My fleet

Nice collection. I particularly like the AST, very neat and compact design.

Law212 wrote on 2026-09-16, 17:53:

My fleet

So, all those PCs look very neat, clean and well taken care of, except for that red sticker on the middle one 😆 What's up with that?

mtest001 wrote on 2026-09-17, 19:01:

Nice collection. I particularly like the AST, very neat and compact design.

Thanks , Im surprised at someone liking the AST over the others. The Leading Edge is my newest one and I like the bulkier case and the look.

Law212 wrote on 2026-09-18, 17:51:

mtest001 wrote on 2026-09-17, 19:01:

Nice collection. I particularly like the AST, very neat and compact design.

Thanks , Im surprised at someone liking the AST over the others. The Leading Edge is my newest one and I like the bulkier case and the look.

I considered removing the sticker. Its one of those stickers that came with a box of 5.25 inch floppies. Someone put it there and I decided to leave it and not remove it.

xHi all,

Looks like my 1998 Pentium II system just wasn't going to cut it for some more ambitious tasks. That's why...

Introducing! My recently assembled year 1999 system:

1. Pentium III 450 MHz SL364 (Katmai) + new fan
2. QDI BrillianX IS (Intel 440BX)
3. 256 MB SDRAM PC100
4. 3Dfx Voodoo 3 2000 + fan
5. Creative Sound Blaster Live! CT4830
6. "Planet" Realtek 8139 10/100
7. Compact flash 5.25" adapter
8. Gotek floppy emulator
9. Lite-On DVD-ROM
10. Fortron FSP350-60HHN
11. Codegen ATX-6055

The goal was a period correct PC from early 1999 (the Pentium III was introduced in February of that year, and the Voodoo 3 in April). Some parts are newer, but they don't stand out too much (case, DVD drive, PSU). Also, there is some drive emulation going on, which I am fine with (Gotek, CF adapter).

These Codegen cases used to be quite popular, at least in my area, and I keep finding offers on-line. However, the condition is oftentimes questionable. I am fine with yellowing and scratches, but not with structural damage, bending, etc. This one is a decent survivor, all things considered.

Codegen made several models varying in depth, drive bay and front panel design, etc. I may look for some alternative front panel, because as much as I adore beige aesthetics, I don't like this particular panel 😉

I'm not too much obsessed about cable management ("cablegami"), and this PSU has some rather long cables. I'm also using a 20/24 pin adapter.

The Voodoo card has a small fan zip-tied, but on touching the back of the card, it feels quite hot. I may look into removing the original heat sink (which may pose some challenge...), and replace that 27 year old thermal glue...

Also, it would be good to swap the Katmai chip with some Coppermine, maybe a Pentium III 500E, to reduce heat production. I'm not sure if the board works with Coppermines.

Walrus83 wrote on 2026-09-24, 21:14:

Introducing! My recently assembled year 1999 system

The case looks very nice. The grey Gotek drive blends nicely with the rest of the front design. Maybe you could somehow move the ATX power cable "management" away from the center of the PC? Also, is it maybe too close to the CPU fan?

My 2000 Era Retro Box

Case: Athena Power "Pac-Man" CA-3688
CPU: Athlon K7 Slot A 800mhz
Motherboard: EPoX 7KXA
Memory: 1024mb PC133
GPU: 3DFX Voodoo 3 3000
Audio: Aureal Vortex 2 SQ2500
Audio Subsystem: WP32 McCake (MT32-pi Wavetable)
Network: DLink DWL-G510 Wireless
Drives: Epson SD-800 Dual Floppy
Pioneer DVD-106S DVD-ROM 16x/40x
Iomega Z100 Drive
FC-1307 SD-to-IDE Adapter (Boot)
Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 200GB (Storage)

It's only from seeing these awesome rigs with a Voodoo 3000 that I realized how underpowered my K6-2 PC really is for that era. 😜

built a "2008" computer out of parts I've been holding onto for awhile:

Antec 900
XFX NForce 780i
Core 2 Duo E8500 @ 4.4ghz
2x2GB DDR2 @ 800mhz
...gtx 760 and an SSD bottlenecked by SATA2 (sorry)

Originally put a 8800GTX in which was the appropriate choice, but got bored with it pretty quick, 20 year old GPUs have aged much than 20 CPUs have. I'm not trying to run period correct stuff, I'm trying to push it and see what the platform can still do, which is more fun to me 😀

In that breath, I loaded Windows 10 LTSC on it for now because I wanted to see how the duo copes with a modern bloaty OS and web browser. The answer is, surprisingly good still!

Got the case and motherboard together for 8$ at my ol recycling center when they still sold stuff to the public. it was a whole build with a 750ti, and it was FILTHY. everything was caked with dust and the fans were mostly all seized. but they cleaned and lubed up great and work really well still! also had to swap a couple of capacitors. should definitely do a full recap, but not today...

actually completed cinebench 11.5 @ 4.7ghz but settled with 4.4 for now. maybe I'll go higher, or maybe I'll upgrade the cooler, slap in a quad core xeon and see how far it can really go. funny thing is, in the single threaded test, this thing smokes my FX 8320 at the same clock speed. 133 vs 116!

I'm at 1.5v right now, but this motherboard and cooler handle it like a champ... that'll change quick if I put in a quad though. I have two more matching sticks of RAM on the way to hopefully bump it up to 8GB, cause the memory has actually been the most limiting factor, not the duo!

Originally had a more period correct SSD, a Kingston ssdnow 64GB SSD that launched in early 2009. it was 250$ at launch in 2009 money! Windows 10 was just hammering it though, constantly at 100% disk usage, so a modern budget SSD even after being bottlenecked by the sata interface is much faster and smoother.

Sorry for the formatting of this post, was originally written for bsky so I was fighting character limits.

2Buck wrote on 2026-10-04, 17:56:

built a "2008" computer out of parts I've been holding onto for awhile: […]
Show full quote

built a "2008" computer out of parts I've been holding onto for awhile:

Antec 900
XFX NForce 780i
Core 2 Duo E8500 @ 4.4ghz
2x2GB DDR2 @ 800mhz
...gtx 760 and an SSD bottlenecked by SATA2 (sorry)

In that breath, I loaded Windows 10 LTSC on it for now because I wanted to see how the duo copes with a modern bloaty OS and web browser. The answer is, surprisingly good still!

Got the case and motherboard together for 8$ at my ol recycling center when they still sold stuff to the public. it was a whole build with a 750ti, and it was FILTHY. everything was caked with dust and the fans were mostly all seized. but they cleaned and lubed up great and work really well still! also had to swap a couple of capacitors. should definitely do a full recap, but not today...

I like it, and i like the approach - get cheap, rescue it all, see what its capable of. i admit i'd probably leave the e8500 @ stock Ghz as its pretty fast anyway, but nice you boosted it!

I also like that you used win 10 - often i see way over powered machines hobbled (imo.. its fine really) by windows XP when Win 7 would not only be better suited but generally copes well with a huge range of 32 and 64 bit apps and games. taking it to win 10 is cool

gerry wrote on 2026-10-05, 09:21:

I like it, and i like the approach - get cheap, rescue it all, see what its capable of. i admit i'd probably leave the e8500 @ stock Ghz as its pretty fast anyway, but nice you boosted it!

I also like that you used win 10 - often i see way over powered machines hobbled (imo.. its fine really) by windows XP when Win 7 would not only be better suited but generally copes well with a huge range of 32 and 64 bit apps and games. taking it to win 10 is cool

ty!! 3.16ghz is already pretty fast, but I wanted faster because I have a 3.16ghz duo machine already which is an OC'd e6400 (stock 2133mhz), a recreation of my first overclock I did back in 2014! Not the same motherboard, but it's the same CPU. 😀

Asus p5B, EVGA 9800GT 512mb, Core 2 Duo e6400 2133mhz @ 3166mhz, 4x1GB DDR2 800, 64GB Kingston ssdnow
Even with the stock heatsink it stays under 70c, it does run hot which is far from ideal but I was being faithful to my original p5b build 🤣

For this one though, I wanted to see everything the duo's got!

And yeah, I love XP to death, but it'd be kinda sad to limit this machine to XP when it's capable of running a surprising amount of modern software. If it could run more up to date stuff, Windows 7 would be my ideal choice, it's so much lighter... Even though I'm using the LTSC version, 10 is still so heavy! even so, it's still running pretty well! I suppose Mint could be a really neat choice, I'll play with that at some point.