Now thats a tower. I love those gigantic cases. Hopefully you show some benchmarks and the guts when its done.

The "Kraken" is right!!!

That's what I call a skookum case! I loved those, but never could get hold of one back in the day, lucky find that!

jade_angel wrote:

That's what I call a skookum case! I loved those, but never could get hold of one back in the day, lucky find that!

http://www.movesurplus.com/product/10-bay-at- … -power-supply-5

They're even cheaper and there are 30 available 🤣

Oh, sweet! That neatly solves a vexing problem!

Remember those cases from way back - solid build.

Due to some driver conflicts with the CD-ROM drivers I had to remove the 40x drive, however the quad speed Creative drive works through the sound card. It does slightly bend the sound card down though, but it still works okay afaict

Trident VLB card is being replaced with a generic S3 card once it arrives. It seems there was some sort of fatal error while installing video software in Windows 3.1, and any resolution combination I try to use brings up either a black screen or a single pixel which is the cursor. Tried two different variations of the driver, one was for the AGi variant (came with card new in box) and one for the PCI bus variant. Neither worked.

cj_reha wrote:

Tried two different variations of the driver, one was for the AGi variant (came with card new in box) and one for the PCI bus variant. Neither worked.

That's a shame, hopefully the S3 card does fix it.

Build is looking great. I used to have that case, or something very similar, but had to sell it when I was moving. It was just too big to bring to the new place 🙁

Look forward to seeing it running when it's all done!

On the bright side, the S3 should almost certainly turn in better performance. Numbers for reference, from a box I'm putting together.

1CPU                           Motherboard                      Graphics card                      RAM                  OS         3DBench  Chris's VGA  Chris's SVGA  PCPlayer VGA PCP SVGA  DOOM Realtics  Quake Lo-res
2Am5x86-P75-133	Biostar MB-8433UUD	     Trident TGUI9680-1 2MB PCI	 4x16 FPM	    MS-DOS 6.22	    59.3	   42.5	       16.4	            17.1	      6.7	          1857	       12.8
3Am5x86-P75-133	Biostar MB-8433UUD	     S3 Trio64V2/DX 2MB PCI	 4x16 FPM	    MS-DOS 6.22	    72.2	   88.9(!)	       12.7(?)           18.0	      6.4	          1681	       13.8

I think I've got something mildly hinky there - note the weirdness in the SVGA benchmarks - but the S3 is much faster in most cases

Liking your build immensely! And as a neat coincidence a couple of weeks back I built a very similar Kraken 🤣 Alas the rear plastic cover on mine has some broken tabs so it's not in place.

Non-turbo setting says 'A5' but isn't connected to the motherboard. 7 segments is a bit limiting!

PC Chips M919 Rev 3.2 with 256k cache module
AMD 5x86-133
16MB FPM (2x8MB) - it doesn't seem to like my 16MB FPM sticks but maybe I'll get some 4MB 30-pin stuff later, think it can use both types at once?
Diamond Stealth II S220 Verite 2100 PCI
Adaptec 2940 Fast SCSI PCI
SB Pro CT1600
Seagate Barracuda 2GB (IIRC) - crazy jet engine noisy hard disk
Some 24x CD-ROM
200W Power Supply - just the standard one that came with the case

DOS 6 installed like a charm, but the COM ports are troublesome and my serial and bus mice can't be found - tried a few things, including the original mouse driver that came with the mouse, CTMOUSE and other MS drivers, but no go. Need to stick a serial controller in.

Good news: The S3 card came today, and the drivers work perfectly. It's an S3 805, by the way.

All systems are a go, is it benchmarking time? 😀

Just suggest programs I can run and I'll put them on some floppies and run 'em.

Benchmarking results.

I used Phil's DOS benchmarking pack, by the way. Evidently the Creative 4X CD-ROM drive reads burned CD-Rs quite seamlessly. It especially loves Verbatim and Memorex brands. 🤣 🤣

Superscape benchmark (3DBENCH): 62.5 FPS
Superscape benchmark (3DBENCH2): 60.8 FPS
Chris's 3D Benchmark: 33.9 FPS (56.5 Chris's score)
Chris's 3D SVGA Benchmark: 8.1 FPS (13.5 Chris's score)
Speedsys: 37.48

Wow, those are actually really good numbers!

What's the chipset on the motherboard, BTW?

jade_angel wrote:

Wow, those are actually really good numbers!

What's the chipset on the motherboard, BTW?

UMC UM8498F 😀

The main reason I'm asking is that your benchmark scores are actually quite a bit above mine, despite a theoretically slower CPU. Time to investigate 😀

jade_angel wrote:

The main reason I'm asking is that your benchmark scores are actually quite a bit above mine, despite a theoretically slower CPU. Time to investigate 😀

Specs of the comparative build?

I actually think the video card is so fast the hard drive/I/O controller is bottlenecking it, Doom runs very fast but sometimes freezes for a split second while the hard drive loads.

My setup is as follows:

CPU: AMD 5x86/133, Write-back cache
RAM: 64MB 60ns FPM (4x16MB)
Motherboard: Biostar MB8433UUD (UMC 8886), 512k L2.
Video: S3 Trio64V2/DX 2MB PCI
NIC: 3Com 3c905C PCI
Audio: Yamaha Audician 32 with Dreamblaster S1
Disk: 4GB industrial CF in adapter
Optical: 48x CD-RW
IO Controller: Onboard, PCI

That's why I'm a bit confused - faster CPU, WB cache... Either I'm doing something really wrong or you're doing something really right, or both!