44-46 degrees is not that much and I never seen any socket 370 boards with chipset fans, but adding one will not hurt anything. And good ventilation is always nice to have for any given case.

I ordered a Noctua 40mm fan to install directly on the chipset radiator; will test as soon as it arrives but right now I can not touch the radiator because is really burning!

Noctua fan arrived! I glued it to the chip-set heat sink and it runs very quiet at 3700 rpm! The thermometer now registers 38 - 39 degrees and I can touck the back of the motherboard when the chip-set is located now!
I installed Windows XP on the system and it runs just fine an is also period correct- 1.5gb of ram is plenty for XP! The main bottleneck is the HDD which is from 2005 and is horribly slow!

From what I can see, it's a very promising S370 build the one you're going to make! If the BIOS (and the sticks) lets you do so, make sure to try to run your RAM modules at CAS2 Turbo mode. You'll get some extra performance out of your system. You might be also able to overclock it as long as your parts can tolerate it. I run my Tualatin-S PC at 1.47Ghz stable with the FSB at 140Mhz and the RAM at CAS2 Turbo (even though I have CAS3 modules), with no issues whatsoever; the graphics card is overclocked too. VIA based motherboards are often snobbed but if they are set up correctly with the right chipset drivers and are paired with the right hardware, they can be on par with the best 440BX motherboards.

For some extra speed, ditch that old hard drive and get a Promise SATA300 TX2 or TX4 and use either a Western Digital Velociraptor HDD or an SSD. It will run like a champ. What graphics card are you going to use? On my Tualatin daily driver I use a Geforce 6800GT, fast enough both for desktop use and games.

Tonight I replaced the Celeron 1400 with Tualatin 1400 after a 24h loop of 3dmark 2001 went well!
I was thinking about an era correct hard drive from 2001 but after seeing how slow is this one from 2005 I am not going to an even slower one! SSD/SATA controller do not represent an appropriate combination for a 2001 PC. I try to be as era accurate as possible and I do have a 80gb IDE hard drive from 2001 that must be even slower but for now I think i will stay with the 2005 one for the time being!
The video card will be a BIG problem because the prices for era correct ones are astronomically! I was thinking about a geforce3 or a radeon 8500. Right now I am using a radeon 9250 128mb that is compatible with 3.3v and 1.5v! Performance is around a vanilla geforce3!

nd22 wrote:

... The main bottleneck is the HDD which is from 2005 and is horribly slow!

What model? Maybe try checking the SMART health with HD Tune. Horrific slowness can be a sign of an HDD that is on its way out.

Smart is OK! The problem is the transfer rate of about 66 MB/s which is really poor! it's incredible how far the same old technology - hard drive - has advanced in 10 years! I got a WD black 2tb that has a 200 MB/s transfer rate!
Now I have a few questions about the second socket 370 system! The preliminary configuration is the following:
CPU: Intel Celeron tualatin version 1.4ghz
RAM: the system will not recognize any of the 512mb dimms but works just fine with 128mb ones! Is this a general problem with Intel 815 chipset or should I search for other brands?
Motherboard: Abit ST6 - one of the legends of socket 370 era; it does not work with IDE/SATA over adapter hard drives over 500gb that is the maximum limit!
HDD: several IDE starting from 80 GB to 400 GB; SATA over adapter - many! However the final choice will be influenced by the operating system!
PSU: FSP 350w plenty for this system
Case: -- not decided yet but probably cooler master force 500 one of the last cases with a 3.5inch external slot!
GPU: -- I am not willing to spend over 100 US/euro for a geforce3/radeon 8500 so an era correct video card remains out of reach for now!
Windows: with only 512mb of ram XP is out of the question! Now I narrowed my choices to 3: 98SE; 2000; ME. I used 98 and it would be a great match for this system! I never used 2000 on a system designed for gaming only on office oriented ones so I don't know how compatible would be with old games/applications! ME would be an interesting choice because: just because 😊

I've always liked using Windows ME on machines that won't be doing much DOS. The built in USB stack saves a nice bit of time, and the networking stack does a better job of handling files on my NAS.

nd22 wrote:

RAM: the system will not recognize any of the 512mb dimms but works just fine with 128mb ones! Is this a general problem with Intel 815 chipset or should I search for other brands?

See intel 815 chipset specs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_c … ts#8xx_chipsets

nd22 wrote:

Motherboard: Abit ST6 - one of the legends of socket 370 era; it does not work with IDE/SATA over adapter hard drives over 500gb that is the maximum limit!

Why do you want to connect big drives with >500 GB? It is normal that older hardware have limits due to their bios and chipset restrictions.
Look at this era correct test system of Abit ST6, there is a 30GB hdd installed:
http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/article/1390.5/

OK I will use a 80 GB hard drive and install Windows Me. The system is maxed out at 512 MB and I will use the 1.4 GHz celeron. Because I don't have a correct era video card I will use a Radeon 9250 for now! Is a 300 w power supply OK for this system? One problem is the USB keyboard that is not recognized by the BIOS; I have to use a PS/2 keyboard otherwise the system will not boot! The system will not be connected to the internet so the question of the network card is moot!

nd22 wrote:

OK I will use a 80 GB hard drive and install Windows Me. The system is maxed out at 512 MB and I will use the 1.4 GHz celeron. Because I don't have a correct era video card I will use a Radeon 9250 for now! Is a 300 w power supply OK for this system? One problem is the USB keyboard that is not recognized by the BIOS; I have to use a PS/2 keyboard otherwise the system will not boot! The system will not be connected to the internet so the question of the network card is moot!

300W is ok for that, I know by experience (similar configuration with a second GPU, a Voodoo2, 8 HDDs - 5 of them SCSI - was working fine with an Aopen 300W PSU for years). Be sure that it is a healthy PSU though, especially if it is an elderly one.

For the USB keyboard, are you sure you set the BIOS accordingly? Something like "legacy USB support enabled"? A very high percentage of s370 systems I've seen have BIOS support for USB keyboards.

I am building one right now. I don’t know what I am going to do with it.
It’s an Asus CUSL2 motherboard with a P3-933mhz CPU. 256mb x 2 = 512mb ram.
I am using a tornado cpu cooler which is too laud. Going to replace it with a quieter cooler.
Runs good. Really easy to setup and install. Running WinME for now.
Sound Blaster live 5.1 and onboard sound max audio. Going to ad a Yamaha XG YMF-7xx.
Using an Nvidia GeForce 2mx AGP.
It’s a really stable build. All the drivers installed flawlessly.

tayyare wrote:

nd22 wrote:

OK I will use a 80 GB hard drive and install Windows Me. The system is maxed out at 512 MB and I will use the 1.4 GHz celeron. Because I don't have a correct era video card I will use a Radeon 9250 for now! Is a 300 w power supply OK for this system? One problem is the USB keyboard that is not recognized by the BIOS; I have to use a PS/2 keyboard otherwise the system will not boot! The system will not be connected to the internet so the question of the network card is moot!

300W is ok for that, I know by experience (similar configuration with a second GPU, a Voodoo2, 8 HDDs - 5 of them SCSI - was working fine with an Aopen 300W PSU for years). Be sure that it is a healthy PSU though, especially if it is an elderly one.

For the USB keyboard, are you sure you set the BIOS accordingly? Something like "legacy USB support enabled"? A very high percentage of s370 systems I've seen have BIOS support for USB keyboards.

USB support was there since the 430TX (and VX too? idk) if my memory serves me right.

I found the problem with USB keyboard: you need a somewhat older model not a recent one! With an old Genius it works just fine but with a brand new wireless Logitech it would not!
I installed all the POS2009 updates until August 2018 and the system is working fine; no glitches whatsoever!
About the second system: Windows ME is highly unstable with crashes and BSOD every time a game or other demanding application is run! The system is not connected to the internet and the installation is simply Windows and some games and 3dmark nothing else; no updates; no Office; no unofficial service pack or kernel-ex! Any ideas or suggestion would be great!

Last night I had enough of Windows Me and formatted the HDD. Installed Windows 2000; chip-set drivers, audio drivers and video card drivers. I let the system run 3dmark 2001 overnight and this morning is was still running it so I guess 2000 will remain for now! I used a 200gb IDE HDD but only the first 128gb are recognized - any idea how to "fix" this? The system is not connected to the internet, no updates are installed only vanilla 2000 SP4.

You are talking about the Abit St6, right? Try to update the Bios

Bios Issue Date: 2002/02/05
BIOS ID: 7T

1. Fix ACPI error in system event viewer after resume from STR mode.
2. Support up to 137GB HDD and above.

Here you can find the latest (ver. 9p)

https://soggi.org/motherboards/abit.htm#S370

The bios is already updated to version 9P! From what I found there seems to be a registry hack to enable LBA48 support!