First post, by Great Hierophant
- Rank
- l33t
A few years ago, my brother-in-law gave me a Voodoo 3 3000 PCI card he had kept from his old PC, from with that sprang the nucleus of a Windows 98SE gaming system. I am a firm believer in convenience, and have always wanted to build a powerhouse turn of the century gaming system. After many failures and false starts, I have finally enough of that system in place to be able to show it off. Here are the specs :
CPU : Intel Pentium III 600E Coppermine Slot 1 w/heatsink & fan
RAM : 256MB PC133 SDRAM CL2
Motherboard : ASUS P3B-F v1.03 1xAGP/5xPCI/2xISA
Graphics : Voodoo 3 3000 PCI 16MB SDRAM
NIC : 3Com Fast Etherlink 10/100Mbit 3C905B-TX
Audio Card 1 : Diamond Monster Sound MX300
Audio Card 2 : Sound Blaster Live! CT4760
Hard Drive : WD300BB 30GB 7200RPM 2MB Cache IDE
Optical Drive : Pioneer DVD-115 16xDVD/40xCD
Floppy Drive : Epson SD-800 Combo 5.25" & 3.5" HD
Keyboard : IBM Model M 1391401 PS/2
Gamepad : Playstation Gamepad w/PSX to USB adapter
Mouse : Microsoft Intellimouse Wheel PS/2
Case : Antec Solution Series SLK 1600 w/Antec 300W power supply w/2x80mm case fans
As you may note, some of these components (hard/optical drive, case/ps, fans) are not strictly vintage-1999 or earlier, but none of the major components are outside the timeframe.
The beauty about the Voodoo 3 PCI card is that it has no problem with overclocking the system to 800/133 CPU/FSB. The CPU does this very well. Also, because of the 6.0 multiplier, the system will underclock to 400/66. Thus a wider range of software can be run on the system. Additionally, the Glide support allows a wider variety of games to run in 3D accelerated mode than on comparable or better accelerators of the year 1999. Because it is a PCI card, I used a fast CPU.
Fan and Heatsinks are much easier to install to Slot 1 CPUs than the socketed CPUs of the time. One of the case fans has an LED attached.
The two audio cards handle A3D and EAX duties. Both can happily exist in the same system. The ISA slots are currently unoccupied, but I anticipate inserting an AWE32 in one of them. I have one free PCI slot, which I may use for a Creative DXR2 decoder card, if I can find one cheap. The Antec case is perfect for this because it does has clearance for a 13" card at the bottom of the case. The power supply provides a -5v line, and has plugs as varied as a SATA and AT P8/P9 style (only one of each).
The 3Com NIC is very common and cheap, and it has native Win 98SE drivers, and also a working DOS packet driver. I can get sometimes 5MB/sec transfer speeds over an Ethernet-based LAN.
The hard drive is hot to the touch, but is large enough to hold disk images. A 30GB hard drive was high end in 1999, but two drives could provide the equivalent space. One drive is more convenient. The DVD drive is old enough to be flashed to region free RPC-1 status, and I have done so, because I can! Its tray is a bit ornery, the drive sometimes fails to catch itself when it closes.
So far, I have yet to play a game that refuses to work on this system. Final Fantasy VII, Planescape Torment, Tomb Raider, GLQuake, and many more all work happily.
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