That is a solid looking setup! Swap in a GeForce 2 of some sort or a Voodoo3, between 256-512mb of ram, some dusting and a case fan and you are pretty much set.

Thanks, ODwilly.

Aaaand I should also mention I have some fresh caps in my near future.

As your no doubt aware, Slot 1 makes good late Dos/9x cross over PC.
I would:
ATI Rage Pro Turbo (Might go into my Pentium 200..) - Upgrade to a GeForce 4 ti4600 or below, so you have good D3d gaming and DOS compatibility
Netgear NIC with dead spider - keep both, NIC for easy file transfers, spider as a warning to other critters!
Voice modem - Useless, unless nostalgic value
Creative Labs 24x speed CD-ROM - CD drive is a CD drive is a CD drive.
Good PCI sound card for 9x, Audigy 2 ZS is my goto.
ISA soundcard for DOS. personally AWE64, lack of OPL isn't a big deal as you have earlier PC's for Adlib gaming

Hey, chinny22. Good to hear from you.

At the moment, I am shooting for a rather small window of gaming with this one - maybe 1998-2000/2001. I am using a Pentium 200 (and earlier builds) for most DOS applications. This is mostly a Windows 98 machine, but I do like crossover options for the systems - so I might try to grab some very late DOS compatibility. We'll see.

So at the moment, I am looking at something like Voodoo3/TNT2 Ultra/GeForce 2-4 for video.

This system as it was built back when I used it was:
Pentium III 500 MHz
128MB->256MB of RAM
Matrox G200->Riva TNT2 Ultra->Geforce DDR
Voodoo 2 (8 MB) SLI
Diamond Monster MX300 (Vortex2) with AWE 64 Gold

I jumped to a CUSL2 with Socket 370 P3 700Mhz at the very early 2000s (somewhere in there), but I imagine I will look to get this system up and running and potentially push some "slotket" upgrade on it at some point.

For now, however, I will take a look at what is in the card collection and build what I can.

There was actually a bit of time where the raw clock of the TNT2 Ultra was actually faster than the new GeForce T&L due to older games not supporting T&L, but I am going to assume going further down the line in GeForces would reclaim that raw clock speed. When I was "of the era," I was mostly concerned about moving forward.

Nice looking system.
Its simple and likely very reliable with a wide range of use.

I'd say (if you play games) a video card upgrade may be in order. A mx440 sound like a nice idea. Maybe a GF2 or voodoo3000.

I wouldn't really go with a MX440, especially since that's a EpoX board, and for some reason MX440 will display a garbled screen on boards from that era.

At least, my EP-7KXA does that right after the main post screen and until Windows 98 boots into the usual VGA mode.

I stripped out the cards and the mobo/proc from the case. Wow! Apparently I was in a hurry to get this one out of the way at my parents house when I upgraded the lowest common denominator computer (this one) at the time. The screws didn't fit the standoffs and were jammed in. Despite how embarrassing this is, I think it is worth noting that this *most* likely happened because I was on the verge of tossing everything out for recycling... but this one somehow survived - It was most likely moved to the attic at my parents' because they weren't sure what I wanted to do with it.

After getting the screws out of the standoffs, I blew out the processor and the surface of the mobo with some compressed air. I think there were a few intermittent contact issues with the processor and motherboard at the start - I had some non-boot instances and some freezes. I dropped down to 1 stick of RAM and threw in an ATI Rage Mach 64 that was hanging out nearby. Not willing to admit it was just the capacitors and after making sure the proc was once again secured properly, I fired up.

I used a "bench" computer PSU, placed the board on a digikey box (nice, low profile), and fired up (bad cap still in circuit).

Hmm. I pulled a support page for Epox from archive.org, and it looks like this isn't quite the most recent BIOS.
(7/26/2000 flashed vs 9/20/2000 on website. Apparently, the latest version adds 65 GB drive support)

BIOS played nice. I was able to reboot a few times after tweaking/saving settings.

So now I gotta decide what direction I want to go with the caps. I am tempted to just ignore the problem. Then I think, "well, I could replace the one cap." Then I think, "Might as well replace them all if you are going to bother..."

I suppose it depends on what sort of time commitment I want to make.

After coming to terms with reality (and installing Windows 98 SE just to have a bit of fun), I have decided to recap the board & have started the cap map, removal, and documentation process.

The green caps (including the one that vented) are Tayeh caps, and are known to be among the usual suspects during the cap plague.

Going to replace all electrolytics on the board. I think I have somewhere around 38. Hopefully the quantity + the quality of the replacements I order won't cost too much.

I encountered some iffy cold boots (black screen, power down, wiggle AGP card a bit, try again, repeat, then it finally comes up after a few tries), and laughed because yeah, there was no way I was going to get past the fact I need to replace the capacitors.

All capacitors have been replaced on the motherboard. I used Panasonic FR for the big ones. Installed a Voodoo 3, booted Windows 98 second edition, and messed around with Unreal Tournament.

Case has been cleaned out and motherboard mounted. I found some RAM to put in it. The BX board is naturally quite old and can only use half of one particular stick, but thanks to two additional sticks, the RAM is up to 256 MB.

Setbacks -
1: The 40 GB hard drive that I found in my garage has started slamming the head into the side of the drive. It recovers after a bit of this, but this early warning sign gives me no reason to proceed with this drive, sadly.
2: I have a fairly decent PATA Seagate 250 GB drive that could serve as a 137 GB drive to max out Windows 98 S.E., however the BIOS hangs when trying to detect it. I know I don't have the latest BIOS installed, however the final BIOS adds support for drives up to (only) 65 GB. So I am a bit undecided as to what I want to do next. I may have some other drives around in the 20-40 GB range. We'll see.

They sell new 80 and 160gb IDE drives on ebay for $14 shipped still. I think they are NOS oem stock left over. EDIT: I think that also includes 40gb

CkRtech wrote:

All capacitors have been replaced on the motherboard. I used Panasonic FR for the big ones. Installed a Voodoo 3, booted Windows […]
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All capacitors have been replaced on the motherboard. I used Panasonic FR for the big ones. Installed a Voodoo 3, booted Windows 98 second edition, and messed around with Unreal Tournament.

Slot1.jpg

Case has been cleaned out and motherboard mounted. I found some RAM to put in it. The BX board is naturally quite old and can only use half of one particular stick, but thanks to two additional sticks, the RAM is up to 256 MB.

Setbacks -
1: The 40 GB hard drive that I found in my garage has started slamming the head into the side of the drive. It recovers after a bit of this, but this early warning sign gives me no reason to proceed with this drive, sadly.
2: I have a fairly decent PATA Seagate 250 GB drive that could serve as a 137 GB drive to max out Windows 98 S.E., however the BIOS hangs when trying to detect it. I know I don't have the latest BIOS installed, however the final BIOS adds support for drives up to (only) 65 GB. So I am a bit undecided as to what I want to do next. I may have some other drives around in the 20-40 GB range. We'll see.

Unless you can use the space in another machine, I'd recommend putting a limit on the drive with SeaTools and then moving on.

Nice looking recap job.

Had a stroke of good luck.

I Googled around and found the final BIOS revision for the board (Epox EP-BX3) from September 2000. I figured it was worth flashing since it involved larger drive support (65 GB as mentioned in the changelog). Fortunately, this update resolved the BIOS freeze when detecting/POSTing with the 250 GB hard drive hooked up. It detected it and reported the capacity as the 128/137/139 Max.

gdjacobs wrote:

Unless you can use the space in another machine, I'd recommend putting a limit on the drive with SeaTools and then moving on.

Fortunately, the BIOS update let me finally boot up and limit the drive capacity, partition, format, and install Windows 98 S.E. Prior to that, it wanted nothing to do with the drive. Locks during HDD Auto detection, manual Primary Master geometry, POSTing - the works.

Now installing Shogo: Mobile Armor Division. I'll mess around with the system a bit and then look to use the screws on the DVD drive (my old slot-loading Pioneer 106S) and the floppy drive.

After that, I will have to decide on which power supply to use.

Jade Falcon wrote:

Nice looking recap job.

Thanks!

Cleaned out PSU I planned on using for this build. It had a ton of dust. Going to put it under load and see how it does running an actual system.

Things are shaping up, but I have to say that the old Intel stock fan is... loud. Perhaps I will look into alternative Slot 1 CPU coolers for the long term.

In the process of recapping the power supply. Found a burned out resistor near the PWM IC. You can see the terrible glue they used in the surrounding area. Tough to get a reading on the resistor. I have it out of circuit and am going to try to sand the legs a bit.

CkRtech wrote:

1: The 40 GB hard drive that I found in my garage has started slamming the head into the side of the drive. It recovers after a bit of this, but this early warning sign gives me no reason to proceed with this drive, sadly.

Could be just that it wasn't started in a while. I have a WD400BB that would slam the head at seeking for a few times when I first powered it up but then it worked fine ever since. Try running it a bit longer and see what happens 😁

CkRtech wrote:

In the process of recapping the power supply. Found a burned out resistor near the PWM IC. You can see the terrible glue they used in the surrounding area. Tough to get a reading on the resistor. I have it out of circuit and am going to try to sand the legs a bit.

I would suggest finding the supervisory IC, locating a datasheet for it, and checking which trace corresponds to the current sense pins. If the resistor is used for current sense, it will be quite small, so you can sanity check your results.

gdjacobs wrote:

CkRtech wrote:

In the process of recapping the power supply. Found a burned out resistor near the PWM IC. You can see the terrible glue they used in the surrounding area. Tough to get a reading on the resistor. I have it out of circuit and am going to try to sand the legs a bit.

I would suggest finding the supervisory IC, locating a datasheet for it, and checking which trace corresponds to the current sense pins. If the resistor is used for current sense, it will be quite small, so you can sanity check your results.

So the PWM is a TL494 IC, and that resistor has one end tied into the secondary auxiliary rail - on the side that hits pin 12 (Vcc) of the IC. Momaka of badcaps mentioned that of the half bridge PSU schematics he has, most of them tend to use a 1.5kOhm resistor there. So I will probably pick up a 1.5k, 2 watt resistor...and perhaps a few others with some lower resistance just to have on hand. I'll throw them in with the cart of caps. Meanwhile, I gotta clean off the various old glue spots that are turning brown (and in this case, black).

PWM - http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/tl494.pdf