Piccy time!
Even though I've been sidetracked with many other projects (including having RSI and modding some games for my LAN parties) I've (nearly) completed 2 rigs.
Rig one is the third and final new LAN rig (though a spare spare LAN rig is in the back of my mind 🤣).
This one is the highest specced rig of the 3 with the other 2 being a Socket A sempron 2600+ and Athlon 64 3200+ s754.
Specs are:
ASUS AM2 mATX board with an Athlon 3800+ 2.4Ghz
2GB DDR2-800
ASUS GF8600 I think PCIe
500GB "sold for dead" WD SATA2 harddrive
Onboard sound
9.2cm LED system fan brand new
Windows XP
350W dual-rail FSP PSU with a big fan
Black DVD drive (and CD burner which I don't plan on using)
And all in a nice little black case with the drive cage missing 🤣
The basic idea is that, as this rig is the fastest, it'll also be used to host MP/COOP games
I noticed it was missing it's hatrddrive cage so I resorted to using a floppy 5.25/3.5 adapter which has an opening for cooling the drive (even though that may not even be needed, this adapter was just so easy to install...and it was laying around...so...Lol 😜)
This rig is ready top be tested, gonna try out Unreal Tournament 3 on it first before I declare it LAN-ready. Building rigs is nice but useless if it turns out to be unstable.
I left the thumb drive in it just for the heck of it 😁
The second rig is my now tweaked but still missing DirectX retro LAN rig. I made this as a 1st in a line of 3 9x LAN rigs for playing games that for whatever reason won't run properly on XP (for instance the game "Z").
Specs:
GA-6OXT (or GA-60XT I dunno yet 🤣), i815 chipset
The extremely rare and uncommon *joke!* Tualatin-s 1.4Ghz 512kb cache
256MB PC-133 (can upgrade to 512 if need be)
Geforce 3 Ti200 64MB
20GB laptop drive using a few adapters
Black optical drive
Silver case
FSP 300W PSU
8cm system fan
A modded HSF with the noisy 6cm fan replaced with a much more quiet 7cm AMD s754/s939 stock fan
Soundblaster Live! possibly on the way but it's onboard sound is working so might just let it stay that way and see what happens 😉
Windows ME tweaked
This rig was a fun project as I tweaked the ME install CD first (including lots of testing in Virtual PC). The ME disk I in the end created now boots like a floppy and is almost fully unattended straight from the disk 😁
The laptop adapters I bought a loooong time ago and were realy cheap. As I was mounting the laptop drive I found out why it was so cheap:The metal brackets have the screw holes too high, I couldn't for the life of me mount it in the harddrive cage!
But no worries, I decided to use some more of the green stuff (as I now call the wires 😜) and it's fixed into place very solidly 😀
As you can see from the pics, theres still a few things that need to be done like sealing the holes in the front and back, but all in due time 😀
I still need to figure out what version of DX is best to install. Probably DX8, DX8.1 or DX9 perhaps. Right now I lean towards DX8 more as the hardware has no DX9 to be used, including the games I plan to play on it.