Wow! Beautiful looking build.

havli wrote:

Hello.

and now it has reached the final state - there is simply nothing to upgrade anymore. 😁

Actually u could upgrade the processor to a 3200+ and the mainboard to something with nforce2 ultra.

Nahkri wrote:

Actually u could upgrade the processor to a 3200+ and the mainboard to something with nforce2 ultra.

3200+ would be fairly minimal performance boost (if the board even supports 400FSB), and afaik nForce 2 doesn't do 3.3V AGP. 😊

To havli: very nice build you've got there indeed. I was wondering why none of the cards had I/O shields and then saw the case. 😲 Did that take very long to build?

Fantastic looking machine, thanks for sharing!

Thank you 😀

I started building this case back in 2008 - I had plenty of free time then. Still it took dozens of hours to build.
Yeah - the I/O shield is part of the case and cards must be mounted directly. It isn't very flexible when changing HW configuration of the PC. And I did that couple if times already, this is photo of the original I/O plate. Instead of the 29160N and SB Live! there were two Voodoo2 accelerators and LAN card at the bottom.

As for the Barton 3200+ upgrade:
I need MB with AGP 2x (3,3V) support for the Voodoo5. The most modern chipsets supporting it are VIA KT333, SiS 745 (both Athlon XP) and SiS 645 (P4 Northwood). I have tested all of them and the KT333 seems to be the best... plus Epox 8K5A3+ is the best KT333 board. 😁
Barton 3200+ should work there, but KT333 doesn't have AGP/PCI divider for FSB 400. I don't want to risk damage to the V5 with raised AGP clock. The best option for CPU upgrade would be unlocked AXP-M running at 2,4+ GHz and still keeping FSB 333.
http://www.abload.de/img/epox_xp-m6s37k.png (testing of FSB 400 when I bought the board)

NForce2 boards can be modded to work with Voodoo5 AGP, but thats not what I want. Also I believe the possibility of damaging both V5 and MB is quite significant in the long term.

I always wondered what happened to these see-through cases. I remember seeing them for sale around 2005 or so but they seem to have disappeared.

Now you've tempted me to start another project and begin my search for that case. Dammit!

Very nice build btw 😀

Beautiful case, havli! You made that yourself? Must've taken a long time to get it built.

Yes, it is my own design. Basically classic midi-tower, just a bit longer. Nothing special (apart of the material). 😀
I don't remember how long exactly it took to build... but it was a lot. Acrylic glass is tricky material to work with.

philscomputerlab wrote:

I always wondered what happened to these see-through cases. I remember seeing them for sale around 2005 or so but they seem to have disappeared.

I recall seeing some clear acrylic mid-towers by Logisys on Newegg around a couple years ago. I went to check and see if Newegg still had them and they're no longer on there! 😒

AlphaDangerDen wrote:

philscomputerlab wrote:

I always wondered what happened to these see-through cases. I remember seeing them for sale around 2005 or so but they seem to have disappeared.

I recall seeing some clear acrylic mid-towers by Logisys on Newegg around a couple years ago. I went to check and see if Newegg still had them and they're no longer on there! 😒

I once had one of those cases, very nice but good luck keeping them clean and can get scratched. Amazon might have one here or there.

Incredible setup! I love it
It's superb! I hope to do a similar platform in the future
Is very hard to find a Voodoo 5 at a good price and even more difficult to find a good VIA KT333 mainboard
I'm very interested about your case
how you open it?

Yeah, Voodoo5 is very expensive nowadays. Too bad I was too lazy to get few spare while the were still affordable. At the moment I have "only" three - one AGP, one PCI and one defective AGP which need primary VSA-100 replaced.

The case is actually very easy to open/close. There are 16 M4 bolts holding the left side, nuts are soldered from the inside to 8 metal parts visible at the photo. (sorry, I'm not very good at describing construction details in english 🤣 )
Classic home-made design I would say. No glue, only bolts... many. If necessary this case can be disassembled.

Cool. One of my friends in NL used to impress everyone at LAN parties with a case like that with lots of LEDs.

I had an ABII DiGiDiCe: another friend of mine designed it so I got it really cheap. It was a really cool barebone.