First post, by jheronimus
- Rank
- Oldbie
Hi, all
Finally got everything I needed for a SS7 build! Namely:
An AMD K6-3+ 400 ATZ
I got this from eBay and really excited about this CPU. Not only is it interesting because I can mess around with 386 speeds on it, but it actually should be roughly in the ballpark of PII@233 that was my main gaming machine back in my childhood.
I thought about overclocking it to 550MHz or so, but AFAIK that would make setmul less effective or even unusable. Anyways, there's not a lot of benefit in such speed bump for me — it probably still wouldn't be able to run Deus Ex or Black & White properly — both games are really P3 territory.
A Lucky Star 5MVP3 rev 4.0 motherboard
Probably, the most common SS7 motherboard in Russia. Lucky Star is a brand that was often used by a really popular OEM vendor called Formoza and some of these boards are even reported to be assembled in Moscow. I have probably seven of their boards, mostly 430VX and 430TX. I actually even have two of these 5MVP3's 😀.
The issue with this one is that it has a non-standard PS/2 pinout. Schematics exist to make a proper header, but for me it was easier to either get another board or a board with the proper header. Which I ended up getting.
Rev 4.0 is supposed to be really stable (as opposed to less common rev 2.0), but it definitely gave me some issues. ACPI is enabled by default in BIOS, which causes Windows to freeze at boot. Took me three days to figure that out 😀
PowerColor EvilKing 3 Pro — a Voodoo 3 3000 — AGP 2x, 16MB
Never had the chance to use this card extensively, so I'm really curious. I was lucky that this card barely has any 3DFX or Voodoo logos, which is why I was able to get it for ridiculous 100 RUB (1,75USD).
Actually, I have a lot of other GPUs for this system:
- NVIDIA TNT2@16MB;
- ATI Rage Pro@16MB;
- ATI Rage 128 Pro@16MB — the card one of the 5MVP3 boards came with;
- 3DFX Voodoo Banshee;
- 2x 3DFX Voodoo 2 — though I don't have an SLI cable yet.
I NVIDIA would give me 32bit color, but I had a Vanta on my Pentium machine back then, so I really wanted to try Voodoo for mid to late Win9x gaming.
SoundBlaster 16 CT2230
This is the best SoundBlaster that I have. True OPL3, doesn't have hanging note bugs in Doom-based games and has really clean output. I'm pairing it with a DreamBlaster X2.
Otherwise the specs are:
- 2x128MB SDRAM@133. I know I can use up to 384MB, but I don't have three sticks of PC-133 memory, and this board doesn't allow me to mix it with PC-100 (unlike an Asus 440BX board that I have). Anyways, even 256MB is probably an overkill for this system.
- 80GB HDD
- 3COM 3C905 NIC
- Asus CRW-3212A 40x CD-RW
Here's a quick photo of the finished build:
I really like this case: it has a proper three digit MHz indicator (but no turbo button) and a nice sliding door that covers the CD and floppy drives and actually provides some pretty good sound isolation that really helps with a 40x CD drive. Also, this is a case from another Formoza rig. My childhood P2 machine had the same case — only in ATX.
At this point I've only finished the actual build and OS installation. I need to connect this machine to my network — either by moving it to another room or by getting a really long Ethernet cable 😀 After that I'll be able to mess around with software for AMD K6, benchmarks and games.