seems a nice start for a nice system 😀 keep us informed!

You can use PC100 and PC133 SD-RAM in these S7 boards.

I have a 128MB PC133 stick in my 6x86MX PR200 system, works a treat.

Thanks for the tip. I'm pretty sure I have some PC133 ram (probably a 256mb stick!). Nice.

I'm not 100% sure of what all this talk about cacheable ram is though.

Yes, nice board. ATC - If I'm not wrong, it's a A-Trend brand, which is reliable. Also note that the PCI/ISA is not shared, and separated by the (luckily) coin-cell battery, which also makes it easier to replace the battery when needed. And it has the intel 430-based chipset which is also reliable.

Longer PCI cards can be installed on the first 2 PCI slots. The rest PCI slots might not be appropriate for longer cards due to future heatsink/fan combo on the cpu socket. Voodoo 1 will be comfortable though, on any slot.

I'm actually thinking of a pair of 12MB Voodoo 2s or maybe even a Voodoo 3!

I'd even like to get a HW T&L card to see how that runs on such an old system (although that will be later).

I've found my Pentium CPUs and fans, so they're good to go

Pentium 133MHz

Pentium 166MMX (the older looking CPU, looks the same as the Pentium 133).

And a couple of things to add.

I need to work out which sound card to use. I'll probably go with the SB Live. I have no idea if the Audigy 2 would even work.

And a copy of Windows 98se (for distribution with a new pc only 🤣)

for the love of all that is good in the universe don't use the live or audigy, find an ess isa card or a sb16...or ensoniq audiopci...

Ha okay :p I do have an SB16 in my 486, but the CDROM drive is plugged into it. I'll have to go hunting!

What about this? I don't even remember where I got it!

Creative Ensoniq ES1370

Thats an ensoniq AudioPCI. one of the best PCI sound cards ever made, IMO. I have a collection of about 5 of them, and I would sincerely like about 50 more.

Wow awesome. I don't even know how I got it, or why I didn't throw it out! That is awesome it will be in my Pentium 1 box!

Don't get me wrong, it's a very basic sound card, and it was modest stats-wise even when it came out. It's simply the most reliable and ubiquitous sound card out there for classic systems, and it has very good clean output, too.

If it had 64 bit windows drivers I would have one in my newer PCs too, but as it stands one of those goes in all of my win95-XP and *nix computers that doesn't already have an intel azalia HD audio onboard.

Here you go, some information on the card series:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ensoniq_AudioPCI

Sounds good enough for what I will use it for.

I don't really want to use ISA. I remember my Duron 800 machine had an ISA sound card and it really hurt the performance of the system when playing games. The SB Live! increased FPS by around 6 to 9 over the old ISA card.

I want to have as few bottlenecks in this system (except the CPU!) as possible.

On another note I think I have a turtle beach sound card somewhere too.

Actually one of the main reasons I would like to get a Socket 7 (or any other older boards) is the ISA slot.

I wouldn't choose a PCI based as the sole sound card for a Socket 7 based system - unless if I already have an ISA card along too. Then I would go for a PCI card for digital output in Win95.

Huh awesome, I have a PCI128 (apparently a rebranded AudioPCI) that I always assumed was a low-quality budget card. Nice to know it's actually pretty cool little card. Got me through lots of gaming back on the family computer with a Radeon 7000 as a kid, now it sits in my K6-2 with a Banshee 😀

In short, if your board has an ISA slot then just go with a Sound Blaster Pro / 16 or AWE.

The AudioPCI is an awesome card, I have a huge soft spot for it, but I would only use if you don't have an ISA slots.

I wrote a guide a while ago:

Ensoniq / Creative AudioPCI

Has all the drivers, infos and some example recordings.

The audio output is very very clean. That's a huge plus IMO. Gaming compatibility is great with newer DOS games, but not so good with the really old ones.

But for games like Doom or Descent it's a fantastic sounding card.

We've really gone way in depth with the AudioPCI here over the years. I used to run one back in 97-98, and have one still.

AudioPCI has OK DOS support. It uses the same (or similar if older drivers) DOS driver that Live and Audigy use. The driver requires EMM386 be loaded. It supports SB, Adlib, General MIDI, MT32 emu, SBPro and SB16 (or Ensoniq Soundscape). But it has nearly unbearable OPL3 emulation. General MIDI and MT32 emulation are accomplished by software based wavetable MIDI which isn't great but is on par with say AWE32's ROM.

Its Windows support is poor compared to Live or Audigy. AudioPCI has very little hardware acceleration and its 3D audio support is very basic. MIDI support is all software as in DOS, and weak. Live and Audigy's synth is in an entirely different class. An AWE32 or AWE64 are also much more capable for MIDI because they have real synth hardware and when equipped with RAM can sound amazing through soundfonts.

The nicest aspect to the card is its relatively clean output, especially compared to ISA SoundBlasters.

It depends on the driver! The Ensoniq driver gives you SB Pro and Soundscape compatibility (and General Midi I believe), the Creative driver SB16 and General Midi 😀

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

It depends on the driver! The Ensoniq driver gives you SB Pro and Soundscape compatibility (and General Midi I believe), the Creative driver SB16 and General Midi 😀

Yeah I'm trying to remember the exact details. I think it may be possible to find drivers for any of them that will do the SB16. The original Ensoniq card eventually got an "upgrade" to the SBPCI64 name. They all can do GMIDI for certain.

The biggest issue, aside from the EMM386 requirement, is the really poor OPL3 emulation. Stay far away from AudioPCI/Live/Audigy if you want to use FM synthesis.