About time I posted something here. A bit of an update coming, actually, so I won't be speaking of everything. Suffice to say, there were (and are still planned) changes to Bard, Seer, I've acquired and successfully tested hardware for the future Athlon build (still needs a name), plus there's new hardware coming for Tualatin...
But today's star of the show is the Emperor himself. I've finally gotten a holiday, and instantly went to building this chap all for myself. Therefore not that many photos, but, still, you can get the picture.
Started off with the usual Fractal Design Define R6 case.
This is also my first build with RGB lighting. The passive kind, mind you, I don't like all that sparkling, ever changing will-o-wispy look. I just needed to get some purple non-UV to supplement the UV strip that went into this chap. And here's a test:
Now then, installing the rest of stuff... A nice ECS P965 board, in glorious purple, a Crossfire Edition Radeon X1800 XT (master card, with that special port for the dongle), and, as promised, a P4 3.8 cooled by EDIT:Asus Arctic Square monstrosity.
It also has an Ageia PhysX card inside (this, second one I tried, the first being DOA, actually works, and the seller claimed it was a preproduction sample by Ageia themselves - perhaps, who knows?), and a DMX 6Fire audio card, which, considering it is superior to Audigy in all but being software only, is a complete non-issue in Vista, which is pretty much a cutoff point for hardware sound.
This thing ran on P4 2.8 before during my tests, and the cooler managed to keep the CPU below 40... That same cooler with those same settings is barely keeping the 3.8 monster below 60. I've already ordered a replacement fan for it (original was flakey at best, and the white Akasa 80mm fan seems a bit too weak), so there's that.
I've also gotten very weird effects on boot with BIOS logo...
That said, the card booted Windows perfectly, and no artifacts anywhere. Perhaps, this is how BIOS hacks for displaying those logos (mis-)interact with the external compositing engine this card has? Don't know, and probably shouldn't care, so long as it works.
At any rate, waiting for the second card to arrive (and yes, in ATI's version of multi-gpu setup the master card goes into secondary slot for some reason, so the topmost PCIE is free, waiting for the slave card. EDIT: that turned out to be completely wrong, master goes into the first slot.
Now there are a few more things. I've gotten the XP box for future Athlon build.
Nothing special, but makes me happy. Now I just need DOS 6 for Seer and W95 for Bard...
Finally, now that we can proudly shout "Long live the (new) Emperor"... which sticker do I use?
This here is a bunch of various ones for more than this machine, but there are two P4 HT stickers, a flat one and one with some relief. Which one would you suggest? I'm leaning towards the non-flat one (it is also slightly wider). The round red Intel one will probably go to the Seer, since there aren't any 386-specific stickers that were originally produced, and the Xeon will sadly not happen. Tried it in Abit board, but there were memory errors (which weren't there with the same memory and a Q6600 - perhaps that particular CPU has cache issues, perhaps the board doesn't like 1333, but the memory errors appeared on 1200 also, which was a perfectly stable overclock for Q6600 for I can't remember how many years now, so I've ordered a new 3 GHz Core Extreme, and will see where that one ends).
Finally, future plans:
There's more to do with Bard and Seer, and, perhaps, I'll finally finish the video with Korg NX5R demo songs (I've replaced the fuses, so it is now properly protected against dangers of 220V 😀)