First post, by Atreus
- Rank
- Newbie
Here I want to share some information about my Retro Rig based on Pentium II 333MHz on Gigabyte GA-6EM rev 1.8 motherboard.
Firstly I've build PIII 600MHz with 256MB RAM and integrated Sound Card based on ESS Solo-1. Motherboard was Biostar M6TZF. It was a lot of fun to install Win'98SE and drivers. Especially for this sound card. I needed to manually copy needed files drom instalation packs just to have a proper Midi files in system. But this is completely different story.
After some time and looking on Ebay and Allegro, I'd found an Gigabyte GA-6EM motherboard. It's tiny, simple and have some charm in it. But when I read about specs on internet, I've resigned from buying it. Months were passing and this mobo was still for sale. No one wanted it, so I thought "I'll give it a try, even if I prefer to have faster PIII...". So after finalizing payment and waiting about 1.5 month the board was finally mine.
Motherboard after arriving.
Comparison of sizes with M396F (386SX).
In the meantime I've bought the fastest CPU for it. It is full PII 330MHz with 66MHz FSB. Codename SL2S5. Unfortunately CPU have different case, so I needed to disassemble CPU brackets from motherboard.
After checking everything if it will fit together, I've taken mobo to take a bath.
When mobo was clean, it was dryed in oven for about 20 minutes in temperature 50 degrees of Celsius. And left to cool down and dry if somethings left between IC's and mobo for another day.
In the meantime I've decided to use a small PC case which I bought some time ago from Germany. It's not beautifull and have some limitations, but I give it a try.
First limitation was that it utilizes different size ATX PSU. I needed to cut bigger hole.
When I was doing that I also cut hole for fan in front of the case.
Second limitation is the size. It's shorter than Sound Blaster AWE32 CT3900, so I needed to install SB CT3600. But maybe I'll change it for Sound Blaster 16 CT2230 with NEC XR385.
Here is a photo of inside the case.
I'm thinking about changing 3.5" cage for disk drives. With this one I can install only 1x 3.5" FDD and 1x 3.5" HDD. Nothing else.
As for now configuration of this PC is:
- PII SL2S5 overclocked to 416MHz (yes it's working with FSB set to 83MHz)
- 256MB of RAM (Kingston KTD-OPGX1N/128)
- GFX Card: Gigabyte AV32S (Ati Radeon 7000 32MB)
- GFX 3D Card: Innovision Voodoo II 12MB
- Sound Card: Sound Blaster CT3600 with 2MB RAM
- 1x FDD 3.5" 1.44MB
- 1x FDD 5.25" 1.2MB
- 2x HDD 3.5" 20GB
- 1x TEAC DVD-ROM
Even if it's overclocked. it's working very stable in Win'98SE. F.e. "Clive Barker's Unduying" runs very well on Voodoo II 😁 This game was my testbench for this computer on all 3 FSB settings 66/75/83 MHz.
Goals to do with this computer.
- changing all caps
- changing 3.5" drives cage
- choose between SB CT3600 or SB CT2230 with NEC XR385
- custom made front panel in PC Tower case
- adding XT-IDE ROM to be able of using larger HDD
Already done:
- changing heat paste in CPU
- changing cooler on CPU. Old one was very noisy.