The legendary Athlon XP+ series. Great choice. I am planning to do a similar build in the future myself, but I am going to use Creative Audigy 2 ZS as my sound card and ATi Radeon 9700-9800 as my video card.

Same here, but, i'm doing mine with an AGP HD2600 Pro, 3gb of ram and mabey an audigy 2 / zs. likely windows 7.

I have a boxed Athlon xp 2200+ sitting on my shelf. Never opened! This is making me really want to find some more NIB parts and build a brand new Athlon system.

Hey guys,

Sorry for taking so long to write anything about the progress of the build. I've been extremely busy at work and with my Master's coursework the last few months. The build has undergone a few changes and I ended up building the following system:

- AMD Sempron 3000+ (2.0GHz) /w Rosewill RCX-Z100 Cooler (as a 92mm fan with 80mm fan holes, so I can replace it with another 80mm fan or a 120mm fan using a 120mm -> 80mm adaptor)
- 2Gb (2x1Gb Kingston DDR400 Modules)
- Soyo SY-KT600 Dragon Plus V2.0 (Running BIOS 2aa4, the latest I could find)
- ATI Radeon X800 XL /w Zalman VNF-700 AlCu
- ASUS Xonar DG Sound Card
- Windows XP with "SP4" installed
- Promise TX4 SATA300 PCI Sata Card (the onboard VIA sata was just giving me too much trouble)
- Kingston V300 120Gb SSD (managed to get it to work with the TX4 and the system is silky smooth)
- Casecom CB-914 Case with 450W Generic PSU
- GOTEK Floppy Drive Emulator
- LiteOn Super Multi IDE drive

Obviously, the system is still a work in progress. The Casecom CB-914 is quite cheaply made and it wasn't as a good a plotform as I was hoping it would be. What's really cool about the Soyo motherboard is that it uses an ATX12V connector to power the CPU so you don't have the traditional problem of needing a PSU with lots of amperage for the 3.3V/5V lines, which means I can safely use something like a Corsair CX430M on this system (which I intend to do). I'm very happy with the Rosewill CPU cooler, it manages to keep the Sempron at 40 degrees full load, althought I would've liked something a bit less noisier (something to work on in the future perhaps). The X800 XL is surprisingly fast too and you can run quite a lot of games on high settings at 1024x768, 1280x720 and 1600x1200. My setup is just a little messed up in the sense that I only have a 27" 1440p Dell monitor. Not really ideal for these types of systems. I struggled quite a bit to get the Promise SATA card to work with Windows XP's install, but eventually I won that battle. The SACON capacitors on the Soyo board didn't fail immediately, so I will replace them with Panasonic capacitors over time. I fully intend to scan and upload the board's manual, the bios and some of the harder to find drivers on the internet.

I apologise for the double post. To assist those who have bought a Soyo SY-KT600 DragonPlus V2 motherboard, I'm going to attach a p.d.f. copy of the manual as well as the latest BIOS. I managed to flash the BIOS, by getting it to boot from a USB Flash Drive with FreeDOS 1.0 on it (I used Rufus to create this). To get it to boot I used Plop Linux 4.2. After that it's very straight forward what to do. I've also attached the motherboard's manual (which is a whopping 33 pages long) and the SATA RAID Floppy Disk (it's best just to stay away from the VIA SATA in my opinion). Hope this will save someone some time and effort.

If you recapped the Soyo KT-600 board then that's good.

Also,I'd recomment a Apevia B1KL case (minus the gutless wonder PSU it comes with) and a FSP (Fortron Source) ZEN400 PSU.

Apevia cases look quite well built,sad that their PSUs aren't worth a dime.

Recapping the Soyo is definitely on my to-do list for after Christmas. I have to wait for RS-Electronics to be open for business again. Well, since both the CPU and graphics card get power from the 12V lines I was thinking of getting a Corsair CX430M (with an 4-pin molex modular cable). It's nice and quiet and reliable. We don't get Apevia cases in South Africa unfortunately, and with the ammount it will cost me to import one I could just as well have bought a Lian-Li or premium Corsair case. I'm leaning towards getting something like a Deepcool Tesseract or Cooler Master K280. I'm leaning more towards the CM, since I know it is very high quality for the price.

Evert wrote:

I apologise for the double post. To assist those who have bought a Soyo SY-KT600 DragonPlus V2 motherboard, I'm going to attach a p.d.f. copy of the manual as well as the latest BIOS. I managed to flash the BIOS, by getting it to boot from a USB Flash Drive with FreeDOS 1.0 on it (I used Rufus to create this). To get it to boot I used Plop Linux 4.2. After that it's very straight forward what to do. I've also attached the motherboard's manual (which is a whopping 33 pages long) and the SATA RAID Floppy Disk (it's best just to stay away from the VIA SATA in my opinion). Hope this will save someone some time and effort.

All uploaded to vogonsdrivers.com

Btw, I recently bought a Fractal Design Core 2500 case, despite being slightly budget-oriented, it's very solid and a pleaswure to work with.

Thank you so much for uploading them RacoonRider. There are quite a lot of Soyo SY-KT600 boards you can buy brand new on eBay, so I'm sure people will find it very useful.

Those Fractal Design cases are beautiful. The R4 and R5 are some of the most beautiful designs I have ever seen in my life. I was looking at what my suppliers have to offer and I'm considering any of the following:

Cooler Master K280:

Corsair Carbide 200R:

Deepcool Tessarac:

In other news, I replaced the bulged and broken capacitors on the old Gigabyte GA-7VM400M today and it booted up just fine. Putting new ones in isn't as difficult or tricky as it is getting them out in the first place. I'm very tempted to pay someone to recap the Soyo SY-KT600 for me, because it took me 90 minutes to replace 7 capacitors.

In the 'Retro Rig Photo Thread', ChainsawR posted a picture of his case and it reminded me a Cooler Master HAF XB.

ChainsawR's System Shock 2 themed case:

Cooler Master HAF XB Case:

I could not help but think that this would be the 'perfect' case for my Sempron 3000+ rig. It has great airflow (you can even put a 200mm fan at the top of the mesh version), hot swap hard drive bays and the power supply cables can easily reach the motherboard. Has anyone on Vogons tried one of these cases for a retro build before? I'm considering using the same case for my 1.4GHz T-Bird + Voodoo 5 rig.

Edit: HardwareCanucks has a pretty good YouTube review of the case too.