First post, by ratfink
- Rank
- Oldbie
This box started off as an exercise to create a linux box to use free software for music creation and recording, based around a Soyo P4 845ISA s478 motherboard with a Pentium 4 and 2gb ram [most the board can handle] - fastest stuff I have as spares. The P4 is a 2.8ghz with hyper-threading; can vary the multiplier from 15 to 21 [2gz to 2.8ghz]; guess it's a northwood.
Sound card is an M-Audio 2496 Delta Audiophile, which seemed to have the capabilities needed for music stuff and linux drivers too. I'm not the musician, I only dabble, this aspect of the machine is kind-of-for-my-son if he gets round to it - the idea was something fanless with a decent soundcard for recording, able to run rosegarden at least.
CPU heat sink is a Sonic Tower that I had bought years ago as NOS - so I avoid a cpu fan
I tried a few graphics cards but settled on a supposedl-NOS FX5500 I had bought which turned out to have a rusted-solid fan. Removed that and stuck an old AM2 heatsink on the gpu with thermal tape - so I have no gpu fan
The hard drive I used turned out to have Windows 2000 already on it in a couple of small partitions [2gb, 20gb], so that stayed. The rest was given over to Debian - installed via Windows over the web.
To add capacity I've installed an Icybox SATA enclosure which attaches to a cheap pci sata card from Hong Kong. Icybox means I have an easily-removable sata drive in a box that has a power adapter and a usb socket [I think!].
Both debian and 2000 have drivers for the onboard network, so no issues with connectivity.
Eventually I started wondering about the unused ISA slots - realised that although Windows 98 would have issues with the 2gb ram, DOS would not so the box could double up as a dos box. So, I added an IDE/CF adapter to the main hard drive's IDE cable, with a 2gb compact flash card. Temporarily attached a floppy drive so I could install DOS 6.22 to the CF card. The CF card already had PAS16 drivers on it, so I dug out my PAS16 to get the machine operational quickly for some dos gaming. Needed to reserve IRQ5 and DMA1 for legacy ISA in the bios to get sound from it in DOS; works fine and sounds great.
Rebooting and running update-grub I now have a triple boot system:
Debian
Windows 2000
DOS 6.22
with this current spec:
Pentium 4 QRG4 ES + Sonic Tower hsf
Soyo 845 ISA motherboard [agp 8x, 4 pci, 3 isa]
2gb ram
FX5500 with AM2 cpu heatsink
M-Audio 2496 Audiophile
PAS 16
SATA pci card + sata icybox
DVD writer
IDE hard drive
CF card
Antec GX700 "rugged" case - they were going cheap 😉
FSP Blue Storm PSU
Unfortunately the AM2 heatsink blocks 2 pci slots or I might have thought about a second graphics card.