Caporegime
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!).
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).
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).
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".
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!).
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).
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).
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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