Check the label on your Antec supplies. That Truepower should have high 3.3v and 5v rails

Just be aware that many Antec supplies from that era will need recapping due to inferior components being used. The designs are usually great, but they've often got crap from the likes of Fuhyyuh (aka F-You capacitors). Once recapped, PSUs so affected should be solid.

Today I got the Abit an7 with floppy, IDE, and Sata cables; the board looks fine, maybe a little dust on it, but otherwise all capacitors are in good shape and they are Rubycon! I cleaned up the board myself with a soft brush and it's shining again. I even got the input - output shield.
The CPU is a Duron 1800; it's full of thermal paste and I used arctic silver thermal material remover but no luck; can I use ordinary alcohol?
The cooler is a regular one, not the standard AMD cooler but something a little better.

99% alcohol is my go to, so rubbing alcohol is A-ok! Sounds like a nice setup

First test done today! Results: the motherboard would not boot and got stuck while trying to save bios settings; problem solved with a new 3V battery. After reviewing the BIOS I noticed the version is 15! The last version is 19. Should I attempt to flash or no? (all CPU, RAM, HDD, ODD and FDD were correctly recognized). The board would not boot off a USB drive so floppy is needed to update BIOS but that is to be expected from a 2004 board!
All voltages, temperatures and fans were detected and monitored but the northbridge fan makes a noise like a jet engine; should I replace him outright or try to lubricate first?
I used the corsair tx 750w v2 PSU and all went fine including the 5V voltages, but I should mention that the CPU is the Duron 1800 because the 3200 is on the way!
Now for the really nasty part: I don't have any AGP video card so I got a MSI radeon 9250 for testing for a horrendous price and it seems any really good AGP card will have to be paid with gold!
PS: I will try to post pictures tomorrow.

If you are in the US you should be able to source a good AGP card for cheap. That 9250 will be a pretty major bottleneck in alot of games. See about getting a Geforce 4 ti or a Radeon 9600 or something along those lines.

Could you post a pic of the CPU cooler you intend to use with your 3200+?
Those chips ran quite hot, even with that copper stock AMD HSF! (especially if the top of the fins started getting dusty)

If you're still in need of a common but good sA HSF, I'd recommend an Arctic Cooling Copper Lite 3/Copper Silent 3, they're cheap and effective.

I'd agree with a R9600 being good for that build. I did notice an improvement when using a 7600GS (which is roughly similar to a GF6800 in performance), but anything faster that that didn't seem to improve performance any further.

I will post pictures soon! In the meantime I tried to test install windows XP but it can't find any HDD connected to the system despite having 1 Maxtor 80 SATA1 hard drive that I know is good connected and recognized by the board! Do I need to load some extra drivers before the Windows Xp setup starts?

That screen while it is loading drivers during the xp install itl ask you to hit an F key to install third party SCSI drivers. Do that and throw a floppy or whatever in there with your Sata drivers and load them when it asks you to.

I used a floppy to install silicon image drivers and it worked! Windows XP sp3 successfully installed! Now I installed n force drivers and it went fine, it recognized my 5.1 sound system. Afterwards I installed realtek drivers and all sound is gone! I was thinking the n force audio drivers and the realtek drivers are conflicting with each other so I uninstalled realtek but now I got no sound either! Any suggestions would be great!
I checked my antec PSU and it has 24 A on the 5 v rail so corsair is better; also i got no random restart, no BSOD until now!
About the GPU: found the following on local ebay:
1. gainward geforce 7800gs 512mb
2. leadtek geforce 7600gt 256mb
3. his radeon x1650xt 256mb
4. gecube radeon x1950 pro 256mb
Which one would be a good choice?
I will not try anything newer because I know for a fact that radeon 3850 and 4670 have serious compatibility problems on socket 462 systems.

Gainward 7800 GS 512MB hands down.
It can be expensive tho, so if that's the case go for cheaper 7600 GT (it's usually faster than 6800 Ultra).
Radeon X1950 Pro can be a good option for newer games (DX9), in older ones NV usually is the better choise (since it's got better OpenGL support and less problematic drivers).

Try switching off/on audio in BIOS.
Also : Do you see any errors or unknown devices in Device Menager ?

Sorry for the delay but I got caught up in work.
1. Regarding the audio problem: tried uninstalling and installing again nforce and realtek drivers with no luck! Had to fresh install Windows XP SP3.
2. I tried to copy from a 1000gb Western Digital black hard drive all drivers and goodies but every single time the system would hang up when detecting the capacity of the drive! The board would recognize the hard drive as western digital 1001 FALS but would hang up immediately (the bios is setup to show all drives connected to the silicon image controller). After using the jumper to set the drive to SATA1 with no result I was baffled because I know the drive to be good but that got me thinking. After trying all hard drives that I have with identical results I tried as last resort a 180 GB Intel SATA3 SSD and struck gold 😎 It was recognized on the spot! I tried a 240gb Intel SATA3 SSD that also worked. After several attempts I determined that the maximum drive capacity supported by the silicon image controller to be 500gb. Anything over and it freezes on detection. It does not matter if the drive is SATA1/2/3!
3. Regarding the power supply problem: I found a raid max 850w power supply with 30A on the 5V rail but the total capacity of the 3.3v and 5v rails are the same as corsair 750w - 150w. the price is also good and the OEM is Andyson which is a reliable manufacturer! Would that one be a good choice or no? I am very reluctant to use an old power supply - from experience 😵 This is the one: http://www.raidmax.com/power-supplies_rx-850ae.html. I don't care if it's overkill I just want to know if it is OK or no.
4. How much performance would I loose if I go with a geforce 7600gt? I ask because the price of AGP video cards are really horrible here and I have no easy access to "original" eBay. The monitor which will be used with the system is a Samsung 19 LCD (sorry, no CRT) with maximum resolution of 1280*1024. I want very much to use a classic monitor with 4/3 aspect ratio (actually is 5/4 aspect ratio but still OK in my books). I have 2 of them so I could use them both.

With your cpu the 7600 should not have much performance loss, Raidmax has a bad rep but their nicer units are actually pretty well built. Glad ya got the HDD issue sorted out 😀 the 500gb limit is pretty common on those old sata1 controllers. For the audio issues, is the front panel connector on the mobo either connected or jumpered off? If not make sure they are. Also try older drivers/different drivers, ensuring that the old ones are completely wiped.

The front panel connector is jumpered off because it's a 14 pin connector that does not match either the AC97 or the hd audio of the case which is 10 pin. Also the manual states that once the front panel audio is connected the rear panel stops functioning and I don't want to loose the 5.1 audio setup on the nvidia soundstorm!
About the PSU: I am going to buy that raidmax and see how it will hold up! The final CPU will be the athlon xp 3200 but that one didn't arrived yet. I think i am going for a geforce 7600gt because it's much cheaper then 7800gs and for 1280*1024 will be more than enough.
After updating with a floppy to the latest bios which is version 19 now I can now select in bios multipliers for the cpu up to 20 - that would give a frequency of 2660mhz! However I will not overclock, stability and long life is more important!
Tonight I will post pictures with the current setup!

The first pictures with the system: the black object from the last picture is the ssd tray from the cooler master haf xb! Also this is a very shy attempt of IDE cable management 😊 ! The front panel audio connector is the green one with 14 pins with 4 of them jumpered off

I've had an NF7-S and an AN7. The AN7 was my main PC for 2-3 years.
One of those boards ruined the 3.3v rail of a modern 550W PSU but I suspected the main cause was a GF4Ti card I was using, not just the motherboard itself. It was okay at first but in a couple weeks the 3.3v rail was sagging. That PSU was 3.3v 22A, 5v 26A, 3.3v+5v 160W max. I replaced it with an old 300W PSU that had better ratings on those rails and it was perfect after that.

I don't remember ever using a Realtek driver. Whenever I installed WinXP on those boards, I just used nVidia's nForce2 driver package. I never used 5.1 though so I have no idea if there are additional steps related to that.
The Soundstorm audio supports something like 20-bit or 24-bit PCM (I can't remember the correct number). If you use WinAmp 2.x as I do, then there's a plugin for it that enables the higher bit depth.

When installing the nForce2 drivers, I would leave the nVidia IDE driver unselected. One time I did try installing the nVidia IDE driver on the NF7-S, and shortly after there were some strange WinXP errors. Before and after that I read a bunch of stories about the nVidia IDE driver causing data corruption, so I decided to blame those errors on that issue. Since that time I always stayed with the generic Microsoft driver and never had that problem again. I noticed that a later version of nVidia's driver installer even displays a vague warning message about the IDE driver. It seems to imply that nVidia was aware of problems with their IDE driver, but it doesn't say so directly.
I remember reading about problems with the SATA controller also but I never used it on these boards, I always ran these boards with IDE. If you do run into problems then a PCI card is of course an option. The onboard Sil3112 controller is on the PCI bus anyway, so it would make no difference in the bus utilization. The IDE ports talk directly to the southbridge, they don't use PCI.

If the board isn't brand new then the chipset fan is always bad. They're probably the worst chipset fans anybody ever put on a motherboard, and that's saying something. The "heatsink" is really just a thin little enclosure to hold the fan, which is one of those video card style fans with 3 screws on a platform at the bottom of it. I doubt oiling the fan will make it last for any decent length of time, even when new they didn't last.
Instead of trying to find a compatible fan that will last longer than 2 months, I'd just convert it to something more conventional. On my boards, I removed the heatsink and replaced it with a common green heatsink from the 440BX/etc era. The spacing of the pins that go into the motherboard matches a 440BX. You can fit a common 40mm square fan over that and thread screws into the heatsink from above. The fans I used were some overpowered 40x20mm 6000rpm Deltas just because I already had a bunch of them handy, but they were overkill and somewhat loud. Reliable though.
Some nForce2 boards had a passive heatsink, but those were bigger heatsinks than what you'd find on most boards. I think DFI did that, not sure who else.

I like the AN7 because of some ways that it's more modernized than the NF7-S. It has some fan control features that the NF7 lacks. Also has firewire, but I guess nobody uses that anymore. The AN7 can boot from USB, which is handy on occasion.
It can be set up to work with Mobile CPUs, you just have to go into the BIOS and manually set the Vcore and multiplier. The BIOS can save multiple presets for the CPU setup.

I felt like my AN7 was a great match for a Radeon 9800 Pro, but nowadays I'd also consider the Geforce 6600-6800-7600 range of cards. I doubt a 7800GS would gain anything and they're very expensive.

Yesterday evening a small package arrived at my door! It was the athlon xp 3200! I installed the CPU and a new cooler with cooper base. I used arctic silver 5 but the temperatures are a bit high in my opinion: idle at around 42C and full load at around 49C. The duron 1800 never exceeded 46C. Another problem is that the system is not stable with the CPU at stock settings - FSB200 - and resets itself when CPU is under load. After fiddling a lot with the BIOS I managed to get the system stable under load at FSB182. The seller assured me that the CPU is fine, he even offered me screenshots! Could it be the power supply exceeding the 25A on the 5v line? I am positive that the CPU is well seated and the cooler is properly installed. Any ideas would be great! A friend of mine offered me for free the following power supply: http://inter-tech.de/index.php?option=com_con … mid=153&lang=en . It has 30A on the 5v rail and a combined wattage of 220v. I should mention that the PSU is not new!
These are the first pictures:

If temps of your Barton 3200+ are not the cause (mine survived up to 80c or something before crashing/locking up several times till I improved the system's cooling), then you could test doing exactly the same but using your Duron 1800.

Consider that apparently downclocking your rig seems to held prevent system instability, implying that your PSU may be the cause of the instability.

25A isn't really enough and many more modern PSUs weren't designed to run mainly 5v stuff.

Maybe it's a bit far fetched, but could in theory a heavy 12v AGP card draw more from the PSU's 12v rail, make for less cross-loading (instead of the 12v barely being used, it stresses the PSU's 12v a bit more) and make the PSU endure a little bit more punishment from systems that will otherwise eat mostly 5v?

But what nd22 is considered (why these old (and perhaps fixed) PSUs are not as bad or irrelevant as they may seem at first), the old 30A 300W PSUs were kinda made for Barton's.

My Barton rig (configured at the time with 3200+ and Radeon 9600) ran pretty good on an old 300W FSP which had 30A on 5v and maybe only 10A or 12A on 12v.

nd22 wrote:

A friend of mine offered me for free the following power supply: http://inter-tech.de/index.php?option=com_con … mid=153&lang=en . It has 30A on the 5v rail and a combined wattage of 220v. I should mention that the PSU is not new!
These are the first pictures:

I suppose you mean it's 5v/3.3v wattage is 220W and total combined is 480W?

I don't know this brand. It has very few Molex/SATA plugs (sometimes done to prevent people from attaching too much stuff which could toast their PSU and result in more returns "Sorry, you weren't supposed to use a cable splitter, your fault so we won't repair/replace it for you").

If your PSU is the same as this one http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?It … N82E16817553018 then it doesn't seem like a really good deal.

edit: Here is a review of your PSU https://www.computerbase.de/2015-01/7-billig- … agen-im-test/3/
Seems yours was the worst of the crappy PSU batch tested here.

From October 25 to November 20 the system was used with the Duron 1800 and ran without crashing even once! I did memtest, superpi, 3dmar2001 all night loop and worked perfectly! The problems started when I switched to the Athlon xp 3200 and particularly when the CPU is under 100% load! The primary culprit seems to be the PSU! I am now searching for an era correct PSU on the local eBay.
As a side note I got myself a SATA to PATA adaptor and tried again to connect the western digital 1000gb hard drive using the adaptor on the IDE port: again the system freezes on drive detection without letting me to enter the bios and runs perfect as soon as I put in a smaller drive - drives tested and working 100%: Maxtor 80gb sata1, western digital 320gb sata2, Intel 180gb sata3, Intel 240gb sata3, Intel 480gb sata3.