VOGONS


First post, by Hopeapaa

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The expansion cards from top to down:
Gainward GeForce2 Ti/500 XP ViVo Golden Sample
-With Zalman ZM80D-HP HeatPipe passive cooling

2 x 3dFX Voodoo2 12MB
-SLI configuration capable of 1024x768 resolution

Sound Blaster AWE32 IDE with 2x4MB 30-pin SIMM (CT3900)
-total of 8MB memory is enough for my purposes...
-Notice that card is hanging from long side to prevend bending

Gravis Ultrasound Extreme
-Last card from Gravis
-Back to the GF1 designs, no InterWave etc. here...

Roland LAPC-I
-notice the support the card needs egainst bending from own weight[/img]

The rest is there only to get these cards working: MSI5169, K6-2 450Mhz, 2x64+32 as PC-100 memory, some HDD:s (2 at the moment full of crap to test HW with), disk drives... Silent enough (note the casing).

Reply 2 of 3, by leileilol

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I hope it's cooled well

AWE32/64's aren't friendly to heat, not very fun when your sound gets cut off mid-game (yes even FM midi stops) and you'd have to do a 10 minute (sometimes longer) power-off for it to return to normal working state

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long live PCem

Reply 3 of 3, by Hopeapaa

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The mainboard is "full" as there is no more space for anything else. Actually the case cannot take anything more than one 5,25" drive. There are two free PCI slots, but one is blocked by the passive cooling of the GeForce2 Ti and the other is a shared slot with the topmost ISA, which is naturally taken since there are 3 ISA sound boards fitted.

The case is quite roomy though, even with a totally "full" configuration, and the system runs surprisingly cool. By the way I use the same ZM80D passive cooling with Radeon 9800Pro in my HTPC, so that's actually almost an overkill.

One thing to mention: the system runs Quake2-era shooters quite nicely under Windows98, but for example Hi-Octane is still quite playable (meaning: not too fast). Under DosBOX Hi-Octane and other old games new enought to support SVGA require a quite powerful PC. So, at the moment this configuration runs old games best in my household 😀.

One other thing to mention: it's funny to compare the sounds and musics of old games between the real HW and emulators/new HW. A real Roland sounds still the best with adventure games from late 80's early 90's. Even some really huge sound-banks with new hardware doesn't sound so well balanced than the card the developers used to use. Ultrasound is also a quite nice card to be used with tracker-music and some old games such as Descent and Duke Nukem 3D. The Ultrasound still doesn't offer anything that couldn't be currently reproduced identically with oher HW.