Rig1 looks good, The MX440 is good match for a P2 IMHO
Just needs that isa card you mentioned.

What's Rig2 got for graphics?

Sorry I forgot to add that, It has aGeforce 9500 GS as it's primary card (only because its 1 slot not two) the PCI slot next to it houses the xonar.

Rig 3 - Not needed really but houses windows 2000

Motherboard: PC-Chips M848a V2.1 (Sis 748)
CPU: Duron Socket A (Appelbred) 1.6Ghz
RAM: 1GB DDR1
Sound: Soundblaster Audigy 2 OEM DELL Edition - Right Kaffafe this one - you need the later liveware CD and junk the installer, and look for the CT app for driver switching this forces the WDM in and it then operates as it should. Manual install of the apps using their respecting installers in the audio folder then does the trick.
Floppy: YES
IDE: YES
IDE Primary Master: 10GB Quantum Fireball
IDE Primary Slave: NONE
IDE Secondary Master: LG DVD-ROM/CD-RW
IDE Secondary Slave: NONE
OS: Windows 2000 Professional SP5 (no not a typo, uses USP5)

Rig 4 - Daily Driver

Mac Pro 4,1 2009

Flashed: yes to 5,1 firmware
Flashed: yes DVD-RW firmware flashed to retail LG allows for DVD RAM to be read
Flashed: yes Retail AMD 5870 flashed with Netkas to shoehorn EFI into the VBIOS - allows for bootscreen.
Modded: Power rail to power an innateck USB3 card using the FL1100 chipset
CPU: Intel Xeon W3520 2.66GHZ
GPU: AMD Radeon 5870 HD
RAM: 8GB DDR3
OS: macOS High Sierra (can do Mojave but I need a metal card for that)
Daily Driver: Yes - my internet browser / Google hangouts / office / photo editing
SATA1: Original 640GB HDD
SATA2: WD Blue 500GB
SATA3: WD BLue 250GB
SATA4: WD BLue 250GB
SATA5: Original Apple DVD-RW drive (made by LG)
SATA6: NONE - Power is used from here to operate the USB3 card

Rig 5 - Win Games Machine (Faulty)

Motherboard: Gigabyte x58a-ud3r V2.0
CPU: Core i7-950 3.07GHZ
RAM: 6GB DDR3 Corsair XMS3 1600 XMP
GPU: AMD radeon 4890 HD
Sound: Soundblaster X-FI Titanium HD
Floppy: NO
IDE: YES
IDE Primary Master: NONE
IDE Primary Slave: NONE
SATA1 3G BASIC: Unbranded DVD-RW
SATA2 3G BASIC: Samsung DVD-RW
SATA3 3G Intel X-Raid: WD BLue 250GB
SATA4 3G Intel X-Raid: NONE
SATA5 3G Intel X-Raid: NONE
SATA6 3G Intel X-Raid: NONE
SATA7 3G Intel X-Raid: NONE
SATA8 3G Intel X-Raid: NONE
SATA9 6G Marvell: Corsair Force3 180GB SSD
SATA10 6G Marvell: NONE
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate / Windows 10 Pro

This one boots fine but randomly will bluescreen from 10 minutes upto maybe 2/3 hours, with a hardware fault. even stripped to just CPU/RAM/GPU it will bluescreen. Tried other GPU's/HDD's and still does it. So the issue has to be either the CPU, RAM (although memtest says its fine), Motherboard (if another CPU causes it to bluescreen), or the PSU loosing its power delivery over time. its a Zalman 550W so should be fine for this board

Thats my main setups.... laptops later (I have quite a few

Hi all.

Sure I vanished. Life changes and such I now have my own place.
This P2 machine still going strong. Now has ATI Rage 128 Ultra instead of the Geforce 4. Now has a dedicated ISA soundcard (OPTi 82C929a based MAD16 card).

For now it's running well.

My goal now is to swap to a proper chassis, and then the final component is the voodoo 2 card. Once that's done it's pretty much there.

I should also say I have another exact compaq slot one board 100% the same but this one when I rescued it came with a Pentium III 500. so the Geforce 4 is going there.
This computer will be designed to handle the more later games around the 2000 era and will house my SB Live! Platinum card.

P II system = win98 / DOS for mid/late 90's games + dos games
P III system = windows 98 for the early 2000 era games and late 90's games that would benefit from the speed increase of the P III + Geforce 4.
As for my 486DX2 (has intel overdrive in it) I think I'll keep that just for the really slow games like themepark.

Any pics? 😜

And how is Rig 5? You figured out in the mean time what the issue with this system was?

i like the sounds of rig 3, with a 3d card and maybe more storage that could do many late 90's early 00's things

anyway, agree with tetrium - updates needed 😀

.. and what of these laptops?

Rig 5, was a few missing parts, superceeded by my ryzen build. Rig 3 sadly died. Vrm failed and took cpu with it. Now replaced by the p3 build.

Pictures soon but the p2 rig ain't pretty

As for laptops I have a thinkpad 380D. And a dell precision circa 2000 era.

Pictures tonight as I have secured a case that suits it very well.
Thanks to the driver library here I also have my SB Live! put back in as well. Since I have the digital cable, I have the DVD-RW drive hooked up to both soundcards (digitally via the Live and Analogue via the MAD16).

Quite tidy. I notice though that the onboard floppy controller is very very picky.
I have to use a cable without the twist (and without the legacy 5 1/4 connector as well) or it doesn't detect it and gives 'controller error' and then disables the floppy in the BIOS every single time.
Once I swapped to that cable, re-enabled the drive and rebooted, I then saw it do it's boot up seek and the error went away. I assume due to this I can only use 3 1/2. No bother, it runs well enough.

If I really want to be extravagant I could look for a live drive! and also bung a zip drive into the other 3 1/2 bay. the PSU I realised has two sata power connectors, so I can actually use my IDE to sata quite easily. but the HDD runs good enough.

Only things that do not work is the reset button as the board has no header for it and the onboard PC speaker (beeper) appears to be dead. (no header for it its soldered on). I'm not too worried about that as it boots.

The case when I acquired it. Had a Socket A board in there (not tested it yet) and appears to have its original AMD cooler and what I think is a 600mhz Duron (spitfire) in the socket (just at first glance I noticed the die is vertical not horizontal and it's a purple/grey ish cpu, so not mustard yellow or green) it's missing it's ram and CMOS battery as well. Looks clean so I guess it should be fine. Also found a Maxtor HDD inside, have not pulled it so I can't check capacity but from early glances of what I can see and the depth of it, it looks to be probably 80GB (I had one similar back in the day). I have no clue if it even fires up, however I have a spare IDE channel so I may as well jumper it and boot it up see what windows 98/bios thinks of it.

The Compaq BIOS are weird, if its under 6GB the BIOS will report its Heads, Cylinders etc over that and it doesn't but if on later firmware it will still boot it just fine.
I reckon the diak of it does boot probably has either windows 98 or Windows 2000 on it.

biohazardx9 wrote on 2022-07-06, 07:33:

The case when I acquired it. Had a Socket A board in there (not tested it yet) and appears to have its original AMD cooler and what I think is a 600mhz Duron (spitfire) in the socket

the beginnings of another rig!

gerry wrote on 2022-07-07, 07:12:

the beginnings of another rig!

Could very well be! Socket A was very interesting for sure and I used to own an abit board in the day which was nforce 2. Lovely board it was too.

Well

I am still around
life dropped a ball on me, as it would.

Hopefully I should be more active on here now.
Things have happened since though.....

There will be pictures too to go with it it all for your enjoyment.

The gigabyte board had a missing cap which is why it bluescreened randomly. it had suffered damage so tossed it in the bin, (it's dead Jim!)
the SIS board also died, the slot one pc slipped out my hands and landed on it. tired and stressed that day. in the graveyard that went.
still got the shuttle but thats abandoned. - for a good reason....

since then I have acquired the following components:

1x boxed original DOS 6.22 in ok condition
1x Jetway N2PAP-Ultra which came with 512gb ram and a cpu.... (see next item) (awaiting delivery of it)
1x Athlon XP 2500+ (yes it's a barton core - also waiting delivery of it)
1x Radeon 9550 (which I have successfully flashed over to a 9600 pro)
1x Turtle Beach Santa Cruz soundcard (this is a nice card, crap for DOS really but for 98 games it sure does very well)
1x SiI3114 PCI sata card (I know about the good and the bad with these but I'll try anyway ultra board has no sata on it)
1x Athlon 1200 (non XP) - thunderbird 1.2ghz
1x QDi Kinetiz 7B board (KT133) - running fine in 98 has the odd stumble over, nothing to really worry about them via chipsets were flakey and this board has the SB live PCI bug with southbridge. (why im using the sanata cruz for now but will slot in something else for it later on)
1x Compaq Prolinea 66.... this one a bit special. has an intel overdrive 486DX2 in it.

so here are the 'revised' plans

the slot 1 machine will become a pure DOS PC, utilizing the MAD16 OPTi soundcard. it's perfect for the job. and will have the rage card for display.
the 486DX2 will be used for speed sensitive games, I need a soundcard with cd-rom controller built in for that. if I land on a decent ISA card like an AWE64 or similar or something better than the OPTi then the OPTi will go in the DX2 and the new card in slot 1.
The nForce2 board will be windows 98 for that period of games. yes it's designed for XP but the nforce 2 did have drivers for 98 same as that radeon. and for games like sims, Q3, NFS3, UT99 etc it'll be fine.
The KT133 board, I have no real use for but could make for a killer windows 95 machine. (over the top for sure! but oddly enough the via 4in1 drivers for this board actually have windows 95 drivers... so long as you use OSR2b you'll get USB as well)

but hey thanks in advance if you are reading this. my life ain't out of the woods yet. but when one of your parents has the dreaded cancer, it really turns everything upside down.