First post, by Darkman
- Rank
- Oldbie
as the title suggests , here is my new IBM Netfinity 3000 , with some modifications and upgrades I made.
I really like the look of the case, has a weird "retro but not retro" sort of look , maybe not as flashy as some newer cases, but certainly more interesting to me than alot of the beige cases at the time.
This particular Netfinity has a 350Mhz PII and 96Mb of SDRAM ,which I reduced to 32Mb for now for compatibility with certain DOS games. It uses the 440BX chipset which is nice.
onboard Audio/Video is provided by an S3 Trio3d and what I assume to be some SB16 clone common at the time. I opted instead to go for a Matrox Mystique 220 and AWE64G . This has 3 PCI and 3 ISA slots on a riser card. There is also an AGP slot on the main board in a bit of an odd place, which I may use at some point for an AGP ATI Rage Pro I have. Originally this had 2 4GB SCSI drives , but since I wanted much more storage space, and lack any other SCSI cards , I went instead with 2 IDE drives. The CD drive is a Sony CDU701-F 32X speed drive, pretty decent for the time I guess
Initially I wanted to put Win95 on this, but I figured there was no practical reason , Win98SE does more or less the same with extras, and a 350Mhz PII should do the job just fine.
Some upgrades I want to make in the near future.
1) Install a 3DFX Voodoo1 board , I already have a Diamond Monster 3D board on the way, so this should be done within a week. I figured it was suitable for the system , and I wanted something that just works with the oldest 3DFX games (I have the V5500 in the other machine for later stuff)
2) replace the tape drive on this machine with another CD/DVD drive, potentially my NEC DVD drive.
3) If possible, dual boot NT4 on this machine, this one is a maybe , depends on how easy it would be to pair with 98SE and how useful it will be.
Here are some photos , had this running on my Apple studio display. Excuse the blurry pics of the screen, the camera just doesn't focus on it well.
The machine being built, you can see the odd AGP slot placement, along with what looks like a door key . The machine has a bit of sticker residue at the front I need to remove
DOTT was one of the games giving me issues on the 1GHz, it would either not start at all , or start and crash within 30 seconds in DOS, seems to work fine here.
Tomb Raider using the Matrox Mystique patch , I also have the Matrox version of Mechwarrior 2 , but I haven't played it yet.
Im aware the Matrox card has issues with both the Keen games and Jazz Jackrabbit, but given that they aren't affected by CPU speed (Jazz with the patch anyways) I can run those on my V5500.
Overall I quite like this machine, Only thing I need to do now is figure out if its possible to set the FSB or caches, no option in the BIOS or on the board from what I can see (maybe a BIOS update will solve that)