Great find. Nice to get a Voodoo 3 for free and other parts as a bonus 😀

These Teac dual format drives are actually not so common - I'm surprised a system from this era would have one. I bought one on ebay a few years ago but I've only been able to make the 3.5" part of it work. The 5.25" drive won't read disks.

I remember getting an FIC SD11 on eBay a long time ago, but it never worked. It took years for me to get another slot-A board which showed the CPU was good. It was one of the weirdest packing jobs I've had from an eBay seller. The motherboard was shipped on a piece of carpet. That's neither ESD safe, nor is it light, so I have no idea what motivated that decision.

I've never actually used a slot-A for a significant length of time, but it is definitely an interesting moment in time. I remember really wanting one of these but it required buying too many new parts, so I settled for a K6-3 upgrade instead. Turns out Slot-A didn't last long so I guess it wasn't really the right time to jump into a major upgrade anyway.

I might be mixing this up, but if I remember right, some versions of this motherboard only have half of the Vcore MOSFETs populated. If that's the case, and you're inclined to do such things, it might be worth filling in the missing parts. Check with a multimeter though to make sure those pads are actually in parallel with the populated ones.
If you do any soldering on the board then it might also need caps, I think mine had some bad ones.

That is a cool dual floppy drive. Pretty surprising to find that in an Athlon. To this day I've never had a 5.25" except in an old Apple.

Nice catch! Do the slot A's run hot? What game era would a system like this fit?

I'd say the PCI Voodoo 3 and Combo floppy are a bigger deal than the Slot-A stuff, it's a fantastic find overall!

I love Slot A stuff so I'm pleased to see another one in good shape! Mine is daily driver for retro gaming which I picked up for cheap before I realised they were not that common. I also use mine with a Voodoo 3 2000 pci.

appiah4 wrote:

I'd say the PCI Voodoo 3 and Combo floppy are a bigger deal than the Slot-A stuff, it's a fantastic find overall!

I'll admit the voodoo is probably the most useful then the combo drive but they show up here more often then Slot A's
But I'd of been happy with just one of the 3 bits of hardware in a dumpster PC

The CPU doesn't get that hot, if I didn't know better I would think the seized fan only spins up when needed as its only warm (of course this isn't the case the fans have no sensor whatsoever) but also think its above 700Mhz where various hardware was starting to get pushed, my 650 non Thunderbird isn't that fast in the grand scheme of Slot A's.

I'm really not sure what's original and what isn't. The Zip drive definitely isn't, I'm assuming the Voodoo is as its period correct and a good match. but that floppy makes no sense I agree. Either they were getting rid of old stock or its been salvaged from an older PC, but yeh 5.25 died out with 386 or 486's so is bit of an odd one.

Almoststew1990 what do you have? I still haven't had time to try it out properly yet but first impressions aren't great. maybe its just my setup

I hope you have good luck with that SD11. I had one when they were new, with a Step-Thermodynamics modified Athlon, and it was nothing but an intolerable stream of problems for me. I switched to an ABIT board and life was much better immediately.
If it acts up, it's not just you.

What was that modified athlon ?

sunaiac wrote:

What was that modified athlon ?

The company Step Thermodynamics had overclocked hard-modded Athlons for sale. Mine was an Athlon 500@650 . I basically spent most of QuakeCon 2000 fighting graphics corruption issues on my system, after reinstalling Win98 multiple times. The board was too much trouble for me - and I was used to arriving at any given LAN party and just reinstalling Windows when I got plugged in, because of issues I always had. 🤣

That's cool. I'll try to find one for my collection.

JodieC wrote:

I was used to arriving at any given LAN party and just reinstalling Windows when I got plugged in, because of issues I always had. 🤣

Ahh that was a big part of Win9x era LAN parties Only did 1 proper big party in a hall with my brother and one of our PC's had problems, cant remember what. dispute them working fine on our home network with a 3rd PC.

Most of the time it was just 2 mates round mine with me and my brothers Slot 1 systems, the old 486 and my 2 mates with a AMD K6? and cant remember what the other guy had at all!
First 1/2 of the first day was always spent trying to get the network going and then still troubleshooting games. After I left home and my brother continued to have mates round for a gaming weekend mum would say they were playing games right away, yeh they were using XP by then.

Anyway back on topic! this little project has stalled due to lack of time.
This build took me right back to late 90's early 2000's. I even had my "Triple J Hottest 100 the complete list" playing from the era while working on this which emulates a radio station quite well with some songs you like and others you dont.

Now that it's up and running it also feels alot like my P2 400 from back then. and by that the drivers don't feel optimized and a little bit buggy.
but wile the intel drivers were not perfect in the late 90's they benefited from continued development, where as Slot A was dropped pretty quickly.

2 main probloms I noticed right away was Windows will freeze every few seconds, I can be clicking on the start menu, or using explorer but I'll just freeze for a second, then work again, Doesn't happen when playing games luckily but is an annoyance.
NFS4 crashes if I enable Triple Buffer, having this enabled on my Slot 1 P3 + V2 SLI works fine.

Both of these may be just a case of finding the right driver combination,but haven't had to play that game for years either. These days I usually just get the latest ones and they work fine. oh well I don't have time for that now.

Not sure what my long term plan is yet. The original idea was to get a Vortex 2 and have it as an alternative to my standard combination of Intel, Nvidia, Creative, but those cards are not easy to find at a decent price.
I would also like to get it to the magical 1Ghz in either a Tbird or not, but cant even find them on ebay at all!

So for now it sits unused, maybe a little bit unloved but still not unwanted. It's nice to have to compare to the Slot 1's