First post, by candle_86
- Rank
- l33t
So time to do this right, pictures incomming, lots of pictures, but lets get right to it
The purpose is first off for a budget minded retro computer running Windows 98SE, this means no 440BX, no i815, no Athlon or K6-3 stuff, budget is key, Am I misisng some qualify of life things like ISA sound or hardware accelerated sound yes, I am. I also miss out on Glide, but thats ok. The purpose is to see if you can build a feature complete retro system for under 100 US and enjoy it. The key is of course the apollo Pro chipset, because no one wants to deal with it, well almost no one, the fact these boards go for almost free makes it perfect.
Parts included
$Free Pentium III 500 Kamati Passive
$20 SuperPower 6VX133+
$10 Infineon PC133 512mb
$10 Creative TNT2
$5 Soundblaster Live Dell SB0200
$1 3Com 3c905C-TX 10/100
$5 20GB Maxtor HDD
$5 Case that included PSU/Opticals and Floppy
Total Cost on this system $56, pretty budget for this time period, if I'd bought the cpu I see them going used on ebay for around $15, so it would raise the cost to $71, still pretty much budget
Some struggles I've encounted, Ram speed is slow, but the interleave patch raises that from 241mb/s to 601mbs, a pretty good increase, it doesn't work with any Western Digital Disk Drive, limiting me to my Maxtor drives
The 512mb Ram only detects as 256, but my next size down from 512 is 16mb, and for 10 bucks I'll take it. Benchmarks and game tests to follow for now, the pictures of the Budget Retro Station