First post, by Dochartaigh
I wanted a brand name computer (for the aesthetic), built to the highest specs during my college days (thus no main parts released after 2000), which I could play late DOS and early Windows games on (just like I did back then!), with some modern convenience upgrades.
I went with a Dell Dimension XPS T700r for the aesthetics, based off the 440bx chipset.
Upgraded to a 800MHz Coppermine Pentium III Slot 1 Processor (released 12.1999)
(yes, I still have 5.25" discs!, and the .Zip drive comes in handy since some of my other computers don't have USB for USB drives)
Beauty shot of some of the main components:
I LOVE how the GeForce 256 matches the color of the Thermaltake Golden Orb heatsink:
Component list:
384 MB SDRAM, PC-100, 100Mhz, Non-ECC (wanted to stay below 512)
Nvidia GeForce 256, 64 MB DDR, AGP Video Card (12.1999)
ESS ES1869F ISA Sound Card w/ Dreamblaster X2 General MIDI module (Buran V10 SoundFont)
Audigy 2 ZS PCI Windows Sound Card (think this is cheating and came out later...but I had slurred speech on some later Win98 games with the ESS)
I went overkill on SSD's. Could have gone 32gb for the main C:\ drive but the 120gb's were cheaper. Then wanted ALL the games (many with large ISO images) on the D:\ drive which truly needs to be 120gb to fit everything. The original 7200rpm mechanical I cloned is still in there too.
I went with 2x Voodoo2 12mb's in SLI because A.) It's the first proper SLI setup released which I think is cool, B.) It benchmarks even (if not above in some cases) with a Voodoo3 which is circa the 1999 era I wanted to keep to, and C.) I wanted to be able to compare 3dfx/Glide to Nvidia's best offering from 1999.
This Noctua fan blows directly on the 2x Voodoo2's and the GeForce 256 (just in case they needed some extra cooling).
Full album if you want more pics.
https://imgur.com/a/XeTkQ7w
Thank you to everybody who helped me get this running through my numerous (probably annoying 😉 topics here. I wont lie, it was an absolute nightmare. I had to organize all my photos for this project to get the keepers above... and just noticed there's 244 pics and videos of the literally hundreds of errors I had left and right in building this... Still don't know what made this build work - I think it was the updated Chipset drivers but who knows. All that matters is it's been stable for several weeks now and I'm happy!