First post, by fyy
My XP box. It was mostly built out of spare parts, but it has a lot of versatility thanks to the VIA PT880 Pro chipset.
Motherboard: 775Dual-VSTA w/ unofficial bios
CPU: Core2Duo E6400
Memory: 3GB DDR2-667
Video Card: Radeon X800 GTO
What I like about this board is that the chipset was created to ease the transition from DDR1/AGP to DDR2/PCIE. So as a result I get a little bit of everything at the cost of a little bit of overall capacity/speed. But since it's built around XP, this isn't a big concern. This board has:
PCIe 16x (at 4x)
AGP 8x
DDR1
DDR2
SATA1
PATA
In theory, i'm only able to run 2GB of DDR1 or DDR2 at a time, but with the modded bios I'm able to actually run 3GB. The bios also adds support for Core2Quads, but I haven't tried one out yet. 2GB would be fine for XP anyways, so I wasn't too worried. I put an old CPU fan on the GPU, which makes it run much quieter than the tiny little stock fan that was spinning at some ridiculous RPM, had to resolder the connector, but it works nicely. It's bigger and pushes more air than the 775 HSF, haha, but it keeps the X800 super cool. I also use it as a makeshift DDR1/DDR2/AGP test bench.
I also like that the bios chip is in a PLCC socket so I can easily remove it if I end up nuking the bios. I would eventually like to get it a 256MB/512MB card but I don't have any on hand that aren't being used at the moment, the X800 GTO 128MB is treating me good though at the moment. 🤣