Nice! I'd say 'evolved' PCs are the highly period correct tbh.😁
Is this the original motherboard though? Only the later 3.x revisions of the Asus P/I-P55T2P4 had a switching mode VRM iirc. Or do you use an interposer?😃
Also does the overclock affect system stability at all?

Welcome to the forum btw.😃

Thanks, I already love it here 😀

Oh, if you call it that way then I'm very into 'evolving' my PCs 😉 A couple of years later I had a computer (based on a rather decent Asus M3A79-T Deluxe motherboard) which started life as an Athlon 64 X2 with a 3870X2 and thanks to numerous upgrades it lasted 11 years overall as my main PC, being finally retired in 2020 with a top spec Phenom II X6 @4.2 GHz with dual Vega 64 GPUs 😁 I bet my current Zen+ based PC will end up as a ridiculously 'evolved' behemoth as well - the X570 chipset provides an upgrade path to 16 cores 😉

I don't know all the details about the PC's early life when it was with its first owner. It is indeed a 3.x revision board so no modifications were needed to make unsupported CPUs work (except updating the BIOS if I recall correctly, I've done all the upgrades years ag0 so the memories have faded a bit 😉). From what I've gathered those became available towards the end of 1996 so it may be there from the beginning but at the same time it might as well be a warranty replacement. Hard to tell.

As to the system stability - it's rock solid, no random freezes or restarts whatsoever. Somehow it turned out to be the right combination of parts that run happily at FSB 83 (well, the 8 gig HDD finally gave up the ghost last summer but by the looks of it seems to be recoverable, I just have to replace the electronics). It is also quite well ventilated. You can't see it on the picture, as a matter of fact it may seem to be passively cooled, but normally there's a 120 mm fan attached to the bottom of the case right next to the sound card, turned at a 45 degree angle towards the radiator, which cools both the processor and the graphics cards with air drawn through the ventilation louvres on the front panel. Why is the original fan on the radiator missing you may ask. Well, it's because the cooler is a bit oversized (it's in fact a Socket-370/462 cooler with a Socket-7 mounting clip) and with the fan in place the Voodoo cards wouldn't fit, they're too long. After taking the fan and its shroud off the cards slip snuggly into the factory cutout for the clip 😉

There's just one issue with it that needs addressing and it's quite obvious for this particular motherboard - the Dallas RTC chip. The PC still works with a dead battery and funnily enough it remembers the last date and time I turned it off but there are some features that it forgets instantly after saving the changes and restarting, effectively making them permanently disabled - the USB support for instance, quite a nuisance. I am, however, surprised how long it lasted, I remember it still working around 2015, not bad! Still, I am yet to decide which path should I take, a straight 1:1 replacement (with or without fitting a socket) or a coin battery substitute, like Necroware's. Frankly, I could go either way. But I have yet to find a replacement Dallas chip with a current production date or a substitute with a yellow PCB to match the board (that's just me being fussy 😜, I don't like how they look in green, violet or black).

I think the thing that stands out most for a period correct build is the removable HDD bay. Every gamer had these by the late 90's. I was the other half that crammed as many HDD's into an old PC and called it a "server"
If the CD drive still works I don't see much need to replace it. with a 20GB drive you should have plenty of space for iso's or no-cd patch a game so the drive hardly gets used anyway. That was my case anyway.

My 486's Dallas Chip lasted from 95 till about 2019. Good few years of that was it in storage. Replacing it is still on my todo list as well. I figure I'll fit a socket which sorts the problem. I can then decide if I go dallas, coin, or whatever.

Yeah, the removable HDD bays, or HDD drawers as we called them, were indeed a thing towards the end of the 90s. CD writers weren't widely available yet but we had old 'decommissioned' 850 MB HDDs which were perfect for moving 650 MB disc images. And since I was lucky to be the first kid on the block to get a symmetrical 1.5 Mbps connection at home people from my class often popped by to get stuff off the internet way quicker than it would take on their dial-ups, sometimes even during lunch break. It wouldn't be possible without these bays.

That 20 gig Barracuda I mentioned earlier is a temporary measure. It's loud as hell and requires a 5.25" bitum-box to become acoustically bearable and there is not enough space for that in such small case. I'm planning to bring the 8 gig disk back to life, I have some fun stuff from the past 20 years there which I'd like to recover - game saves, benchmark results etc. As I mentioned the symptoms suggest it's the electronics that failed, most likely from years of strain from 41,5 MHz clock. I'll give it a try, it's like $10 in replacement parts an 10 minutes worth of labour. As for the 20 gig - I have two of them so I might put them with proper sound deadening into a Voodoo5 machine and have some RAID0 fun with them.