Many Bothans wrote on 2024-09-23, 19:55:

Here's a couple of pics of the 486 rig in my sig. I've been working on this one for a while and I think it's about where I'd li […]
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Here's a couple of pics of the 486 rig in my sig. I've been working on this one for a while and I think it's about where I'd like it to be now.

AOpen AP43 with 1MB L2 Cache
AMD Am5x86 at 160MHz
128MB FPM RAM
Diamond Stealth III S540
80GB Western Digital Caviar SE HDD
Promise Ultra66
Acer 40X CD Drive
Panasonic ZIP 250 ATAPI
HP Colorado T1000 Travan, connected to CMS FC-20 Controller
D-Link DE-530TX 10/100 NIC
AOpen FM56-ITU2 VoiceFaxModem
Creative Sound Blaster 32PnP, 8MB in SIMMs for samples
Cambridge Soundworks PCWorks 2.1 Speakers
Acer 17" 4:3 LCD Monitor
Acer Keyboard, Microsoft Serial Mouse
Powercom KIN-1000 UPS
Windows 98 Second Edition as primary OS

It was originally put together to read old floppies, zip disks and QIC tapes to archive to a NAS. This was way before there was such a thing as the greaseweazle.

Not sure on the make/model of the AT minitower case, it was purchased as NOS years ago and I dug the early 2000's light beige with translucent accent vibe. The same case popped up on This Does Not Compute's Youtube channel recently, but with nifty lighting upgrades.

An AMD Am5x86 at 160MHz ???? Been reading about this and yours is overclocked, nice, never tried this but surely going to.
Great build, congratulations!!

paulo_becas wrote on 2025-12-27, 12:13:

Many Bothans wrote on 2024-09-23, 19:55:

Here's a couple of pics of the 486 rig in my sig. I've been working on this one for a while and I think it's about where I'd li […]
Show full quote

Here's a couple of pics of the 486 rig in my sig. I've been working on this one for a while and I think it's about where I'd like it to be now.

AOpen AP43 with 1MB L2 Cache
AMD Am5x86 at 160MHz
[..]

An AMD Am5x86 at 160MHz ???? Been reading about this and yours is overclocked, nice, never tried this but surely going to.
Great build, congratulations!!

Thanks! It's an easy bump in FSB from 33 to 40 on these Am5x86s, almost all of them can get there. Now finding other components that play nice is another matter.

Loving these rigs. Love the big box games. Glad ive managed to rebuild my childhood collection.

Here's my 4th retro PC this was my first 2CPU workstation build, however I did give it a decent graphics card and sound card, for the rest it's pretty much original as it was back on December 12, 2000, rebuilding such systems always makes my mind go in awe and then seeing all the amazing builds everyone here at Vogons have built, rebuilt or just maintained all over them years, major respects fro m my end everyone, thanks for keeping the retro/vintage computers alive, this is all part of a very important history we are all keeping intact here and properly maintained, that truly pays off big time.

Gradinko SMP 2000

2x Intel Pentium !!!/EB Coppermine 1000Mhz SL4MF CPU's
2x TITAN Majesty V / Thermaltake Golden Orbs for Socket 370
ABiT VP6 Rev. 1.0 0048
4x 512MB PC-133 ECC Registered by HP/Micron Crucial USA
ATi Radeon 8500 AGP 64MB 128Bit DDR Rev.A 0152
Belkin F5U220-NN 5 Port USB 2.0 PCI Card Rev. 9 1222
Intel Pro 1000 GT PCI Ethernet Adapter
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS SB0350 Rev.A 2703
2x Seagate Barracuda V 250GB 7200.7 rpm UATA 133 HDD's
Plextor PX-760A 16x/8x DVD-RW / 48x / 24x CD-RW UATA-133 Drive
Enermax WG565AX-VE(G) 535 Watt PSU with support for 32Amps on the +5 Volt Rail
Addtronics 7896A Server Tower from 1999
Compaq S710 17" Blackshade CRT @ 1024x768x32 @ 85Hz

Windows XP Professional USA + Service Pack 3
ATi Catalyst 6.11 + ATi Catalyst Control Center 6.14

This is where the main & slave HDD"s are, all the way in the top HDD bay area:

Here all the parts neatly installed, it's wallpaper is a photo of a Lace Monitor Lizard from Australia 😎

I think that first sentence makes the list of “Longest Recorded”
😉

AndrettiGTO wrote on 2026-01-15, 20:45:

I think that first sentence makes the list of “Longest Recorded”
😉

Hmm not sure what you mean by this but I think that is a good thing?
Thanks if so 😀

marcin512 wrote on 2024-10-12, 08:10:

- QLogic QLA2200F

Finally, someone who is using FC! 😀
Are you using this as a general boot solution for different hosts or do you have images per machine basis?

Obijuan1983 wrote on 2022-11-24, 16:27:

IBM Netfinity 3500 […]
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IBM Netfinity 3500

Just restored this nice server 😀

2 x Pentium II 233MHz

256MB RAM

2 x 9.1GB SCSI HDD 7200rpm

S3 Virge GX2 AGP SVGA

2 x IDE Controller

FDD Controller

Ethernet

How do I open the front panel of this computer case? I've tried for quite a while but haven't been able to.

Gold Leader-B747 wrote on 2026-01-13, 23:35:

Here's my 4th retro PC this was my first 2CPU workstation build, however I did give it a decent graphics card and sound card, f […]
Show full quote

Here's my 4th retro PC this was my first 2CPU workstation build, however I did give it a decent graphics card and sound card, for the rest it's pretty much original as it was back on December 12, 2000, rebuilding such systems always makes my mind go in awe and then seeing all the amazing builds everyone here at Vogons have built, rebuilt or just maintained all over them years, major respects fro m my end everyone, thanks for keeping the retro/vintage computers alive, this is all part of a very important history we are all keeping intact here and properly maintained, that truly pays off big time.

Gradinko SMP 2000

2x Intel Pentium !!!/EB Coppermine 1000Mhz SL4MF CPU's
2x TITAN Majesty V / Thermaltake Golden Orbs for Socket 370
ABiT VP6 Rev. 1.0 0048
4x 512MB PC-133 ECC Registered by HP/Micron Crucial USA
ATi Radeon 8500 AGP 64MB 128Bit DDR Rev.A 0152
Belkin F5U220-NN 5 Port USB 2.0 PCI Card Rev. 9 1222
Intel Pro 1000 GT PCI Ethernet Adapter
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS SB0350 Rev.A 2703
2x Seagate Barracuda V 250GB 7200.7 rpm UATA 133 HDD's
Plextor PX-760A 16x/8x DVD-RW / 48x / 24x CD-RW UATA-133 Drive
Enermax WG565AX-VE(G) 535 Watt PSU with support for 32Amps on the +5 Volt Rail
Addtronics 7896A Server Tower from 1999
Compaq S710 17" Blackshade CRT @ 1024x768x32 @ 85Hz

Windows XP Professional USA + Service Pack 3
ATi Catalyst 6.11 + ATi Catalyst Control Center 6.14

This is where the main & slave HDD"s are, all the way in the top HDD bay area:

Here all the parts neatly installed, it's wallpaper is a photo of a Lace Monitor Lizard from Australia 😎

That's a really nice setup, did you recap the VP6? I've had to pull mine out of its case multiple times to replace them.

Going to start showing my collection....

System 1:
Slot 1 unit running a PIII Clocked at 1.23 GHz on an Asus P2B
Win98 SE
BFG GeForce 4-Ti 4200
SoundBlaster Live Platinum

System 2:
Core 2 Duo E6750 2.66 GHz
XP and Win98 SE Dual Boot
Radeon x800
SoundBlaster Live

More to come...

Fish3r wrote on Yesterday, 15:41:

That's a really nice setup, did you recap the VP6? I've had to pull mine out of its case multiple times to replace them.

Hey many thanks and no that VP6 was never recapped the caps were measured and none of them were out of peak values, the system was always used as a file server for the most of it, it traveled all over the world but always was well taken care of.
I was able to buy the mainboard, CPU's & Ram with original IO Plate and manual for a decent deal of 200 Eur, it felt nice to have my old original system up and running again and as long things are running stable, I decide to give it a go, I can always send the mainboard to my friend in Germany for a full recap, but as long the caps showed a safe peak value, well I kind of went with it really, the VP6 wears the PCB date of 0048 meaning it was made in year 2000 during week 48 since it was made it runs surprisingly well and rock solid not a single crash ever seen yet either, despite being just over 25 years and 2 months of age.

Personally I think this is thanks to the low wattage the system has endured, P3's aren't like Athlons, they can operate at full power and not going over 34C under load, and this is a much lesser strain on the capacitors and resistors as well as other parts within the system, which lead to it's long lifespan in return.

Th e VP6 build is also one of my favorite rebuilds as well when it comes to a reuse of original parts especially, the other savior was the 7 layer mesh filter the Addtronics 7896A has, this blocks out 98% of dust particles, thereby keeping the parts of the system cleaner than most filters would allow them to be, I also always kept my parts cleaned from dust, that goes for the case and parts as well as the PSU etc, Maintenance saves computer lives really.

Absolutely lovely to see setups with GoldenORb action in both "tomcattech" and obviously "Gold Leaders" setups, always had a sweetspot for those coolers (and the ofcourse the Alpha ones).

Captain NA wrote on Today, 09:27:

Absolutely lovely to see setups with GoldenORb action in both "tomcattech" and obviously "Gold Leaders" setups, always had a sweetspot for those coolers (and the ofcourse the Alpha ones).

Yoooo Kasper, good to see you here buddy! I hope you been doing well and many thanks it was my ultimate dream to get that VP6 system back to life and even when I use it today it's very responsive and rock solid, that was a big surprise being it uses the VIA Apollo Pro 133A Chipset, I guess WInXP Pro + SP3 also does a good job regarding the stability of things.

I use it for Descent 1 &2 with DXX Rebirth 0.58.1 and DXX Retro 1.3 for D1 and 1.3a for D2, these mods also add SMP Support up to 4 core support so gets some benefit out of this system as well, I also use it for C&C RA2 + Yuri's Revenge with Purple Alert Mod 4.10.28 I run the game on CPU 0 and my WinAmp music and background apps on CPU 1 setting manual affinities is ideal with such a build, thereby dividing tasks and workloads over both nodes, something a 1 CPU system of it's timeline will just struggle with.

Since it has ATi's R200 in there I am going to see how FarCry 1 runs with Shader Model 1.4 support by using Far Cry version 1.33, Doom3 ran on it btw at 640x480x32 at lowest settings it did a consistent frame rate of 21 to 23 ps, I was very impressed tbh, just by keeping in mind that Doom3 is a good 4.5 years newer than this system as well

Next up is system 3:

Asus P5PE-VM with an E5800 Dual Core
GeForce 5700 Ultra
Soundblaster CT4790

(Yes, I know it has an Athlon sticker on the front... 🤣)

System 4: The EMachine Of Wonders
P4B266-LA with a P4 2.6
Radeon 9550
On board sound