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The 70Watt Athlon Thunderbird budget gaming rig

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First post, by Munx

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I decided to re-build my old gaming rig that served the teenage-me early to mid 2000s. Thought I'd share this with you guys 😀

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The rig. Not the same case, however it has the same styling. I didn't save all my original parts, however the Video card, hard drive and ram are from the original machine.

Motherboard - Shuttle AK37, which uses the 12V rail to power the CPU. This 3 Euro purchase is how I am able to make a project like this work, since good 5V-heavy PSUs are so hard to come by these days
CPU - Athlon Thunderbird 1400C, running @ 1333Mhz (original was 1333MHz, but getting a 1400Mhz one today is cheaper for some reason...)
Video Card - Gefoce2 MX400
RAM: 256 MB DDR266 in single-channel (I remember the crappy original case wouldn't fit a second stick w/o removing the CD drive 🤣 . Not that I had a second one to put in there...)
Windows XP SP3 (I wanted SP2, however it doesn't play nice with my wifi adapter 😵 )

I ran some very basic tests on the games I played during that time: Battlefield 1942/Vietnam, Call of Duty, Counter-Strike 1.6, Mafia, Need for Speed Underground, Unreal Tournament, Red Alert 2, Stronghold Crusader, Rise of Nations, Worms 3D (which I cant understand why people hate so much) and Half-Life 2 (which I didn't really play until I got a new PC, even though I wanted to so bad, but I just didn't think it would run).

Pics in the link 😀

http://imgur.com/a/T0sdP

My builds!
The FireStarter 2.0 - The wooden K5
The Underdog - The budget K6
The Voodoo powerhouse - The power-hungry K7
The troll PC - The Socket 423 Pentium 4

Reply 1 of 2, by Tetrium

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Hi 😀

I really liked your storytelling in imgur, but it would be easier (and perhaps also wiser) to upload directly to Vogons as picsharing sites do have the tendency to disappear after a while or to misbehave in other ways 😜
It's quite similar to my own Thunderbird 1400, except I used an SDRAM board that did need a good 5v PSU. It worked pretty well for what it was.
Maybe I missed it, but what harddrive are you using?

And about the Athlon 1400 being easy to find, it was always harder to find the 100MHz FSB part.

Whats missing in your collections?
My retro rigs (old topic)
Interesting Vogons threads (links to Vogonswiki)
Report spammers here!

Reply 2 of 2, by Munx

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Tetrium wrote:
Hi :) […]
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Hi 😀

I really liked your storytelling in imgur, but it would be easier (and perhaps also wiser) to upload directly to Vogons as picsharing sites do have the tendency to disappear after a while or to misbehave in other ways 😜
It's quite similar to my own Thunderbird 1400, except I used an SDRAM board that did need a good 5v PSU. It worked pretty well for what it was.
Maybe I missed it, but what harddrive are you using?

And about the Athlon 1400 being easy to find, it was always harder to find the 100MHz FSB part.

Thank you for the tip, gonna use use Vogons for images from now, it's easier that way anyway.

The harddrive is an IDE ExcelStor 80GB. Used it a lot in my older W9x builds as it has a handy jumper setting for a 32GB limit.

My builds!
The FireStarter 2.0 - The wooden K5
The Underdog - The budget K6
The Voodoo powerhouse - The power-hungry K7
The troll PC - The Socket 423 Pentium 4

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