First post, by CapnCrunch53
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Hey guys, this is my first thread here, hope I don't screw anything up too bad 🤣. I like talking about hardware so this might be pretty lengthy...
This is a "retro" (I know it's not super old) PC I built recently with the intent of being more or less accurate for a build from late 2004. The computer started out as an HP, and was used and abused as a workstation at the radio station I work at (it may have had a prior life, as I think it predates the station, and I know they started out using donated PCs).
It was given to me a few years ago when they upgraded. At the time, I figured it was just another cruddy prebuilt P4 system, and not anything special. I threw my old PCI Radeon X1550 (coincidently, my first GPU) into it along with a really nice 500GB Western Digital Blue IDE drive that my dad had bought, decided he didn't need, and gave to me. I used this machine along with Mythbuntu as a media machine for my room (since I only have a standard definition CRT in my room, it was powerful enough).
Eventually, the machine stopped working; I assumed the motherboard was bad and let it sit for awhile. About a month or two ago, I discovered it was actually my poor old X1550 that was bad when I tried to use it in another machine, so I decided to give this P4 another look. When I cracked it open I was surprised by the quality of the parts in it. When I get a prebuilt Pentium 4 machine, I'm used to seeing a motherboard that's lacking for features, with 2 RAM slots (sometimes not even DDR), a few PCI slots, and often not even any AGP. They usually have tiny little CPU coolers and a small amount of no-name RAM. That's why I was so impressed by what HP put in this box: it's got a nice Asus motherboard that not only has 4 DDR slots and AGP 8x, it even has SATA! Never seen a 478 system with SATA before. It's got a nice big CoolerMaster heatsink, and it had 1.5GB of RAM (obviously some was added by some previous owner). I took out the 2 256MB DIMMS for another machine, and was left with 2 nice 512MB sticks of PC2700, that even have cool silver heatsinks on them.
After seeing the nicely-featured motherboard, the cool RAM, and rediscovering that this was in fact a 2.6GHz HT Northwood and not some crappy Willamette like my other P4s, I decided to make a retro gaming rig out of it. I threw in my Audigy 2 ZS and a very nice 400W Corsair power supply that I had previously thought was dead (pulled it from my dad's system thinking it was bad and got a new one; turned out the same problem popped up later and there was some dust in the RAM slot. The fact that it worked when I changed the PSU was a coincidence, and as a result I had an extra PSU). Then I bought a 128MB 6600GT AGP card from eBay (with the silly Doom 3 artwork on it 😁) and a nice new CoolerMaster Elite 311 from Newegg to replace the ugly HP case. I put Windows XP Home SP3 on it (fortunately I was able to use the OEM key from the original case), and now it's all set. Here's the full spec list:
Serenity:
2.6GHz Pentium 4 HT Northwood
Asus P4SD-LA "Stingray"
2x512MB PC2700 DDR
XFX GeForce 6600GT 128MB AGP
Creative Audigy 2 ZS
500GB IDE Western Digital Caviar Blue
Generic Black IDE DVD-ROM Drive
Generic Black 3.5" Floppy Drive
Generic Multicard Reader
Corsair 400CX PSU
Cooler Master Elite 311 Silver
Windows XP Home SP3
From what I recall from my research, the HT Northwoods came out in 2003, and the 6600GT came out in very late 2004, so other than the hard drive and case, I think this is a reasonable representation of a mid-level gaming machine somebody might have built in late 2004 or early 2005. So far I've run Halo PC on it which runs excellent (I love that game; my first FPS, first online game, and loads of nostalgic memories with it), and I've also played some Half-Life 2 on it. HL2 doesn't run as well as I'd like, probably because since they updated all the old Source games to the Orange Box version of the engine, they don't run nearly as well on old hardware. Still, with DirectX 8.1 mode, low-medium settings, and 1024x768, I get good enough FPS to play it. Dips into the 30s sometimes, which I'm not used to given my current machine, but it's definitely playable (and back when I played through the entire Orange Box on my trusty old X1550 and the 3.0GHz HT Northwood in the family PC, I had worse FPS). I won't be playing CSS on it though since I do need solid FPS in that game.
Overall I've been having fun with it, and pretty soon I'm probably going to do full playthroughs of Halo's singleplayer and Half-Life 2. Enough of my babbling, you guys probably want to see a few pics right? I had fun cable managing this guy, although I got it super nice and then realized that there was no way I could get the side panel on. I made it slightly more messy, and now it goes on well enough, though there is some slight bulging, but it's not my main PC so who cares.
By the way, the white Gateway peeking in on the left in the last pic is David, one of 4 3DFX powered rigs I built recently. I'll get around to making a thread about them, eventually...
PCs, Macs, old and new... too much stuff.
