My "Wetro" build

Caporegime
Joined
26 Aug 2003
Posts
37,508
Location
Leafy Cheshire
After seeing a number of retro builds appear on the forums (and the internet as a whole) recently, I thought about reliving some of the nostalgia myself. I wasn't 100% set on an era, a platform or even the OS, but I thought that somewhere around the PIII/Athlon XP era was the way to go. I wanted a retro build, but with modern twists (custom loop water cooling, braided cabling, fan controllers etc)

My plan was to make it look (from the outside) like a PC from the time, so needed a suitable period case, and suitable period components. I lucked upon a bundle in the MM of an Abit BH6, 64MB! of PC100 RAM, a Slot-1 PIII 650, a Voodoo 3 AGP 2x card, and a Sound Blaster AWE64 ISA card. £25?! Bargain!

I also bought (for another £25) a bundle of over 30 sticks of mixed PC100 and PC133 (mainly 133) so have managed to bump the RAM from a measily 64MB to 768MB (matched 3x256MB sticks), which is nice.

Here it all is during some initial testing (needed a new CMOS battery in order to not forget everything when the PSU was unplugged). I played around with some overclocking to see where I could get it up to stably, turns out with a minor 0.1v increase on the core I was able to get the CPU to boot at 124x6.5 (rather than the stock 100x6.5) or a whopping 806MHz! I then installed Windows 2000 Professional onto one of the 80GB IDE drives I had lying around (though I did have to use a SATA DVD-ROM drive and a Silicon Image R3114 card to get a working optical drive!).

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So I now needed a case. I did still own a Coolermaster ATCS-201-SXK (Silver Widow), but it does have some scratching on the top panel and front panel due to both my own stupidity (I was young when I bought this case!) and due to poor storage (again my fault), but thought that I'd see what else was out there (I was tempted to go beige, but decided against it). I stumbled across an immaculate CoolerMaster ATCS-210 in blue, and when I say immaculate, I mean immaculate, there wasn't even a spec of dust, still boxed and with all accessories, manuals and screws! £40 later and I had that in my possession too. So here that is with the kit installed (temporarily, I'll obviously have to remove it all again to mod some radiators in and do some cable tidying).

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I was pretty happy with the components, especially for the price, but curiosity (and drunken ebaying) always leaves me looking for more. I was still looking for alternative cases, and ended up buying (for £50) a fully working Sun Ultra 40 workstation (sorry about the ebay picture, it's all I have right now).

ultra40.jpg


Not sure what to do now, continue to use the ATCS-210 or to gut this (fully working dual 2-core Opteron) Sun Workstation and set about using it's (clearly epic) airflow for radiators.

Also, my eBay perusing has also ended up with me ordering a dual socket-370 motherboard in need of repair (capacitors need replacing), so I also have the potential to swap the above slot-1 system for a dual 1GHz Coppermine FC-PGA based PIII rig (I'm also looking into the possibility to mod for running Tualatins, but information is thin on the ground). Decisions decisions...

So yes, this is where I'm up to so far, clearly I need to make some decisions on both case and components before starting the more complex tasks of custom waterblocks (if I go slot-1) or custom mounting brackets for S370 waterblocks (I'll likely use "universal" GPU blocks and fabricate custom mountings for them if I do go dual-370).

I know I've rambled on a bit, but I'm open to suggestions as much as I am posting this up as a "log".
 
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Well, in prep for my dual socket 370 board arriving, I've finally managed to find some information on modifying for Tualatin processors, so ordered a couple of 1.13GHz PIII-T's. Just realised that I have no Socket 370/A type heatsinks so need to do something with that too (i'll likely need to utilize the mounting mechanism to fabricate my waterblock mounts).

Oh well at least I'm gaining lots of nectar points :rolleyes:
 
What dual 370 board have you gone for? I've got a Abit VP6 with 2 Coppermine 1ghz CPUs. That too needs the caps doing as the original Jackon caps are as cheap as hell!

Nice project though. I've got a Coolermaster ATC-201 which currently has a Tualatin 1.4ghz installed in it. You planning to do the pin mod on your chips?
 
It's only an Epox EP-D3VA (so Via Apollo Pro133a) but it "should" work with the 3-pin isolation mod on the tualatins (if not then I've always got a fallback of 2x 1GHz Coppermines).

Which pin-mod are you referring to? VID?

Getting more and more tempted to try either water-chilling, or utilizing TECs on the CPUs.
 
Just received my GeForce 4 Ti4200 (Leadtek WinFast A250LE 64MB). Not certain if this is going to replace the Voodoo3, or whether I now do two retro builds, one based on my Slot1 BX board and one based on my forthcoming Dual Socket 370 board.

Still a nice purchase for £4.50!

ti4200.jpg
 
Some good news and some (potentially) bad news.

First, the good news, my temporary air coolers arrived "StarTech 1U Socket 7/370 CPU Cooler Fan With Copper Heatsink", my pair of coppermine P3 1GHz arrived, and best of all, my replacement 1500uf 6.3v capacitors arrived and I set about replacing the blown caps. Now, onto the possible bad news. I got the Epox EP-D3VA set up with the dual coppermines (for now, I need to decide if I'm modding the tualatin CPUs or the board itself), installed 1.5GB of PC133 (3x512MB) fitted the coolers (I forgot how much of a PITA socket 7/370/462 mounts are), and put the Leadtek Ti4200 in. PSU plugged in... blank screen :(

Messed around for AAAAAAGES resetting the CMOS, trying individual sticks of RAM, even resorting to a known-good stick of 64MB PC100, not a sausage. In a moment of despair, I ripped a PCI Radeon 7000 out of another machine, low and behold it's fine, ish. I got to the point of trying to set up 4x 250GB IDE drives in RAID on the Highpoint controller and every single time, the board would freeze up. Now I need to do some research into if the RAID controller itself supports such sized drives (as it was reporting that they were 140GB or so in size), and I also need to try switching round IDE cables as I'm not certain that these Abit branded "rounded" IDE cables are OK.

Got some universal water blocks ordered to go on the CPUs eventually, but now need to decide what I'm doing about the Geforce 4, it still works fine in the Slot-1 BX Abit BH6 board :confused: I've tried setting the EP-D3VA into both AGP 4x and APG 2x mode, no difference. I don't want to keep buying AGP cards just to find that the AGP slot on the board is dead, I'll try the Voodoo 3 tonight and see if that works in the Epox I guess.

Pics:

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Well, I've grabbed the Voodoo 3 AGP from Retro Build #1 and the Epox starts up fine with that, so it doesn't appear to be the AGP slot on the board that's at fault.

Weirdly however, the Ti4200 is definitely fine in the Abit, booted into windows and ran 3Dmark2001 no problems at all :confused:

I can't imagine that it's an incompatibility between the motherboard (or chipset?) and the GeForce, but I guess it must be :(
 
Well, re-soldered the cap and now all seems well! Got XP SP3 up and running on my dual-1GHz Coppermines, albeit with a bit of a "new" video card for the era (Geforce 6800 XT). Still on the hunt for a new (old) card. Found a Radeon 9550 in a box in the loft, but as seems to be the way with this EPOX, no output when trying to use it :confused:

As always (again) all components seem to be fine in the Abit BH6! Should have stuck to Slot 1!
 
Ordered some more bits from the bay, a collection of PCI and ISA cards, including two PCI SoundBlaster Live! cards, one "generic" PCI sound card (likely a realtek chipset), and two ISA sound cards (unknown brand/chip). Also has a USB add-in card, a firewire add-in card, and a spattering of PCI modems (that will go in the bin).

£8.50 including delivery \o/
 
If you're still gonna use the old CM case, I did a project log on here a while back where I used a CM atcs 200 (I think) ever so slightly smaller than a 201 I believe, and did a total rebuild of the internals to take 3 x 120mm (rear exhaust fan is a VERY tight fit) fans, 2500K/gigabyte Z68 mobo, corsair H55 cpu cooler, CM V700 psu, and a GTX 780ti.
if you'd like any info on the pitfalls I came across, and there were a few, let me know I'll post up a coupla pics.
 
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