Nice machine, love it

What operating system do you plan using on it?

My kinda style... good stuff!

XP and a 6/7 series Nvidia AGP card would be rockin on that.

nemesis wrote:

250GB IDE HDD (I figured I'd stick with IDE over SATA for the nonstalgia and era accurate results)

Plus there's no chance of the cable falling out or the connectors breaking off 🤣

What operating system do you plan using on it?

That depends partially on what video cards I decide to keep. Desktop/gaming graphics go well with XP pro (works with 2 CPUs).

I might just try out a nice linux install because they're easier than most of the windows versions to work with dual cpus.

I can't seem to find much for high end desktop graphics cards left in my collection right now so I'm kinda stuck at the moment.

Another thought, would it be worth it to throw in a PCI sound card vs using the onboard? Just because I probably won't be doing a whole lot of gaming (at least at first) on this machine and I'm not sure if the PCI dividers will help enough if I overclock.

I own a Gigabyte GA-7DPXDW-P (like this one, AMD760MPX based) and wanted also to build a dual Athlon machine (at some point I wanted to build several SMP machines), but I haven't had a clue what I would run on it (and I didn't want another WinXP machine). In the end it will be probably my AGP Pro test machine (and run just with one CPU). Does your AOpen have an AGP Pro slot?

Unfortunately it doesn't have AGP pro. That looks like a nice setup you're going for though.

I don't want to put in XP home because it can't support more than 1 cpu but I can't find my XP pro 32 bit version so no OS yet. I really think I'm going to use Windows 7 now.

HOLY JEBUS ALMIGHTY! a black pcb dual tualatin with agp. O_0

EDIT since when can xp home not support more than one CPU? I could have sworn ME was the last single cpu OS.

GL1zdA wrote:

I own a Gigabyte GA-7DPXDW-P (like this one, AMD760MPX based) and wanted also to build a dual Athlon machine (at some point I wanted to build several SMP machines), but I haven't had a clue what I would run on it (and I didn't want another WinXP machine). In the end it will be probably my AGP Pro test machine (and run just with one CPU). Does your AOpen have an AGP Pro slot?

I have the same board. I ran it with dual 2800MP's for 3-4 years as my main machine up until maybe 2008/9. Very solid and dependable system. The only fly in the ointment was the need for registered memory.

Dual setups are a favourite of mine, I used the following systems as my machine machine over the last 10-12 years (current is a Q6600 for desktop and an AMD X4 6400e in the fileserver):

Gigabyte GA6BXD - dual P3-450 (mainly Linux/Win98/2K)
ASUS CUR-DLS - dual P3-933 (Linux)
Gigabyte GA-7DPXDW-P+ - dual Athlon 2800MP (Linux 2K/XP/Vista)

The gigabyte boards have been rock solid, but the ASUS was a surprisingly nice piece of kit too - using the Intel ServerWorks III chipset and a nice set of 64bit PCI slots.

ASUS is harder than rock solid, i've seen asus with failing components run just fine, My friend Eric's asus is micro atx 4 phase running an over clocked 95 watt quad (with vrm sinks), blown/blowing caps, over heating FSB (about 70c).

and with a medium over clock what 2.6 or 2.4 stock amd i think it's running 3.5. oh yeah the PSU is damn near the end of it's life filled with smoke residue and blowing caps as well as a failing hard drive and it runs like a champ.

that aside, what model is this board? i can see it's an aopen and thats about it.

cdoublejj wrote:

EDIT since when can xp home not support more than one CPU? I could have sworn ME was the last single cpu OS.

The license does not allow it. You have to buy XP Professional for one or two CPUs (and Server editions for more than two, unless it's a SGI Visual Workstation 540 and you have the original installation media which has a version of NT 4.0 (upgradeable to 2000, but not XP) which can work with 4 CPUs).

cdoublejj wrote:

HOLY JEBUS ALMIGHTY! a black pcb dual tualatin with agp. O_0

EDIT since when can xp home not support more than one CPU? I could have sworn ME was the last single cpu OS.

XP Home supports multiple cores, but not multiple CPU's. So a single quad core CPU would be supported but two dual cores would not. The only time this would really be a problem is if you were trying to install it on a system that uses 2 or more single core CPU's like a dual P-II or P-III motherboard then you'd be required to buy a copy of XP Professional. Odds are if you were building a dual (or more) CPU system back then that you would be using the top level version of Windows anyway. I don't know of anybody who would have spent thousands of dollars on hardware back then and then bought the entry level version of Windows to save a few bucks.

cdoublejj wrote:

ASUS is harder than rock solid, i've seen asus with failing components run just fine, My friend Eric's asus is micro atx 4 phase running an over clocked 95 watt quad (with vrm sinks), blown/blowing caps, over heating FSB (about 70c).

and with a medium over clock what 2.6 or 2.4 stock amd i think it's running 3.5. oh yeah the PSU is damn near the end of it's life filled with smoke residue and blowing caps as well as a failing hard drive and it runs like a champ.

that aside, what model is this board? i can see it's an aopen and thats about it.

I love ASUS too. Most of my builds were on ASUS boards in the past and I noticed the same things that you did about it's stablility even with damaged parts and/or long term overclocking.

Aopen DX34R-U motherboard

EDIT: I installed a spare copy of Windows 7 on it for now anyway, and it scored (experience index) 3.3 on memory and cpu and 5.2 on hard disk... not too bad for IDE. Video was of course a 1.

I added a 6800 Ultra AGP video card (BFG overclock version) to replace the GeForce 2 from a guy on eBay. I forgot that this beastly video card requires 2 independent rails though to work properly so I only boot far enough to get to windows 7 splash screen so far... hunting for a 4 rail PSU now. 😖
EDIT: I'm just hoping that's all that's wrong.

nemesis wrote:

I added a 6800 Ultra AGP video card (BFG overclock version) to replace the GeForce 2 from a guy on eBay. I forgot that this beastly video card requires 2 independent rails though to work properly so I only boot far enough to get to windows 7 splash screen so far... hunting for a 4 rail PSU now. 😖
EDIT: I'm just hoping that's all that's wrong.

It's more the total amount of amps that's required. The ultra does need more power then my standard 6800 but my 6800 works fine with a dual rail PSU (FSP 350W with 25A on the 12v lines).

It's more the total amount of amps that's required.

Thank you. Once again, you helped me refocus on what's really wrong.
It appears that a file became corrupt and that's what is causing it to refuse to boot. I'll post more when I finish testing it.

refresh that WEI i bet it will be a lot higher than 1 and you will be able ot run windows aero if the cpu will allow it. i ran 6000 nvidia with an am athlon 2600+ and it ran aero and flash at the same time like it was nothing.

I made a second attempt and before I could see the new WEI score, it was crashing again. I'm hoping that nothing is wrong with the hardware right now. At this point i'm going to review everything I have in there to find the weak link.

well whats the blue screen say?if there is no blue screen it may be power related.

well whats the blue screen say?if there is no blue screen it may be power related.

There is no blue screen. The screen simply goes blank now.
I think I have a 600+ watt PSU somewhere around here that will put to rest any power related concerns. Now to find it. 😵