First post, by gn0me
Well, it's been a hot minute since my last post which covered two iterations of a build that ultimately went nowhere. Every motherboard/cpu combo I tried either didn't work or was incomplete (such as the p4 Intel board supposedly new in box from Russia) was missing the retention brackets for the cooler which was the sole reason for buying it. And the other motherboards I have for P2/P3 CPUs either didn't have the feature sets I wanted, or didn't have a slot arrangement that I was happy with.
Here's to hoping the third time's the charm. I present the Y2K was no 'thang build with a side of GPU, DVD and SCSI upgrade in 2002.
The whole idea behind this build, which mirrors something very similar to what I owned back in the day would have been to enjoy most new titles released in 2000, and extend the usability/enjoyment of the machine in 2002, while also enjoying older DOS/Windows titles utilizing Glide/Midi.
Built today, I made some quality of life changes with modern equipment.
MSRP of the original build would have been in the $2000 USD range not including monitor or peripherals. MSRP of the upgrades in 2002 would have been about $725 USD for a Radeon 8500LE 128mb, Audigy 2 ZS, Toshiba SD-M1401 SCSI-2 16x DVDROM and a P3-1000, all pricing based on back issues of Maximum PC. These prices are based on what I legitimately would have been able to afford after having gotten my first job in 2000 after graduating high school in June of that year, and in 2002 I had moved out and had actual expenses, building a whole new PC would have been untenable at that time.
The build as it sits today:
CPU Intel Pentium III 550 MHz w/ Coolermaster HSF (P3-1000's are stupidly overpriced right now)
Motherboard: Asus P3B-F v1.03 (it has only 1 ISA slot which is weird, because I thought only 1.04+ revisions had dropped the 2nd ISA slot)
Memory: 512MB PC-133 SDRAM (single stick)
GPU: ATI Radeon 8500LE 128MB
GPU: STB Black Magic Voodoo2 12MB
GPU: STB Black Magic Voodoo2 12MB
Sound Card: Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE64 Value CT4380 (This is for DOS emulation and MIDI connectivity to my next future project, MT32-Pi. Audio output is sent to the analog input of the Audigy 2 ZS)
Sound Card: Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS w/ Audigy Drive (Digital out connects to my Schiit Audio Modi DAC, which in turn feeds my Onkyo Integra A-809 integrated amplifier outputing to a pair of large tower speakers with built in 10" subwoofers)
Storage: Cable-less IDE2CF adapter, 128GB SanDisk Compact Flash card (this will be partitioned to emulate a multi drive setup of the times. Haven't decided on the scheme yet)
Optical: Toshiba SD-M1401 SCSI-2 16x DVDROM
Optical: Nakamichi MJ-5.16SI SCSI-2 16x 5-Disc CDROM changer
Removable: Panasonic 1.44 FDD
Removable: Iomega Zip Drive 250mb IDE
SCSI Card: Adaptec AHA-2930CU
Network: Startech ST1000BT32 10/100/1000 PCI (Supposedly the Realtek chipset has support for Windows 98SE, will see. If not then I'll just chuck a random 10/100 NIC in instead)
OS: Windows 98 SE
This PC would have lasted me for years, as I don't think it was until 2008 that I was really able to afford to build a whole new PC, and much had changed by then. Future plans for this build is to try and find a reasonably priced p3-1000, perhaps I'll look into upgrading the SCSI to Ultra160 and get some faster optical drives. I also have a fairly extensive case mod planned for my Antec Sonata III mid-tower case.
1990-1997 DOS/W95: micron millennium mme/p200mmx/64mb/matrox millennium II 6mb/orchid righteous 3d 4mb/sb16 & dream blaster s2