Awesome! Pure hardware porn, just like you say 🤣 .

Gotta love them Enlight cases! 😀

havli wrote:

Nice build... and with rare components.
PII 450 SECC1 is not that common. And 200SBi - quite hard to get. Let me guess - is it from Ebay, Canada? 😀 There were few of them for sale last year.

Thanks! I got it in March of 2013 from a US-based Ebay user. I just checked and I guess he's no longer a registered eBay member.

Beautiful system 😀

Quantum3D Obsidian 200SBI 24MB PCI is such a badass of a card.

Looks great. CT2950 will give you garbled MIDI via the DB header, unfortunately.

bjt wrote:

Looks great. CT2950 will give you garbled MIDI via the DB header, unfortunately.

Thanks! Yeah, it is a rev 4.13 chip on there but so far so good with the games I've tried.

Artex wrote:

bjt wrote:

Looks great. CT2950 will give you garbled MIDI via the DB header, unfortunately.

Thanks! Yeah, it is a rev 4.13 chip on there but so far so good with the games I've tried.

You managed to not get any hanging notes at all using this card? My CT2950 had one big continuos hanging note in hexen and also affected doom making the games unplayable when using my DB50XG for midi.

borgie83 wrote:

Artex wrote:

bjt wrote:

Looks great. CT2950 will give you garbled MIDI via the DB header, unfortunately.

Thanks! Yeah, it is a rev 4.13 chip on there but so far so good with the games I've tried.

You managed to not get any hanging notes at all using this card? My CT2950 had one big continuos hanging note in hexen and also affected doom making the games unplayable when using my DB50XG for midi.

I've tried DOOM, DOOM 2, Heretic, Duke 3d and Rott so far. I haven't seen the issue yet. I was kind of surprised myself knowing the revision.

Nice machine. For a while i wanted to build a machine for each Microsoft Windows release year. 1998 was one of them.
In the end i changed it to first quarter 1999 and eventually just to 1999. Not that it made a big difference but it allowed me to up the CPU quite a bit and the graphics card too.

Thanks for all the compliments everyone! Greatly appreciated! So much fun to get these up and running each week.

I think the metal PII sticker you used truly matches the rock solid construction of the Enlight PC case. I love PC case stickers, its my version of stamp collecting. You can easily find a bunch of new ones online still.

computergeek92 wrote:

I think the metal PII sticker you used truly matches the rock solid construction of the Enlight PC case. I love PC case stickers, its my version of stamp collecting. You can easily find a bunch of new ones online still.

Hahah. Ya know, I totally agree. Much better than the flimsy paper-thin 'stickers' you see out there. Glad you noticed this subtle detail!

That is the most fantastic 98 system ever. Hats off sir! In total agreement with the "Fat stickers" too for cases, stamp collecting indeed, bought many a case from the bootsale purely on the strenght of the reto stickers on the case. 😀

Artex wrote:

Alrighty folks... Enough waiting... On with the show! […]
Show full quote

Alrighty folks... Enough waiting... On with the show!

We all know (or should know) that 1998 was a great year in computing - not only on the software (gaming) side of things, but on the hardware side of things as well. 3DFX released their Voodoo2 chipset and killed it performance-wise across the board.

Another up-and-comer, NVIDIA, released their Twin-Texel powerhouse - the Riva TNT chip - which handled both 2D and 3D in a single card, and could handle 32-bit color as well (vs the Voodoo2's 16-bit). The drawbacks of this card were of course the fact that Glide support for the TNT card was non-existant, and use of the Direct3D renderer at this point in time was fairly limited as well. I also remember fighting the TNT card on a Super 7 chipset. Finally, you also needed a pretty powerful CPU to get the performance out of these cards.

So my goal with this build was simple.. Let's try to stay time-period specific, using hardware released in 1998. Why not get the benefit of *both* Direct3D and Glide by using a 2D/3D Riva TNT card (Diamond Viper V550 16MB AGP) and some kind of 3DFX solution as well. Then I thought, "how can I up the "bad-ass" factor of this system?" Back in the day I had two 12MB Voodoo2's connected for 1024x768 SLI gaming. Of course everyone knows the cool/retro factor of that setup, but why not amp things up a bit?

I dug through my collection of hardware and found a little (well, not really little) diamond in the rough - my Quantum3D Obsidian 200SBI - the single card SLI solution that superceded the "stacked" X-24 board in 1998. In my opinion, this is a better design of the card since the X-24 was prone to heat issues. I popped open my boxed X-24, grabbed the medusa cable and got to work. Thankfully this classic Enlight EN-7237 case actually fits this giant card!

I decided to go with the Pentium II 450 Slot 1 processor to pump out enough juice to push these cards, and I paired with my rock-stable Asus P2B 440BX chipset motherboard. I decided to scale back a little bit with the sound card for this build, using a PnP Sound Blaster 16 but I still made use of a Roland SCD-15/SCB-55 GM daughterboard to preserve the excellent MIDI soundtracks for games that used it. On the memory front I chose a single 128MB stick (way overkill) and a large 120GB Western Digital spindle drive to store the heaps of ISO's I've made. To round things out, a USB 2.0 card, NIC, and CD-ROM.

Case: Enlight Enlight EN-7237 (4-Bay)
Power Supply: Enlight HPC250-G2 250W
Motherboard: Asus P2B Rev. 1.02 (Intel 440BX)
Processor: Intel Pentium II 450Mhz (SLOT 1)
Cooling: Just Cooler SECC Pentium II Cooling Fan & Heatsink

Network: Network Everywhere NC100 10/100 PCI Adapter

Misc: Belkin F5U220 Rev. 3 5-Port USB 2.0 PCI Interface Card

Storage:
Western Digital 120GB Hard Drive (WD1200BB)
3.5" Floppy Drive
LG CRD-8480C 20X-48X IDE CD-ROM

Memory:
1x128MB PC133 6NS 3.3V NON ECC SDRAM

Audio:
Creative CT-2950 Sound Blaster 16 PnP
Roland SCD-15/SCB-55 General Midi Daughterboard

Video:
Diamond Viper V550 16MB AGP (Nvidia RIVA TNT)
Quantum3D Obsidian 200SBI 24MB PCI (2 x 3DFX Voodoo2)

Onto the hardware Pr0n!

Diamond Viper V550 16MB AGP

Intel Pentium II 450

Beautiful Beige!

There she is - the bad-ass 200Sbi.

"Is that a Medusa cable coming out of the back of your PC, or are you just happy to see me?" 😎

Creative Sound Blaster 16 PnP (CT-2950)

Roland SCD-15/SCB-55 GM Daughterboard

Mounted!

Asus P2B Rev 1.02 (Intel 440BX for the win!)

Quantum3D Obsidian Driver

WOW awesome system!!! And awesome pictures!! The 200SBI is such a cool card, I've gotten to the point where I don't really think I'll be collecting anything really other than more Q3D hardware because it's so amazing. On a side note, what camera/lens did you use for these photos? They came out SO good!!!

I believe that was my Sony DSC-RX100M2 at that point. Thanks for the feedback!

Looks great. I strongly recommend building some kind of support for the 200Sbi. It's very easy for long cards like that to warp with gravity.

Artex wrote:

I believe that was my Sony DSC-RX100M2 at that point. Thanks for the feedback!

Absolutely!! Are you on Retro Machines on Facebook?

TheeRaccoon wrote:

Artex wrote:

I believe that was my Sony DSC-RX100M2 at that point. Thanks for the feedback!

Absolutely!! Are you on Retro Machines on Facebook?

I'm not. Unfortunately with the arrival of my kiddo in 2015 I haven't had a whole lot of time to dedicate to these builds. Although I am starting to piece together a system around my Cyrix 5x86 133 chip that's been recently refurbished back to health.

Artex wrote:

TheeRaccoon wrote:

Artex wrote:

I believe that was my Sony DSC-RX100M2 at that point. Thanks for the feedback!

Absolutely!! Are you on Retro Machines on Facebook?

I'm not. Unfortunately with the arrival of my kiddo in 2015 I haven't had a whole lot of time to dedicate to these builds. Although I am starting to piece together a system around my Cyrix 5x86 133 chip that's been recently refurbished back to health.

Totally get it. And that's awesome!! I would like to build a 486 system sometime in the future but I'm really caught up in late 90's hardware as of these past few years haha.