those chip set coolers are rather crappy, almost no surface area to dissipate heat that and temp censers form this era are not well know to be correct to begin with.

old school gamer man wrote on 2025-08-01, 14:18:

those chip set coolers are rather crappy, almost no surface area to dissipate heat that and temp censers form this era are not well know to be correct to begin with.

yeah it was very small and looked very cheap. I replaced with a larger heatsinc and a larger fan. Just snaped the old ABIT plate over it but its all new. even so the temperature apparently did not change hahaha

Nice build, can have a lot of fun with it, especially with the CRT.

For chipset 50C is fine, but i personally prefer to replace the cooler with substantially larger heatsink with no fan. Those fans are quite bad - noisy, low airflow, die fast. There should be already some airflow there from CPU cooler so larger heatsink is usually more than enough.

May want to stick something onto SB too, if that's getting hot...

Also which 2600+ variety? 333x11.5 one is quite interesting in a sense that it is very likely to work with 400FSB...

Danilo_Dias wrote on 2025-08-01, 14:44:

old school gamer man wrote on 2025-08-01, 14:18:

those chip set coolers are rather crappy, almost no surface area to dissipate heat that and temp censers form this era are not well know to be correct to begin with.

yeah it was very small and looked very cheap. I replaced with a larger heatsinc and a larger fan. Just snaped the old ABIT plate over it but its all new. even so the temperature apparently did not change hahaha

yeah the temp censers on these boards are not the best.

Archer57 wrote on 2025-08-01, 15:00:

Nice build, can have a lot of fun with it, especially with the CRT. […]
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Nice build, can have a lot of fun with it, especially with the CRT.

For chipset 50C is fine, but i personally prefer to replace the cooler with substantially larger heatsink with no fan. Those fans are quite bad - noisy, low airflow, die fast. There should be already some airflow there from CPU cooler so larger heatsink is usually more than enough.

May want to stick something onto SB too, if that's getting hot...

Also which 2600+ variety? 333x11.5 one is quite interesting in a sense that it is very likely to work with 400FSB...

yeah its 166x 11.5, but i'm afraid of doying any overclock on it. its very rare to find any cpu 462 socket here in brazil above athlonxp 2000+ =( I was very lucky to find one working, nowdays i can not even find a 2400+ anymore

Oh it must be awesome. You can try all sorts of overclock and configuration without fear of never see one again ahahaha.
Even this 9600xt I have was ultra rare to finde here these days. If you're lucky you find a 6200 agp hahaha

Danilo_Dias wrote on 2025-08-01, 17:21:

yeah its 166x 11.5, but i'm afraid of doying any overclock on it. its very rare to find any cpu 462 socket here in brazil above athlonxp 2000+ =( I was very lucky to find one working, nowdays i can not even find a 2400+ anymore

It is weird how different things are more/less common in different parts of the world... like i can not find any mobile ones out here, they are plain unobtainable, but regular ones are super common. Especially 2500+ (166x11) barton, which is literally everywhere, bundled with half the motherboards listed etc and is more often than not all you practically need as so far all of them i've had worked just fine at 200x11/3200+.

Try to talk to the guys which are obvious resellers and sell socketA motherboards or other CPUs, ask them if they have any. Because it is a thing out here - nobody bothers to sell them because they are too cheap.

Alternatively - sometimes a good way to find stuff like this is by looking for motherboard+CPU bundles or even complete PCs...

But yeah, if it is rare/valuable where you are not wanting to overclock is completely understandable (and probably the right idea too). Kind of like i do not want to overclock AGP cards which are quite expensive at this point. Even given overclocking is pretty much safe as long as voltage is not involved and heat is not an issue.

Danilo_Dias wrote on 2025-08-01, 18:15:

Even this 9600xt I have was ultra rare to finde here these days. If you're lucky you find a 6200 agp hahaha

Yeah, higher end cards are uncommon. They are not impossible to find, but unless you are willing to wait for good deals, buy "untested" or even "broken" and repair yourself - you can easily end up paying a few hundred $ for a card...

I was recently lucky enough to fish x800GTO out of "old office PC, can run MS word", which was kind of exciting and left the guy perplexed why i was willing to ship a worthless box across whole country for like 2x more in shipping then he wanted for it.

Nice period correct build. I had Athlon XP 2500+ (overclocked to 3200+) back in the day with a Radeon All in Wonder 9700 Pro. Loved the ATI demos at the time. Especially Pipedream.

I still have the Radeon. I sold the motherboard though, as caps were going bad.

RetroPCCupboard wrote on 2025-08-01, 19:08:

Nice period correct build. I had Athlon XP 2500+ (overclocked to 3200+) back in the day with a Radeon All in Wonder 9700 Pro. Loved the ATI demos at the time. Especially Pipedream.

I still have the Radeon. I sold the motherboard though, as caps were going bad.

soldering is a skill more people need to know. so many simple things can be fixed with a iron.

speaking about bad caps i have a p5k premium here that 5 years ago was still running ok and now is unstable and sometimes even turn itself off. i imagine if its a cap problem.

old school gamer man wrote on 2025-08-01, 19:20:

soldering is a skill more people need to know. so many simple things can be fixed with a iron.

Agreed. I have the tools to do it now. I didn't then. I recently brought a dead 5.25" floppy drive from the dead by replacing some caps (with advice from some of the amazing Vogons members).

The bad caps wasnt the only reason I got rid of it. I was only starting to get into retro PC gaming. I started off trying to build overkill systems and just didn't feel like I would use Athlon XP.

I regret getting rid of it now but I have since then bought a couple of Athlon XP CPUs and motherboards. Not used them yet, but will probably build a system similar to the OP when I do.