VOGONS


First post, by Starlance

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I had be gathering parts over the last few weeks, and finally my Super 7 retro machine lives. It's that kind of build that I wanted back in 99' that I couldn't afford as a kid.

Case is a modern Thermal Master from Microcenter (Nice case for the price for these kind of builds)

Motherboard is an Asus P5A rev 1.04 (I found this on ebay listed an s shuttle spacewalker board but when I looked at the pics I saw it was the Asus, only paid $25.00 for it because of the mis-listing)

CPU is a AMD K6-2+ 500mhz clocked to 600Mhz (I'd like to find a K6-III+ but all I find is 2+'s)

Memory is 128MB stick from Micron CL2 133mhz

Video is handled by a Voodoo3 2000 AGP (Will overclock to 3000 stats) with a 'custom' fan installed
I also have a Matrox G450 that I had before the Voodoo, just left it in since it works and I have have dual displays!

Sound is a Aztec card out of an old Packard Bell Pentium MMX 75mhz machine. I has a YMF262 and works pretty well, I also have the front panel audio hooked up to the card.

Drives are an iomega branded 40x CD-ROM burner that was cannibalized out of an USB Iomega external CD drive.
Second is a modern SATA Sony DVD burner that I had extra from a donated machine
The HD is a 160gb Hitachi 2.5" Laptop SATA drive I had laying around. I used a dos utility to resize it down to 64GB as that's the max the BIOS will recognize.
Both SATA drives are using SATA to IDE adapters and they seem to work flawlessly.
3.5" Floppy is out of the same Packard Bell as the sound card. I painted it black but plan on getting a Gotek to replace it.

I tried to do as best cable management as I could on in the case, hard though with IDE cables and no room behind motherboard.

Two 120mm fans (One front on back) and a 80mm On the CPU

500 Watt power supply that was included in the case, works great for this build.

I ended up buying about 4 CD-ROMs since I wanted an IDE burner, SATA Adaptors don't have a place for audio connection so had to have an IDE, but I ended up with one that didn't have an audio out even though the plug is there. Another that worked but added tons of nosie to the audio signal. One that had a broken eject switch and finally this once I took out the Iomega drive, it's very low noise since I believe it'a a later IDE drive. Pretty much all from Goodwill for a couple bucks each.

I have a Belkin wireless card that worked on another motherboard (A gigabyte super 7) but will not work on the Asus, if you have ideas please let me know!?!?

Lastly some pics! I love the machine and runs great after some setting tinkering, running Win98SE with the SP3 upgrade.

Thanks for looking!!

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Reply 1 of 7, by gdjacobs

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Weird. 64 gb is not a normal hdd size limit. Usually, that's an issue at either >32gb or >127gb.

All hail the Great Capacitor Brand Finder

Reply 2 of 7, by Starlance

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Actually now that I think about it that limit was from the gigabyte board, a 5smm. I thought it was odd to, but was mentioned in the patch notes on the last bios that it was increased but that bios will not work with the plus chips so had to roll back to an earlier one.

Reply 3 of 7, by AlphaDangerDen

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I read online that those Packard Bell sound cards a very weird pieces of hardware, and that they're a pain to install and/or get working after installing, but it's good that you got it working 🤣. Does the card have a normal ATX front panel audio connector or something Packard Bell-ish?

Anyway, I really like this build, it's a great mix of old hardware and new!

Reply 4 of 7, by Starlance

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I really didn't have any trouble. It has a modem built in on the card but I just ignored it and downloaded a driver for the chipset and works great even in DOS. The card is nice since it has lots of internal connections for input and output. I just rewired the stock AC'97 pinout to match the pins on the sound card to get the front panel working. I plan on doing the same with the USB as well as it would be a lot more convenient.

Getting some of the new tech was a bit daunting to get working but have had no issue once I did.

Reply 5 of 7, by AlphaDangerDen

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Just thinking out loud (or I guess in text?) but maybe the Belkin wireless card doesn't work is maybe the P5A doesn't support the PCI version of the wireless card? Could also be an IRQ conflict, drivers, etc. I could be completely wrong, just trying to come up with some ideas for what's wrong.

Reply 6 of 7, by Starlance

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It could be, it worked fine on the Gigabyte 5smm but won't even post with it installed in the Asus. It's a really old card, I've had it for years but have no idea what version of PCI it is. If I could find a PCI Voodoo3, I'd use the gigabyte board, it was a mini ATX board and a mini DOS/Win98 machine would be cool but all I find is AGP Voodoos

Reply 7 of 7, by Iris030380

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Nice looking machine. The cooler reminds me of some Akasa copper based Athlon T-Bird coolers I have, with the LED strips. I have a red one and a blue one, identical other than the colour. They do an amazing job on my old Duron / T-Bird CPU's and I think they were designed to cool all the way up to the Barton XP's. Which is probably why cooling a Duron 1Ghz is a doddle for them! 🤣

Nice looking build overall though! Well done!

I5-2500K @ 4.0Ghz + R9 290 + 8GB DDR3 1333 :: I3-540 @ 4.2 GHZ + 6870 4GB DDR3 2000 :: E6300 @ 2.7 GHZ + 1950XTX 2GB DDR2 800 :: A64 3700 + 1950PRO AGP 2GB DDR400 :: K63+ @ 550MHZ + V2 SLI 256 PC133:: P200 + MYSTIQUE / 3Dfx 128 PC66