After a good long while since this project has stood on its own without the Gateway Tabor III and Coppermine CPU carrying it, I finally (knock on wood) have something that comes close to achieving my goal. This project may never be completed to my satisfaction, or it may one day be completed: I have no idea if or when I will actually have a computer I am 100% "happy," with. At this point, however, I think I've nailed it as close as I feel I can, and the hope here is that I will only have to make minor(ish) tweaks over time, knock on wood.

With that out of the way, here's some pictures and specs:

Alongside the new motherboard, there are a few new advancements I have made over previous versions of this project. Those include:

- Non-haphazardly constructed CPU cooling.
- Quiet fans + rubber fan mounts (the latter was just from me getting tired of screwing the fans in and the mounts work great, what can I say).
- "Superior," cable management (it's hard to make ide cables look good, i just tried more this time).
- Cleaner.
- Less wild specs, more optimized design.

For a very long time, I just used an OEM cooler not designed to have a fan on it directly with a fan meant to cool a Pentium 4 zip-tied on it directly. This made the cooler so big that I could only use the last RAM slot on the Tabor III and SE440BX-2; the other two slots were covered by the friggin HSF. The fans also made this thing sound like a low power vacuum cleaner, but the fans in it when I had the i740 in it ages ago made it sound like a small jet was taking off nearby to my house. Noise reduction has made improvements, step-by-step.

Cable management for the power cables especially has been improved with Velcro ties. Every single cable I'm not using is strapped together in one giant loop located behind the CD drive, all neat. No more do I use the spare 5.25" bay I have to jam all of my unused cables in. IDE cable management was slightly improved, though it still looks worse than when seasoned retro computer builders do it. I'm not saying I'm an amateur, but comparing myself to a lot of people that do this sort of work, I lack at least 10 years of experience compared to them, and 20 or 30 years at the most. I still technically only have 4 or so years of experience with old computer work at this point, so any step up in running cables like this, even if it still looks like garbage, is better than nothing. At least I'm not jamming them into open expansion bays or various nooks and crannies in the case anymore. That's my best excuse.

Finally, this thing has less useless features than before. Once upon a time, I wanted a time-accurate DVD-ROM alongside a CD burner, however, as time has passed, I've dropped the CD burner I had in it for a long time after the SE440BX-2 died, and replaced it with the good 'ol US$15 48x Samsung CD-ROM drive. I don't need to burn CD's with this thing, I don't need to read DVD's, I just want to play random late '90s games on it, and a CD-ROM + ZIP Drive (I had to have something slightly unnecessary in there) does that just fine.

The back of the machine shows the increase in simplicity as well. I only need three expansion cards: video, sound, and ethernet. I also am now able to use PCI Slot 02, which makes things look a little better in general. I like to give the video card a free expansion slot of empty space to breathe, I really don't want the heatsink mere millimeters away from the card below it.

On an off-topic note, this is the reason why my cable management is so "pretty," on this one and so ugly on the P200. The damn tower is tiny, and has awful airflow. More excuses, but at least this helps visualize it.

Specs:

EPoX EP-61BXA-M Motherboard
Intel Pentium II Deschutes SL2U6 400MHz
128MB (true) PC-100 RAM
Creative Labs 3D Blaster CT5823 (nVidia RIVA TNT2 32MB)
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! Value
Samsung 48X IDE CD-ROM Drive
Quantum Fireball CR 6.4 AT
1.44MB 3.5" FDD

The last thing I should note is that none of this would have been possible if I didn't decide to make an account on here and pester this entire forum for ages on end to learn trivial information over time. The fact that the M64 is garbage, the fact that 400 some megabytes of friggin RAM makes absolutely no sense for a machine like this, the fact that games aren't going to run perfectly with 0 hitches on '90s hardware, the fact that people would not have a PIII 500 the split second it came out- those sorts of things.

Without my incessant interrogation, I would never be able to do any of this. I'd probably be throwing in 768,423MB of RAM with 160 Pentium III's in series right now just to try and remove the bottleneck made by an 8MB TNT2 M64 that's so slow it doesn't even use a heatsink, with all of those Pentium III's frying themselves to death because I never changed the thermal paste on them or implemented proper cooling or cleaning procedures. Either way, all I can say is thank you, and in many ways, this build is just as much yours' as it is mine. Time to run Half-Life at 40fps with stuttering at 800x600: The Way It's Meant to be Played™.

(Honestly, with my recent experience with the Pentium MMX 200MHz build, I can see why this was high end. GLQuake at 1024x768 60+FPS is eons ahead of Quake at 320x200 at 35-40fps, so I'll give this that)