First post, by NiPPonD3nZ0
Hello fellow Vogonists...
Yet again another build from Portugal..
As you all can see by one of my posts here on this forum, I have a lot of "crap" laying around just waiting for me to have the time to assemble it, and stuff keeps on coming in.
A good friend of mine had a client with some old crap that it wanted to get rid of, and he remembered me so I went ahead and picked it all up some weekends back.
The chassis that was given to me was one I believe to be manufactured by DEER, and a very popular chassis over here in Portugal by the end of the last century!
It came complete with a computer inside, a Pentium III 933MHz on a PCCHips M754LMR (those crappy ones with a ALi chipset that have a nVidia Riva TnT2 onchip) and 196MB PC133 RAM, a 2GB Western Digital HDD and a 48x CD-Rom drive and a 250Watt DEER ATX Power supply (being this another indicator of the chassis also being a DEER manufatured one).
None of this hardware, besides the chassis and PSU, was of my intention to use right now, so I dismantled it and gave the chassis and PSU a good cleaning so I could assemble the machine I want to live inside of it!
The plastic was yellowed by time and I like it that way, the "patina" on it looks good in my eyes and just a good pass of some isopropilic alcohol to removed dirt and crap over it led it to a nice, unscratched chassis, without rust.
Now, with the chassis cleaned I turned to the PSU!
Opened it up just to check for blown caps and... there they were... I know these PSU far too well
Time to get the good capacitors bin!
And here we have, a recaped power supply!
I intend to buy a capacimeter one of these days, but for now I just have to trust these old ones!
Now, the good stuff!
I intend to build a Pentium MMX based, ATX system, and I have this mobo to base the system on:
Intel TC430HX
The pictures I found of these on the Interwebs show a full compliment of ports, including USB ones, but the one I have does not have them, nor the onboard S3 Graphics chip
But it has the onboard Yamaha OPL3 sound card
The I/O Shield was a bitch to find. Its a standart one, and I have a ton of them, but none of them have the USB Ports, COM2 port and Ethernet still closed
But I found one 😀
And so the board went into the chassis
Then, RAM... this board only takes SIMM, either EDO or Fast Page, so I grabbed the biggest ones I have in house
So they are 2x16MB EDO RAM and 2x8MB Fast Page RAM to a total of 48MB
And then it was CPU time. I have a few Pentium CPU's, raging from a Pentium 75 to a 233MHZ, and I wanted to get the 233MHz in this baby, but I cannot get it to boot here, but it works fine on my QDI Titanium IIB board, so, there it stayed.
This one took the second best: A Pentium MMX 200MHz
Its a retail one, I believe, judging by the glued heatsink on it
The fan cable was MIA, so I adapted a WOL cable from a old LAN card to a 3PIN header to connect to the CPU_FAN header on the motherboard, and that is why the cable is wraped, to hide the heat shrink on the leads 😀
Then, time to storage!
I think its a nice machine to apply some SCSI goodness, so time for Adaptec to jump in with a PM2554U controller card, based on a Intel i960 chipset!
Then, some blasphemy... 2x4GB on RAID 0 SCSI Apple branded IBM HDD thronwed in there, leftovers from a dead Power Machintosh G3 I have laying around!
Yep, that SCSI cable is a bitch to manage 😁
S'more blasphemy:
Apple 24x IDE CD-Rom drive (Hitachi build drive)
Then, graphics! I have ALOT of PCI S3 Graphics, Cirrus Logic, SiS, Matrox and even a couple of ATi ones, but settled on one of this 2 Diamond Stealth 64
To round up this baby, a ethernet card, and as I don't own any ISA LAN cards, have to settle on one of the 3COM PCi cards I have laying around!
I have yet to install an OS on this baby, but will have Windows 95 probably!
Trying to find a licence of this OS is a pain in the ass these days... I had a few my dad tossed in the bin a few years ago... shame on him.. 🙁
Sorry for the long post, will be coming back with updates soon!
Best regards from Portugal!
