Anyway, back to the pics! 😁
Part one
My old former main rig
Zalman 300W PSU, brand new
Intel D815EEA Socket 370 i815 AGP board
Intel Coppermine 1000Mhz
512MB SDRAM PC-133
Geforce2MX 64MB AGP
40GB brand new Maxtor 5400rpm harddrive
Some random optical drives
Front, being used as a "table", these days this rig never leaves this place anymore.

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As you can see, I tried to kinda keep the inside from becoming a cable mess. It originally had all it's cables wrapped together but now just leave them like this so I can remove/plug/unplug easier

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The cables used to look a little bit more like this:

The first one comes with a story:
Back in the days (must've been around 5 or 6 years ago) I only had my very first computer (a 550Mhz Katmai with 512MB RAM and a 20gig harddrive. I had attemtted to upgrade with a brand new 40gig Maxtor harddrive but the board could never recognize it for some reason...yes I updated the BIOS! 😁), a Celeron 400 and my 486. While the Celeron 400 worked great, it was still slower then my Katmai 550 and the Katmai 550 had LOADS of crap on it's harddrive so I could never bear to format the drive, so the Celeron 400 was basically my main rig for a couple years.
I still had a Coppermine 1000 laying around, taken out of a dead board I found, but I didn't have a motherboard to put it in.
In those days there was a large "computer fair" in Amsterdam every few months. Lots of people selling new stuff and older stuff, but I had difficulty finding the right parts I needed to build myself a good-enough rig. Either it was all damaged (like 15 bare motherboards in a large cardboard box, full of scratches and like €10 each, untested.
I did find plenty other small parts over there, mainly oem Socket A coolers (the copper ones 😀 )so no shortages on those parts. Bought a lot of those copper Barton AMD coolers for €2 each 😁
But...still no motherboard 🙁
Then I had a lucky break at work. We had received a bunch of hardware, cases, complete computers and lots and lots of parts!
Amongst these parts was an Intel mobo, i815 chipset and AGP which had been tossed in the bin because they had broken the lever of the CPU socket! (my collegues weren't exactly rocket scientists you know -_-...one was actually a former bikes repairman!)
Without lever, the board would be useless but they gave it to me as I wanted it. Perhaps I could fix it somehow?
So I brought the board back home and saw I'd need a plastic lever from where-ever!
I looked in my pile of dead boards and found a Socket A board with leaking caps and it had the same plastic lever.
So I thought "Heck, why not!? If I don't try I got nothing for sure, so might as well!".
I investigated the socket and noticed it was basically 2 plastic parts that can slide over eachother, so I reckoned the top part of the socket must be removable.
I placed the dead board on a table and used a screwdriver to try and find a way to remove the top half of the socket which in the end worked, though I broke it while I did it. No harm done, that boards dead anyway and it gave me precious experience to try to remove the top half of the socket from that Intel board.
I successfully managed to remove the plastic lever and basically hoped it would fit. Well, they looked the same so I thought my chances were fairly good, provided I didn't break the socket of the Intel board.
So again, with a flatbed screwdriver I (carefully!!) removed the top half of it's socket...and it worked! I removed the broken lever, placed the good lever into position and clicked the 2 halves back together.
Now I placed the P3 into the board, sinked it, equip memory and an S3 PCI card (I'm using the same 2 test S3 PCI cards for years now 😉 ), plug in a PSU and pushed that button...SUCCESS!!
The board still worked yay! So next I installed a true AGP graphics card (a GF2MX 64MB was the best AGP card I had at my disposal at the time), tested again, worky!
I wanted to pick my components carefully. I wanted this system to be maxed BUT also wanted to be as economical as possible as I had very little parts to use.
I wanted 512MB, but knew the i815 chipset would max out at 512MB and supported up to 256MB DS SDRAM modules. If I put 3 DS SDRAM modules in the board, it would run the memory as PC-100, so my task was to put 512MB in there but still have it all run as PC-133. For this I needed to use a max of 4 banks of memory in there. Thus I ended up putting 1x256MB DS (->2 banks) and 2x128MB SS (->2x1bank) and it worked! This way I wouldn't need to use one of my very few 256MB memory modules and I still got what I wanted 😀
I continued to do this, install 1 component, test, install another, test, until I got the complete system ready on a cardboard box.
One drawback was that apparently it's floppydrive controller had died, but the upside of this board was that it had 3 memory slots 😀.
The brand new Maxtor 40GB drive also worked in it, so I had everything ready!
Since a short while I also finally had a copy of XP, so this rig would be my very first XP rig. All my previous machines had either ME, 2k or 95 oem. I didn't own a copy of 98SE back then and the w2k disk wasn't even bootable, so XP it is!
After the install was done, I put the system in it's case (btw, also an Intel case) and finally had a computer worthy of succeeding my Celeron 400. This would be my main rig for the time being.
Now I could finally play games that were too slow for the Celeron, like Unreal 2 and Homeworld 2.
Also this system became my new offline database, it's 40gigs was MUCH larger then any other harddrive I had at the time.
However, it still had problems. The system never was as stable as I wanted it to be. Also the Maxtor harddrive was annoying to hear all the time. The case it was in wasn't particularly noise friendly.
On top of that, even though the P3-1000 performed it's intended purpose well enough, it had always been a stop gap solution until I could afford me a new, faster main rig, build with brand new parts.
I had attemtted to get this system to run more stably, including replacing it's 3 DIMM's with 2x 256MB identical PC-133, but it didn't seem to matter a lot.
The 3 other DIMM's ended up in my P3-800 lan rig, upgrading the amount of memory in there.
About 3 1/2 years ago this is exactly what happened. I bought parts for about €300, used some parts from here and from there and my new main rig was up!
The P3-1000 got demoted to being a spare rig. I copied all of it's data to the much bigger harddrive of the new system and from then on I continue to use this P3-1000 system as a system for harddrive data recovery, along with a removable harddrive bay.
When I moved to my new house (with attic!! 😁) it ended up in the attic right away and these days I even keep the side panel off so I can access it easier.
I have since used the P3-1000 at least 3 or 4 times to save data from harddrives of family 😁 and countless times from my own harddrives 😀
So this system is now about 5-ish years old(?) and only sparcely used, it's still operational 😀
edit: Since PB decided to take a crap on us, I decided to re-upload at least some of the pics to Vogons directly, because missing pics in a picture thread just isn't really something many of us will probably like. Keep enjoying! 😀