Nice. You talking about 9700 Pro reminds me of my PC that I built in 2003. Athlon Xp 3200+ ATI and All in Wonder 9700 Pro. That ATI Animusic Pipe dream demo impresses me even now. Sadly the motherboard developed bad caps so I sold the motherboard and CPU. I still have the 9700 Pro though.

Geforce FX 5900 is still OK if you stick to pre DX 9 games

Geforce FX 5900 is unfortunately useless when it comes to dx9 games.

I don't dislike the GF FX 5900--its a fantastic retro card to be honest--I just wanted to keep the core of this build within 2002.

I think I have a Radeon 9800 Pro somewhere around here, I'll slot that in and pretend its a 9700 Pro 🤣

I guess if I wanted to be more extreme with this Dream Machine, I could...

• switch the Voodoo3 3000 PCI for a Voodoo5 5500 PCI,
• hunt down a Yamaha WaveForce to replace my generic YMF card
• max out the RAM.

None of those are appealing to me, for various reasons. Mostly because those parts command outrageous prices now.
I feel the new "retro" parts to pick up at a decent price now are from 2008 onwards. Anything before that is just too expensive.

Anyways, the Promise SATA150 controller is also funny. It was announced at the end of 2002, and I think the first SATA drives arrived at the beginning of 2003.
It works great with SSDs, has Win 98/2k/XP drivers, it can be booted from, etc. Great controller card all in all.

Your thread has prompted me to recreate my 2003 build. I still have the 9700 Pro (and 6800 GT that I later upgraded to). I have just bought an nForce 2 motherboard and Athlon XP to put in it.... next problem, is whether I have a suitable PSU, as I think this will be quite heavy on the 5v rail. The motherboard does not have 12v connector. I do have one with that connector, but I wanted nForce 2 to match what I originally had.

RetroPCCupboard wrote on 2025-11-15, 16:29:

Your thread has prompted me to recreate my 2003 build. I still have the 9700 Pro (and 6800 GT that I later upgraded to). I have just bought an nForce 2 motherboard and Athlon XP to put in it.... next problem, is whether I have a suitable PSU, as I think this will be quite heavy on the 5v rail. The motherboard does not have 12v connector. I do have one with that connector, but I wanted nForce 2 to match what I originally had.

Cool stuff!

I love Athlon / Athlon XP stuff, but I steer clear of it these days due to the heavy use of 5V. Hope to see it in action soon!

slivercr wrote on 2025-11-15, 18:49:

Cool stuff!

I love Athlon / Athlon XP stuff, but I steer clear of it these days due to the heavy use of 5V. Hope to see it in action soon!

I found an old PSU that has 25A on the 5V rail... it's kinda rusty though.... It's in a system that I bought for the case, as its very early XP era! The previous owner had put a Core 2 Quad system in it though. I guess I probably should open it up and check if any caps are looking bad...

Anyway, have you played any games on your machine yet? If so, what?

RetroPCCupboard wrote on 2025-11-15, 19:18:

I found an old PSU that has 25A on the 5V rail... it's kinda rusty though.... It's in a system that I bought for the case, as its very early XP era! The previous owner had put a Core 2 Quad system in it though. I guess I probably should open it up and check if any caps are looking bad...

Anyway, have you played any games on your machine yet? If so, what?

Oh yah, I've been itching to replay Warcraft 3 for a while now, thankfully I still have my old copy.
Out of all the big box games I used to have in highschool/college I only kept the ones from Blizzard. They were just THAT good, its a shame what they've become.

Oh and I also kept Max Payne, I still use the mouse pad that came with the game even 🤣

That's what I've been playing since I built this machine.

slivercr wrote on 2025-11-17, 02:23:

Oh yah, I've been itching to replay Warcraft 3 for a while now, thankfully I still have my old copy. Out of all the big box game […]
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Oh yah, I've been itching to replay Warcraft 3 for a while now, thankfully I still have my old copy.
Out of all the big box games I used to have in highschool/college I only kept the ones from Blizzard. They were just THAT good, its a shame what they've become.

Oh and I also kept Max Payne, I still use the mouse pad that came with the game even 🤣

That's what I've been playing since I built this machine.

Nice. I kick myself for throwing out some of the games and hardware I had. I have never played Warcraft. But Max Payne is a classic. That is a game I did keep....

I have bought StarCraft recently. Haven't played it yet.

Warcraft 3 looks interesting to me. So just bought it and Frozen throne expansion on Ebay...

Playing / building continues.
The machine is a bit more fully formed now, but I'm still tinkering with it.

I replaced the Geforce 5900 with a Quadro FX 1000 BIOS-modded to a Geforce FX 5800, only because its single slot.
This is not permanent though, I will probably end up using a Geforce 7800GS in this PC. At least that's the plan, but I cant find it in my stash 😓

Since this will no longer be a 2002-machine, I've taken to calling it DreamMachine2002++

I got this IcyDock drive bay to house 2 SSDs and the FDD, its working pretty nicely.