I needed an IDE machine to recover some old CHS hard drives and got distracted by the possibility of replicating something close to the PC I had in high school, and then by the possibility of maxing out that PC. This is a Dell XPS B866 I got from a vintage computer liquidator. It appears to be a top of the line machine from May 2000. The hard drive had been removed so I don't know what it was originally used for, but it came with SCSI, Firewire, and Zip250 support, so somebody clearly called Dell and asked for every kind of storage they had. It also came with a Dell OEM Geforce 256 64MB DDR, which was a big surprise to me, as I didn't know there was a Geforce 256 with that much RAM or a DVI-D output. As far as I can tell I got it with all original parts; it was never upgraded. The PC has an unusual shroud and fan mechanism that exhausts CPU heat to the outside of the case, but no other fans aside from the PSU fan.

This is a nice case; the side and front panels can all be removed without tools. The support bar that blocks the graphics card requires a screwdriver although I received it with no screw.

I went on an upgrade journey to create the ultimate beige Pentium III. It now has:

• Intel D820LP i820 motherboard with proprietary Dell connectors (original, the improved socket 370 version of the VC820 [SOLVED/CONFIRMED] The Intel VC820 Motherboard Supports Tualatins!)
• Pentium III-S 1266Mhz Tualatin CPU (via socket adapter)
• 1024Mb RDRAM (also has lower latency than the OEM RAM)
• IDE2SDcard adapter from Ebay, spray painted beige and installed where the zip drive used to be
• Quadro FX3000 GPU (I am using the 56.64 drivers and configured it as a Quadro FX5900 Ultra)
• Soundblaster Live! CT4780 (original, this is the "good" Dell OEM SBLive)
• New CPU fan and additional fan installed for case intake
• Realtek RTL8169 gigabit NIC

I found a Dell Quietkey keyboard, a still-in-production PS2+USB mouse from Cherry, a NEC AccuSync LCD92VX monitor, and Creative Labs SBS50 speakers. The monitor supports 75Hz which is nice. I would have preferred a 4:3 instead of a 5:4 monitor, but couldn't find a beige one. I also gave the PC new stickers from Geekenspiel, and cleaned everything. I then installed Windows 98 onto a 128GB sdcard. It turns out the sdcard adapter does not support LBA48 so 128GB is the max, regardless of Windows patches. The speakers don't sound very good and I need to find something else. I'm going to add a 250GB SSD I have to archive installation media for games. And I want to get a 1400Mhz Pentium III-S, too, but don't know if I can solder the adapter myself.

Benchmarks are:

• 3DMark 2000: 8244
• 3DMark 2001SE: 8162
• 3DMark 03: 4272

Some mishaps occurred during the build:

• The sdcard adapter's lack of LBA48 support caused me a bunch of problems.
• I accidentally turned on the new CPU without the cooler installed; it went into thermal overload protection and shut down. It still works fine; I think the integrated heat spreader was enough cooling capability to save it.
• Finding the right drivers was a pain and only really possible because of https://www.philscomputerlab.com/

I have some questions remaining:

• Do I need to do any maintenance on the Quadro? Replacing the thermal compound seems difficult.
• Should I look into backlight replacements for the monitor? It seems a little dim, but maybe it's just like that.

Thanks to everybody on Vogons for the helpful posts, tools, and replies; I didn't have any Pentium or Windows 98 knowledge from this millennium before I found this forum. If you are doing something similar, the monitor is available on Ebay and the Quadro FX3000 is available from ServerWorlds. And in the end, my hard drives were unrecoverable, but I'm still happy. Even my kids like the PC.

Original specs:

• Pentium III 866Mhz CPU
• Geforce 256 64MB DDR GPU (Dell OEM edition based on reference board Are GeForce 256 DDR cards that rare?)
• 256Mb RDRAM
• DVD drive
• CD-R drive
• Zip250 drive
• Floppy drive
• SCSI card
• Firewire card
• Soundblaster Live! CT4780
• Intel Pro 100 NIC
• Some modem