First post, by Blzut3
Since silvercr asked here's a novel about my seriously over budget dual tualatin build. What draws me to the Pentium 3 is that the first computer that was assigned to me alone (shared a 286 and AMD K5 prior) was a slot 1 Mendocino Celeron 300A, so with the P3 basically being a P2 with SSE the Tualatin is kind of the final iteration of what was my first computer. For awhile I was satisfied with my 1GHz Coppermine because the need for a different motherboard was off putting on top of I believe for awhile the 1400S processors were a bit expensive.
Fast forward some years to October 2016 and I now have a job and plenty of disposable income. Was curious so I searched again and to my surprise the processors were $35 for a pair. Did some research on motherboards and found a Supermicro P3TDDE for under $80. Ran some figures on how much the entire system would cost and while somewhat expensive it was reasonable. If I recall correctly it looked like it would come out to $500. So of course I made an intentional mistake and asked a friend known for gratuitous spending for advice. Down the rabbit hole I went.
Ultimately this build is a "it would be cool to own" build rather than being a practical retro machine. There are a lot of things in this build that I would not recommend but I did it anyway.
The Motherboard
As stated above the motherboard I went with was the Supermicro P3TDDE. One of the interesting things about dual Tualatin builds is that there seems to be no obvious choice for which motherboard to go with, and there's always going to be a trade off of some sort with the board choice. The P3TDDE's big feature is the AGP 4x interface and that's honestly what drew me to it. VIA may not be known for the most stable chipsets, but lets be real these retro systems aren't 24/7 systems so the chipset isn't as important today as it may have been in the past.
The Chassis
For the case I considered going with something retro, but finding retro cases is kind of a pain since a) they're usually not labeled so no one knows what they have. b) Generally can't be very choosy. Combine that with the EATX requirement, and I figured I'd save time just getting a modern case. Don't get me wrong, I love retro cases with the InWin A500 probably being my favorite case design externally, but many of the larger ones miss the mark usually bringing a whole new meaning to the word "tower."
Which isn't to say that modern EATX cases are any better. Almost all of them are designed for water cooling or just plain being flashy. They're also considerably more expensive than a good normal ATX case. Now my requirements were I wanted to keep the build white, wanted the case to be relatively normal, and it needed to have 5" drive bays for optical and floppy. Also wanted to use the front IO drive bay for the SB Live/Audigy. My candidate set became:
- InWin 707 - which I liked largely because of it being the same brand as my favorite case, but I didn't like that it had a window, it has a door on the drive bays preventing use of the live drive (and it's not one of those where you can remove the door and have a normal looking case), and worst of all it is geared for used with a radiator at the top and would just be a useless mesh sticking out of the top and letting in all the dust. Real shame since the ATX version of the same case doesn't have that problem.
- Fractal Design Define R2 XL - Forgoing the white requirement I've really been digging the Fractal Design cases as of late. Plain, holds your stuff, easy to work on, and you can sit on them. What's not to like? Well again with the door. This case would look OK with the door removed so not that big of a deal. But then again, it's not white.
- NZXT Switch 810 - White, no door, holds all the stuff, not too ridiculous of a design, and the top radiator mount can be closed off. Seemed like the only downside was the window. IIRC it was also the cheapest on the list.
So I went with the NZXT. That was probably a mistake. In hindsight I probably should have just went with the Fractal and lived with the black case. The case was a little bigger than I expected, but also has some functional issues like most of the tool less mounting stuff making absolutely no sense. With the window I also had to think about cable management more and while I like how that factor turned out it did make things more expensive.
Power Supply
At this point I've committed to caring about the wiring so a modular power supply was a must, but it also needed to have relatively strong minor rails. I flipped through several PSU vendor websites one by one and listed out all of the options over 100W. Unfortunately I no longer have this data since I know I found some cheaper units that provided the same or similar output, but I ultimately settled on the Corsair HX750i. Fully modular and figured I might be able to use Corsair Link to get an idea of how close to the limit I was driving the system (I'm fully aware that these integrated monitors are not accurate, but they don't need to be accurate to be useful). Pay a little bit extra now and determine if I could get away with a cheaper unit in the future with other retro builds or repurpose the HX750i and swap in a smaller unit.
Another reason for the HX750i over other units was the number of peripheral connections it supports. I actually made this purchase after figuring out that I needed a 6 pin aux connector so knew that I'd end up using two for that, one for the drive bays, one for the storage and the GPU, and one for the SATA connector for the rear case lights.
Really wish PSU manufactures would just put a spec table on their website so us retro builders can find the one or two PSUs they offer with relatively high minor rails.
Video Card
For the video card it's pretty much just all about performance and flexibility. I had a GeForce Ti4600 in my Coppermine build that I originally intended to just transfer over. This card generally brings the CPU to its limit and supports a lot of operating systems. I don't think I need to say here why it's a great choice for retro systems and since I got it when they were plentiful for $20 it was a no brainer.
That said I thought it might be nice to pair this build up with a workstation card. Plus while the machine was running comfortably on the 150W minor rail I figured moving up a generation would allow me more head room and fill out the space in the case a little more. I put a watch for a Quadro FX 3000G on ebay and after some time got one for $37. I have no use for the genlock daughter card, but as far as I know it doesn't hurt performance and it fills up the space in the window so win-win. The Quadro is a bit noisy, but being hearing impaired after taking some basic measures (described later) I can really only hear it when specifically looking for it. On the plus side the card also came with the full length extension thing that isn't useful for its intended purpose, but hides the power wire when viewed from above so kind of nice in that regard.
Given that the GF4 was CPU limited, obviously the Quadro didn't bring much extra performance. In fact in some games it hurts since it doesn't have the game hacks. It does run some later benchmarks better, but the CPU can't really handle those benchmarks so kind of a moot point. I didn't go later than the FX since after that you start losing OS compatibility.
As a side note I eventually accidentally killed the GF4 testing another board (turns out you can do damage by putting too much memory in a system). Ironically after BIOS modding to reduce the memory clock to where it kind of works I now have a sacrificial AGP card.
Sound Card
With the mentions of the live drive it's probably obvious that I went with a Sound Blaster. I had a Sound Blaster Audigy 1 on hand when I was curious to see how the Audigy 1&2 sounded compared to the SB Live I've been using in every build since the 300A. (While I haven't done a blind test it seems the answer is quite a bit better.) The main reason for the Audigy is OS support. That card runs on pretty much everything.
I did consider swapping in the Audigy 2 ZS, but I have interest in running NT4 which is the only OS that's doesn't have Audigy 2 drivers but works with the Audigy 1. Unless I'm wrong and there's a driver hack to get the 2 working there I think flexibility of the 1 is worth more than the additional level of EAX support and native support for front audio jacks. My Audigy 2 also exhibited the famous crackle and pop issue on my Linux machine but I have not verified if that's an issue with the card or the machine (both the Live and Audigy 1 have given me zero issues).
I have the PC speaker and optical routed through the card. The former I got a little lucky with the board's on board buzzer being able to be used simultaneously as well as the board having a few extra positive pins. This provided the resistance needed for the speaker to be enabled while still allowing me to connect to both the left and right inputs in the CD in using a normal wire.
Other add-in cards
- Intel PRO/1000 GT - Gigabit, cheap, and supported by pretty much every OS. Unless you're doing a Win95 build what's not to love? Of course you need NT or Linux to really break 100Mbit.
- HP Internal USB 2.0 card w/ NEC chip - Wanted to get the front USB and SD card reader working and this was the ticket. Just note that the card will hurt overall system performance, but that hit can be minimized by disabling the USB 1.1 part of the controller. You can use the on board USB ports for 1.1. On the topic of front USB, the USB "3.0" ports are connected to this card with the two "2.0" ports being connected to the on board, so the build still has the distinction just the wrong speed. 😀
- Lucent PCI-7XT 56k modem - Why have a modem? Because I found this in the box of spare parts and found that it was a hardware modem. So it doesn't impact performance at all (verified with benchmarks) and fills in the build. Might be useful for bridging a Dreamcast as well. Not sure.
But that's not all. I also have the gameport bracket for the Audigy as well as a bracket with a USB and mini-USB port. The USB port connects to the last port on the internal USB card, and the mini-USB exposes the Corsair Link port so I can connect it to another computer running a more modern version of Windows.
That leaves one more slot on the back which I will probably use to connect a Firewire port to the Audigy because it would be harmless and add to the ridiculousness of the build.
Cards have been specifically arranged to not share IRQs when the not really useful parts are disabled.
Memory
No overkill Tualatin build is complete without 4x1GB Registered ECC CL2 SDRAM from Micron. At $10/module I can't say this added any price premium. It does hurt performance in benchmarks, but you can get that back by just turning off ECC in the BIOS. Of course this means I need to run an unofficial patch for Windows 9x, but it was worth it to complete the build.
Storage
Similarly if you're going over the top you need an SSD. It's probably getting to be about that time where it might be worth stocking up on 120GB SSDs for retro builds as we're starting to see that convenient capacity point disappear. I decided on a Kingston HyperX Fury 120GB SSD since it was only a few dollars more than the other options and had an order of magnitude higher write endurance rating. Not that I'm too concerned about the write endurance since again this is not a 24/7 machine.
I did try the cheap IDE to SATA adapter since it seemed to work OK in Phil's video, but after a little use it was clear that the controller on it was crap. Got the StarTech IDE2SAT2 adapter and it has been consistently fast and gave absolutely no issues. So if anyone is looking to go this route I highly recommend that adapter. It costs more, but you get what you pay for.
On the removable side of things I managed to get a Canon MD5511-V6 for $53. I thought I was paying a premium for the combo drive, but apparently standalone 5" floppy drives go for about that much anyway. Not that I have any need for a 5" drive, but it also killed the need for a bay adapter. I went for that particular combo drive since it's powered by a full sized molex instead of the floppy connector making it more modern PSU friendly. The downside is that it uses the edge connector instead of the newer pins and thus had to buy a more expensive cable (plus I have no shortage of the pin cables all over the place). The drive uses a straight through cable to have the 3" drive as A so for aesthetics I cut the far end of the cable off. Now the white balance was off for the seller so I thought the drive was white/beige, but turns out it's actually that brown color that was used as an accent color on some AT machines. Which means I need to eventually get around to painting the face plate.
For the optical drive I had an NEC-2500A DVD drive on hand. Black faceplate but the case has a cover for the optical drive, so doesn't really matter. However the drive eventually stopped consistently reading discs. I need to open it up and see if there's anything I can do to get it back in working order, but in the mean time I get curious and discovered that PATA Bluray drives were a thing. Had to know how they worked in DOS and Win9x, so I got a Panasonic SW-5582-C. The answer is pretty well and provided that your Bluray disc is in the right file system works fine. While the drive fits the overkill theme of the build, unfortunately it has a small problem.
While the Live/Audigy have a PC Speaker input, a TAD in, and an AUX in. The mixer only gives access to the CD in. I have to double check that the PC speaker input doesn't work, but if I recall correctly the only way to route the PC speaker through the sound card in DOS is to put it on the analog CD in. Since both the analog and digital inputs are active simultaneously I put the DVD drive on the digital in and everything was great. However the digital out, while present, doesn't seem to be functional on the Bluray drive. I might be able to work around that with a passive mixer, but I might end up just putting a DVD drive back in if for no other reason than with the window on the case it's cool to see the extra wires going into the sound card. I did open a thread here asking if there's any not well known settings that might coerce the digital out into working, but that got no reply.
Cooling
Not being familiar with the Tualatin I tried to use a normal socket 370 cooler. Didn't get very far with that of course, so got the Startech socket A/370 cooler which supports the side hooks. Had to bend the bracket to reduce the tension as usual, but no big deal.
Since I already knew how fun these older coolers were to remove I decided to use a high end thermal paste on them: Thermal Grizzly Aeronaut. I suppose you might be wondering why stop there instead of going for the Kryonaut, and well I guess even I have limits. 😜 In any case though the CPUs don't go above 40-something degrees C under stress with the fans turned all the way down so I can't imagine it would have made a difference.
Speaking of the fans, the stock fans on the cooler are quite noisy. They're probably not bad normally, but they really resonated with the chassis meaning for operating systems without speedfan even my hearing impaired self was annoyed by the hum. Fortunately there are still 60mm fans being produced so got some Fractal Design Silent Series R3 fans. These have the same color scheme as the NZXT case fans so that made the choice of them obvious. The problem is they're 25mm when the stock fans are 20mm so the screws don't fit. Luckily I was able to find screws just barely long enough at Home Depot (Everbilt #6 x 1-1/4 in. Zinc-Plated Steel). While not much longer than the fan they tap into the heatsink just fine.
All four case fans are connected to headers on the motherboard. More than needed but they came with the case and there were ports for them so why not? Config is push/pull on the hard drive cage, intake on bottom, and exhaust out the back. I've blocked off the top rad mount with foam which significantly cut down the noise from the Quadro as well as hopefully directing the airflow over more useful areas. (Also taped off the external tubing grommets.)
What else I didn't know - The $500 power cable
Somehow in all my research I didn't realize that the motherboard required the 6-pin aux power cable. Amusingly the board ran without it for some time and then suddenly stopped POSTing. A buddy suggested that it might be a bad CPU so I took out one CPU and the board worked again. Put the second one back in and it continued to work briefly and then stopped booting again. In all this struggle I still managed to not notice the power plug in the corner, but felt like an idiot when I finally did (mostly because I wasted really good thermal paste).
Now my Coppermine build has an old Zalman PSU that I've had for ages and it happened to have the required power connector for me to confirm that this was indeed the problem. Thus began the process of building a custom cable, but this isn't something I normally do so it got expensive fast. Not that I wasn't planning on to buying one already, but I got a multimeter for checking my work and since this is the thing that prompted me to get it I include it in the cost. Got a few not very cheap tools for crimping pins and stripping wires. Way more molex connectors than I needed (so even though per piece they're cheap you can't just buy one). Some 18AWG wire that I'm not really sure is actually 18AWG (mostly insulation), but it works nonetheless.
Operating Systems
- Windows ME - Although I recall it working fine in the era I can not for the life of me get the restart in MS-DOS mode option to produce an actual working system. I can disable BootGUI to have 98SE start in DOS mode and that will work beautifully and I can get into windows with the win command with no issues, but the other way doesn't work. Besides the nostalgia of typing win to get to Windows I can't say the real DOS mode is actually an advantage of 98SE anymore, so why not run the newer version. I was one of the people who never had a problem with ME (well more than 98SE anyway) so seems more logical. Additionally it reduces redundancy since I do still have my Coppermine build running a Vortex with an 8500 which runs 98SE.
- Some version of DOS - Of course I'd still like to run a variety of DOS games, so would need a separate DOS install.
- Windows NT4 Workstation - With the second CPU I need to run some form of NT and given that I can get more useful mileage out of 2000/XP on a more modern machine looking at using NT4. Would allow me to test my code on real NT4 hardware as well. It is a huge pain to install though, but then again so is 9x.
Conclusion/What's next
Everything accounted for I'm $1,273 into this build and there are still a few things left to do. The floppy drive needs to be painted, I might need to do another thing for the optical drive, still need the firewire port for the last slot (or find something else to do with it). Might be interested in trying to fit some lighting into it to help show it off even though I'm not normally a fan of lights (hence not a fan of windows on cases). No idea yet how I would do it so it's actually integrated into the build.
I will probably also take a soldering iron to the live drive to try to get the front audio jacks working. Mostly because they're the only thing not connected, so it'd be cool if the entire thing was functional.
Have also considered trying to find an IR port for the last drive bay (currently a hot swap SATA bay that comes stock with the case). I do have a laptop with an IR port and the board supports it so it'd be a cool novelty.
While not entirely to plan, I do like how it's turning out. Maybe it's just me but I really love the way that cable managed ribbons look.
Photos
Current state
Rear IO
The dirty work (back side wiring) (Side panel closes just fine)
Inside (Crappy through the window shot)
Drive wiring
Earlier photos can be found in the directory: http://maniacsvault.net/loosefiles/tualatin/
