I'm fairly new around here, I've only shared one previous build on the forum, Outrigger, based around the OR840 motherboard. That system was intended to be a Celeron 300A until it derailed beyond recognition after 10 minutes into motherboard shopping. I am starting a system, and again I stray from the original intent, but this time I want to start a thread right away and document my progress. Here's my starting point: a socket 423 Pentium4 and an ABIT TH7-RAID motherboard…
I've been meaning to build a retro machine for everyday use: my work involves a lot of reading pdfs, typing LaTeX, and web browsing. The latter basically means I need a Pentium4 because its the earliest possible CPU with SSE2, allowing me to use modern browsers.
My original idea was to get a socket 478 motherboard and use a Prescott and some DDR I have laying around, install Debian and be done. I took to marktplaats—dutch ebay, basically—and found this combo of mobo, CPU, RAM and heatsink for €5 + shipping, so €12 in total. I jumped on it because a) it was cheaper than all the 478 mobos listed at the moment, b) I have a lot of leftover RDRAM from my previous build, enough to max out the board with 2GB; and c) it looks like a fun and semi-exotic build that I would like to try.
With these components as a base, the plan is to get a few things to make the build as convenient as possible for today's daily usage;
Faster CPU: overclock this one for sure, but I will keep an eye out for faster CPUs available.
Fast storage (have): SSD is a must. I have a Promise SATA300 TX2 and an old Crucial MX100 ready to go, so I am set;
Fast data transfer (need): this will be tricky/expensive. I could in theory setup an eSATA port with the aforementioned controller, but eSATA is not something I use on other computers—I would have to invest in eSATA stuff. The other option is investing in a USB3 PCI card, which will be expensive unless I am lucky and find it used. I am leaning towards USB3, to be honest. Caveat: neither of these will hit full speed due to PCI limitations, which may be even more serious due to the PCI bug I've read about on the i850 chipset;
Fast internet connection (need): this means a 1Gb LAN adapter, since that already maxes out the PCI bus;
Powerful GPU (need): this gets tricky, too. I could max out the AGP port with a GeForce 7900 or a Radeon 3850, but I think none of the AGP options provide video decoding under Linux (I'm not sure on the ATI side, I'd love to be wrong about this). The next generation GeForce/Radeon have PCI versions, which have some sort of video acceleration present under Linux, so its something to look into. I could also just use Windows, but I haven't done that in a while for a work machine.
Modern case (need): USB3 in the front would be a must, as would be a headphone plug. It must be silent, too: a couple of well placed big fans cooling stuff down. I want to steer clear of watercooling since it adds complexity/money to the build. Finally, it must look good and showcase the hardware.
Before doing all these things, though, some basic maintenance to the board will be done. Even though no cap looks bloated, ABIT was notorious for making great boards with BAD caps, so the first thing to do is replacing all of them. After that is done I will start looking into the other things.
If you have any thoughts or ideas for such a system, I would love to hear them!
Last edited by slivercr on 2017-10-21, 17:15. Edited 3 times in total.
The other option is investing in a USB3 PCI card, which will be expensive unless I am lucky and find it used. I am leaning towards USB3, to be honest. Caveat: neither of these will hit full speed due to PCI limitations, which may be even more serious due to the PCI bug I've read about on the i850 chipset;
Another user on here is using a PCIe-to-PCI adapter with a conventional PCIe USB 3.0 card. You might be able to find this for cheaper than would cost an actual PCI USB 3.0 board (which by my understanding, would likely contain a very similar PCIe-to-PCI bridge chip as would be found on such a PCIe-to-PCI adapter).
slivercr wrote:
To be perfectly honest, I was looking for CNR stuff because I never had anything 😅
The most interesting card I found is a network adapter like this one, but at that speed I think I'll pass.
The majority of CNR cards are 56K winmodems/softmodems; e.g. mostly useless. I actually had no idea there were NICs for CNR, and Intel ones, no less...
Very nice ideas for your system, there aren't many people around here who use a vintage computer for everyday tasks, I'm one of them with my Pentium 3 system.
About the graphics card, I can recommend you the Geforce 6800GT 256MB. Yes, it's not as fast as an ATI Radeon HD3850, but at least on my system, it's fast enough for video playback (to watch Youtube videos I use Minitube, both on XP and Lubuntu 14.04) and for games and GUI. Are you going to use Linux only on that machine?
I also recommend you to reduce the load on the CPU and RAM as much as possible, since RDRAM wasn't known to be a very fast performer. On my Pentium 3, I managed to reduce the strain with a Sound Blaster X-Fi XTreme Music Edition PCI sound card, that has its own RAM and hardware sound acceleration, so it doesn't use the CPU and the system RAM for playing sounds and so on. It works like a charm.
For USB 3.0, there are some PCI cards available on Ebay, mostly made by Startech. They are very expensive, but if you have the budget, why not. Sure, you can have a case with USB 3.0 front ports, but the motherboard was made before the introduction of USB 3.0, so unless you find a PCI card with additional headers, you're out of luck about that.
My Retro Daily Driver: Pentium !!!-S 1.7GHz | 3GB PC166 ECC SDRAM | Geforce 6800 Ultra 256MB | 128GB Lite-On SSD + 500GB WD Blue SSD | ESS Allegro PCI | Windows XP Professional SP3
looking4awayout wrote:Very nice ideas for your system, there aren't many people around here who use a vintage computer for everyday tasks, I'm one of […] Show full quote
Very nice ideas for your system, there aren't many people around here who use a vintage computer for everyday tasks, I'm one of them with my Pentium 3 system.
About the graphics card, I can recommend you the Geforce 6800GT 256MB. Yes, it's not as fast as an ATI Radeon HD3850, but at least on my system, it's fast enough for video playback (to watch Youtube videos I use Minitube, both on XP and Lubuntu 14.04) and for games and GUI. Are you going to use Linux only on that machine?
I also recommend you to reduce the load on the CPU and RAM as much as possible, since RDRAM wasn't known to be a very fast performer. On my Pentium 3, I managed to reduce the strain with a Sound Blaster X-Fi XTreme Music Edition PCI sound card, that has its own RAM and hardware sound acceleration, so it doesn't use the CPU and the system RAM for playing sounds and so on. It works like a charm.
For USB 3.0, there are some PCI cards available on Ebay, mostly made by Startech. They are very expensive, but if you have the budget, why not. Sure, you can have a case with USB 3.0 front ports, but the motherboard was made before the introduction of USB 3.0, so unless you find a PCI card with additional headers, you're out of luck about that.
Thanks for the comments! The concept is using mainly Linux to work, and Windows for the occasional game. We'll see what happens when I start making progress.
About the GPU: I dont really want a super fast card to play, but I do want a card that can provide video acceleration. Coming back to what you said about offloading the CPU, a card that can accelerate mpeg2/4, h.264, etc would make the machine a lot more usable. I only mentioned the GF79x0 and RHD38x0 because while they "max out" the AGP bus, their video acceleration capabilities are not supported in a Linux environment, only in Windows (I'm sure about this for the Nvidia cards, not sure for ATI cards). I do have a 6800, which supports VP1, but in Linux VDPAU support goes from VP2 onwards, which is somewhere in the GF8x00 lineup. That's why I mention either wanting to track down a PCI GF8x00 for acceleration in Linux, or sticking to Windows as a work environment, which makes me feel weird 😜 ["Reference'" for Nvidia PureVideo]
About the RAM: as far as I recall RDRAM was always touted as fast but expensive. It ultimately lost to DDR because the latter was way easier on the budget and performed similarly. The mobo has dual-channel RDRAM, plenty of bandwidth to throw around!
About the Soundcard: I will for sure stay away from the integrated one. What you mention about the X-Fi sounds interesting---I'll look into it.
About USB3: Obviously I meant USB3 from the PCI card, the mobo only offers USB1! The startech cards are the ones I've been looking at (and the only ones I know of, actually), I found a local source that offers them cheaper, but they are still on the expensive expensive. My idea was either rerouting some of the back ports into a header with an adapter cable and plug the front panel connection, or whip out the soldering iron and mod a header into the card. It will get done, though 😀
Jade Falcon wrote:
I have also seen cnr sound cards and usb cards
I will probably use up the PCI port instead of the CNR anyway, I just thought it curious because I've never used the connection. Still, the choices available don't make it too attractive for what I have in mind.
MINI-UPDATE: I've been irresponsibly trying to overclock the CPU before recapping the motherboard. It reached 2GHz with ease and allowed me to boot WindowsXP and run some benchmarks, but wouldn't let me go any higher. We'll see if the situation is improved after the recap.
Another user on here is using a PCIe-to-PCI adapter with a conventional PCIe USB 3.0 card. You might be able to find this for cheaper than would cost an actual PCI USB 3.0 board (which by my understanding, would likely contain a very similar PCIe-to-PCI bridge chip as would be found on such a PCIe-to-PCI adapter).
I'll look into this, depending on what is more convenient I will decide what to get.
SW-SSG wrote:
The majority of CNR cards are 56K winmodems/softmodems; e.g. mostly useless. I actually had no idea there were NICs for CNR, and Intel ones, no less...
I had no idea either until I looked at the possibilities yesterday or the day before 😜
CPU is sweating bullets! Can't overclock further: the max voltage setting on the motherboard is 1.85 V, selecting this setting yields a voltage that oscillates between 1.77 V max and 1.73 V min. Recapping should help with these problems, and I hope with a bit more juice, 1.8 V or so (stock is 1.75 V), I'll be able to reach 2133 MHz stably.
The RAM performs admirably, I must say. It is also overclocked, running at 125 MHz, i.e., PC1000 RD-RAM. I had to put an 8cm fan on top of it because its COOKING! I am fairly confident that the clock generator and RAM will get to 133 MHz without trouble, but then again, I cannot really test without recapping. In the event they don't, well, I've always wanted to change a clock-gen and I have been reading about a similar mod that was performed on the TH7II-RAID, which uses the same clock-gen, sooooo… 😀
The SSD seems to be performing well, too. Best performer of the system, even! During installation I had to use the Vista drivers for the Promise SATA300 TX2 Plus, but after loading them the drives were recognized without any trouble.
I'll play with W7 Starter and see if its unbearably slow, or if its a good fit. Bigger update and plenty of pictures when I recap this weekend.
A tip for a heatsink for better overclocking. 604 and 771 heatsinks will work out of the box for the most part.
What copper monstrosities—thanks for the tip!
Just keep in mind that you will need a back plate as most 604 and 771 heat sinks mount to the case and not to the motherboard.
I believe most ASUS 604 boards come with back plates.
Also keep in mind that the height of the mounts may be a tick off and you may need to adjust the mounting bolts a little.
I have successfully changed each and every capacitor in the motherboard, even ones from circuits I know I won't use like the audio output. A few pictures…
My hope was that the recap would stabilize the voltage input into the CPU, unfortunately this was not the case and I am still getting max 1.77V or so. I will check every connection again tomorrow, if something's messed up I'll fix it.
I'll look into a voltage mod and see if I can make the board output some more juice.
Since recapping didn't help increase/stabilize the voltage going into the CPU, and I need more voltage to overclock, something needed to be done.
The first attempt was naive: Willamettes have 5 pins to set voltage, and grounding all of them sets the voltage to 1.85 V. The 1.6 GHz model, and I think every 423 CPU, uses 1.75 V as a default, which means all but one of the pins are grounded.
To start I bridged that pin to another one (top right corner), effectively grounding it, hoping the motherboard would enable higher voltage options if the CPU asks for 1.85 V. No dice: max voltage setting is 1.85V, and the max I am getting is still around 1.77 V. Time to read.
The voltage regulator feeding the CPU is the HIP6301, along with companion ICs HIP6601. Looking at the datasheet of the first one, I came upon something interesting: the regulator features adjustable Voltage Droop, set by using a single resistor.
You can see the controller in this picture, set up vertically under the 4pin connector. The 7th pin on the right side, from the bottom up, is the feedback (FB) pin, basically reads off the voltage/current going into the CPU and adjusts accordingly. If you follow the trace coming out of that pin you come upon a a 2000 Ohm resistor (marked "202"), this is the resistor used for VDroop: it basically reduces the voltage going into the FB pin, and that voltage drop is substracted from the output that feeds the CPU. The datasheet says we can calculate the voltage drop with Ohm's law, assuming a 50uA load current;
VDroop = 50/1000000 * 2000 = 0.1 V, i.e., the reason I can only get 1.77 V when I ask the motherboard to give me 1.85 V. What I did was simply remove the resistor and bridge the contacts,
It works! Feeding 1.825 V to the CPU allows it to POST at 2133 MHz. Unfortunately it will not boot Windows, nor will 2080 MHz, even with 1.85 V. The fastest frequency that allowed Windows to boot was 2000 MHz, which I already had before. I want to push for more because 2000 MHz overclocks the PCI bus, which the SATA card does not like at all (I have already ran into problems because of it!)
2ghz is pushing it for such a system. Maybe a 1.9ghz or 2ghz p4 would help?
Also there are 423 to 478 adapters out there.
True, I am just getting greedy about the OC. I'll try to come up with some other mod to give the CPU even more juice, around 1.9 V or so, and see if it stabilizes.
I have also tracked down a 1.7 GHz CPU nearby, it may overclock better or worse, but at the price it is I think I'll get it just for kicks.
Also locally I found a PL-P4/W, one of the adapters you mentioned, but it only takes Willamette CPUs in 478 package. Its on the expensive side, too. If I could find an adapter that takes Northwoods I'd be happy, but it will most likely be VERY expensive.
