit with this one, but I got an Asus P6T7 WS Supercomputer, a Xeon X5680 (thanks again @rare ), and a bunch of GTX480s (of which at least three work, which is good because I'm going to go with Tri-SLI to begin with)

Serious bit of kit.

Home furnace.

A bit of cable management... I don't make art of this, I just do it as well as is needed.

You're probably thinking... But Acme... 750W is nowhere near enough for three GTX480s and a 6 core Xeon!

To which I say, you're right! Thats why there is an additional 600W PSU hiding in here.

Why? Because I had these sitting around, and 1300+W PSUs are silly expensive. Plus, similarly to running the Velociraptors in RAID 0 before, I haven't run dual PSUs before. So I wanted to give it a try.

As for the customised Dell from last time, it now has a new power button and power and HDD activity LEDs.

And having had my fun with the Cedar Mill, I pulled it out and put in a Q8200 Core 2 Quad I had sitting around, and overclocked it to 3.1GHz from the stock 2.33GHz.