Got the last part for my Win98SE build that was holding me back, the 20pin->24pin power adapter and was finally able to get the thing running! Before that I had to throw in the remaining parts that I hadn't been able to put in yet or just didn't want to so I'd have space to work in there. One of these was the CPU heatsink, been about 20 years since I last had to deal with Socket 370/A heatsinks and they haven't gotten any better with time.. thermal paste sure got spreaded well all around, I just hope there is still at least some between the heatsink and the CPU 😜
After getting the cards in too (Voodoo 3, SBLive and Orpheus Soundcard) I crossed my fingers and turned it on, and sure enough it booted right up and gave a surprisingly sharp picture. Didn't recognize all the RAM though. Went to BIOS and noticed the CPU temperature was already at 60°C and slowly creeping up.. I didn't put any fan on the heatsink, I had already noticed earlier the fan that came with the StarTech heatsink was laud as hell while testing fans I had lying around with passively cooled videocards, and I repurposed the noctua fan that I originally intended for the heatsink for a 9800 GTX+ instead. As the temperature rose to 70+°C I figured I REALLY messed up with the heatsink or it just wasn't alone enough for the Pentium 3 in there, opened the machine and the heatsink was pretty hot so I figured the latter was probably the case. Slapped the original noisy StarTech fan back on there and the temps dropped to around 35°C.
As I was messing around with that I also tested the RAM sticks, slot 1 and the 128MB stick in there seems to work just fine, but either one or both of the two other 64MB sticks are iffy or the two slots are, need to have a closer look at that later as another issue turned up: the CDROM drive wasn't being recognized no matter what I tried. It powered up and ejected the tray just fine, but BIOS didn't see it at boot up and neither did Win98SE setup. I tried it with IDE/SATA adapter with my XP machine and it didn't like it one bit and froze as WinXP was loading. Next I tried a SATA DVD drive on the Win98 machine with the same adapter as you can use it both ways and that wasn't being recognized either.
So I figure
- A: The IDE CDROM drive is just somehow busted and the StarTech IDE/SATA adapter doesn't work with optical drive at least on that machine
or
- B: The IDE/SATA adapter was DOA and I'm somehow being a dummy with the CDROM drive.
Eh, I guess I just need to find another CD drive, so more waiting has to be done.