xjas wrote:Honestly, I'm gonna have to stop thrifting if this keeps up.
I should listen to my past self. 😜
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This time this beige tower caught my eye. I spotted the zip drive & Creative DVD drive on the front, which was enough to make me pull it off the shelf and turn it around. On the back I see serial and parallel ports, a video card with S-video & VGA, an empty slot where it looks like an ISA sound card used to be, and some kind of MPEG card with a second VGA out(!).
Well, let’s open it up:
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Slot 1 system on an Asus P3V133 with a VIA chipset. I can’t remember the last time I encountered that combo, the Slot 1 stuff I find is almost always BX. Three ISA slots is pretty nice.
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Turns out it’s a P3/450 with some other choice goodies. All the caps on the board look totally clean too.
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Yep.
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^^ Somebody really liked Creative Labs, there's at least three Creative products in here including the DVD drive, and I'm willing to bet the ISA slot once held a Sound Blaster 16 or AWE. Surprisingly, the Voodoo card isn't by Creative (it's STB.) This must have been somebody’s LAN party monster rig back in the day, but here it is in bits in my living room 18-ish years later. I wish they’d left the HDD in.
I guess the second VGA out on the MPEG card is for primitive dual-heading? So you can watch DVDs on one monitor while you work on the other?
Anyway, you can see why it followed me home. I needed another beige tower like I need another butthole, but I couldn’t pass up the goods on the inside. That tag on the front is what I paid, so the video card alone was worth the sticker price.
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