First post, by phantasia
Hi all,
I've been lurking around here for some time, only very recently (a very few weeks) ago, did I started to feel the need to build a retro gaming machine.
My idea is to try to get something that can run Win98se, and some of the late 90's games until 2003/4 maybe.
So I had a Northwood Celeron 2.8, on an Asrock P4VM8. I think that the board is not ok, due to a lot of issues in booting with a USB stick and even getting through the installation of Windows98, etc. The temperatures of it with the stock cooler are 55º at bios. Which is not good for what I'm used. Looking at the prices of 478 coolers, going over 20€ (crazy prices), I changed to start looking at older stuff.
I've begun to look into what I could get from outside my home country, but only some days ago, did I start to look into the local stuff that people have around.
To build everything by each part, It would get extremely expensive to what I want to spend. So I've been looking at what people have for sale, whole computers.
What I have in mind was either a Pentium 3 or Athlon system.
The Athlon parts are practically non existent, only saw a couple of Athlon XP 2800+, but were HP ones.
Now the P3's are some around and after emailing sellers, etc. I have a shortlist of the systems i'm interested in.
The first one, the seller is not sure of the cpu speed, but other stuff in there is:
- Motherboard - Soltek SL-65KV2-CT - Can't find any drivers for this on the web... Anyone can help with this?
- Sound Blaster Live! with the Live2 front panel.
- Floppy.
All for 35€
This one left me wondering since it already supports the Tualatin P3's but still unsure of the rest of the components (need to go there and check it myself). If everything works out, I can prolly get my hands on a tualatin 1.4 and make it "fly". The lack of drivers online and the owner not having them as well is a huge potential problem for me. Not sure how to sort it in case this is where I want to head.
The motherboard appears to have an universal agp slot, which is good to get a 9800XT or pro running and it also has an ISA slot! In case I wish to run some older dos games, I can get my hands on ISA soundcard and use it.
The next one:
- Motherboard Asus CUV4X-E
- Pentium III 933MHz
- 512Mb Ram
- Riva TNT2 32mb
- SB Live!
- Ethernet card
- CDr-rw LG
- Maxtor 20Gb
- Floppy
All for 30€.
This one looks good as well, but the motherboard appears to lack support for 1.5v AGP cards, no ISA and no support for Tualatins 🙁
The final one appears to be the best choice:
Celeron Tualatin 1.3
Matsonic ms7177ct
1Gb Ram
40Gb Samsung Hdd
Geforce MX400
Ethernet Card
DVD Rom reader
CD burner
Floppy
Dell Screen E173FC
Keyboard+Mouse+Speakers
Basically everything, for 45€.
Supports tualatins, AGP slot appears to be universal.
Lows? No ISA. Celeron only 😀
What are your thoughts? 😀 Taking into account that to replace the cooler of the 478 slot build I have around it would cost me around 20€... I guess I wouldn't be all that bad with going with one of the builds shown here...
My idea to change where possible the CPU for a 1.4 Tualatin P3, maybe the Celeron is more than enough? And the Graphic Card for 9800XT at the most, least an Nvidia fx5700.
Regarding the first one, does anyone have the drivers for the Soltek SL-65KV2-CT? If I end up going to see that one live and everything works I might bet on that one.