First post, by Artex
- Rank
- l33t
I struggled a bit on deciding what year to go with for this week's build. If I would follow suit, I really should do a 1999 build and that was my original thought. However, I already had a system sitting pretty with a PIII 1Ghz Coppermine (eb) chip tucked under a beautiful Thermaltake Golden Orb dropped into an Asus CUSL2 motherboard.
1999 was a kind of a mixed bag year in terms of hardware. There were the early-1999 SECC2/SLOT1 Katmai's and the later-1999 FC-PGA/SOCKET 370 Coppermines. Back in the day I remember having P3-500, P3-700, P3-700 (e), P3-1Ghz (e) and then jumped to a P3-1Ghz (eb) Coppermine back in 2000. Since the Katmai's were similar to the earlier "Deschutes" SLOT1 Pentium II chips, I decided to go with the Y2K-released Coppermine for this build since the architecture is different enough from my previous Pentium II SLOT1 build, especially when considering the form-factor change and the added on-chip L2 cache.
On the video card front in 1999, there was the awesome NVIDIA Riva TNT2/TNT2 Ultra (I had a 32MB Creative Card back then) but then they also released the first "GPU" - the Geforce 256 SDR/DDR cards. While the SDR cards weren't much better than the TNT2 Ultra's, the DDR cards really provided a much better gaming experience. Unfortunately, my DDR-based Geforce 256 card looks to be on its last leg, probably because the fan is shot on it.
So I said "Eff it" and skipped right to Y2K, a landmark year for all the doomsday preppers, and a landmark year for computing & computer hardware in general. NVIDIA released their NV15 series, which smoked the Geforce 256. The "Ultra" version of the Geforce 2 was released in September of 2000, and this is the card I used for the build below. The Radeon DDR (R100) was also released in this year, but the Geforce2 cards typically rocked the Radeon in 16-bit color benchmarks, and still had somewhat of a performance advantage in 32-bit color as well.
On the audio side of things, PCI cards were all the rage so I decided to throw in a Turtle Beach Montego II with the "Quadzilla" Digital Out card hooked up as well. I still may throw a GM daughterboard on it as well. I could have went with a Sound Blaster Live!, but why not mix it up a bit right?!
Case: Enlight Enlight EN-7237 (4-Bay)
Power Supply: Enlight HPC250-G2 250W
Motherboard: Asus CUSL2 1.02 (Intel i815E) (BIOS 1.09)
Processor: Intel Pentium III 1Ghz (Coppermine, EB) (Socket 370)
Cooling: Thermaltake Golden Orb Fan & Heatsink
Network: 3Com 3C905B-TX
Misc: USB 2.0 PCI Interface Card
Storage:
Western Digital Special Edition 120GB Hard Drive (WD1200JB)
3.5" Floppy Drive
Plextor 8/4/32A CD Burner
Memory:
1x256MB PC133 6NS 3.3V NON ECC SDRAM
Audio:
Turtle Beach Montego 2 "Quadzilla"
Video:
NVIDIA GeForce2 Ultra - VisionTek NV886-0 Rev. A with S-Video 64MB AGP (NV15) (2000)
Onto the hardware Pr0n!
More wonderful beige (with a slightly yellowed burner) 😜
The GUTS!
Asus CUSL2 1.02 (Intel i815E) (BIOS 1.09)
So GOLDEN...and...so.. ORBY..? 😎
Good ole' Plextor quality
Humming along at 1Ghz
Turtle Beach Montego 2 "Quadzilla"
NVIDIA GeForce2 Ultra - VisionTek NV886-0 Rev. A with S-Video 64MB AGP (NV15) (2000)
My Retro B:\ytes YouTube Channel & Retro Collection
