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HP Pavilion 8500 upgrade suggestions?

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First post, by cyclone3d

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I ended up purchasing an HP Pavilion 8500 tower because it had a Diamond MX300 sound card in it.

The system works fine and is in really good shape overall.
I would like to set it up as a DOS/Win98 SE machine as was intended.

Some joker put XP on it with only 128MB RAM.

The only real bad thing is that it has a small form factor PSU which is only 160w. Not sure if that is going to be an issue at all but don't want to kill the PSU by drawing too much power.

I can't stick a regular size PSU in it because it will
Interfere with the optical drives.

I might be able to get away with a regular PSU if I use
a short optical drive.

Current specs as I received it are:

ASUS P2B-VT motherboard (Slot 1 VIA 693a / 596b - supports 133fsb and has jumpers to go up to 150fsb) edit: the FSB jumpers are not installed, so it is stuck with auto-detect. / edit

AGP
4x PCI
1x ISA

Pentium III 733Mhz

ASUS AGP-V3800/32M ( TNT2)
Diamond MX300 sound card
10/100 NIC
Winmodem.
HP CD/RW
DVD
36GB whiney as all get-out Maxtor HDD.
3.5" floppy.

Other than the definite swap out of the HDD
for an SSD, I am open to suggestions.

Last edited by cyclone3d on 2022-02-21, 03:45. Edited 1 time in total.

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Reply 1 of 6, by dionb

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Unless you wanted to go overboard with a non-period AGP monster, I wouldn't worry too much about the 160W PSU, at least, as long as it's working reliably. Swapping HDD for SSD will reduce load for starters.

How far do you want to go? Hearing about missing jumper headers, I'd be tempted to solder them on 😉

Apart from that, you want to do DOS so an ISA sound card would be nice.

Reply 2 of 6, by cyclone3d

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Here are some pics of the system:

The attachment front.jpg is no longer available
The attachment model_sticker.jpg is no longer available

Much to my surprise, this thing is completely stock. Before I noticed that sticker, I figured the previous owner had swapped out the sound and maybe video card:

The attachment build_sticker.jpg is no longer available

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

Reply 3 of 6, by cyclone3d

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Here are some pics of the inside and the PSU situation.

The attachment inside_no_psu.jpg is no longer available
The attachment inside_with_psu.jpg is no longer available

Shorty PSU compared to regular ATX PSU

The attachment PSU_size.jpg is no longer available

Regular ATX PSU interferes with original optical drives

The attachment full_size_PSU_interference.jpg is no longer available

Clearance of regular size PSU if I were to use a shorty optical drive

The attachment short_DVD_burner_clearance.jpg is no longer available

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

Reply 4 of 6, by cyclone3d

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I think I may just upgrade the video card and add and ISA sound card and also put in an expansion slot exhaust fan below the video card.

Might also put a faster CPU in there depending on if the 733 bottlenecks the faster GPU.

As for the missing fsb jumpers, not sure I will bother with them. The BIOS has no settings available to tweak for if I were to overclock, plus I have way better boards than this that will be used in custom builds

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

Reply 5 of 6, by cyclone3d

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Ended up installing a GeForce 3 Ti 200 Pro. I did run it in th motherboard BIOS with the fan disconnected so it would warm up the pink goop they used for thermal compound and replaced it with Arctic MX-5.

Also installed the expansion slot exhaust fan.

For the SSD, I used an old 128GB Samsung drive along with a Chinesium SATA to IDE adapter.

Installed Windows 98Se, NUSB, chipset and video drivers as well as the MS 2004 update pack.

For the sound cards, the MX300 will stay and I am planning on adding an Live! Or Audigy card for Windows as well as probably an Opti based card with onboard wavetable for DOS.

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

Reply 6 of 6, by cyclone3d

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Did a bit more work on this system last night.
I replaced the fan on the CPU cooler for one that was not making death noises. I wanted to take the old fan apart and clean/oil it but the way the Cooler Master fan was made that was impossible.

I also fixed the DVD drive. It was only very rarely opening the drawer. I opened it up and found that the gears on both the motor that controlled the laser assembly and on the motor that controlled the tray mechanism were split. I super-glued them both.

The drive seems to work fine now but it make a horrid pop noise when the tray opens and closes because where it was split, 2 teeth are further apart than normal.

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

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