First post, by psychz
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It was high time I built a proper 3D gaming rig. I had lots of trouble making a CUV4X+Radeon 9600+Voodoo2 build, got a lot of crashes and display corruption, and I thought that VIA chipsets were to blame, so I went with 440BX/nVidia instead, making quite a few sacrifices (100MHz FSB, ATA-66, WinME). A few days ago I got my first working i815 Solano motherboard, unfortunately without an I/O panel. There we go:
M/B: Mitac 6515WU (HP-branded, from a Vectra VL400)
CPU: Pentium III 1000EB / 133MHz FSB, Thermaltake "Golden Orb" s370 cooler
RAM: 1x256MB @ 133MHz
HDD: Seagate SpinPoint 60GB
GPU: HIS ATi Radeon 9600 Pro/256MB
PCI: 2x Creative Voodoo2 12MB with stock SLI cable
Sound: On-board Cirrus Logic AC97 (Crystal CS4277)
OS: Windows 98 Second Edition (finally)
Had some trouble getting it to boot 😢 This motherboard needs fans in all its connectors, so you have to jumper the + with the tach signal pin (red with yellow), otherwise it won't start 😵 After installing the ATI and then the Voodoo2 drivers, I was still getting lots of display corruption and crashes, which were eventually solved, after serious googling sessions, with this fix (mentioned here). No custom drivers this time, installed almost everything HP supplied for their VL400 back then, chipset drivers straight from Intel, stock Catalysts and reference 3dfx drivers. Small motherboard - too few slots; can't add a soundcard without blocking Radeon's fan. Thank god it has an integrated 3C905 and I don't need another PCI slot for networking. Board(chipset?) also features an Ultra100 IDE controller. Was in doubt whether a PCI ATA133 controller would be useful or bottleneck the bus, in the end just went with the integrated one. Tomorrow I'll be adding fans, looking for a CRT 😈 , installing USB mass storage support and some old games to check it out. Sorry for the quality of the pics, were taken with my old phone under relatively low light. 3DMark tests were at 1024x768x16 this time. Not bad, huh?
Todo: Might look for a 1GHz Coppermine with 100MHz FSB to use in the 6BA+IV SLI build, just for comparison.
wrote:Its not like components found in trash after 20 years in rain dont still work flawlessly.
:: chemical reaction :: athens in love || reality is absent || spectrality || meteoron || the lie you believe