First post, by philmac
OK, so this isn't a dream build, more of a resurrection build 😜
Shuttle make a range of small-form-factor PC barebones builds. They provide the PSU, motherboard and case, all you have to do is drop in your CPU, RAM, storage and you're good to go. I bought one of these in 2005, and used it as my main XP build up until I upgraded to a Phenom-based Athlon (and Win7). This particular Shuttle is an SN41G2v3 with an FN45 motherboard, designed for an Athlon XP processor. It uses the nForce2 chipset, and has built-in USB, sound, networking, firewire (and on the original board, dual-VGA GeForce 4 MX graphics). It also had support for IDE and SATA drives, and featured a heat-pipe cooler and a 250W PSU.
I had vague memories of being able to run Win98 on it when I first got it, and Covid Lockdown had me bored, so I decided to try and build a working 98/XP machine out of the spares I have, buying as little as possible. I fished it back out of a box of spares, and found it wouldn't power up properly... great. Onto eBay and I managed to find an FN45 motherboard of an earlier version that would fit the case, so I snapped it up. The original Athlon XP 3000+ and 1Gb RAM seemed to work OK, and the replacement board resulted in a bootup.
For graphics I'd normally rely on the built-in GPU, but the replacement board didn't have the VGA connectors. I was planning on using a Radeon HD 3650 AGP, but found out that this doesn't support Win98. Luckily I found an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro in my spares box in working order. The nForce chipset did include 5.1 sound, but no DOS support and no game port. I had a spare SBLive 0220 card kicking about from an old build and decided to use this alongside the Radeon card. I had originally gone for an Audigy 2 ZS from another PC, but realised after putting this in that it didn't have a game port attached.
For storage, I used a combination of older devices I had kicking about. A Maxtor 120Gb UDMA IDE drive for Win98, an ex-Apple Macbook 500Gb SATA drive for XP, and a Samsung 1.5TB HD for general storage, along with a NEC DVD-RW.
With all of this crammed in, there really isn't much room. The entire case is cooled by a single 80mm fan, luckily the BIOS supports temp-based controls (so I've configured it to keep the CPU below 48C).
Assembly complete, only parts bought were a (replacement) motherboard:
Final Spec:
Shuttle SN41G2 (FN43 Motherboard)
1Gb DDR200 RAM
AMD Athlon XP 3000+
ATI Radeon 9600
SB Live 0220
Maxtor 120Gb IDE Drive (Win98)
Seagate 500Gb SATA Drive (WinXP)
HP CD-RW IDE.
