First post, by RetroAddict
Greetings all,
I'm a long time reader of vogons and as my collection of retro bits builds that my partner loathes I figured I'd sign up here to give some input and hopefully ask some advice!
I figured I'd start by listing the fully assembled machines that I have and then the parts I've accumulated - I'd like any critique you can give or suggestions as to what to do with the hardware I have spare please.
Machine 1 -
RM Accelerator
Pentium 3 @ 450Mhz - originally a p2 @ 350MHz
Intel SE440BX Motherboard
256mb PC 100
Graphics card to be decided (ATI rage 128 pro 32mb currently), it had a Geforce 2 GTS but it's given up on life it seems!
Turtle Beach Fiji Soundcard with Yamaha DB50XG daughterboard
Mechanical 20gb drive
Creative Labs DVD drive
Windows 98 SE
My intention is to keep this for DOS games and early games like Unreal / Unreal tournament (it struggles with this) and go from there. The midi quality seems fab to my unqualified ears!
Machine 2
Pentium 3 @ 866MHz
256MB PC133
SD to IDE with 64gb card
Geforce TI 4600
Creative SB Live
Generic dvd/cdrw combo
Windows 98 SE
Tiny Computer
QDI Brillianx 1s/2000
Pentium 3 @ 1GHz
384mb pc100
SD to IDE with 64gb card
Geforce FX 5900
Creative SB Live
Matshita DVD drive
Windows me
Now I love the above machines and can probably get away with keeping these out for regular use, but I have other machines that I don't have any connection to because I didn't use them whilst at College / they weren't machines I ever had similar specs to.
Loosely these are as follows-
3x Pentium 4 desktops (micro atx). Two of these have agp slots, one doesn't. I figured I could repurpose the cases for some of the items below.
1x Pentium 4 ATX tower with the p4i65g motherboard, and a 3.4Ghz EE Pentium 4
On to the parts I've accumulated -
2x KT7a Abit Boards (one is new)
4x Aopen MX3s boards with 866MHz (Socket 370) and various amounts of memory
1x Abit NF7
Various AMD cpus
Various Intel CPUs (all slot 1) but multiple of each speed and a couple of p3 @ 1GHz
Matrox G400 - This won't post in any machine I have, not sure why but if anyone has any suggestions they'd be appreciated! May put a thread in the graphics forum for this card as I'd love to use it.
Matrox Parhelia 128
Can anyone offer any suggestions of what gpu should be in each machine please? I've spent a long time reading the threads here about period appropriate cards, which I don't think any of the machines currently have. Will I be causing any significant issues using the cards I had put in each? I realise the cpu may be limiting in each, but would that allow me to turn on some eye candy to better utilise the cards?
I'm tempted to make an xp machine also, I've got both micro atx and atx gigabyte boards plus various core 2 cpu. I've a q6600 which I'd like to use if possible for this! I have an old RM tower which I could use for this, if I removed the p4 guts contained within.
Thanks so much for reading.