Very nice build! What PSU did you used? It should smoke every game up to 2004!
How is the Intel stock cooler? Is it enough? Northwood should be cooler than an equivalent Prescott!
I have that motherboard along with every other socket 478 Abit board.

The PSU used is an AOpen Z500-12AE3, made by FSP.
The stock cooler holds up really well for a Northwood HT - it's only Prescott that it starts turning into a furnace.
Anyways, finding ABIT mainboards here in Romania has (at least for me) been very painful. The only ones I have are this IS7-E and a BE6-II.

PcBytes wrote on 2023-05-08, 07:57:

Still needs some ironing - case' HDD LED isn't working, and the XP install that was on the 160GB drive got a strange virus that would not allow proper shutdown. Ah well.

did you find out what is this strange virus?

PcBytes wrote on 2023-05-08, 09:48:

The PSU used is an AOpen Z500-12AE3, made by FSP.
The stock cooler holds up really well for a Northwood HT - it's only Prescott that it starts turning into a furnace.
Anyways, finding ABIT mainboards here in Romania has (at least for me) been very painful. The only ones I have are this IS7-E and a BE6-II.

Indeed, finding any Abit parts in Romania is incredibly difficult and will most likely become impossible in 2-3 years. I am lucky I started my collection back in 2014 when Abit boards where pretty easy to find and relatively cheap! I now have 155 motherboards that covers all ATX era - I am only missing a few unicorns!

Masaw wrote on 2023-05-09, 03:34:

PcBytes wrote on 2023-05-08, 07:57:

Still needs some ironing - case' HDD LED isn't working, and the XP install that was on the 160GB drive got a strange virus that would not allow proper shutdown. Ah well.

did you find out what is this strange virus?

Apparently yes and it wasn't a virus. Whatever coding was done on Daniel_K's Audigy drivers messes up the shutdown sequence, ending with a winlogon BSOD - it'll just sit on the desktop for roughly 2-3 minutes or so, try to log off, and it then hangs on the desktop background before finally shutting down with a winlogon bluescreen, where I have to manually turn it off from the ATX power button.

I have since then reinstalled XP and installed standard non-modded Audigy 2 ZS drivers. No more shutdown issues.

@nd22 - interesting. I'm still on the look for boards - there's also an IS7-E2 that I've seen for some time - if no one nabs it until I can get to my college dorm the following days... I might nab it , even if it's a "lite" version of the IS7-E featured here.

And a shot of the desktop.

Not much has changed since the reinstall, aside from more game icons (FR2, Mashed Drive To Survive, Total Immersion Racing, Crazy Taxi and NFS Hot Pursuit II), Zune Theme instead of Royale, and a Makima (Chainsaw Man) wallpaper that absolutely fits too well with the rest of the build.

nd22 wrote on 2023-05-09, 08:01:

PcBytes wrote on 2023-05-08, 09:48:

The PSU used is an AOpen Z500-12AE3, made by FSP.
The stock cooler holds up really well for a Northwood HT - it's only Prescott that it starts turning into a furnace.
Anyways, finding ABIT mainboards here in Romania has (at least for me) been very painful. The only ones I have are this IS7-E and a BE6-II.

Indeed, finding any Abit parts in Romania is incredibly difficult and will most likely become impossible in 2-3 years. I am lucky I started my collection back in 2014 when Abit boards where pretty easy to find and relatively cheap! I now have 155 motherboards that covers all ATX era - I am only missing a few unicorns!

155 ABIT or 155 ATX boards in general? Impressive, never the less! Think I gav a maximum of 15 boards in total: 🤣:

Likely ABIT. Now I know who to blame when there will be no ABIT boards to buy here in Romania 🤣 (jk)

155 Abit motherboards; socket 7 up to LGA 775/ AM2+ when Abit was closed down. I own only 2 other non-Abit motherboards: 1 MSI and 1 Asus. Around 50 video cards - I did not counted them actually - maybe half of them Abit, from Riva TNT/Radeon up to GTX 295/Radeon 4870X2 that covers the entire Direct X 6 - 10 era and correspond to the period covered by the motherboards. The parts I wish I have are the Voodoo video cards however they are stupidly expensive. Today in 2023 it has become impossible to actually collect Abit parts - they are either impossible to find or sellers are asking crazy prices! The thing that I actually miss is time to do some extensive testing and comparatives that covers those 10 years.

nd22 wrote on 2023-05-14, 08:14:

155 Abit motherboards; socket 7 up to LGA 775/ AM2+ when Abit was closed down. I own only 2 other non-Abit motherboards: 1 MSI and 1 Asus. Around 50 video cards - I did not counted them actually - maybe half of them Abit, from Riva TNT/Radeon up to GTX 295/Radeon 4870X2 that covers the entire Direct X 6 - 10 era and correspond to the period covered by the motherboards. The parts I wish I have are the Voodoo video cards however they are stupidly expensive. Today in 2023 it has become impossible to actually collect Abit parts - they are either impossible to find or sellers are asking crazy prices! The thing that I actually miss is time to do some extensive testing and comparatives that covers those 10 years.

Welp, the two I've managed to get were from two sources. One was a well known classified user (RetroForTheMasses is his username on that platform) and the other was from an user on another forum (lab501, user brhams).
The GPU came from lab501 as well, from another user. I did have to scrub it clean, being soaked in cooking oil for whatever reason. I was expecting nasty stuff, but the initial state I got the card in wasn't too bad (considering I had to repair a Savage 4 in nearly the same state, and a Radeon X1550 as well.)

As for the prices, even eBay isn't an option - I'm still dreaming to get my hands on a BP6 (or VP6), but the prices for anything ABIT branded (even broken) is absolutely atrocious.

There's a NF7 build in Bucharest, and if anything, I'll ask the seller if he either can part with the motherboard, or at least ship the whole build to me (I'm currently in Arad with final exams + bachelor degree).

That, or I guess I'll hit the car boot sale this Sunday if the weather is gonna be clear. I've found some nice gems there before (my MSI K7N2-Delta ILSR comes from there - all it had that would prevent it from booting was a corrupt BIOS chip, though I didn't mind recapping it while at replacing the BIOS) and wouldn't throw the possibility to find an ABIT mobo over there.

As for what other "gems" (in my opinon) I own to this moment, I guess I can list them here since I have nothing better to do at the moment:

- ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe
- ASUS P4P800-E Deluxe
- ABIT NF-M2SV (rebranded ECS mobo, but at least the BIOS is more competent than the dumb monkeys at ECS/PCChips)
- MSI K7N2 Delta-ILSR
- ASUS P2B Rev1.02 (the true 1.02, not the fake one)
- DFI nF4 SLi Infinity (another brand that's rare as hen's teeth here.)
- Gigabyte EX58-UD5
- ASUS A8N-SLi (the standard non-deluxe variant)
- MSI 865PE Neo2-LSR
- MSI 865PE Neo3-V
- ASUS P5PE-VM (famous for supporting up to C2D E6xxx chips, wonder if there's a mod to support beyond that?)
- Soyo 6BA+ IV
- Gateway Tabor III/ Intel WS440BX (a slightly better version of the SE440BX, w/ integrated ES1373 audio that's pretty much a swiss knife at DOS/9x gaming)
- ASUS P5B
- Gigabyte P55A-UD3
- LuckyTech P5MVP3
- Zida 6DLX/LX-98AT
- PCChips M726MRT (ALi Aladdin Pro II, pretty good and stable to my surprise, even with a Voodoo3 no less!)
- Epox EP-7KXA
- Epox EP-8RDA6I Plus
- ASUS A7N8X-VM/400 (with Chaintech 7NIF2 BIOS, the only thing that's not working is the thermal sensor but it doesn't beep about it either, 🤣)
... and the list could very well go on. From all those, the A8N SLi, DFI nF4 SLi, Soyo 6BA+IV, LT P5MVP3 and the P55A-UD3 are all now full builds. Here's the 6BA+IV for now.

Frumos , uite unul din systemele mele :

Speaking of this build, I think I'll probably replace the DVD drive once again.
I just found an older (and more period correct, IMO) ND-3500A that's made around September 2004.
The PSU will stay the same, mainly because I don't have anything older that would be able to safely run the X1950 Pro.
Oh, and I guess the next thing to look for is a thicker heatsink for the X1950. The Sapphire cooler isn't original to the card (which is a HIS card, this one to be exact) and I'm not really expecting the stock type of heatsink (that Sapphire based its own HSF from) to be very efficient, despite having a rather large copper block inside it.