First post, by gex85
Hey guys,
I am considering a new build with "all things dual", as the thread title suggests.
Background:
1. Earlier this year I "found" a Voodoo 5 5500 AGP in a scrap lot, as I described here: Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?
2. Last week I received a Tyan Tiger 100 (dual Slot 1, 440BX) with two P3-600 CPUs: Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today
3. Searching on the forums, I found this 2017 thread with a system built around these two components that looks just fantastic: Dual Slot-1 PIII / Voodoo 5 5500 build
So now I am planning to do a similar build with the following hardware:
- Tyan Tiger 100 Dual Slot 1 mainboard
- 2x Pentium III 600 MHz CPUs
- 4x 256MB RAM
- Voodoo 5 5500
- 3ware 7000-2 dual-port IDE RAID controller to increase read/write speed and work around the BIOS disk size limitation
- Dual IDE hard disks in RAID0 or RAID1, something in the 40-80 GB range
- D-Link dual port ethernet adapter with two Intel chips
- Maybe dual sound cards, probably a Yamaha Waveforce 192XG (YMF724) and one ISA sound card, not decided yet. That would only make sense if I would dual-boot with DOS.
- USB 2.0 PCI card, because why not
I want to go with Windows 2000 (and maybe dual-boot DOS), because it is my favorite retro OS and supports dual CPUs. Not the ideal choice for the Voodoo 5, which would probably work better with Win 98, I know.
Question 1:
Regarding graphics cards, I could also do a Rage Fury Maxx (2x Rage 128) + Voodoo 2 SLI setup. That would support the "all things dual" theme even better, but the Maxx doesn't have drivers for anything else than Win9x, which would make the dual CPUs quite pointless. What do you think?
(I know the CPUs are a bit on the weak side for the Voodoo, but I don't have anything faster for Slot 1, let alone a matched pair. But if maxing out the Voodoo was the goal, I would go with a Socket A system anyway, so that's not the point here.)
Question 2:
I haven't decided on a case yet. These are the options:
- Use a generic beige box, InWin H500. Pretty boring, I think.
- Use a black Chieftec CS601, which would be at least somewhat period correct, but then I would need a new case for my S775 build which currently occupies the Chieftec.
- Get a brand new BeQuiet Pure Base 600 with tempered glass side door. This would allow for clean cable management and nice exhibitions of the components. I would probably even add some white LEDs to illuminate the build which should look pretty cool since all PCBs are of the same green color. Usually I don't do retro builds in modern cases, but I think I could make an exception here. I already have like 10 or 15 beige boxes, something different wouldn't be too bad.
Any comments?