First post, by Eleanor1967
Hey guys,
a couple of days ago I found a pretty much untouched but dirty Compag Pentium 3 on the street, probably waiting to be picked up by the bullky-trash-pickup service we have here in Germany. But you know how it goes, we all have a big heart for something, so naturally I picked it up. They machine seems to be pretty much unmodified besides a different CD drive which is a year to new for the rest of the machine and was mounted with different screws.
Its specs are:
- Pentium 3 450 Mhz
- 128 MB of RAM
- Compaq OEM motherboard (Pic attached)
- ATI Rage IIc AGP graphics card
- Compaq Premier Sound (ES1869f based) Seems to be pretty decent actually
and a modem and 3COM network card which I already put on the to be thrown away pile.
The question is what do I do with this stuff now? I was kinda looking for a Pentium 3 anyway so building a machine is the natural thing to do here. I do have a couple of questions and wanted to ask you guys for your opinion/input.
I was thinking of building a higher end Pentium 3 before finding this system, more like 800-1000 Mhz range, but now with that 450 Mhz Pentium laying around I could just use that, I have a good selection of games which would run on this system that wouldn't on my currently fastest machine, a 233 Mhz P1 mmx system.
- So question is what GPU should I get for the system? Single V2 ? V2 SLI ? Maybe a V3? Maybe an ATI or something completely different ? Which one you guys think would fit this CPU ?
- Should I use the motherboard ? It works and looks fine at the first glance and its BIOS looked useable for an OEM board. So should I just run with it ?
I am curious about the motherboard it seems the have an Intel 740 on it, which according to wikipedia is an GPU, but its the only chip which could be the chipset and the board has no video out as far as I can see, so I am wondering how this is all coming together. A picture is attaced. Sorry for the poor quality, my phone is the only thing a have here at the moment, but I could borrow a DSLR if needed.
That should be enough of a wall of text for now, thanks for reading it 😉
Cheers,
Eleanor1967