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October 2002 "best you could get" P4 32-bit Rdram

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First post, by flupke11

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1. Background story
The build described here is a replica of the build I purchased and used extensively in my year as an Erasmus student (2002-2003) in the UK. I was fortunate (or stupid) enough to splurge my student job cash on the best system available in 2002, which, of course, was outdated, devaluated and utterly pointless a few moths later when Rdram was ditched and 800FSB's were introduced.

October 2002 being as dull and gloomy as they come in the far north of England and myself unbeknownst to Intel's devious scheming, I sent in an order on overclockers.co.uk for a brand new Asus P4T533-R, the only available mainboard with 512 MB of blazing fast PC4200 232-pins 32-bit Rambus memory. Add an order at ATI for the new 9700 Pro, and I was set for the future, or so I thought.

These purchases stressed my kitty bag somewhat harder that I had anticipated, and so buying a new CPU was out of the equation. I salvaged my 1,6A/400/512 and sold off the old Geforce 2 and my trusty DFI i845 SDRam-based mainboard. The 1,6 hummed happily at 2,4 GHz on a 150 MHz FSB, which made me a very happy, but now impoverished, student indeed.

The original system was housed in a full tower Chieftec case, with 2 75-series IBM Deskstar HDDs, a Hercules 5.1 surround Yamaha-based PCI-sound card and an retail built by ATI original 9700Pro AGP card. Dial up modem via USB. Monitor was a Hercules Prophetview 15” LCD.

It truly was an epic system at the time, providing the Warcraft III game server for the whole student house, the file server for all things edgy and groovy and the jukebox whenever a reason was seen fit to throw a house party (about every two days).

In 2006 the case, mainboard, sound card and GPU were sold, and life went on.

So come 2020, and I finally found the time to test the two P4T533 I have found over the recent years. Luckily, one system booted fine after replacing the battery. The other one never showed any sign of life.

2. Rebuilding
The aim is not to be a 100% faithful rebuild of the original, but the idea is to have a useful system for demanding Win98 games and the first WinXP games. Aimed period: end 2002 to early 2004.

The working mainboard already had the last (beta) BIOS on it, so that was already one issue out of the way. The P4T533 was notoriously unstable with old revisions / BIOS-versions and the Northbridge i850e runs very hot. The active fan on the dead board was installed on the working board, replacing the passive heatsink. Unfortunately, one of the hoops which holds the retention clips of the cooler was missing on the board. With the use of a paperclip (the diameter of the paper clip matches perfectly with the solder holes) I was able to install the cooler.

One of the 6,3V-3300µF caps next to the socket shows sign of bulging, so that does worry me a bit. So far, however, the system has shown no stability issues.

I installed a screw based socket 478 back plate as I’m not a fan of the pushpin S478 plastic retention system, and a stock 478 cooler, with copper centre. The first test with a low profile cooler yielded results too hot for my taste. As the system is going inside a desktop case, I need the cpu to stay as cool as possible.
There is onboard sound, but I did not use that in the past, so I will not do so today. Sound is provided by an Audigy 2ZS (about a year too recent for this system).

So the final system has:
- Asus P4T533 rev. 1.03 witch active NB cooler, BIOS 1007.002 Beta
- Pentium 4 3.06GHz/533/512 SL6PG +AS5 and copper/alu stockIntel cooler
- 2*256 PC4200 RIMM MD16R1628DF0-CT9
- AGP: Hercules (Guillemot) 3D Prophet 9700 PRO with aftermarket Arctic cooler (256 DDR)
- PCI slot 4: Sound Blaster Audiy 2ZS SB0350
- PCI slot 6: 3COM NIC 3C905CX
- Onboard LPT,COM, audio and raid disabled
- IDE1p: WD Velociraptor 3000HLFS 300GB with Startech pATA to sATA converter, 4 partitions
- IDE2s: Slot in Pioneer pATA DVD
- Case: no name desktop case
- PSU: Chieftec 360W with 35A on +5V, 28A on +3.3V and 17A on 12V
- OS: Win98SE and WinXP Vanilla

3. Pictures
3.1 Fixing the NB heatsink retainer clip

How the clip should look:

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The gonzo solution to retention problems: a bent paperclip

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Flipped on its back:

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3.2 The bulging Taicon cap

Second one from the left:

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Reply 1 of 11, by flupke11

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The board in full view. Overall layout is mediocre, I suppose the huge amount of traces going from both 232-pin slots to the cpu make it very difficult to put anything else around the ram slots.

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A modern 24-pin PSU is difficult to use, the fastening clip will hit molex connector.

The Chieftec PSU is ideal (see here for detailed specs):

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The aftermarket cooler on the 9700 Pro gobbles up a PCI-slot, but it is a high quality installation, and this card has never had any issue:

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Last edited by flupke11 on 2020-01-19, 21:12. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 2 of 11, by Warlord

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would of thought that your thread would have got more responses.

2002 Intel had the top performance. 2003 AMD64 of course took the crown away with the Athlon 64 for anyone who was paying attention.

So for this very sliver of time you might of had close to top performance if that's what you were going for.

For the time this was a beast. Looking back I was running dual 1ghz 133fsb PIIIs on I840 chip set during this time. It might not of been as fast as this in single threaded. But it was could hold its own in general.

Reply 4 of 11, by cyclone3d

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Pretty cool. I have PIV and a PIII RDRAM builds I am planning on doing. Already have the boards and RAM.

I looked into the 32-bit RDRAM stuff but it doesn't really make any difference over the 16-bit stuff except that you use half as many sticks with the 32-bit stuff. The 32-bit stuff is basically 2x 16-bit sticks on a single stick.

Also a lot harder to find the 32-bit sticks.

I worked on some PIV RDRAM setups back in the day and they were super slow pieces of junk... Stupid OEMs who use the crappiest parts possible was part of it.

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

Reply 5 of 11, by Warlord

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kolderman wrote on 2020-01-19, 03:14:

If by best you mean evil, sure.

best is always subjective, assuming that you could build that in 2002 it would of been very close to best for a few months anyways. I decided to skip Pentium 4 and won't be doing a p4 build. I will be doing a 479 build though.

Reply 6 of 11, by flupke11

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kolderman wrote on 2020-01-19, 03:14:

If by best you mean evil, sure.

"Best" is of course a marketing term, used to lure the innocent into parting with his/her cash. No intention from my part to advocate for Intel's solution at that time, apart from being "tricked" into believing this was going to be a system to last me a few years. They fooled me, but so did Kellog's by claiming Frosties are healthy. On the other hand, I'm a very content person with an 8 year old Z77-i7 3770K system who enjoys eating Jordan's with locally sourced yoghurt as breakfast. Not all is evil, not all is great.

Was it a value for money system: absolutely not. I would have been far better off buying an AMD DDR solution, or even holding out with the i845.

Is it an interesting system to build in 2020: absolutely. Just like a i840 rdram dual PIII system, these dual rdram systems are rare and therefore, in my opinion, collectible.
I'd love to see an Abit SI7 for comparison's sake, but I have yet to find one.

The 512 MB limits the useability to Win98Se, and early XP applications. Perfectly fine for me.

Reply 7 of 11, by chinny22

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Sure your better off with a 845 based system, but that's boring as studying then throwing parties every 2nd day.
A RD based system is in my wishlist as it's more interesting vs the endless SD RAM systems (not to mention cost is in my favour now)

Reply 8 of 11, by greasemonkey90s

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chinny22 wrote on 2020-01-19, 20:38:

Sure your better off with a 845 based system, but that's boring as studying then throwing parties every 2nd day.
A RD based system is in my wishlist as it's more interesting vs the endless SD RAM systems (not to mention cost is in my favour now)

Intel 845 systems get owned by sis chipsets. Highend p4 of 2002 is either intel granite bay or i850e plain and simple.

Sis is the way to go and nothing less for the budget segment.

Reply 10 of 11, by Errius

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A year earlier than you (Nov. 2001) I got a i850 ABIT board with 1 GB RAM, 2 GHz P4 and GeForce 3. It wasn't cheap, but I drove that rig for 8 years with upgrades.

Is this too much voodoo?

Reply 11 of 11, by aveo99

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Hello, I used to have this board too around 2003, I have regretted selling it ever since, just because it was very uncommon. I have been searching ebay constantly for new listings of it. Currently the only one for sale has a $400.00 price tag. If anyone knows where I can find one cheaper that would be awesome! Would love to build a rig with this board again.

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