Been playing around with my new timeperiod correct 1997 build with ASUS P/I-P65UP5 using (build log with pictures will come at some point)
- Dual Pentium II 300mhz (SL2HA)
- 192MB EDO 60ns RAM
- Matrox Millennium II,
- Canopus Pure3D 3DFX Voodoo Graphics (6MB)
- PowerVR PCX2,
- AWE64 GOLD
- Asus PCI-2940UW (Asus MediaBus card) SCSI+SB16
- IBM Ultrastar 9ES 9.1 GB SCSI harddrive
- Plextor SCSI 40x CD (this drive is not period correct since its from 2002, but I do not own a black bezel drive from 1997. SCSI CD-ROM would have been installed in a system like this back in 97, so in it went
Managed to install the whole build into an old ATX case (which is the only case I have which will let me install the P65UPs CPU board AND also supports mounting an AT motherboard). The case is black, so I've installed black bezel'ed CD-ROM drive and floppy.
Thought I had bought a LVD harddrive (IBM Ultrastar 9ES) which came out in 1997, but after alot of testing and error searching I found out I got the FAST SE version (only upto 40mb/s, not 80mb/s). Kind of disappointed I didn't notice when I bought it on Ebay as I thought all 80pin SCA drives were LVD. In practice I don't think it matters unless it's using the cache for transferring.
Next thing I spent alot of time on were setting up Windows NT. It just wouldn't boot after install. Turns out you need to have the parition WITHIN the first 2gb on the entire harddrive. Luckily PartitionMagic 5.0 managed to move the partitions around without me having to reinstall everything. Running dualboot Windows 95 OSR 2.5 and Windows NT SP3 (staying within 1997). The P65UP5 must be one of the first motherboards to support boot from CDROM, it's very nice!
I've installed Office 97, Photoshop 4.0, Adobe Premiere and IE 4.0 in Windows NT. It's very snappy for running that time correct software. The SCSI drive seems to be NOS and I'm very happy with it (no loud whine from it).
I wanted to see how quick it would be in SP6a and webbrowsing, so I've temporarily upgraded the WinNT installation to try out Opera and RetroZilla.
http://www.win3x.org/uh19/ works great on IE 4.0 (I even tried it out in IE 2.0, but search didnt work), really looking forward to when that site also includes drivers for expansion cards!
Do anyone know if a black bezel SCSI drive from 1997 exists at all?