Windows 98 Gaming PC: The Beige Build

This PC is still going! I've painted it to a very poor standard after the undercoating in the posts above. I kept giving it numerous coats to try and it improve it, without realising it was the bright red undercoat that was causing the problems and now the panels are a couple of millimetres bigger than they used to be and it doesn't quite physically fit together like it used to. Still, the inside looks much better now.

Old insides when I got it for £10:

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New insides
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It's now got an Slot A Athlon 800MHz CPU with a Voodoo 3 and SoundBlaster Live which is a bit too powerful really - A game that needs 800MHz will probably be natively compatible with Windows XP or later and therefore look and run better on my much more powerful XP PC.
 
almoststew1990 said:
Thanks for that, I had found that page but I'm not having much luck with installing the drivers! I'll give it another go tonight I think.

In other news I have rage-bought a crap Compaq Socket 370 motherboard to finally upgrade the 450MHz PII to (hopefully) a 1+GHz Tualatin. Eventually anyway; I've got a 700MHz Coppermine to slot in when it arrives from my failed slotket adventure.

I say rage-bought because I missed out on a two nice ASUS boards; one went for a reasonable price but I was outbid by about 7p and the other went for £45 so I didn't bother. I've had my eye on this compaq board for a while and for £13 it's worth the risk of being crap. eBay seller's picture below:

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It's from a Compaq Deskpro Workstation AP230, part number 187498-001. Details on it are limited and often contradictory but it's got an 815E chipset which allows for 133MHz FSB/RAM, uses SDRAM like I have already, AGP x4, PCI 2.2...

I'm a little nervous about the AGP slot as some pictures of the board and similar boards on the net show a random, small PCB inserted, not much bigger than the slot itself, with no outputs on it... Was AGP used for anything other than graphics cards?
Click to expand...

Hi there. Did you ever get this working? is it a proprietary PSU needed (24 pins is unusual for the era)

I'm looking to get a similar mobo but it's not worth it if the PSU costs more!
 
c0burn said:
Hi there. Did you ever get this working? is it a proprietary PSU needed (24 pins is unusual for the era)

I'm looking to get a similar mobo but it's not worth it if the PSU costs more!
Click to expand...

Yes, it did need a propietary PSU. You can buy adapters that swap the pins around though.

I personally wouldn't buy a 20 year old Dell PSU for an old build! It will be loud and the capacitors will likely need replacing. To be honest I would get a retail rather than OEM board and use a modern power supply.
 
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