Beautiful build!

You were lucky to get such a good GPU. I have an EPIA-TC with a Unichrome Pro IGP and it's not very good for DOS stuff. It has the typical stutter/scrolling glitch in games such as Keen4, Crystal Caves, and many more. I also noticed that there's some random static in the picture. So I was lucky to find the EXT-PCI riser and use a FX5200 on it, alongside an ESS-Solo. The case is quite a problem but I managed to make it fit in a micro ATX slim case after some modding. With one intake 92mm fan and one 40mm fan on the CPU heat sink, it runs cool. it can go below 30°C on stand by. Overclocked at full load 65°C. The CPU is a 1GHz Nehemiah C5P, but I usually run it @1.4GHz on XP.

About the noise, have you thought about using a Noctua fan? They can be very silent, and they also have a 5v version.

One more thing, you can make the Nehemiah run slower with a tool called CPUSPD. It can get really really slow if you set the multiplier to 4x and disable all the caches: m4 c1d c2d ecd eid ebd. That's a 386 around 20-33MHz. If you throttle that with the t1 option, it's as slow as a PC-XT according to checkit.

And if you want DX2-66 speed try m4 c2d ecd. That sets the 4x multiplier and disables the L2 cache and the D-cache.

Thanks!
I think the main problem contributing to this fan's noise is how close it is to the side panel, and how tiny the air holes are. Besides, a 5V Noctua does not run more quiet than the 12V version - instead it runs the full RPM at 5V instead. To get it silent, you'd use the 12V fan but then only feed it 5V instead, which makes it run at half speed or so.

As for CPUSPD, as I wrote in the beginning, I use setmul for the exact same effect. I guess CPUSPD is just as good.

Still, I'd prefer if I could get an Ezra-T instead of the Nehemiah, since less heat produced means less ventilation needed.

Oh, and I found out today that the Sound Blaster AWE64 Value CT4380 is longer than the CT4520 and does not fin inside my case. Which means it is highly likely the Gold wouldn't fit either. So the 4520 is probably the only model that does fit inside.

Hi Manfred,

I also swapped from Nehemiah to Ezra last year, and much happier for DOS compatibility 😀

Just note that while Ezra-T offer more multipliers and possibly higher nominal clocks, it seems not to support MTRR (Fastvid, etc.) on all motherboards I tried.

You will only get minimal boost with MTRR (<5%) on Ezra-T vs 60-250% on Ezra, so when running e.g. Quake you will go faster on Ezra than Ezra-T.

Ezra 1000 is actually 50% faster in Quake+MTRR than Ezra-T 1200.

See: VIA C3 Ezra vs Ezra-T: Interesting Behavior of MTRR/FASTVID

If you look for "VIA C3" you will find couple Ezra on ebay.de.

Hope this helps.

Great notes on the Neoware CA2 and excellent discussion.

This is my favorite thin client of all time. It's been rock solid for me, with wide compatibility.

I have since made some changes to the system, among them:
- I went back to the VIA C3 Nehemiah, which I let run at 8x100 by default instead of 6x133, for the simple reason that this overclocks to 1400 MHz, and using a lower FSB means I get more multipliers and thus finer settings betweens minimum and maximum speed.
- I used some different sound cards: a Labway LWHA1100 with ESFM and a n AdmosQDP700 wavetable on board, which sounded great in the FM department and okay for General MIDI, then tried a Guillemot Maxi Sound 64 Dynamic 3D, but despite software, driver and resources looking perfect I never got sound of it. Very sad, because I love the ESFM and this one combined it with a DREAM synthesizer and 18 MB RAM for loading sound fonts for General MIDI. In the end I put the AWE64 back in. Yeah, Creative CQM sounds worse than OPL3, ESFM and CrystalFM. But personally I think CQM can sound great once you activate Chorus and Reverb for it, at 25 or 50% it plays in the same league as the aforementioned FM synths in my opinion, and the choice comes down to personal preference.
-the noisy 60mm fan was replaced with a Noctua, and a 40mm Noctua added to the S3 ProSavage.
-I made an Excel sheet for all 336 possible speed settings of the VIA C3 Nehemiah - from 400 MHz without L1 cache, L2 cache, instruction cache and branch prediction to 1400 MHz with all of those enabled. Have yet to fill it with the corresponding benchmark scores to make it easier to dial in the correct speeds for speed sensitive games.
-a second Excel sheet for all 224 combinations with FSB133 is in the works to see if the lower clockspeed is even needed to hit certain vital speed points

All in all, I am extremely happy with the project.
Without any emulation, all in real hardware, this achieves maximum compatibility with DOS games, both in the sound and graphics department. Meanwhile, it can even play Half Life at 800x600 with perfectly playable framerates (as in: more than 40 FPS most of the time, practically no drops below 30).
Especially surprised by the S3 ProSavage IGP. I'd say that with its 3D core taken from the Savage 4, it's somewhere between a Voodoo 2and 3 in terms of performance. The 2D portion of the card is derived from the more modern Savage 2000, which supports Vesa 2.0 and is both fast and very compatible, it doesn't glitch out even in more picky games like Commander Keen or Jazz Jackrabbit. It also supports both 8 bit paletted textures and table fog, which some Windows 98 games need to display everything correctly. As the cherry on top, S3TC enables this IGP to display higher resolution textures than other cards of the time could, in games that supported it. These include for instance Unreal Tournament and Quake III Arena.

@Danger Manfred
What fans are you using, 12V or 5V? Is there a fan header on mainboard?
Is this a custom VGA heatsink and how did you attach it?

stef80 wrote on 2025-11-01, 09:10:

What fans are you using, 12V or 5V? Is there a fan header on mainboard?
Is this a custom VGA heatsink and how did you attach it?

The fans are 12V Noctuas, 60x15 and 40x10mm. There is a fan header "hidden" under that piece of PCB next to the bigger one, so I connected a Y splitter and both fans to it.

The VGA heatsink is really just whatever chunk of heatsink I could find, I believe it was a socket 7 CPU cooler, and I used thermal adhesive tape. After all, external cards with that chip were mostly using 40x10mm passive heatsinks and still worked (mostly) fine.

Danger Manfred wrote on 2025-01-03, 09:20:

an aquaintance of mine designed replacements [risers] that you can get printed [...] I'll upload these if anyone is interested.

While I haven't managed to hunt down a CA2 yet, I'd be grateful if you could make those gerbers available. Parky Towers mentions a potential secondary source ("Eon" thin clients) for original ones, but those, too, are a limited, diminishing resource.

Spoke to him and it turns out he had already uploaded them to github!

Here goes:

https://github.com/jensma-de/Neoware-Eon-CA2-PISA-riser

I have found some photos of internals of Igel 5-2, which seems to be identical to Neoware CA2:

Source:
https://www.jegeek.net/2020/08/21/test-de-ligel-5-2/

I must say case looks better then CA2 😀. I also never new this Igel existed, not much about it on the Internet.

Thanks, Manfred, for making sure the risers stay available.

stef80: Nice find, and funny how that one, too, ended up w/ a sound card added and playing DOS games. Isn't the first time Igel and Neoware shared mainboards either.

stef80 wrote on Yesterday, 17:06:

I have found some photos of internals of Igel 5-2, which seems to be identical to Neoware CA2: https://www.jegeek.net/wp-content […]
Show full quote

I have found some photos of internals of Igel 5-2, which seems to be identical to Neoware CA2:

Source:
https://www.jegeek.net/2020/08/21/test-de-ligel-5-2/

I must say case looks better then CA2 😀. I also never new this Igel existed, not much about it on the Internet.

The Igel 5/2 is really hard to get.
5/3 is easily obtainable for 5-20€, but only has a PCI slot.
Which isn't that bad, since it can fit e.g. a Terratec Solo-1 with ESS Audiodrive 1868 and a wavetable header. Or a Yamaha YMF744B based card.