First post, by Danger Manfred
I finally finished my 2003 dream rig!
The case is an Enermax Silver Wizard 2 that comes with color changing LED pillars in the front, and I had to modify the back a little bit to accomodate some additional video outputs, but I'll get to that later.
I hunted down a transparent Levicom PSU with UV reactive cables, since I wanted to go with a complete 2003 modding case look.
The motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-7NNXP, which is among the coolest you can get for socket 462: blue PCB, Nforce 2 Ultra chipset (SATA, Gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0, FSB400, DDR400 Dual Channel), dual BIOS, 4 RAM slots, AGP Pro slot, 12V power connector for the CPU (many 462 boards use the 5V rail to power the CPU instead, good luck finding a good PSU for that today), and a daughterboard with 3 additional VRMs for a total of 6, which doesn't really add to the overclocking ability but at least keeps the VRMs nice and cool. The only negative thing about the board is that it doesn't have mounting holes for socket 462 coolers, so I have to rely on coolers that clamp onto these little "noses" on the socket instead.
The CPU is an AMD Athlon XP-M 2400+ ULV. Unlike the normal XP-M 2400+ Barton, that is binned to run with only 1.45V at 1.8 GHz, this one is binned even further and only needs 1.35V.
This is cooled by an Aerocool HT-101, which is a full copper triple heatpipe tower with an 80x25mm fan. Transparent blue plastic cage around the thing to hold the transparent blue LED fan, really looks the 2003 part.
The RAM: Corsair XMS Pro DDR 400 CL2 with activity LEDs on the top, 2x512 MB in dual channel mode
The graphics card is a bit exotic, too: a Medion Radeon 9800 XXL is basically an OEM Radeon 9800 XT produced by MSI for german discounter Aldi for their prebuilt PCs. These have slightly lower clockrates compared to regular 9800 XTs, and use 128 MB of cheaper RAM that basically doesn't overclock. So why use it? Because it has a connector leading to an addon board with TV output signals, and that one has it all: composite, component, SCART and S-Video!
I can use this to play SNES and N64 games and output them not just to a real CRT, but even to a real CRT TV! Who needs CRT shaders when you can just use a real CRT!
I had to cut out a bit of the back of the case to make room for these outputs, but it's so worth it. The screen is basically cloned to the TV at no performance hit.
The cooler has been upgraded to a Zalman VF-950 Fatal1ty Edition, which is basically a VF-900 CU that has been nickel plated and the fan runs at 3600 instead of 2400 RPM max, which makes it unnecessarily loud, but back in the day neither me nor my friends cared about noise at all, so I decided to stay true to that and just accept it.
For a sound card I used a Terratec DMX 6fire 24/96 with a really cluttered looking silver front panel that can hold a wavetable daughterboard. I'm not using this function so far, but maybe I should.
To hide the non-era-appropriate SATA SSD, I use a silver front panel with a small backlit screen showing the temperature.
No ODDs here, but a 2.5" fan controller by Revoltec.
I'm really happy with it so far, running UT2004, Etherlords 2, Freelancer and some emulated stuff!
