OK, now that the heatsink plaster has solidified, I'm going to tell/show you, what this has been all about.

Since the moment I installed 2 slot exhaust fans and one extra intake fan, I had to put Aureal Vortex 2 into a drawer and use the onboard Crystal sound chip. With most games it was OKish, but some, Grim Fandango in particular, had awful sound. It can be described as scratching in random moments and speech/music repeating itself while location is loading (every 15 seconds that is). Moreover, the exhaust fans did not cool the chips (and they never could), so the hangups I told about before were still there, only it took much more time for them to appear (1,5-2 hours, sometimes more).

So I came with a decision to find heatsinks for main chips and to remove one exhaust cooler in favor of the Vortex card. Here comes the difficulty: There are only 3 PCI slots and they are situated to the top side of the riser, so the only place for the blower is in the lowest, ISA-only, slot. That is in no way optimal, but time will tell.

The master Voodoo 2 card was placed next to slot exhaust fan as it is supposed (though not confirmed) to produce more heat. Next to it is the Vortex card - it's better to place less heating parts among more heating to spread the heat a little. Next goes the secondary Voodoo 2 card and that's it. Haven't tested the setup yet, but it looks promising.

Since this time I forced the screws in to get rid of the ATX chassis on the back, I had to remove left-side cover and V770 card. So here are some pictures I could not make when they were in place and, since I took it out anyway, there's a picture of V770 with an NLX backplate as well.

Fan goes to the bottom - there are only 3 PCI slots in this giant computer

From bottom to top: fan, first Voodoo, Vortex, second Voodoo (triple "V" 😁)

Diamond Viper V770 (TNT2) with NLX backplate:

atleast that case fan is pushing cool air over to pci slots. if there was room i would hot glue another fan of any notable size like 60mm or up closer to the video cards to help push-pull the air to the video card area. i'd maybe even get a hole saw and some mesh and JB weld and add a vent over PCI slot areas i have i done with several cases and laptops. i also make my own heat sinks for VRMs and VRAM and north bridges and what not.

I had the spaceOrb 360 and believeme, i couldnt find any game that took full advantage of that weird controller, it just felt akward the whole month i tried it...

BTW, there's no point on having a voodoo 2 sli when you can use a v3 2000 and play all the games that can run in a pentium 2 (even a TNT2 M64 is overkill). For systems under 600Mhz theres no better card than a v3. Think about it, you go from 3 cards to just 1 with the same results.

Living wrote:

I had the spaceOrb 360 and believeme, i couldnt find any game that took full advantage of that weird controller, it just felt akward the whole month i tried it...

Well, I like to play descent on it, it's really cool once you get used to the ball. Yesterday I played dethkarz and I was pretty impressed with how fine you can drive with the ball. Did you play through the spaceorb tutorial? It has really useful exercises and it also suggests you to put your palm on the ball the way it was intended to. I have larger than everage palm and it did not feel right at first.

Living wrote:

BTW, there's no point on having a voodoo 2 sli when you can use a v3 2000 and play all the games that can run in a pentium 2 (even a TNT2 M64 is overkill). For systems under 600Mhz theres no better card than a v3. Think about it, you go from 3 cards to just 1 with the same results.

Voodoo3 is not in every way superior to Voodoo2. This machine was intended to be an SLI rig, the TNT2 is secondary tbh, in case the game does not support Glide and I feel V2SLI does not cut it. And besides, I would have to buy the V3 first.

Hey it actually looks kinda like the IBM 300GL I've just gotten
Though the Voodoo 2 is glitching (Could it just be a dying card or is it just running too hot inside)

Dakkiller wrote:

Hey it actually looks kinda like the IBM 300GL I've just gotten
Though the Voodoo 2 is glitching (Could it just be a dying card or is it just running too hot inside)

Of course it does! Same generation 300GL and 300PL even share motherboard design, except that 300GL was marketed as a budget model. 300GLs I've seen don't feature AGP, 3rd DIMM and sound.

I've uploaded a couple of manuals some time ago that you might find interesting 😀 http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/dosearch.php?q=300GL

I missed this when originally posted. Nice to see a OEM PC getting some love. Sure they aren't as flexible as generic tower cases but that makes them more special

RacoonRider wrote:

Voodoo3 is not in every way superior to Voodoo2. This machine was intended to be an SLI rig, the TNT2 is secondary tbh, in case the game does not support Glide and I feel V2SLI does not cut it. And besides, I would have to buy the V3 first.

The v3 does have a really good 2d core and decent dos compatibility but I like the freedom of choosing a separate 2d card that v2 gives. if I want the best DOS compatibility but I still want to play some dos glide stuff you can always pair it with a s3 trio or something. or if you want to play with api's like s3d or matrox cards or what not.

if overheating is the issue you can always keep your eyes open for the V2 stealth cooler heatsink/fans. there pretty rare though.

chinny22 wrote:

I missed this when originally posted. Nice to see a OEM PC getting some love. Sure they aren't as flexible as generic tower cases but that makes them more special

😀 There's also a tower version of this PC, which is basically the same computer with a bigger riser... Still not as flexible as a generic tower. It does feel really good to mess with slightly obscure OEM stuff.

The 300PL hasn't seen much use for almost a year. In efforts to make it more stable I took it apart completely, including the PSU. It tuns out, the PSU has a small circuit board that burned out. Btw, I was impressed with the amount of components it had, including solid copper radiators. Wow!

So basically, all this time the PSU kept saying "I'm too old for this shit" and shutting down the entire system. Sadly, the electricians on our plant, whom I really trust, told me there was no way to fix it. The impulse transformer that had a turn-to-turn short circuit caused the mess and they could not replace it since they had no idea concerning its characteristics. The PSU is not very different from standard ATX, though I did not try a more common one instead.

I had to say "Good bye, SLI". I replaced 2 V2s and the TNT2 with a humble Voodoo3 2000 AGP. With no monsters and vipers, this system can't be called "Diamond-powered" anymore, not that it means much. No sense in keeping a slot exhaust fan as well. I'm yet to say if this time the system is fine from the brief testing I've done, but it surely is less power-hungry.

Without all this stuff the case seems empty and sad. It does not look like much has changed when you run the system. However, it feels bad. Like trading off your old Quad-core for a new Celly that is just as fast, but deserves no drooling over.

However, I'm not entirely done with V2SLI 😀 It's going to my upcoming Coppermine build to run alongside Geforce3 Ti on ASUS P3V4X mobo 😀

It seems likely to just drop in a standard ATX/AT one. Just be careful if the mainboard uses a different pinout. Dell and such did so back then.

RacoonRider wrote:

The 300PL hasn't seen much use for almost a year. In efforts to make it more stable I took it apart completely, including the PS […]
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The 300PL hasn't seen much use for almost a year. In efforts to make it more stable I took it apart completely, including the PSU. It tuns out, the PSU has a small circuit board that burned out. Btw, I was impressed with the amount of components it had, including solid copper radiators. Wow!

So basically, all this time the PSU kept saying "I'm too old for this shit" and shutting down the entire system. Sadly, the electricians on our plant, whom I really trust, told me there was no way to fix it. The impulse transformer that had a turn-to-turn short circuit caused the mess and they could not replace it since they had no idea concerning its characteristics. The PSU is not very different from standard ATX, though I did not try a more common one instead.

I had to say "Good bye, SLI". I replaced 2 V2s and the TNT2 with a humble Voodoo3 2000 AGP. With no monsters and vipers, this system can't be called "Diamond-powered" anymore, not that it means much. No sense in keeping a slot exhaust fan as well. I'm yet to say if this time the system is fine from the brief testing I've done, but it surely is less power-hungry.

Without all this stuff the case seems empty and sad. It does not look like much has changed when you run the system. However, it feels bad. Like trading off your old Quad-core for a new Celly that is just as fast, but deserves no drooling over.

However, I'm not entirely done with V2SLI 😀 It's going to my upcoming Coppermine build to run alongside Geforce3 Ti on ASUS P3V4X mobo 😀

Yes the secondary circuit board with the resistor is always burned out on those PSUs. Anyways, I do happen to have a spare one from when I threw out my pentium 2 300PL. I also still have that spare blue panel for the front.

In regards to cooling, this case is designed for a pentium 1 and not really a pentium 2. The original pentium 1 300PLs have some more features. One thing you should do is put on tall rubber feet at the bottom so the main 92MM fan has more room to pull air from the button.

raymangold wrote:

Yes the secondary circuit board with the resistor is always burned out on those PSUs. Anyways, I do happen to have a spare one from when I threw out my pentium 2 300PL. I also still have that spare blue panel for the front.

In regards to cooling, this case is designed for a pentium 1 and not really a pentium 2. The original pentium 1 300PLs have some more features. One thing you should do is put on tall rubber feet at the bottom so the main 92MM fan has more room to pull air from the button.

I put this case on bedside table so that the front hangs over the edge 😀 That way the cooling gap is always open. Anyway, the CPU does not heat much. As far as I know, PII-450 has Deschutes core in newer Katmai style package. It makes the CPU generally cooler than some lower-clocked Deschutes. I might be wrong, I read it a long time ago. I added another 92mm FAN there anyway, as you can see from the pictures 😀

I actually ended up liking this system even better, now that it's less noisy and does exaclty the same thing.

Btw, do you know what function does that secondary circuit board have? 😀

RacoonRider wrote:

An update on the topic: got new heatsinks for V2s https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/99196890/vogons/P1040705.JPG […]
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An update on the topic: got new heatsinks for V2s

What size are those? Did they come with thermal pads? Did it really help you to lower the temperature on those Voodoo2 chips? Do you know what was it before and where is it now at?

Dreamer_of_the_past wrote:

RacoonRider wrote:

An update on the topic: got new heatsinks for V2s https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/99196890/vogons/P1040705.JPG […]
Show full quote

An update on the topic: got new heatsinks for V2s

What size are those? Did they come with thermal pads? Did it really help you to lower the temperature on those Voodoo2 chips? Do you know what was it before and where is it now at?

They are 28x28x11mm, come in packs of 5 with 1 heatsink plaster tube:
http://i.ebayimg.com/images/i/111280203378-0-0/s-l140.jpg

11mm is a little too much height-wise, I should have looked for 9-10mm ones so that I would be able to use Voodoos in adjacent slots.

I don't know if it helped much: as it turned out, the issue was not thermal. But it's always nice to keep your precious Voodoo magic cool.

RacoonRider wrote:

They are 28x28x11mm, come in packs of 5 with 1 heatsink plaster tube:

11mm is a little too much height-wise, I should have looked for 9-10mm ones so that I would be able to use Voodoos in adjacent slots.

I don't know if it helped much: as it turned out, the issue was not thermal. But it's always nice to keep your precious Voodoo magic cool.

5pcs 28mm Aluminium Cooler Cooling Heatsink For VGA IC Chipset w/ Thermal Glue

If this is what you got then it's actually 28x28x13mm. At least that's what it says in the listing. So 28x28x11 is the size to go for.

Yes, this is even the same store I got them from. I think they are 11mm, I think I measured them with Vernier calliper, but it was a while ago. I can double check.

RacoonRider wrote:

I can double check.

Please do because I need to know exactly what size to go for. I am looking at these right now
20Pcs Silver Tone 28x28x11mm Thick Al Heat Dissipate Cooling Fins for Rooting
What do you think?

I've purchased the same computer for about 15$ and had a lot of problems with it. After the trouble of finding working ram modules for it (only managed to get 224mb of 3 kinds that would work with this mb)
now I want to install an ISA sound card big enough just not to fit, except by removing the CPU holding socket (the black lateral bars). Is there any simple way besides taking apart the entire computer?

Meister, you can remove the left metal panel and slide the motherboard out (it's on plastic rails) to give you enough space. Be careful though, the plastic is easy to break. And yes, the case is a PITA.