Nice mashup of parts, you should post some pics of it! So what is the disk layout like exactly? Is this right?

Grub bootloader
Primary - Windows 2000
Secondary - Debian
and then a CF with DOS 6.22?

Was curious why you went with a CF card for DOS instead of just chopping the drive up a bit more and putting DOS on its own partition?

ratfink wrote:

Soyo 845 ISA motherboard [agp 8x, 4 pci, 3 isa]

...NOW I'm interested. Pics please!

The Soyo P4 board is very likely this one:

http://www.baber.com/baber/411/soyo_sy-p4i-845pe-isa.htm

For a time I really wanted this motherboard, but seeing how expensive it was I eventually settled for the standard P4I-845PE (which I still have).

@ratfink: There are FX5500 cards with just a passive heatsink that's also low-profile. This is the one I have:

A card like this would allow you to regain use of the two PCI slots currently blocked by the AM2 heatsink.

So you want a completely passively cooled box? With a P4? Not saying it isn't possible, but I don't think sticking a couple of huge passive heatsinks in a standard ATX case is gonna work.

Even a little bit of airflow helps a huge amount, and IMO a completely quiet computer isn't necessary for music work. I've recorded in my office with my not-loud-but-not-really-quiet-either-PC on, with sensitive microphones, and the noise wasn't disruptive.

The 5500 shouldn't need an insane heatsink; my FX 5200 (they have the same GPU) is passive (it looks sort of like the Voodoo3 heatsink) and doesn't get burner-hot even when running 3DMark. I'm not sure, however, if you can still buy such heatsinks as aftermarket parts, but you should be able to find a complete FX 5200/5500 with passive sink for sale.

To be honest with the fx5500, I'm not especially wedded to using a low-end gf5 card, it was more a case of using what I had - the fastest card I had/have with passive cooling by design is probably a matrox g200, but the fx5500 had a dead fan so was a candidate for tinkering and I thought would be better for 2000.

It's a few years since I last succeeded in getting nvidia's linux graphics drivers working on a machine - no intention of going there again soon, I just take whatever the default is. But I'd be interested to know whether a newer card would give a better linux [2D] experience and/or whether there's any accurate and comprehensive instructions for installing the drivers. 😀

Sounds like the am2 heatsink was over the top 🤣. But I'm not sure what use a second card would be without installing 98, which I hadn't planned on [yet]. Had been wondering about an NV1 maybe - that would be in keeping with the gestalt nature of this box: not worth having a box dedicated to such a card, but as an addon to a multi-purpose machine it might be interesting. I wonder if 98se will work with 2gb ram installed, and booting from a sata drive?

Point taken about the p4 and cooling, the Sonic Tower gets a bit warm if i turn off the overhead case fans. I don't know if the current noise level is an issue, I know my son turns off various things when he's recording.

@fyy:

The IDE HD has three partitions:
2gb - must be the remnant of a previous usage, this is where boot.ini etc are
20gb - where 2000 lives
130gb - debian
4gb - swap space

I used a CF card for DOS because the hard drive was already set up with 2000 and debian by the time I decided on DOS. Plus I thought dos was already on the CF card!

Cable management and photographing computer gear are not my strong points but I'll attempt a photo later 🤣.

@jayceebee4:

Yeah that's the one - I see them on ebay for mad prices these days; mine was about £50 a few years ago, boxed and hardly used [possibly not used at all from its condition] so I thought it was worth it. Never found it especially useful before but I'm quite taken with it now. The PAS16 doesn't even get detected by 2000 as far as I can tell, and obviously dos doesn't use the m-audio. So it feels like 2 computers in one.

I've never seen 98 like booting on >512MB; there are supposed to be hacks to remedy that though. IME it will attempt to boot and then throw errors and fail. I don't think it cares about SATA vs PATA unless it needs drivers for the SATA controller (just like XP), but many boards will emulate PATA/IDE for SATA and the OS shouldn't know the difference.

As far as the nVidia + Linux situation, I haven't toyed around with a complete install of Linux in years, but Puppy Linux and other bootables from recent years will properly detect and install/configure nv drivers for my FX 5800 automagically, and that will at least work for x.org and whatnot; never tried gaming with it though. I've had generally good luck with nv + linux over the years, FWIW.

Yeah, without gaming the open source driver should be fine; no need to install the proprietary nVidia drivers.

For 98 on >512MB
http://www.thpc.info/ram/vcache98.html

My own recollection is that the total of AGP window and Vcache must not exceed 512MB - so with a 256MB AGP aperture (typical max setting) the Vcache must be limited to a maximum of 256MB

Matth79 wrote:

For 98 on >512MB
http://www.thpc.info/ram/vcache98.html

My own recollection is that the total of AGP window and Vcache must not exceed 512MB - so with a 256MB AGP aperture (typical max setting) the Vcache must be limited to a maximum of 256MB

I haven't played around with this on a large memory machine, but I know that Win98SE had no problems booting up on my i845 with 512MB RAM and a 128MB AGP card. It did, however, have issues with anything over 512MB RAM, even with AGP aperture set low (I've seen this on two machines, the other with an i875p). There's also generally no real benefit to setting AGP aperture to insane values like 256MB either (so if that's what's in the way of setting up your machine, I'd dump it without hesitation) - I'll just link to myself to save re-typing: AGP Aperture Size and video performance!

The standard am2 heatsink is huge (and probably heavy). Thermal tape might not hold it for so long.

You could always use an old Socket 7 or 370 fan on the old stock Heatsink. Tend to have a few around unused from dead systems and with a little bit of grease they stop chattering. Plus they usually just screw right into the HS

filipetolhuizen wrote:

The standard am2 heatsink is huge (and probably heavy). Thermal tape might not hold it for so long.

Super glue would do. At least that was the way I used a Pentium 4 heatsink (the 478 one) on a old 500MHz Celeron (on PGA370). 😀