Almost finished building and configuring my little nuclear reactor:

I had to wait for a FDD extension cable to arrive from Hong Kong, which took 3 weeks (no supply in EU).

Now I still have to figure out what for memory modules this Asus P3B-F (saved it from an e-waste container last year) likes, it doesn't like my 256MB PC133 modules from an unknown brand, so I'll try something else from a well known brand tomorrow.

The overclock on this i440BX chipset board for the PIII 1GHz works fine, no issues. Furthermore my recapped Ti4600 with new Zalman cooler spins happily 😎

SpectriaForce wrote:

Almost finished building and configuring my little nuclear reactor

Actually if you're going for the nuclear reactor effect, blue-violet light would be more appropriate because that's what the Cherenkov radiation appears like:

Lol you're right, but I don't really like blue LED's. I actually had a hard time searching for a green LED fan with the right dimensions. Let's call it green energy then, this pc will save the planet with its superior energy efficiency:

SpectriaForce wrote:

Almost finished building and configuring my little nuclear reactor: […]
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Almost finished building and configuring my little nuclear reactor:

PIII big tower a.jpg

PIII big tower b.jpg

I had to wait for a FDD extension cable to arrive from Hong Kong, which took 3 weeks (no supply in EU).

Now I still have to figure out what for memory modules this Asus P3B-F (saved it from an e-waste container last year) likes, it doesn't like my 256MB PC133 modules from an unknown brand, so I'll try something else from a well known brand tomorrow.

The overclock on this i440BX chipset board for the PIII 1GHz works fine, no issues. Furthermore my recapped Ti4600 with new Zalman cooler spins happily 😎

Have the same motherboard. Sad to hear you're having troubles with memory, though.

Question: Do you in fact have a 1GHz Pentium 3, or a slow-clocked one that you overclocked to 1GHz? Also, is it a slot 1 variant, or did you go the route of the slocket? If you do in fact have a 1GHz slot 1 P3 (with a 100MHz stock FSB clock), you are one lucky b*stard, because those are rare/supper expensive. 😀

Also, what an interesting case that allows you to install a fan right above the CPU. Only seen a few of those.

Installing Windows 95C on an IBM PC330. Was amazed to see that this ancient beast (originally shipped with a P75) actually supported boot from CD. Was rather less amazed to discover that it somehow failed to actually boot from any CD I fed it. Oh well, time for the Gotek...

oeuvre wrote:

I recall an IRC friend explaining that it's not even worth the work to refine it cause you only get a few dollars worth of gold more than what you end up paying for and it's a time consuming process.

Someone posted a link to an auction for one of those gold-diggers, the *claimed* amount of gold that could be found was worth $9, the auction was $36.

Normally a sucker loses their own money without destroying history.

SpectriaForce wrote:

Lol you're right, but I don't really like blue LED's.

I agree. I only mentioned it because you brought the nuclear reactor thing.

dionb wrote:

Installing Windows 95C on an IBM PC330. Was amazed to see that this ancient beast (originally shipped with a P75) actually supported boot from CD. Was rather less amazed to discover that it somehow failed to actually boot from any CD I fed it. Oh well, time for the Gotek...

If you expected your computer to boot from Windows 95's cd, it's normal it didn't work, only windows 98's discs are bootable

Deksor wrote:

dionb wrote:

Installing Windows 95C on an IBM PC330. Was amazed to see that this ancient beast (originally shipped with a P75) actually supported boot from CD. Was rather less amazed to discover that it somehow failed to actually boot from any CD I fed it. Oh well, time for the Gotek...

If you expected your computer to boot from Windows 95's cd, it's normal it didn't work, only windows 98's discs are bootable

I know. First CD I tried booting from was a nice holo-shiny Win98 CD known to work. Then tried a few Linux CDs and finally a dedicated bootfloppy-on-CD. Nope, just a flashing dash in top left hand corner.

the_ultra_code wrote:

Have the same motherboard. Sad to hear you're having troubles with memory, though.

Question: Do you in fact have a 1GHz Pentium 3, or a slow-clocked one that you overclocked to 1GHz? Also, is it a slot 1 variant, or did you go the route of the slocket? If you do in fact have a 1GHz slot 1 P3 (with a 100MHz stock FSB clock), you are one lucky b*stard, because those are rare/supper expensive. 😀

Also, what an interesting case that allows you to install a fan right above the CPU. Only seen a few of those.

Somehow my two 256MB PC133 modules were recognized as 2x 128MB and it failed the memory test. With one module it recognized 128MB and passed the test. Maybe the stickers on the modules are misleading, maybe it doesn’t like the memory organization and it misinterprets information from the SPD.

Only the front side bus of the board is overclocked to 133MHz (PCI runs at 33MHz which I think is stock). Set multiplier to 7.5x and off you go. With the latest BIOS this is no problem.

The CPU is a 133MHz clocked slot 1 version.

I need the big fan for sufficient cooling because the heatsink on the CPU is rather small. The way it is positioned is not something that I would recommend doing, but it works and it’s pretty solid (it’s my genius case mod 😊 ). The case is an AOpen HX08 and only has 2x 80mm fan ‘locations’ in the top area.

SpectriaForce wrote:

[...]

Somehow my two 256MB PC133 modules were recognized as 2x 128MB and it failed the memory test. With one module it recognized 128MB and passed the test. Maybe the stickers on the modules are misleading, maybe it doesn’t like the memory organization and it misinterprets information from the SPD.

Sounds like you have a chipset that can handle max 128M chips, and your DIMMs have 256M chips. If you want to use 256MB DIMMs, they need to be double-sided, i.e. 16 128M chips, not single-sided 8 256M chips like you have now.

[...]

I need the big fan for sufficient cooling because the heatsink on the CPU is rather small. The way it is positioned is not something that I would recommend doing, but it works and it’s pretty solid (it’s my genius case mod 😊 ). The case is an AOpen HX08 and only has 2x 80mm fan ‘locations’ in the top area.

That case is huge, you can easily cut extra holes if needed, but I'd doubt your case temps would get too high in there.

SpectriaForce wrote:

Somehow my two 256MB PC133 modules were recognized as 2x 128MB and it failed the memory test. With one module it recognized 128M […]
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the_ultra_code wrote:

Have the same motherboard. Sad to hear you're having troubles with memory, though.

Question: Do you in fact have a 1GHz Pentium 3, or a slow-clocked one that you overclocked to 1GHz? Also, is it a slot 1 variant, or did you go the route of the slocket? If you do in fact have a 1GHz slot 1 P3 (with a 100MHz stock FSB clock), you are one lucky b*stard, because those are rare/supper expensive. 😀

Also, what an interesting case that allows you to install a fan right above the CPU. Only seen a few of those.

Somehow my two 256MB PC133 modules were recognized as 2x 128MB and it failed the memory test. With one module it recognized 128MB and passed the test. Maybe the stickers on the modules are misleading, maybe it doesn’t like the memory organization and it misinterprets information from the SPD.

Only the front side bus of the board is overclocked to 133MHz (PCI runs at 33MHz which I think is stock). Set multiplier to 7.5x and off you go. With the latest BIOS this is no problem.

The CPU is a 133MHz clocked slot 1 version.

I need the big fan for sufficient cooling because the heatsink on the CPU is rather small. The way it is positioned is not something that I would recommend doing, but it works and it’s pretty solid (it’s my genius case mod 😊 ). The case is an AOpen HX08 and only has 2x 80mm fan ‘locations’ in the top area.

Yeah, that memory situation doesn't make sense to me. It should work. Looking at the manual for the board itself, it says it can support up to 256MB sticks. It could be that they are PC133 speed sticks, though. I know that they should run at PC100 if the motherboard only supports that speed, but maybe the sticks can't cope with that decrease of speed? Just me musing. 😀

Edit: after posting this, read dionb's post above. That makes more sense than my idea.

Not like I would know really anything helpful if you told me, but what revision board do you have, and did you flash the latest beta BIOS from Asus's website?

As for the CPU - okay. Makes sense why you overclocked the FSB then. 😀

Also, how's your AGP Nvidia Ti4600 doing with that overclocked AGP slot (I believe that gets overclocked too when you overclock the FSB, right?)?

And, as for that fan over the CPU - agreed. Not recommended in terms of... maintainability, but not bad either, I would say. 😀

I noticed last night, while going through my stash of hardware in the storage, that the room's walls, wooden furniture and cardboard boxes have all been infested by a brown mold.

Argh..

appiah4 wrote:

I noticed last night, while going through my stash of hardware in the storage, that the room's walls, wooden furniture and cardboard boxes have all been infested by a brown mold.

Argh..

Better than mice. Don't ask me how I know. 🙁

Today and yesterday I have been having a go with my MSI MS-6168 motherboard (v1 with 1.0 bios) - Slot 1 ZX board with 8MB Voodoo 3 2000 integrated and an ES1373 audio chip. At long last! It arrived! I was maybe excessively cautious with it and replaced the two capacitors near the memory slots because one of them had a hole in the top (not split, it looked pushed in) - but both capacitors tested fine after I removed them. The fan is loud and will probably be replaced, but works well enough for testing it.

Because this is a Packard Bell motherboard, which displays the PB logo on boot, it didn't have the standard front panel connectors, so I soldered on the pin headers for those, then found the PB layout is covered in the manual anyway 😊
It also told me off when trying to install the 1.3 bios, maybe because it's a PB OEM board?

I'm really happy to have finally found one of these for a reasonable price in the UK. This particular motherboard is what got me interested in the whole idea of making a retro PC back in around 2002-ish - thanks DionB for reminding me that it exists 😁
Now to give it a case, it's currently resting on a MicroATX motherboard tray that was cut out of an Inwin case I had to throw away many years ago. IT's certainly easier to cool this way, but maybe it's not so portable:

I am really impressed by how easy the ES1373 is to get working with Windows and how good its game support is with very little work. I can see why it was on so many motherboards from that era now.

stamasd wrote:

Actually if you're going for the nuclear reactor effect, blue-violet light would be more appropriate because that's what the Che […]
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SpectriaForce wrote:

Almost finished building and configuring my little nuclear reactor

Actually if you're going for the nuclear reactor effect, blue-violet light would be more appropriate because that's what the Cherenkov radiation appears like:

I'm in a refuel outage at work right now and we just took the reactor head off yesterday. The purplish blue glow looks pretty crazy in person. It's almost like a hologram or ghost type thing that your eyes are seeing. It's pretty difficult to explain and pictures don't do it justice since it is 3 dimensional.

OS/2 Warp 4 in Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 on my XP box.

Just got in the mail some"new" DRAM chips for my Cirrus Logic PCI 2D graphics card for my Pentium MMX 233MHz system to replace the mismatched pair (in terms of speed) of memory chips that came with the card, cleaned with, socketed them in, and BAM!, they worked like a charm!

I was able to play some The NFS SE flawlessly (smoother than ever before on this system, if I dare say), with no artifacts and no half-drawn screens. At this point, this system is now complete (well, maybe I'll get a Voodoo1 later 😀 ).

On a different note, two-decades separated, I got this beauty in the mail today:

An Asus P8Z77-V DELUXE Ivy Bridge motherboard. I'm going to use this with an i7-3770k that's also coming in the mail to upgrade my current modern/OP XP machine, which is currently based on the older Nehalem platform, with a garbage Asus P7H55-M motherboard and an i7-870. This upgrade won't just give me more raw CPU horsepower, but also a lot of quality-of-life improvements, such as native USB3 and SATA III. And believe me, the CPU upgrade will definitely help, since I play all of the games on this system (whether under XP or 10), if possible, at 1440p. 😀

Finally, got a sh*t ton of parts coming in the mail for multiple retro projects. Can't wait to get to work on them.

oeuvre wrote:

https://i.imgur.com/sphjT0um.png […]
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OS/2 Warp 4 in Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 on my XP box.

OS/2 Warp on ANYTHING is a pleasing sight.

wiretap wrote:

I'm in a refuel outage at work right now and we just took the reactor head off yesterday. The purplish blue glow looks pretty crazy in person. It's almost like a hologram or ghost type thing that your eyes are seeing. It's pretty difficult to explain and pictures don't do it justice since it is 3 dimensional.

Very cool. Must be exciting to experience it in person. Stay safe.