1. Welcome
Hi! I'm Declan from Australia. This is my first time posting here on Vogons, yet alone posting a build log! I'm usually most active on Facebook (Retro Machines) and my personal Instagram (nostalgichardware)

Anyway let's jump to the good stuff!, This is my Year 2000 Build with a few modern parts to improve performance and reliability. I have another 11 builds in progress and a bunch already completed, I'm a very large collector of old computer gear and can't wait to share my adventures!

2. The Specs
CPU: Dual 1.4ghz Tualatins on Modified MSI Slot-keys from silvercr
Graphics Card: Voodoo5 5500 AGP 64MB
Motherboard: Intel OR840
Ram: 2GB PC-800 Rambus. Four 512MB Sticks
Soundcard: Undecided
SATA Controller: Promise SATA300 TX4
HDD: 500GB WD Blue

I will be posting the build progress in the next few days

3. Acquiring the Parts

Finding the Motherboard

The OR840. This is a legendary board between 1999-2000 with AGP4X, I840 Chipset, and Rambus Support. It was even used in the Maximum PC - Dream Machine 2000! After seeing a friends OR840 build (silvercr from Vogons) I messaged him and found out he had a spare. I brought his IBM OR840 board along with Two MSI Slotkeys that have been modified by him. After a few weeks the board and slotkeys arrived! Massive Thanks!

Finding the CPUs and Slotkeys
This was already sorted with the OR840! Massive thanks to silvercr for selling them to be with the modifications already preformed

Finding the Coolers!
A local computer shop near me was closing down, I asked if they had any old parts and he produced these and tons of over gear I'll eventually get around to posting on here! New old stock 😊

Finding the Ram

Luckily I had the ram already from a Intel D850 board I got back in 2011. This was a $80 ebay buy from America!. 2GB of Rambus back in 2000 would be well over $1800AUD!

Finding a Case
This was a hard decision for me. The original plan was to use my Addtronics 7896A but after discovering that the double redundant power supply has no aux connector, let alone being quite old I couldn't trust it with this build. So after poking around on facebook for a week, I found a cheap fractal design case on the market place for $50. 20 Minute drive later, I now have a case

Photo from the marketplace ad

Finding the SATA Controller \ HDDs

Finding a decent sata controller was the next step. I original planned to use an adaptec scsi controller with a few cheetah drives. But due to the age of drives these days they all start to become noisy and unreliable. I settled on using a cheap hdd with decent speeds. I searched on ebay and found that promise made a bootible SATAII 300 controller. I ordered two from a ebay store and paid around $20AUD Posted.

Finding the Voodoo 5500

So how did I find my Voodoo 5? back in 2012 I was searching ebay and found this listing which stated dual chip agp graphic cards. I had a quick look on the internet and discovered it was a 3DFX Voodoo 5 5500. I recall hearing about Voodoos as a kid but never knew about the 5500. I decided to buy it for $80. Few weeks later I tried it in a basic pentium 3 system. After launching a game (Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crsis) the computer crashed than artifact'd terribly. I quickly rebooted it and now the bios post is artifatcing. This was a very sad moment. After 6 years of having it sit around, I decided to try it again which still resulted in artifacts. I had a look on ebay for another and noticed they have sky rocketed in prices. The dream of finding a working one was very low now. After a bit more searching I found a ebay listing that does upgrades and repairs to Voodoo 5s. His name is Oschkar. I did a bit of reading about him on forums and other posts and found out its best to email him directly and get it fixed rather than ebay due to the high fees. I sent him a email and than sent the card off for repairs. After 2 weeks he got it and found the issue straight away. One of the ram chips on the backside died, he replaced it and stress tested the card for several days and it was now working flawless! The total ended up being $100 AUD to fix it and post it back to me.