First post, by meisterister
- Rank
- Newbie
Since I've been very busy since I posted it, I've been unable to create a follow-up for my Dual Katmai build as I promised in the short term back then. Now that I've finally been given some time to breathe, I've decided to post about my Presario.
This computer was the result of a trade I did with one of my friends. I gave him my 1.9GHz P4 and he gave me his Compaq. I think it's a fair trade as he's interested primarily in playing games from the late '90s and early 2000s fairly well (which the P4 should prove somewhat competent at), while I just wanted to relive the nostalgia of my first real PC: a 133 MHz Pentium MMX.
This system comes with:
A ~2GB Quantum Bigfoot hard drive (small AND slow? sign me up!)
A 166MHz Pentium MMX that can multipler overclock to 200MHz with no stability problems.
A 32 MB DIMM in addition to 16 MB of on-board RAM.
A 1MB S3 768 (I think) graphics chip.
Windows 98 (though I did a fresh install as per his request as his parents may have had some data on it in the '90s).
Armed with this new computer, I immediately put a 128 MB dimm in and expected it to work. Much to my disappointment, this system can only support up to 80MB of RAM. Armed with this new knwoledge, I decided to make it into a mid-'90s/DOS games rig of some sort. Enough talk, on to the photos!
The computer itself:
The computer with cover off:
A sticker with jumper information and such (I really quite like this. If only modern OEM computers were this competent...):
Closeup of the CPU and RAM:
Closeup of the top of the board:
Closeup of the riser board:
Some hardware I intend to put into the computer (See below for details and questions):
Alright, so for this project, I'm adding a Matrox Mystique (the only 3d accelerated PCI card I could easily find) and a 6GB hard drive. Both parts work perfectly fine as far as I can tell, though some colorful speckles occasionally appear when using the Matrox. As for the K6-2, I have some questions and concerns that I should probably bring up.
As you have seen, I have an upgrade adapter for the K6. It currently sets a 6x multiplier (roughly 400MHz given the 66 MHz system bus) and drops the voltage from the 2.8V that the motherboard provides (which is incedentally the ONLY voltage it provides) to a far lower 2.2V. The adapter does have some problems, such as the fact that it uses my only floppy power cable and has no mounts for the heatsink (so it looks like it's going to slide off when the computer is upright). I have tried the chip in the socket as is, but I feared that the voltage was way to high. What should I do about the situation? I want to play some of the later 3D DOS games like Duke3D and Quake, but I also don't want to have to deal with the possibility of the CPU fan sliding off or becoming detached in any way, shape or form. Can I run the K6 at 2.8 with good cooling? Until then, I'll just stick with the Pentium.
Dual Katmai Pentium III (450 and 600MHz), 512ish MB RAM, 40 GB HDD, ATI Rage 128 | K6-2 400MHz / Pentium MMX 166, 80MB RAM, ~2GB Quantum Bigfoot, Awful integrated S3 graphics.