Pics coming soon. This minitower was given to me several weeks ago by a friend of mine. It came to me with no RAM or hard drive, a busted CD-RW drive (that I have replaced with a beautifully working 40x CD-ROM drive with working CD Audio), a thankfully working floppy drive with a black dust shield (leading me to believe it isn't original), a Pentium II 350, and onboard S3 Trio3D (4MB) graphics.

I had quite a time finding a hard drive for this beauty, the low capacity ones (>=10GB) wouldn't do because I had a lot of stuff to put on this thing since it's my only system that I currently own older than a (not currently working) Pentium 4 Northwood. Don't worry, that will be my next project. Even the 20GB Maxtor I originally attempted to use ran out of space. I would have simply put in another hard drive, but the design of the case really doesn't permit that -- again, you'll see more about that when I post pictures. It wasn't very period-correct of me, but I prioritize reliably working parts that suit my needs over period-correctness anyway, so I settled on a WD800 Caviar. The integrated ATA-33 controller sees it as being 15 GB but FDISK sees the whole 74.5GB. The integrated controller probably isn't doing the I/O rates any favors, and I happen to have a Promise ATA-66 card around here somewhere, but with only three PCI slots available I'm hesitant to take one up for something already integrated into the board.

I had the opportunity to upgrade the PII to a Katmai 500 and jumped at the chance. It would boot alright with it at first, just complain about it not being able to properly detect the CPU, but a wild goose chase yielded results and a very elusive BIOS update nipped that little problem in the bud. I actually had to take the retention mechanism out for the card to fit right -- right now the CPU is being held in at the massive heatsink by the PSU, which mounts directly over top of the CPU for some ungodly reason. I'm thankful it's there, though, so I can work on finding a REAL mechanism by which to hold it in while still having the machine in working condition.

Originally I was led to believe that the chipset (Intel 440BX) was limited to 384MB (3x128MB) of RAM -- but I have 768 (3x256MB) installed and it works flawlessly and can even use it all to boot. They have to be dual-sided 256MB modules though -- none of the single-sided ones would POST. It works, I'm not going to bother it.

Sound is courtesy of the integrated ESS Solo-1, these basically are the same as an AudioDrive. Indeed, oftentimes it works perfectly with ESS AudioDrive settings in DOS games. Other times it works alright in SoundBlaster/AdLib emulation mode. I have no need of anything better than FM synth and 16-bit audio, and while this card gives a bit of electrical feedback it's not too bad. I have a SB Audigy around here someplace, but I've always found Creative's specific driver to be a bit annoying in that it installs some kind of splash screen. Also I've had downright terrible luck getting that card working with DOS games, so I decided not to bother and stick with what worked.

Ethernet is a Compaq Netelligent 10/100 PCI card based on some kind of Texas Instruments chip. Nothing special, nothing fancy, just something I had laying around that Windows 98SE can use out of the box. USB works wonderfully, if a bit slow, using the NUSB33 driver under Win98SE.

More recently I have found an ATi Rage XL PCI card with 8MB VRAM and snapped it up for use in this build. I managed to get everything in this machine for free, believe it or not -- which is why I'm not complaining about its lackluster Direct3D performance. It runs what I want it to, and while the detail is less than desirable, it's certainly playable, and I have no money to throw at this build. I would be looking at AGP cards, except -- again, as you will see when pictures are present, there is none. This is a PCI/ISA only machine. That certainly limits my options, but as I've said before, I have no money to throw at it in the hopes of making my situation any better. This machine is mostly only for running those games that I'm too lazy to fiddle with under Windows 7 and up, although all of my games are supposed to work properly with a little help.

Sadly the machine runs extremely hot -- everything in this beast is passively cooled, it seems. The only fan I've seen in the whole machine is in the power supply, and it's a very small one at that. I've left this machine on for up to 36 hours at a time (massive copy operation over the network, took a VERY long time, actually surprised it didn't time out) and it hasn't croaked so I'm assuming that while I don't really want to touch it while its in operation it's not really in dangerous territory. Thankfully I have found a couple fans suitable for use and my next trick will be to jerry-rig them into the machine.

I'm contemplating trying to find an upgrade slotket for this machine once I have some cash to hand as well as maybe a 1GHz Coppermine chip, probably a Celeron as while this is a 440BX I don't think the board is overclockable. I'm also not sure the board supports CPU multipliers over 5 -- the 500MHz setting is the highest listed in the legend for the DIP switches used to set the speed. Lastly I'm not sure it would be worth the effort -- this is, after all, a PCI/ISA only machine and that severely cripples the graphics performance of this thing. I may go and try to find a Socket 370 board and put it in a different case and just sort of let go of this particular machine. I have several options but unfortunately only a couple are viable right now. I'll see if anyone I know has an old S370 box they want to be rid of. Laugh if you want, but I'm in that weird part of the country where everyone hoards their old electronics so this is a more viable option than you would think.