Hello Guys

It's been a while since I started this project but I'm glad I have finished (most) of it so far.

Long story short: I had some old parts laying around here - mostly socket 478 components and I wanted to build a nice looking Pentium 4 based Retro-PC. But my approach on this topic went a little different than usual...

My goal was to create a machine which had all legacy features (such as Floppy and CD-ROM Drive) on board but the overall exterior look should be pretty much "modern". I'm not sure what the exact term of this is but I've seen ppl doing "sleeper builds" all the way on SM but that's kinda not my style.

Another point was to get a matching color scheme. Old boards came in all sorts of colors (sometimes very- and not so plesant to look at) but for this build I wanted everything to be red/black.

Alright with the first thoughts done I've scrapped together all the parts I used to build:

Board: MSI P4MAM2-V
CPU: Pentium 4 2,8/512/533 - no HT
RAM: 2GB DDR 400 dual channel
GPU: ATI Radeon HD2600pro AGP
HDD: WD Black 80GB Sata II
Sound: Creative Soundblaster X-Fi Extreme Music
BeQuiet System Power 8 500W PSU (from my old main rig)

The only thing I needed was a fitting case. After searching through the web and trying to find a rather modern looking case which still has room for 5,25 drives I kinda gave up since the ones I've found where either "ugly" or too expensive for me. My final choice was the Aerocool CS 111 which I got pretty cheap at a warehouse deal.

First I was sceptical about this case since it's design was more budget orientated than the others I've found but since I got it for such a good deal I couldn't say no. Also the fact that it is indeed so small is a big + since I don't have much space around here and every new tech in my collection needs to find it's place somewhere without me stumbling over it haha.

With the case arrived I started to plan the layout and mounted the first few components - everything seemed to fit in nicely and there was even enough space to mount a floppy drive in the front of the case. For the CD-ROM Drive I went with a slimline laptop drive which I also had laying around here. Connected to an adapter PCB which I could connect a standard IDE cable. I used double sided foam tape to mount the drive in place. It damps the vibrations and keeps the drive secure in place.

However before I put the drives into their place I decided to cover up their case with some black adhesive foil. I usually wanted a matte black finish but I couldn't find anything else at my local stores so I went with the one I could get. It has a slight sparkle texture to it which is rough to touch. I think it looks cool tho.

With everything put together (and having a nightmare with the cable management) I pulled out my trusty Windows XP install USB Stick and gave the machine a try. Everything went smoothly but then suddenly the board itself was acting weird... All of the sudden I couldn't access the CMOS Settings anymore. I have no idea what happened I just couldn't get into the bios options. I've tried different Keyboards, different button combos [...] the list is endless and it was getting so frustrating that I've decided to get a different board. (spoilers: the board somehow works again after it was put away for like a month and then I randomly pulled it out and tested it just to figure out it works without any issues... welp)

So I was looking online for an appropiate replacement - I saw many boards floating around on ebay but they were either plaqued with bad caps or didn't fit the criteria of being "red" - I also tend to avoid VIA Chipsets for the P4 since the last MSI Board I've used with the VIA Chipset had some of the weirdest drivers ever to begin with.

I found a new board also MSI based model this time with an ATI chipset and 4 RAM slots. The board was an MSI MS 7031 and looked like it just came out of the factory - indeed it was NoS and the seller didn't even seemed to know about that. With the new board arrived I installed it and made everything fit nicely (did I mention that I hate cable management?) and my system was ready to go. I've installed a bunch of my favorite games such as Flatout and Bejeweled but as soon as I started playing the games suddenly the framerate wasn't stable anymore.

So I've checked everything - cables, connectors, drivers, temps [...] no issue to be found there so the conclusion was something with the board must been fishy since I was able to verify all components working properly when I put them into my good ol' Dell GX 270 "test station".

At this point I wanted to give up since it took already more of my free time than I actually wanted to spend on this project and all I wanted was just a "working" PC without any weird querks. However it came different once again and I stumbled over another MSI Board which was listed as "refurbished and fully tested" also with 3 year warranty which is quite funny to me given how old these boards are but ok I gave it a shot and - bingo! This time the board works and the games run without weird hangs or freezes!

The ONLY thing I have to complain about this board is it's weird SATA Controller. Theres no option in the Bios to set the Sata Controller to IDE mode so ofc Windows Xp wasn't gooing to install - and yes, I've tried the provided SATA drivers from the MSI and SiS page with the "press F6" option before XP install but no matter what I tried it didn't seem to work. So I used my IDE to SATA adapter for the HDD and that's the way how it works.

With all these adjustments made the final specs of the machine also changed:

Board: MSI 661FM2 - retail version
CPU: Pentium 4 3,00E HT - preshot
The rest is unchanged but the faster P4 is welcome. I however made adjustments to the cooling setup, the thight space inside the case doesn't allow me to mount any bigger heatsink than the intel stock one but it does a good job in combination with the 4 case fans to keep the CPU from melting down while not being super annoying noisy. The board also comes with an somewhat "fan control" which I made use of to keep the little screamer at a comfy 1,400rpm in idle and under load it bumps up to 2,500rpm.

The case itself has some kind of restricted airflow so I nneded to pull out the "big" weapons since all of my "modern" fans I had laying around here didn't really had enough "speed" to keep a constant strong airflow when needed. So I've installed my old server fan which is a Delta FF somewhat 120mm 2,800rpm and this thing has more than enough headroom to keep things under control. Since the space was very restricted at the top side of the case, I couldn't mount regular 120x25mm fans so I had to get "slim fans" instead. my choice went first with the Arctic P12 slim but these fans didn't really generated any airflow at all so not usuable for this setup. After some digging I got a pair of Silverstone Air-slimmer 120 and these are just great. Since all these fans are PWM capable and the board itself has no way to control the fanspeed I've opted for an external fan speed controller which let's me connect up to 7x fans. It also takes it's power from the 6 Pin PCIE power connector from the PSU so it was quite handy to have this power rail not being completely useless floating around in the case.

Of course I can't finish a build without the fitting lighting so I went through my parts box and found some red LED strips and a white one to highlight all the nice parts inside the machine. And nope, this PC stays RGB free - we ain't need that 5% of extra performance here xD

Now I made up quite a story didn't I? I guess the enthusiasm for this hobby just knows no boundaries. 😉

~cheers