First post, by cuco81
Here I present my ongoing (never complete) Retro sleeper build. It all started with my yearning desire to relive my early years of computer gaming back in 1995. I remember my mom purchasing a ECS baby tower with an AMD 66mhz up to 80mhz turbo (forget which CPU it was specifically). This was my first intro into pc gaming with D&D Eye of the Beholder and Doom.
The vision for this build was for a Voodoo2 SLI build with the fastest SS7 platform available. Primary focus was to be able to play the early 3dfx games as well as some of the -not so intensive- later ones. I was in the process of stocking up on retro parts, when a couple of months ago I was lucky enough to find the same ECS baby AT case I had back in the day, on ebay....I did not hesitate to get a hold of it. The case came with a fully working 486 DX4 motherboard with a AMD X5 133mhz which I'll keep for a future pure DOS build.
For the CPU, I came across a AMD K6-2+ 570mhz CPU. Once I got a hold of it, I went ahead and tried to do the upgrade to K6-3+ by unlocking the full 256kb L2 cache. This mod was a success and it truly made the rig come alive.
So, I had everything ready but the V2 SLI set. Luckily, I found a pristine set of Voodoo 2's from a fellow Vogon retro gaming enthusiast who had modified the pair of STB Black Magic Voodoos with TennMax heatsinks (beautiful set!). I purchased the set and once I got the shipment, I was able to install them and set them up for the early 3dfx games in no time. To my surprise, the k63+ paired with the SLI is an extremely capable system that's able to play both early and late 3dfx games with ease. The V2 SLI is as fast as my voodoo 3 2000 but stays way cooler (and looks way cooler too).
Quake and Quake 2 run very smooth....even Starsiege is playable. The evident bottleneck in this system is the CPU.
Here are the current specs:
PC Partner MVP3BS7p954 SS7 motherboard
AMD K6-3+ 550mhz (overclocks easily to a very stable 600mhz)
128MB PC100 RAM
Matrox Millenium G250 8MB
STB Voodoo 2 SLI 16MB (combined)
Sound Blaster 32 pnp
16GB Transcend CF with IDE adapter
Creative CDROM 52x
Floppy drive
AT PSU 300W
VIA Raid controller connected to a 75GB SATA HDD (mainly used for the MP3/FLAC music library)