VOGONS


First post, by Ozzuneoj

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Rank l33t
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l33t

I've been wanting to put this one together for a while and I'm finally doing it! Last year I built a new system for an old acquaintance of mine. I had built him a computer 8-9 years ago using a mix of decent parts I had laying around, and he was finally ready to upgrade. It still worked great, it was just not powerful enough to upgrade to Windows 10.

He gave me the old machine and to my amazement, it contained my old EPoX 9NDA3J! This was a fantastic Socket 939 board using the Nforce 3 Ultra chipset. It was my last AGP board, my last GREEN board and my last single-core equipped board. I was quite happy to see it back, as it has many nice features, and who here doesn't like to see one of their old high-end parts alive and kicking after 12 years?

It had always been equipped with an Athlon 64 3000+ 1.8Ghz single core, but when I learned that a late Beta BIOS supported X2 processors, I began to formulate a new build in my mind. 😒

I had an X2 4200+ which came from my brother's old Abit AN8 32x. Since that board died and I've had a terrible time bringing it back to life, I decided to pass the CPU on to my old EPoX.

This is turning into a novel though, so I'll just say I found a fantastic deal on a BFG 6800 GT OC AGP on ebay last year ($20 shipped) and it is the perfect card for this build, since I actually owned an identical card and used it in this board back then. Here are the current specs of this build. I'm currently trying to get it running (first time I've installed XP in a few years!), so these may change, but here goes:

EPoX 9NDA3J Nforce 3 Ultra with latest Beta BIOS
Athlon 64 X2 4200+ 2.4Ghz Dual Core (cooled by the Thermalright Ultra-90 I used on MY 4200+ after I upgraded to an Nforce 4 Ultra)
3GB DDR-400 SDRAM (2x1GB+2x512MB)
BFG 6800GT OC 256MB AGP ($20)
16GB Sandisk U100 SATA SSD (harvested from a Chromebook I got for parts and resold for way more than it was worth; will be sufficient for Windows XP with unofficial SP4 and some games and applications)
160GB Seagate 7200.10 ATA-133 HDD (will have a small partition containing Windows 98SE and be used for mass storage of larger games and files)
52x CD-RW (not sure what brand, it was in the case still from 10 years ago, it seems to work)
Panasonic JU-455-5 ACG 5.25" 360k Floppy (got cheap on ebay in a lot of 4 5.25" drives that were horribly packed and all were damaged except for this one... will probably need to use a Win98 partition for this)
Panasonic 3.5" Floppy
Seasonic 350ET 80 Plus Bronze PSU (+5v=20a, +12v1=17a, +12v2=17a... someone let me know if you think this won't be enough for this system)

I'm doing this build in hopes of keeping it as fully equipped and usable XP+98SE system that will run just about anything that isn't speed sensitive, while also having parallel, serial, 3.5 and 5.25 floppy support. Since I still have a free SATA port I've also considered putting another SSD in it with Windows 10 installed so I can play around with running a truly modern OS on what would have been a really awesome system in 2005. I wonder how it'd handle some modern indie games, or Minecraft. 😀

So far, the biggest hiccup I've had is that the system seems picky about memory, and the detected amount of memory changes at POST some times with certain sticks installed. I'm thinking either the clips on the RAM slots are either (they don't always click tight), or there are just some issues with the RAM I've been trying to use. So I've dropped to 2x1GB for now.

The second issue that I just noticed is that it seems to only support a single floppy at a time... which is real strange IMO. It only has settings for a single drive in the BIOS. It isn't a huge deal, as I have a USB floppy I can use on this or my main PC and it supports 720k or 1.4MB disks. If I'm doing a lot of work with one size disk or the other, I'll just make sure that one is selected. Another possibility is that I could install one of my LS-120 drives in place of the 3.5" floppy and make the system even more awesome... 😁

I'll post pics of this system once I get it up and running fully. XP is now installed, I just need to install drivers and the unofficial SP4 pack from here: https://ryanvm.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10321

EDIT: Forgot to mention. I'll probably use the onboard audio for now, but may switch it out for an X-Fi extreme music since I have a few laying around. If I wanted to be really crazy I could throw in a Vortex 2 for 98Se, but to be honest, I don't see myself playing too many A3D-ready games on such a new system.

Now for some blitting from the back buffer.