The 'new' retro PC project

The-Plethora

The-Plethora

The-Plethora

Associate
Joined
17 Mar 2009
Posts
443
This seemed to start off by looking at some old pictures I had saved over the years. Whenever I got a new piece of hardware or upgraded things I generally took pictures of stuff to do with my PC setups partly because it was amazing at the time and partly to be able to look back on as technology progresses.
Anyway, I found this picture of my (then) great PC, a rhapsody in beige!



I think this would have been taken around 2001 / 2002, a great time in the world of PCs, Quake 3 was out, Unreal tournament and my personal favorite team fortress classic would have been the order of the day and maybe even the first Battlefield 1942 wasn't too far off. There were amazing single player games around that time like Red Alert 2 and Clive Barker's Undying, Deus Ex, Half-Life.

So that was my awesome PC, note on the right side of the desk is a tiny branded scanner my dad would have gotten with his Tiny PC at the time, these days they are probably a quarter of the height.
On the front of the PC were 2 hard disk caddies that I bought because they looked cool, a CD drive and even an early DVD drive.

The monitor if I remember was a 19" Hansol model, gave a great picture at 1600*1200 before HD was even a thing, lucky I got it as my original 14 inch samsung samtron monitor put out a maximum resolution of 1024*768 at an eye destroying 60Hz!

At the back of the desk would have been my Diamond 56K modem which I upgraded to from the US Robotics 14.4 model that would not let me play a game on quake.demon.co.uk back in the day.
The other monitor would have been hooked up to that PC under the desk but I can't remember too much about that, possibly my old AMD K62-400MHz or a Pentium 166.

Feeling a little nostalgic I have decided to put something together to relive the old days, true you can just emulate and even a lot of the old games will run just fine even now but it's not quite the same.

Thankfully I had saved a picture of the inside of the PC back then. I can't be 100% on the motherboard but I am fairly sure it would have been an AMD Duron 700MHz processor but possibly twined with only 96mb of SDRAM, I seem to remember having 64mb and paying a huge amount for the extra 32mb but it did make a big difference.
From right to left the cards would have been a Kyro Prophet 4500 from Power VR, an Appian Jeronimo pro which I bought because it had 2 outputs and using 2 monitors was properly amazing, an analogue WIN TV card, and soundblaster live value



Thankfully I had saved lots of stuff over the years so have some parts already I can use and a few I will need to get from auction sites (jeez do I have to call it that?).
First rule though, NO BEIGE!, no faded yellow plastic cases, it must look modern and if I can use more modern parts as well to improve performance or reliability then it's all good :)
 
As I say I already have several parts saved that I had been planning to use for this. Up in the loft I had several socket A processors but they were all too fast! An Athlon XP 2500-XPM, Semprons, much too new for this. I had a couple of motherboards but they were micro ATX ones and I really wanted a full ATX one that I could eventually mount in a modern case, so off to the auction site I go.

I think I did rather well and better than expected!

Someone had incorrectly listed this motherboard and CPU as socket A.



That is a slot A AMD Athlon running at 800MHz on a gigabyte GA-71X motherboard. The slot A CPUs if I remember were only available for around 9 months or so and even the CPUs alone seem to go for reasonable money now. I paid a total of £20 delivered, what a steal, it even came with the backplate.



The board and CPU arrived only a few days later, I quickly rigged something together out in the open to check it worked and all was fine. Thankfully I had a spare 128mb module of SDRAM in the loft to test with.

We take a lot for granted these days, this board has no on board video, no on board sound, no on board networking and only 2 USB ports, I suspect they are USB1.1.
However, it does have plenty of expansion slots, and if they are there I plan to use all of them if I can :)
 
OK, so I have 5 PCI slots, 1 AGP Slot and 2 ISA slots to play with. Here are my current card plans :)

3DFX Voodoo 3 2000 PCI


I mean, it had to have something 3DFX based didn't it? I actually got this from an old office PC at work they were throwing out. Seemed odd to have it in an office PC but I am glad I rescued it.
This was actually the first graphics card I bought from PC world back in the day. I was given a 3DFX Voodoo Rush when I got my first PC which was not compatible with very much and I spent my Christmas money on one of these which was a great upgrade and lasted me several years.
This is the same PCI Voodoo 3 PCI 2000 model I had, 16mb of memory and 143MHz I believe at stock clocks.

Soundblaster Live Value


I was given this by a friend who was having a clear out. I also had this exact model at the time. It was a great card. I particularly remember playing around in the EAX control panel selecting the concert hall preset to make music sound great. When I first got this card I had it in a Pentium 166 machine and I remember reading that the main chip on the card had the equivalent power of a Pentium 166 itself, Impressive stuff.
The board has no on board sound so I had to use something. I had a spare SB Audigy 2 and Audigy 4 but they were too new.

USB Card


The motherboard itself only had 2 USB ports on the back which I suspect were USB 1.1 compliant, one would be taken up likely with a keyboard and mouse dongle leaving just one port free for copying files from USB at a slow rate. I managed to find this USB 2 card for just £5 delivered on an auction site and in a fetching blue colour as well, lets hope it auto installs in the OS I decide to use.

SATA Raid card


Obviously the board doesn't come with many modern connectors we take for granted. I bought this card around 2 years ago to use for another project but I ended up not using it. At the moment I am not sure if I will use IDE hard disks and maybe a compact flash boot drive or the abundance of SATA hard disks and DVD drives I have stashed in the loft that I rescued for old office PCs. Adding this card will give me the option though and a lot more flexibility for connectivity.

3Com Ethernet 100mbps


Another old PC rescue. The board has no on board LAN at all. I am not sure how wise it will be hooking an old PC up to the Internet but I could at lest use it to transfer files from local PCs. This would take up the last of the 5 PCI slots the board has and at the moment this is option B :)

Ricoh PCMCIA card and CISCO PCMCIA


I am tempted to go with this. I already had the PCI PCMCIA adapter card in one of my box of bits and I always thought that old PCMCIA cards were cool :) After looking on an auction site I found the CISCO wireless G 54mbps card hardly used from an old project for just £10 delivered, boxed and with drivers, very cool.
Hopefully I could still connect this to my current wireless N router as it has support for G but I am not 100% sure about the security options it supports yet.

Kyro 2 Prophet 4500 64mb Power VR


One thing the PC would be missing was the graphics card I had on that PC, a Kyro 2 prophet 4500 AGP card. This would allow me to switch between the PCI Voodoo 3 and AGP Kyro 2 by changing primary graphics adapters in Windows. A little messy but I could potentially use them to run 2 monitors or simply switch back and forth for glide games.
This was the card that I updated to from that PCI Voodoo 3. I remember spending a lot of time looking at benchmarks and power VR released this card that was actually faster than the Geforce 2 MX 200 and MX400 and in some cases even beat the Geforce 2 GTS thanks to it's memory efficient tile based rendering technique.
I had a bit of trouble getting hold of this from an auction site at a decent price but eventually found one over in Italy for about £23 delivered. It was the exact 64mb model I had back then with the same cooler, 64mb RAM and TV out.

That leaves the 2 ISA slots. Really I would only have access to the end one due to the spacing of the slots as you can use either a PCI or ISA slot in that one place. Looking at ISA cards I could get a network card but that would probably be fairly slow due to the bus speed or an AWE64 sound card and I already have sound covered so for now I will leave these.
 
I did look into voodoo 2s initially but they have shot up in price, even the Voodoo 3s seem to go for about 40 quid plus postage. A couple of years back I saw one of those Obsidian boards on the bay, 2 voodoo 2 cards in SLI on one board, it was going for something like £30, kicking myself for not buying it.
 
I ordered a case this morning so hopefully that should be here on the Tuesday after the easter holiday. However for now there are plenty of things I can get on with.

First job :)


It actually still had the correct time and date in the BIOS but for a few pounds it will be good for years to come.

I had a delivery of memory also. I had that 128mb stick of SDRAM which would have been fine but I thought I would see what else I could buy at auction. The board itself reports it will support a total of 768mb of RAM. Thinking about it that would be extreme overkill for what I had planned. I eventually settled on this, 2 matching 128MB sticks giving me a total of 256mb, more than enough. I could use this with the existing stick but my OCD of different RAM won't let me :) I paid a total of £6 delivered and they even came in the original packaging with instructions.



Checking the various expansion cards for fit. All good
 
Ok, first issue. No BIOS access, I had to go up to the loft and pull out this old PS2 keyboard with PS2 track pad I had in the old days, from there since removing the battery I should be able to enable USB keyboard support in the BIOS.



Now to set the time and date and set optimized defaults, USB keyboard support and a boot sequence.





In the loft 'o' plenty I found 2 matching 80GB SATA hard disks, this should be ample space. I chose this so I can potentially install an OS on each drive and choose between them by simply changing the hard disk boot sequence, that way i don't have to mess around with boot managers, i'm not a big fan of those as if you need to swap out hard disks it can leave things non functional or in the worst case you are left with 2 operating systems that don't load.



I also choose 2 matching DVD ROM drives, both HP models, this will use all 4 ports of the PCI SATA card


I had a spare corsair 430w power supply I can use, it's quite over specced, 250 - 300W would have been fine back around 2000. This also has molex connectors on it which is quite handy and a mainboard connector that can split to handle the old ATX 1.1 specification.



I did seem to find that on the motherboard this cap is a bit close to the connector but just about fits in.



This seemed to be where I ran into a few problems. I set up the PC to boot from CD Rom but when ever the SATA card correctly detected the 2 80GB hard disks during the boot up sequence it would hard lock. I tried loads of times, changed several BIOS settings but it just would not get past it.

In the end I just wanted first to see if all this stuff I had thrown together actually works and so I rigged up a basic out of the box setup but this time using an IDE DVD drive and 60GB IDE hard disk and disconnected all the SATA drives from the SATA card.



No luck, then I cast my mind back and remembered drive jumpers! I set the hard disk to master and the DVD drive to slave and set the DVD drive as the first bootable device to begin the install.

So what is my OS of choice? :)



For me it had to be. In my opinion it's the best OS Microsoft ever released, it was a huge boost in stability after using Windows 98, no unnecessary bells and whistles like you get with XP and would also have been what I was running back on the original PC.
Remember I still have a second hard drive to use, I might go with XP but I am tempted to install windows ME, could be a pain installing stuff though.
 
Last edited:
Progress seems to be good! At first I didn't get a picture and then I realised you can set your primary graphics adaptor in the BIOS and mine was set to PCI (Voodoo 3) and not the Kyro 2 AGP card, although you can simply switch the VGA cable around to whichever card is active easily enough.


We have an install of Windows 2000, the PCMCIA wireless hooked up to my home network although it does seem quite flaky signal wise at the moment.



A blistering 800MHz (Almost) of computing power


Looks like it doesn't compare too favorably with a single core from a more modern CPU



I now have the drivers installed so I can get the configuration options for both the Kyro 2 and 3DFX tools for the Voodoo 3.



3DFX%20Tools_zpsqwdc9cx2.png


A quick hunt on the web and I got the drivers for the RAID card, remember at the moment I am using the old IDE just to test things.



At this point I decided I would just plug in my 2 80GB Samsung drives just to see if the card would crash. They both detected fine.


However at the point they did detect, something popped up on the screen. HP drive recovery software....ah! The disks were from old office PCs so they could have some funny partitions on them which caused the freeze on bootup.
I went into disk management and removed all partitions and formatted as NTFS. I also took my usual precaution of naming the drives Drive C and Drive D on the volume label. If you have 2 identical drives then you need to be pretty sure which one you are backing up etc so this helps things. I then rebooted the PC but left the SATA drives plugged in this time and it booted into Win 2K so crash resolved!

From here I was ready to run the Windows 2000 install again on the SATA disks but I realised I would have to deal with the whole "Press F6 to install a 3rd party SCSI or RAID driver" nonsense when I started the install of Windows again.
I didn't have the drivers on a disk but potentially could have copied them to the IDE drive and browsed to it.

At this point I thought I would take a punt. I have a copy of Acronis 2016 which comes with a boot disk so I set the PC to boot from the IDE DVD ROM drive and Acronis must have drivers for the Silicon image PCI SATA card as the IDE 60GB hard disk and the 2 80GB hard disks detected fine.
I figured I had nothing to lose a hopefully a bit of time to gain and so I simply used Acronis to clone the contents of the IDE drive to one of the SATA drives. I didn't hold out much hope though as the IDE drive install probably didn't have the boot up arrangement for the PCI SATA card.



It worked! :) Very happy with that, I was not sure it would. So now I can do away with the IDE hard disk and DVD drive and boot from the SATA card which has the 2 80GB drives installed along with the 2 DVD drives.

As a quick test I played a little bit of Clive Barker's Undying both on the Kyro 2 and then on the Voodoo 3 by just changing the primary graphics adaptor. I was able to set the Kyro 2 to 1280*1024 at 32 bit and the Voodoo 3 at the same resolution but only the 16bit colour pallete it is limited to but in it's native glide API.



All looks good so far, but the case hasn't even arrived yet!
 
Last edited:
Aha, great minds :)

The case has arrived, have to wait till later till I can work on it but it should come together pretty quickly now, but I can foresee some issues getting the front panel USB and audio connectors working but will cross that bridge when I come to it.



I have tried quite a few different cases over the years (most recently Rajintek) but I always find they lack the quality of Lian Li even at similar prices, the outsides might be aluminum but the interior I find is usually cheap steel. I actually already own one of these cases for my main PC and found it great to work with, good expansion options. The price has certainly changed though! I got the first for about £65, now it's £95!

 
Couple of updates...

Few things in the post. First I found a VGA to HDMI converter. This will be very handy, when I looked back on the web a few years back you would be paying about £40 for a big breakout box, now you can get one for just a couple of quid, power is taken from USB power which is handy that I got that USB card for the extra power, it also has a pass through for a 3.5mm audio jack. I only have a 3 foot long lead so I have bought a short 15cm one that should be here soon.
I also picked up that short VGA cable, I am hoping that will allow me to easily mount the HDMI converter on the back of the case and then just swap the lead onto whatever graphics card I want to use.

Having HDMI does make things a lot easier connectivity wise, I wont have to bother with VGA and separate speakers but I haven't written off the idea of getting a 4:3 monitor for the correct aspect ratio and resolution support although I would go for a TFT rather than a bulky CRT personally, I only have so much space! :)





I have tried it out and it seems to work with a great picture although I think there are some resolutions it cannot support but I will have to get the VGA cable down from the loft again to test if that is the case or if something is crashing.

I also found a cheap USB to Ethernet adapter, unfortunately this does not seem to auto install on Windows 2000 and the drivers that are built in to the device (like a CDRom) do not work. I know it uses a Realtek chipset but I don't know which one as it is not written on, it was only a cheap thing from the auction site but it would allow me to plug it in to the USB 2.0 card for decent speed and it has a flat base on it which means I could easily mount it to the back of the case if I ever need it.

To be fair the ad did say it only worked on XP and above so I can't complain, I have tested it works fine on Windows 10. I am leaning towards XP for that second hard drive just because how many extra devices are supported due to it's huge staying power.



It's slowly starting to come together now, the back plate really didn't want to fit very easily but eventually it saw sense.


The hard drives are mounted with the vibration dampening screws with rubber gromets, the top drive has the Windows 2K install, not much on the other one at the moment



At the moment it looks a bit of a mess inside as I am putting things together, there isn't a huge amount of options to hide cables but I haven't really done any of that yet. The case fan on the left was originally an intake but I have swapped it round to be an exhaust. The PSU annoyingly has the cables coming out the 'wrong' side of the PSU so I can't easily hide them behind the motherboard tray.



YUCK! Don't worry, front bezels for the DVD drives are on the way, I thought I had some in the loft but they are for a black case.



I have a couple of other small but very important bits coming in the post but this is where it stands for now.
 
Last edited:
The 2 new front drive Bezels are now installed which makes things look a lot better.


It wasn't pure coincidence that I bought a case with a 3.5 front panel :)

I know I know, what on earth can you store on that? Not much and I am not 100% set on using it just yet.

Part of the reason I am thinking of using it is that I have been buying Lian Li stuff for years and up in the loft I managed to find a silver Lian Li floppy drive bezel! Probably not easy to find these days.


I'll have to adjust the fit a little but the floppy drive sits behind it just fine.


A guy in Romania makes PC case badges, it was all about case badges back in the day right? right? Whats the point of having blazingly fast 3DFX hardware if your case doesn't shout about it! Also got a gigabyte badge for the motherboard.





Not sure about with floppy drive or without at the moment


Looks a bit neater and less case clutter without the drive though. Maybe I will get a fan controller there instead.


I 'may' get a big 3DFX decal made for one of the side panels of the case at some point, black on a silver background would look pretty cool. The case pretty much looks as I want it now, modern looking but with a couple of retro throwbacks :)
 
Hmm, this is starting to be a pain now! First a couple of updates...

A small thing but I don't think i will ever use water cooling on this PC so I swapped the water cooling grommets for end caps to make it a bit neater.




I have swapped the Cisco PCMCIA card and PCMCIA to PCI card for a normal PCI card. The signal was just not good enough. Bit of a pain to install, I had to use the drivers from an older release and the wireless client from a newer driver that would work with 2000 still (probably not intended to but it works!)



The back of the case now has the VGA to HDMI convert on the back. I am waiting on a shorter audio cable to turn up and need to look for a shorter USB to USB power supply cable for this to neaten it up.



One 'good' problem I ran into was that I quickly ran out of disk space and so I replaced to the 2 80GB drives with a 160 and a 250 Samsung, it was easy enough to clone the drives.


Now the pain...
The PC case has front mounted USB ports on it. I'd really like to hook these up to the PC, it would annoy me off if they were there and did not work. I wanted to connect them to the USB 2 PCI card but unfortunately that didn't have any pin headers (although does have an Internal USB port). I tried to look for a USB port to case front panel connector but I haven't found anything as yet.
That left me with the motherboards own on board connector, true it would likely be USB 1.1 speeds but that wouldn't bother me as long as it was functional.

Here is the issue.



So it is one of the old school 8 pin USB headers, more modern PCs use a 10 pin connector and it is keyed so you can only insert it one way.

The case however came with this rather basic looking USB 2 to 3 connector which would let you attach a USB2 motherboard connector to the USB 3 plug the case comes with for backwards compatability.


The USB 2 end of the plug only has 8 wires but the plug itself is too big to fit as it allows for 10 pins. The empty holes would be a ground pin that I don't think gets used and the blanked off connector hole that lets you insert it only one way into a USB 2 port. 8 wires, 8 pins. Note the order of the colours here on both sides, identical and black green white red.



I downloaded the motherboard manual and found the pin out for the USB port. Rather unhelpfully it shows you what pin 1 is but not any others, the manual itself seems to change for numbering pins horizontally to vertically, however I had the pin names and knew which pin one was.



From the layout of the USB 2 connector itself and checking pin outs online I labelled the pins.



Using a craft knife...(ok a cheap pair of tweezers) I was able to remove the USB 2 'key' hole and the ground hole that won't get used anyway.



I measured twice and cut once several times and plugged it in to the PC and turned it on, all good and I plugged a flash drive in that I could sacrifice if things went up in a puff of smoke. Success! all looks good and I can read and write files.



This is where it gets a bit confusing. the USB stick is plugged into the cases front mount blue USB 3 connector and is working. Plugging it in to the other port (black USB 2) detects an unknown USB device and the USB drive starts to get hot! that is not good (the drive does still work though). So something is wrong.


So I check my USB 2 plug again, I unplug one side, this shows the 4 wires on the side that works just fine (USB 3 connector on the front). Other USB 2 diagrams show the same colors next to each other on the other side (black green white and red) and I haven't changed anything. I also know the 4 pins here must be correctly wired as I have removed the other side, plugged it in and the USB drive works fine, so logically the issue can only be with the wires that side...or something else...



I am fairly sure I haven't wired it incorrectly on the USB 2 plug side, but it does then connect to the cases own USB 3 style connector as shown.

There is a bit of card between the wires. The wires behind the card are the side that work from the USB 2 connector. But I haven't made changes at this point to the connector but then I don't know if wiring standards have changed over the years or what is different on the front case panel for having both a USB 2 and 3 connector.



I checked colours and pin outs on USB 3 and they all look fine as well so I am confused. The black wire is the ground pin and there are a couple of other ground pin 'holes' on the plug you can use, I swapped the wire in those 2 to try a different ground but no luck. Any ideas?
I think I am just going to try and find another USB 2 card that has header pins, I don't want to toast anything but don't know why it doesn't work.
 
Last edited:
I also decided to drop the idea of Windows ME for now. Trying to get stuff to work under 2000 still with the age of hardware I am using is a pain and I know ME which did not have much success would be even harder and as it was an OS I didn't do much with I decided to install XP onto the second disk due to it's much better support, I should be able to use that USB network adaptor from earlier as well if I dual booted XP.

The 160GB drive would run Windows 2000
The 250 GB drive would run XP

Somewhat painfully,everything is hooked up to this SATA raid PCI controller, so the first thing I needed to do was to fish out a floppy drive and the IDE DVD drive again so I could install the RAID drivers.
This is a different floppy drive I had lying around, never seen one like this before, the whole round disk bit spins! mesmerising!



For old times sake lets share the wonder of floppy disks! I think I had these back in my college days, they still work just fine, purchased from Argos I believe :)



The drivers were installed from floppy for Windows XP


This was painful though, time after time it would just crash on installing. I tried removing cards, memory, everything but it would always crash at the same point with the same error, very annoying.


Pure trial and error sorted it. When the SATA cards BIOS would detect the drives at start up, unplug the DVD drives, wait for it to continue past it, plug them in...it works. No idea, don't care, it worked eventually :)


I decided to add in that extra 128mb stick of memory to the PC also so it now has 384mb RAM. I realise not all of this is 'a PC build' as such but I think worth covering some of the frustration when dealing with old hardware and how far things have come.

So really the issues now seem to be...

1. Get a USB card with front headers so I can use front USB (I hope)
2. Get a soundcard that has front pin outs for front case audio. Soundblaster X-Fi PCI has this but doesn't seem to be supported under windows 2000, look for other cards I guess.
3. Do I stick with this SATA card which is a bit of a pain or go with IDE to SATA drive converters, I'd also have to get some sata to molex power adapters for the converters.
4 At least attempt to tidy the case wiring.
 
Last edited:
A couple of small updates.

the various short cables have arrived for the HDMI converter now, what was initially quite a mess is fairly tidy now or at least as neat as it can be. Black wire is VGA, silver is power for the HDMI converter power and red wire is audio in from the sound card.



After scouring ebay for USB cards and turning up nothing suitable I eventually found on overclockers a 7 port USB PCI card, the last one of it's kind and has a drivers disk that works on XP and even 2000, don't think they will be getting more of these in anytime soon. Most importantly it has a front panel header.





I had another better quality USB2 to USB3 pin out converter and plugged this into the USB header on the card and now have 2 fully functional front USB ports.


Also looking through overclockers random cables I managed to find ATX2 to ATX1.0 converters. I don't really need this but it will stop putting stain on that capacitor near the motherboard connector from earlier. They are clearing them out, I think it was 97p so I bought a couple (never know for future projects)



Not particularly neat but clears the capacitor a lot more nicely, I'm going to have a hard time with cable management when I come to it. I actually have a couple of newer power supplies that don't split down on the plug for use with old boards so this is handy to have for the future anyway.


A small but very important retro detail :)






I have still not found a suitable PCI sound card with front USB header, still have to tidy the case wiring and getting problems with the PCI SATA Raid card. It doesn't seem to like booting with 4 drives attached and it keeps coming up with no bootable disk found. There doesn't seem to be a way to set the boot priority on it either, I suppose that's not too surprising as it is really intended for setting up a RAID.
There is a bunch of other cards on auction at the moment but they mostly seem to be the same silicon image 3118 chipset my card uses.

Not sure what to do at the moment, I'd really like to boot with 2 hard disks and 2 DVD drives. I did find some supposedly new sealed IDE hard disks about 180GB in size but they did not seem cheap.
I have also found these adaptors that plug straight into the motherboards IDE connector and you plug your SATA drive into it. No drivers required so that would resolve the no booting problem but from what I can tell you can't support a master and slave drive from a single IDE connector so I would have to buy 2 (one for each IDE header) and still retain the SATA PCI card for use with the DVD drives.

 
I managed to find a soundblaster XFi PCI sound card with front panel header support that has just arrived, managed to get it for 10 quid. I know this will work with Windows XP but I have read conflicting results as to if it will work with Windows 2000 as well.
From previous experience I know that some Win XP drivers work with 2000 also so I might be lucky but it just might be too new. Seems really hard to find cards with front panel support that run on both XP and 2K.



I ordered 2 of those startech IDE to sata adaptors, they seem fairly well made but annoyingly they do use floppy power connectors which will add to the case clutter when I get them installed.
I also found some IDE to sata adaptors on auction as on the previous page which seem to show they have both master and slave drive support, they were only £2 each so I ordered 5 of them but they have not arrived yet, I will see if I stick with these 2 adaptors and the SATA PCI card with the SATA DVD drives or the converters when they show up.


One extra thing I picked up, and I am not sure if I will use it in this build as I like the Kyro 2 card is this Matrox Millendium G550 card. It was brand new and sealed for just a tenner! :) I had to have it. I was also looking at the old Matrox parhelia cards for this build but they seem to be about £50 and up but maybe at the right price...









It's annoying with this boot issue I have with the SATA card as it is holding things up at the moment, hopefully when the adaptors arrive I can get the rest of this finish and finally decide what hardware I can use in this thing to support both operating systems.
 
/facepalm

The IDE to SATA converters work but only detect hard disks up to 137GB and wont read the windows installs that are currently on the drive due to this I am going to use the 2 converters for the DVD drives instead as that seems to work. Finally I should be able to install Windows if I need to without having to resort to an IDE DVD ROM drive or having to install raid card drivers from floppy. I seem to vaguely remember some ancient Seagate utility that sort of tricks the motherboard into detecting it's full size but can't remember much about it.

The X-FI card I installed works ok and I get my front panel audio, but nope! no drivers anywhere for it under Windows 2000, despite several dubious sites saying they have them.
 
My main PCs water pump has died recently so I have been working on that but a couple of updates.

Got hold of a molex to twin floppy adaptor. Both those IDE to SATA converters come with 2 large molex connectors and a floppy connector each which is just more clutter so I should be able to power both from one connector using this.


I decided to mount the USB to LAN connector on the back of the case. Look at the state of this thing!, it's not even powered on and it looks like it is on life support! I mount lots of things using no more nails tape, it's really strong and stops things moving. This does not have drivers for Windows 2000 so I'll just set it to ignore device detection in that and use it in XP if I ever need it.


Made a start on tidying the case, I like using zip tie anchors, you can easily tidy stuff out of the way but also remove them easily enough. The vertical cables are the front mount motherboard cables for power, reset and power light.
The curved cable is front panel USB, audio and I have also had to route the hard drive activity connector here as well as this needs to connect to the SATA card to show hard disk activity on the front case LED.
This case is fairly decent for hiding cables.


Inside of case
I haven't installed the power supply yet but it's not going to be easy to hide cables.
The wire on the left is the HDD connector for activity and then the USB and audio connectors. The 2 SATA / IDE converters are plugged in which go to the 2 DVD drives.
Quick refresh of the current cards left to right, TP Link Wireles, SATA card, Soundblaster XFi (works on XP only). USB 2. card, voodoo 3, Kyro 2 AGP.


Front panel connectors, bit neater than before. Also used red electrical tape to tidy the HDD sata cables and black on the black DVD ROM sata cables, bit neater than using zip ties.


Again no PSU attached, I was hoping the floppy to molex splitter would be a bit longer so I could hide it a bit better but it's not to be. Twisted the CPU fan cable to make it neater and shorter, case fan plug hides behind the motherboard. The USB connector is a pain, it has that 5 inch connector before it connects to the cases front connector. I might see if I can extend the cable from the USB carrd and mount all that round the back of the case.


Even with the current Corsair PSU I had it was going to look a mess so I will have a rethink and maybe go for a cheap modular one, it doesn't need to be more than even 300w to drive this. Too many spare connectors, I would have to tie up a 4 pin PSU connector, 8 pin PSU connector, PCI express power connectors, stuff I will never use.
For now I'll just install a spare HP desktop PSU I have lying around, looks a mess though currently.

Nice and tidy from the front.


Cable spaghetti inside.
 
We don't really use an internal PC speaker anymore as other than BIOS beeps they don't really do much. I found a PC beeper that came with a case, I think you are just supposed to hang this from a motherboard connector header and leave it dangling there. A zip tie and an anchor means I can tidy it up in the case.



My pals in China have sent through those IDE to SATA connectors I was looking at as an option previously (they were so cheap). Quick initial impressions looked good. Although it is a bare board it has the connectors and even a master / slave jumper selector so I could have 2 devices on each IDE channel if needed (hard disks would still be limited to 137GB max size though).




Looking a bit longer, ugh. Yeah, build quality not so great...

I'd say there is a fairly low chance of this one working, all the traces look damaged, these were packed pretty poorly in just a bit of bubble wrap.


Still it's nice that they let the work experience lad have a crack with the soldering iron.



So yeah, I think I will stick with my original choice of those Startech adapters. About 2 of them out of the 5 seem to be ok, handy to have as spares, might need them at some point.

I found an old screenshot in my archives that handily has the calendar showing so I can see what applications I would have been running at this time or just after. I'm going to try (within reason) to try and use some of these on the install.
I can still download mIRC and VNC and maybe some of the other apps like nero burning ROM and daemon tools. However applications like outlook express, MSN messenger, Kazaa, Trillian and IRC are likely of limited use these days :) Maybe install Napster for old times sake. I don't think I will be reinstalling Norton Anti Virus...


But don't worry, so far I have my awesome Cyberlink DVD player software and Winamp with the classic skin naturally :)


I will say though that the CPU and memory use whilst installing updates pretty made the system unusable. I can't believe I used to run this with just 64mb RAM. CPU use is maxed out (can't do much about that) and only about 70mb or so free.
I have given in and ordered 2 sticks of 256mb RAM which should give me a total of 640mb RAM, I might get a further 256mb stick to push the board to it's maximum of 768mb. Funny to think when I started this that I thought 2 sticks of 128 would be overkill, yeah not with Windows updates.

Bonus: 2 Screenshots of running quake 3 on both graphics cards. Ignore the FPS counter. Kyro was at 32bit settings and 3DFX on 16bit. Personally I can't tell much difference...

Power VR Kyro 2 Prophet 4500 64mb AGP


3DFX Voodoo 3 2000 PCI 16mb PCI


Edit: Actually the shading on the white and orange ammo and health text looks smoother on Power VR.
 
Last edited:
My real love was Team Fortress classic and Half-life multiplayer. These days I have progressed to mainly playing Team Fortress 2 :).
I remember looking for games using gamespy, I think that has long since died.

2 sticks of memory turned up today (512 Total). Annoying that it doesn't seem to be a matched pair but I will try it out, one more stick on the way (Kingston). Seems to be hard to get 3 or 4 matching sticks these days.


Another impulse buy that may or may not make it to the final build. A brand new sealed Geforce FX 5200 AGP, this also has DVI out which might help (remember I said there seemed to be some resolutions that the DSUB to HDMI converter could not display?) this might solve that problem. Again I am likely to stick with the Kyro 2 but want to try this out. One downside with the Kyro 2 is that it didn't last very long. As such I can remember that other than the drivers that came on the CD when you bought it there only seemed to be 1 or 2 further releases of drivers on the web after that.
The Kyros performance in Deus Ex seems pretty poor (around 15FPS) and in Quake 3 it's anything from 30 - 100. Not sure if it's a CPU limit I am hitting, missing motherboard drivers, lack of memory or something else.


Wow one day graphics will look this good! :)


An unboxing!


It looks to have a fairly decent heatsink on it as well. I am under no illusion though, this card was pretty underpowered even back in the day I think the Radeon 8000 was a better performer. However it does fully support Direct X 9 (Albeit slowly) and the Kyro is Direct X 7. I can run things like Morrowind on the Kyro but it has bugs like when you first step out of the boat to go outside you are fully underwater, no fancy pixel shaded water either.


I think I have worked out a workaround for the soundcard issue for Windows 2000 also but will need to wait and see.
 
Ha ha, yes it is a bit of a rubbish card and it likely won't be staying.

I'm just using it as the HDMI converter doesn't display some things like the BIOS screen and so messing about with it is a real pain. With the 5200 I can simply plug in a DVI to HDMI cable and run it straight in to my TV without any messing about in the meantime.
Regarding the memory, it seems to work fine even if one stick does seem to be ECC (advert specifically said non EEC though). I'll run CPUID at some point as that lets you detail the specifics of the memory modules.
The last 256mb stick turned up recently but I'm having trouble with the SATA card again and I have given up on that one, it's stopped even being detected in the boot sequence even though I have it set as first boot device SCSI as before. Not to be deterred I have bought another...3 in fact that are on the way :) 2 from OCUK and another from ebay, they are fairly cheap but hopefully one of them will work the way I want.
 
Pay day tomorrow so if you have matching 256mb sticks I'd be more than happy to paypal you :)

2 out of the 3 SATA cards have arrived (the 2 from OCUK) hopefully one these will do the job. With my original card I think it used the sil3114 chipset and I had read that some people had great success with these cards, some people saying they needed to update the BIOS etc. This time though I chose cards that had different chipsets, maybe I will enjoy better luck.

One card uses sil3112 and the other sil3512.







I notice only one of them seems to have a HD LED header so I will probably start off with that one and see how I get on, hopefully i don't need to re-image the disks again.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom