First post, by Woolie Wool
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Update 3/24/2018: The KT7A rig now runs a Thoroughbred 2100+ at its native 1733 MHz. The installation went without a hitch with an assistant to help me with the clips. I'm getting massive improvements in CPU bound games like Doom 3 and Quake II with Qbism's software renderer.
This is my project thread for FUNKENSTEIN_3D, my highly versatile and extremely temperamental socket A Windows/DOS machine, built to roughly 2003-era specifications. It runs most games from 1990 up to 2003 well except for some troublesome DOS and Windows 9x games (and many of the 9x games will work when I finalize my hardware configuration and configure Windows 98, which has never been fully booted). It struggles with CPU-intensive games like Unreal Tournament 2004, Doom 3, and Quake II with Qbism's colored lighting software renderer. However, it also likes to corrupt its BIOS settings and stop booting until they're reset. I expected this computer to be easy to work with, but it's not. I guess that's what you get when you buy a VIA chipset to run software 2003-era computers were never meant to run.
Build specs:
Chenbro SR209 beige ATX server case
Abit KT7A KT133A motherboard with modded KT7ASB4 BIOS
AMD Athlon XP Thoroughbred 2100+ @ 1733 MHz
Startech socket A heat sink
Corsair RMi 750x 750W ATX PSU (overall wattage is overkill, but I might need the 150W on the 3.3V and 5V rails)
1.5GB PC133 SDRAM (will remove two of the three DIMM modules for Windows 98 installation until the high-memory patch is applied)
nVidia GeForce FX 5900 128MB
Genius A151-A00 (Yamaha OPL3-SA3) ISA sound card
Startech PCIUSB7 USB 2.0 controller card
Sound Blaster AWE64 Value ISA sound card
Aureal Vortex Advantage AU8810 PCI sound card
TEAC FD-235 3.5" floppy disk drive
Apple 678T0191 6X IDE DVD-ROM drive (thanks to SW-SSG for reassuring me this is a generic unit and not some special Mac-only drive)
PCI CompactFlash rear bracket, 2 swappable 16 GB CompactFlash cards (boot disks)
40 GB WD Caviar IDE hard drive
Netgear FA31105 10/100Mbps NIC
Logitech MX518 optical mouse with PS/2 adapter
Dell Bigfoot AT101W PS/2 keyboard (black Alps)
Sun Microsystems GDM-5010PT 21" Trinitron CRT monitor
Windows XP Professional and Windows 98 Second Edition on HDD, MS-DOS 6.0 and and FreeDOS 1.2 on bootable CF cards.
Planned:
3DFX Voodoo2 PCI 3D accelerator slaved to the nVidia FX 5900
Noctua 60mm and 80mm fans to make it quiet
Possible:
AMD Athlon XP Barton 3000+ or higher with the conductive paint mod and Zalman 5000S cooler
Current state of the machine:
Photos of some of the parts--hopefully I can assemble and photograph the system this weekend:
Motherboard, processor, RAM (all assembled), I/O shield, CF card (in packaging), PSU, floppy drive, CF adapter, DVD drive, NIC.
The case in its box.