tehsiggi wrote on Yesterday, 18:30:

The 5V rail of your PSU is rated at 20A, which nowadays is sufficient, however that's only 100W. The 9700 will take around 20W of it's 60W from the 5V rail. That leaves you with 80W for the rest of the system. Given that socket 462 boards often rely on the 5V rail for CPU power, you might be a bit in a tight spot here under load. Not sure about your a7v8x-mx.

Awesome, thanks for bringing the numbers! Sounds like I'm right to suspect the PSU, even if I was completely off on the exact reasons. I have a X1950 Pro AGP that bluescreened but didn't trip the PSU off when I tested it in this system. I'm going to guess that means it pulls more on the 12V than the 9700, and that if (when) I build a system around it I'll probably be ok with a modern PSU.

tehsiggi wrote on Yesterday, 18:30:

I'd leave the caps as is. Of all 9500s, 9700s and 9800s I had, none of them died / failed due to bad caps.

Cool - yeah, none of them look like they've wet themselves so I'm happy to leave them alone.

tehsiggi wrote on Yesterday, 18:30:

I'd always grant the memory on 9700s and 9800s memory heatsinks. The memory gets quite warm and the stock cooler already has bad airflow over the memory. Given that you are cooling it passively, I'd highly recommend additional heatsinks on the memory.

Ok on it - I'll wait till I get that sorted to do any further kind of stress testing. Thanks!

Funny, last time I had a 9700 Pro (AIW), I was running it in a tiny Shuttle MiniPC with zero airflow (and a busted PSU in this pic):

Now I want to treat this one like precious cargo.

Had to prep a new HDD for my upcoming "Childhood mashup" build. Its specs are basically the 700MHz Athlon-based Area 51 featured in the December 1999 issue of Maximum PC, with a few slight "twists":

- I'm using the case of my first PC as a kid - Keymouse/KMEX CX-6458/6459 (I hope to get around retrobriting the front bezel one day)
- ODD is a DVD-RW because most of the media I have at easy-n-ready use is... DVD-Rs.
- HDD is a 40GB WD Protege - this was mainly due to the weird azz HDD spec Alienware used - a 34GB IBM Deskstar. My WTH award goes to IBM rather than Alienware, though I'm not really surprised it's none other than IBM pulling this kind of stupid capacities.
- no MPEG decoder unfortunately (idek where I would find out anyways!)

Here's the issue of the said Maximum PC btw: https://archive.org/details/maximum-pc-magazi … e/n113/mode/2up

Huge thanks goes to @Socket3 for the GPU by the way - it's exactly the one from the magazine, and probably THE ONLY NVIDIA THAT ACTUALLY WORKS ON MSI'S 6167. I'm not even joking - this thing REFUSES to run any nVidia past 256. It'll run absolutely anything else (ATi, PowerVR, 3dfx, probably SiS stuff too!) except any nVidia newer than 256 period.

Oh, and possibly having the Dell Dimension 8300 cover part of the 2003-04 period. I'm super excited about the 9800 Pro in it being alive, and usually I've regarded Dell's stuff as high quality.

Successfully patched Wasteland to run in 16 colors on an IBM PCjr.

Next step of the journey. on my Rescued Pentium 4 with Geforce FX card, getting Windows XP onto this think and some benchmarks, man I had a lot of issues with the optical drives lately, its hard enough finding an IDE drive, I had two on this and one was DOA the other was barely working.. is there a way to repair these or common faults? I have more broken IDE drives than working at the moment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWP-IeU5oZg