First post, by chinny22
- Rank
- l33t++
Well few months ago I got a "working P3 500" for £5
I guess it worked in as much as it turned on but once I got it home found it had no ram or video card, slightly upset as I couldn't play with it straight away but really I'd probably upgrade these parts anyway.
I wanted to stick with a slot1 setup as I like how the cartridge includes the heat sink/fan, there are no pins to damage it just seems more organised then sockets, but I also wanted the fastest so upgraded the 500MHz CPU for a 1GHz.
However I stuck with the 100 FSB CPU as I also wanted to use the legendary BX motherboard. I know some BX boards can be jumpered to 133 FSB but that's not really where my interest is.
The original idea was to use this while in the UK then when I return to Australia take a few parts back home and set up again using a ASUS P2B ZX which was the family's old PC and 90% sure is sitting in the garage so got 2 sticks of 256MB of PC133 RAM as that's the max that board can take, and I can push that board harder if I decide to.
I also got what is supposed to be a 32MB Creative TNT 2 Ultra as long term this was going to be used in my stupid quick dos PC and that's the last card to support Win3.x
I say supposed to be as it says it's a CT5823 but it's passively cooled? Either way I paid next to nothing for it and nothing in dos is going to notice the difference.
Next I put in my matching 12MB Diamond Voodoo2 cards and made a SLI cable, which worked 1st time!
I am still new to the world of Voodoo cards so still checking out the games I played in D3D first time round, so was quite excited to have a SLI setup up and running now!
Next was the Audigy 2 ZS so I can get EAX support and on board audio is always crap
Finally I had 2 Maxtor Fireball 3 40GB lying around so both of those went in, and left the Generic CD-ROM it came with.
Installed Win98 and that's when I was quite pleasantly surprised!
I wanted to use my SC55 with the PC but as I don't have the Audigy's Midi bracket went to install the on board audio drivers only to find it listed as a Yamaha XG 64 Voice Wavetable. That got me very interested!
Indeed Midi devices shows as a Yamaha XG Midi device and doom sounded surprisingly good! Plus the left & right channels are reversed just like a real SB Pro!!!
As I'm not into overclocking the fact it's a real Intel SE440BX board which are as stable as they come makes it very attractive. Intel SE440BX3 to be exact. The only problem is Dell nonstandard ATX connection, but adaptors are still quite easy to get.
This now leaves me with a problem though as I quite like this board, it's fast enough for all my Glide games (mainly NFS3-5 Diablo's) but has also made my 486 redundant as it has no issues with my dos games. (Mostly mid 90's or later) and if that's the case I'll probably put in a better AGP card then the TNT2.
Here a pic I quickly took, still needs a bit more of a tidy up, the live drive is for another project but put in as its safer there then just kicking about in my room!
and the inside
Edit, updated link to picture