Nice, but two things I notice

- Wouldn't you want to use a P3 Tualatin over a NWood P4? They are both *roughly* from the same æra, and the P3 (from my experience) is superior in speed and temperature.

- WinXP SP3 didn't exist in 2004; It would have been SP1a (not actually sure myself)

Other than that, I like it! Any pictures?

The reason I went with a NWood P4 is because I wanted to aim for a nearly period correct machine. I know XP SP3 isn't period correct (since SP3 didn't exist back then) but I wanted something secure over period correct-ness.

As for pictures, they're coming soon. I just didn't have the time to take them right now.

harddrivespin wrote:

Wouldn't you want to use a P3 Tualatin over a NWood P4? They are both *roughly* from the same æra, and the P3 (from my experience) is superior in speed and temperature.

Tualatins were an alternative to the Willamette P4's of 2001, but Northwood was a fairly significant leap compared to <=1.4GHz P3's in 2002-2003. Of course, back then you were always better off building with the Athlon XP.

Took a photo of the build. Will do for now, more may come after the 17th, as I have another surprise.

Good lord, a deer PSU. I'd get rid of that PSU ASAP, all deer PSU"s are junk and were known to blow up or start fires.

Otherwise the system looks nice.

I'm sure it makes life exciting.

Jade Falcon wrote:

Good lord, a deer PSU. I'd get rid of that PSU ASAP, all deer PSU"s are junk and were known to blow up or start fires.

Otherwise the system looks nice.

It's been already recapped. I remember I got it from a dumpster PC (from which I still have the parts) that was discarded because of bad caps in the PSU and near the CPU, as well a missing heatsink for the northbridge. An hour later and both the PSU and motherboard came to life. I got lucky enough that the PSU has pretty thick heatsinks (although no PFC but I'm trying to avoid it anyways).

So far I've replaced the output rectifiers in this order - 3.3v got a 16A rectifier, 5v has a 10A rectifier and 12v has a 20A rectifier. This is to be sure it runs on 12v machines. Anyways, this PSU isn't in this PC anymore, as it's been replaced with another one that I modified (I have a bunch of these, and out of them only one was left almost stock, mainly because it didn't see too much usage in the first place.) in the same way as the one in the picture.

I usually have too much free time and too many parts scavenged from other dead PSUs waiting to be used. 🤣 Just recently, I've got an whole set of good parts (12A main transistors, thick heatsinks, big transformer etc.) out of an dead 400W generic PSU, and the casing from it went to a modified "450W" Delux PSU that now powers a Core 2 Duo E7600.

Jade Falcon wrote:

gdjacobs wrote:

I'm sure it makes life exciting.

Indeed it would. Just don't tell your landlord or home owner insurance

Also PcBytes, simply recapping and putting new parts in a deer will not fix the fact that its a trash POS PSU, sure better parts will help, but it will not fix a badly designed psu.

Well, it's been running fine so far, no explosions or dead parts or anything. I've used it for roughly two or three hours in a few games and it's been only putting out a bit of warm air.

PcBytes wrote:

Took a photo of the build. Will do for now, more may come after the 17th, as I have another surprise.

When I see this, I'm quite happy, how we can today cable manage our builds. And also quite surprised, that no one thought about that earlier.

Neat case. I remember often seeing that exact interior layout (with the two 80mm fan placements at the back and fake yin-yang symbol molded into the bottom) in various relatives' and friends' PCs from a decade+ ago.

SW-SSG wrote:

Neat case. I remember often seeing that exact interior layout (with the two 80mm fan placements at the back and fake yin-yang symbol molded into the bottom) in various relatives' and friends' PCs from a decade+ ago.

Apparently these were pretty common here and in Eastern Europe in general. I have quite a lot of these of various sizes.

So were the PSUs that came with them though, although some iterations of them did turn out to be actually decent. I remember I gave a Modecom branded Deer that I recapped and that thing was packed of components, from all MOV slots populated all the way to complete filtering, ERL-35 transformer and beefy output rectifiers. It's currently powering a Q9400 with 4GB DDR2 RAM and a GT730, 250GB Samsung HDD and a HP DVD-RW on a ASUS P5Q Turbo MB and so far everything's been fine. It was recapped with Rubycons though, and the fan was wired to 12v (I couldn't trust the thermal control on these since that would mean the fans were running slow all the time.)

PcBytes wrote:

Jade Falcon wrote:

gdjacobs wrote:

I'm sure it makes life exciting.

Indeed it would. Just don't tell your landlord or home owner insurance

Also PcBytes, simply recapping and putting new parts in a deer will not fix the fact that its a trash POS PSU, sure better parts will help, but it will not fix a badly designed psu.

Well, it's been running fine so far, no explosions or dead parts or anything. I've used it for roughly two or three hours in a few games and it's been only putting out a bit of warm air.

I'd be concerned about the poor quality supervisory ICs. A properly designed PSU should calmly shut down in OVP or OCP conditions instead of exploding.

Very interesting to see this motherboard in use, as one thing I've been curious about is the orange PCI slot - does that give better performance with a PCI graphics card for example or is it just decorative? If you have or ever get a PCI graphics card I'd be curious to see the result. I wondered if it might have dedicated lanes separate from the other PCI slots.

gdjacobs wrote:

I'd be concerned about the poor quality supervisory ICs. A properly designed PSU should calmly shut down in OVP or OCP conditions instead of exploding.

They've improved over time though, since their 2008 and 2012 ICs now do have OVP and OCP. If I'm not mistaken some Deer built Rosewills use this IC and at least one of MSI's PSUs, the 460W TurboStream, also uses the 2008 IC along with a Infineon IC for the 5vSB.

But honestly, I don't really see a Pentium 4 or a basic quad core machine (from which none would be overclocked in the first place.) draw that much current from the rails to burn up.

Qjimbo - According to MSI, that slot was made for PCI WiFi cards and NICs in general, and that its function is similar to ASUS' special WiFi slot present on Deluxe versions of motherboards (like the A7N8X-E, P4P800-E Deluxe).

So, I'm back with an update.

Time to reveal the surprise:

Talked with the seller and I'm buying it tomorrow. From what I gathered from the description and pics, this is what it has:

-a pretty fancy Deer/L&C/ANS/JNC case with thermal sensors (although they're not connected to anything, going to take care of that)
-MSI 865PE Neo2-LS (one of my favourite boards, with the P4P800-E Deluxe being a close second)
-generic LC-B450E PSU that has a cut molex for a 80mm fan (lmfao)
-MSI FX5600 - only one bulging cap - a recap is in order tho
-some Sound Blaster PCI soundcard - looks like a AWE64?
-80GB Maxtor iDE
-random DVD-RW drive
-2.8GHz Pentium 4 - probably a Northwood judging by the heatsink. Will be replaced by a Titan TTC-W6TB cooler (although with a clear Raidmax fan since I am tired of its mediocre fan that they installed)
-1GB RAM
-external PCI RTL8139 NIC for no apparent reason since the board actually has onboard Intel 82547 gigabit NIC.

Sounds like a good deal, although I'll really have to see if it's worth rebuilding the Deer in this one (for a Northwood, it would be more than enough theoretically) since some of these Deers have a PCB that isn't worth beans and some are suited for rebuilding - they usually mark them differently - the gutless ones are marked "Y-B200ATX Ver2.x" and the ones worth rebuilding are marked "X-B2002" (versions usually remain the same - 2.3 up to 3.1).

Other than that, it's nice to see such a system, and I'd be more than happy to restore it and make one hell of a Pentium 4 build, even if people don't really like the Netburst arhitecture.

Also, I replaced the case on the 2004 build with something that might fit, although made a few years later:

It's a Delux MT375 case - it's a bit compact, but OTOH, the build quality is pretty good. Specs as of now, until the 865PE Neo2-LS machine will come:

MB: MSI 848P Neo-V
PSU: Allied AL-A400ATX 120mm recapped - silent
Case: Delux MT375
CPU: Pentium 4 2.8GHz
HSF: OEM AVC full-copper heatsink from a AIO S478-based PC - fan isn't original though - comes from a AMD 754/939 HSF, because the original AVC fan would run full speed and sound like a jet engine
GPU: Xpertvision/Palit Radeon 9550 128MB - planning to BIOS-mod it to a 9600 Pro using an Palit BIOS from a 9600 Pro card
RAM: 2x512MB DDR400
HDD: WDC WD800JB-00JJC0 80GB PATA
ODD: TSSTCorp SH-S162D DVD-RW
Other: MSI D-Bracket, Pixelview PV-TV304P
OS: Windows XP SP3 (better safe than sorry)