Dochartaigh wrote on 2020-01-12, 20:18:
I decided to go with the ESS ES1868F for my DOS ISA sound card right now. With having to buy a new power supply some other things I just don't want to drop the money on the other + dreamblaster (yet at least).
Perfectly good choice. You've seen the rabbit hole, if you ever feel like it, you can jump down. For now this is a compatible, bug-free solution that will at least give you decent sound.
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My buddy found me this ATX/Dell adapter cable I'll pick that up instead of changing everything around myself. […]
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My buddy found me this ATX/Dell adapter cable I'll pick that up instead of changing everything around myself.
(see edit below)
I've been looking up power supplies for the last ~hour and it seems like the highest 5v is 20 amps 120w. Is that enough? EVGA 500 Watt for $40.
Will this work with the above Delll ATX adapter? Do new power supplies have ALL the same wiring hookups my old Dell Dimension XPS T700r computer will need? I will be running a HDD, CD-ROM, 5.25" floppy, 3.5" floppy, Zip 100 Drive (which honestly I probably won't even hook up). The Dell hasn't even shipped yet so I need to rely on you guys telling me if I'll need any adapters and such.
Oh, and the screw holes will line-up in that Dell case, right? And it'll physically fit in the case? My frankensteined P3 800mhz has it like angled 45º with only 2 screws holding it in so just wanted to make sure...
**EDIT** My buddy found this dell-correct Startech 300w power supply which does the same 20 amps on the 5v as the EVGA above. We're trying to add up the total wattage to see if this will be enough. What do you think? ...I'm just a bit worried that it's still probably going to be a LOT older (by prob 15 years if it's old stock I assume).
Can't comment on the adapter, but if the pinout corresponds, it should be OK.
What's the rating of the current PSU on the 5V line? No point in going to great lengths to basically just replicate what you already have... the Startech PSU is new and probably not old stock either, they specialize in replicating obsolete hardware for this kind of purpose. You could ask the seller to be sure...
Given that the Gf4Ti4600 doesn't have an aux power in, it can draw max 48W from AGP (2/3 from 3.3V line, 1/3 from 5V line), the P3-1000 draws about 30W from 5V. Assume about 50% overhead and powering PCI devices, that puts you at 115W for 3.3V + 5V combined. That should work on both the EVGA and the Startech PSU, but it might already work on the original Dell PSU you already have. Max efficiency though is attained around 80% utilization, for that you would want a PSU that offers about 145W on 3.3V+5V.
By comparison I just dug up my AOpen-branded FSP300-60BT(12V). "Only" 300W, but 30A on 5V and 28A on 3.3V individually, and 180W on 3.3V + 5V combined. The PSU also weighs a ton, always a good sign (in absence of any other info, heavier PSUs tend to be better, regardless of proclaimed specs - unless the weight comes from cement, not electronic components, and yes, that is a thing with really shady dealers). Note however that you don't need this much power, a PSU like this was aimed at later AMD AthlonXP (or MP) designs that could draw up to 80W each and still needed to get that from the 5V line.
So you all REALLY don't like solid states for Windows 98 SE, right? Is it because they don't have the build-in mechanism which doesn't write over and over again to the same sectors which will make the solid state (SD card or SSD HDD) break in short order? Just a reminder that this Dell has that SD card reader already in it, and I already have a Sandisk class 10 128gb micro SD card I could put in it... I really don't care if it dies in like a year...
I very much do like solid state drives for Win98SE. I'd recommend SLC drives like the Intel X25E as they hardly suffer from the lack of TRIM support in old OSs.
Whay I don't like is SD - as it's not a native protocol, it add conversion overhead and is far slower than something closer to what a PC would understand.
BUT, if there's other reasons why you don't like SSD's, I can pickup the SYBA SD-SATA150R for $15. I already have a modern SATA Hitachi 640gb 7200RPM HDD I can use (also have a 2.5" Sandisk 240gb SSD I could use...). I can format these into ~120gb partitions, and even have one with straight-up DOS (what is it 6.2.2 that was the latest?) on it for those intensive DOS games like Quake.
Be careful with these Silicon Image controllers:
- they frequently require PCI 2.2. The i440BX chipset in your system only offers PCI 2.1
- Win9x support even in systems with correct PCI is patchy.
Instead look for Highpoint or - better - Promise controllers. The TX2Plus is the best Win98SE SATA solution (and gives you a fast PATA port too).
The last standalone DOS was 6.22. It support FAT12 and 16 only, so no partitions over 2GB. My experience is it doesn't work correctly with larger disks, even if you keep the partitions small. And with "larger" I mean a 4GB CF card, not some 640GB monster. Once again, for DOS you make life much, much simpler if you have a drive that physically isn't bigger than 2GB. I really like 1GB CF cards.
You can extract the DOS 7.x supplied with Win95/98/ME, which does support FAT32, but things get complicated with stuff not working (Creative sound card PnP utils) or working oddly (long file name support). Again, this is an option, but life is much simpler if you stick to MS-DOS 6.22, which just works with all DOS hardware and software. On a max 1GB HDD or CF card.
FAT32 can handle up to 2TB drives, but you need 3rd party tools to format FAT32 over 32GB, and things get very inefficient. Moreover, max file size is 4GB-1B, which means that things like ISOs tend not to fit. FAT32 really isn't designed to handle big drives and big files. That's another reason to keep storage in the network and just use a somewhat period-correct drive size locally for installed software (consider that 20GB was a HUGE drive when Win98SE was launched and when regular support ended in 2002 the 137GB barrier had only just been broken). There's a reason MS was trying to move people to NTFS since the mid 1990s...