Alright, so you know that Slot 1 build I had last weekend that crapped out on me?
Well, I decided to take PcBytes suggestion and put the Slot A board inside the Gateway case that was housing the Slot 1 board.

The funny thing is, the Slot A board I happened to come across is actually from another Gateway system!
While putting all the components together and doing a bit of troubleshooting/research on the motherboard, I found that I'm essentially putting together
an actual system that Gateway sold! Even the case is similar.
The Gateway Select K7-700.
There are very minor differences between this build and the one actually sold. Mine has more RAM, a DVD instead or CD Drive, and lacks a dial-up modem.

System Specs:
CPU: AMD Athlon (Argon) 700 MHz (100 x 7.0)
Mobo: Slot-A Jabil Kadoka 4000594 (1 AGP, 4 PCI, 3 DIMM)
RAM: 384MB Micron PC100 SDRAM (1 x 128MB, and 1 x 256MB, I couldn't find another 256 for 100MHz)
Video: 16MB 3Dfx Voodoo 3 3000 AGP (Has both VGA and S-Video Out, but its not the TV board)
Audio: CT4830 Sound Blaster Live Value PCI
Optical: 16x Jetway IDE DVD-ROM
HDD: 20GB WD Protege IDE 5400rpm
FDD: NEC 3.5" Floppy
OS: Windows 98 Second Edition

THE GUTS:

Yes, I still haven't replaced the duct tape. I checked Home Depot for rubber washers, but as luck would have it, they were out of ones that would be sufficient.

Tons of benchmarks this time. I'm doing Phil's VGA Benchmark Project, and the updated SuperPi.
All 3D accelerated benchmarks were done at 800x600x16 colour, with highest graphical detail setting where applicable.
3DNow optimizations were used when available. Hey, the advantage of Athlons, right?

Final Reality:

3DMark 99 MAX:

3DMark 2000:

GLQuake 1.19 (3dfx MiniGL 1.49) demo1: 969 frames. 6.7secs, 145.9FPS
Quake II demo1.dm2 (3dfx MiniGL 1.49): 689 frames, 5.5secs, 125.1FPS
Quake III Arena - Four.DM_66 - 1260 frames, 23.5secs, 53.6FPS
Unreal Gold - Castle flyby timedemo - 78.33009FPS (4066 Frames, 51.908585secs)

Super Pi - 1M - 3 mins, 47.601 secs

WinTune 98:
CPU Integer 2134.427 MIPS
CPU Floating Point 877.1448 MFLOPS
Video(2D) 176.0413 MPixels/s
Direct3D 182.3526 MPixels/s
OpenGL 78.88966 MPixels/s
Memory 1745.655 MB/s
Cached Disk 133.7488 MB/s
Uncached Disk 2.528038 MB/s

Phil's VGA Benchmarks (all under DOS mode, not Windows), and yes, I'll put them in the Google Docs spreadsheet/database:
3DBENCH - 440.3
PCPBENCH - 216.4
Doom 1.9s - 2134 gametics, 801 realtics
Quake 1.06sw - 320x200 Mode X - 969 frames, 6.9secs, 141.1FPS

Boy, the performance increase coming from the Pentium II is astounding. Really noticed it in the 3DMark 99 benchmark with the Wipeout-like race. Over 60fps in most spots, while it was hardly 30 on the Deschutes. Guess the CPU was really bottlenecking the Voodoo. I suppose if I wanted to see how far the Voodoo can go though, I should put it in a Socket A or 370 board.
Also, I wouldn't mind the Athlon being faster, like a 900MHz one. I'll see if I can get my hands on one, and perhaps a better board, too.
Sure, I could make another Socket A system, but thats so boring! I have so many boards and CPUs for Socket A (mostly VIA chipsets and early Athlon XPs), I don't have enough cases and PSUs to put together with them. Slot A I've never done before, but since I've played with Slot 1 beforehand, it wasn't all too interesting.

Setting it all up made for a pretty fun evening.
Initially had trouble installing Windows. The problem was I was initially using PC-133 SDRAM, which the board does not play nicely with.
After that, was all good.
Didn't use 98lite or even IEradicator this time. However, I did use the Unofficial 98 SE SP3. Only the Main Updates, the Time Zone for Dec 2012 update, and the performance/stability tweaks for >256MB RAM. Using LiveWare 3.0 Drivers for the SB Live and the 1.0700b drivers for Voodoo3 (last official, but beta, drivers).
Also, screwed up the analog audio cable that goes from the Optical Drive to the soundcard. I accidentally inserted an end into the TAD-in header on the Sound Blaster, instead of CD-Audio header. Took me a bit, but figured that out too.

Know what I really like about the SB Live? EAX 3D Audio! You ever play SHOGO or Blood 2 with the reverb set high and the 3D Audio set to Creative EAX? Neat stuff.
Never liked the 3D Audio in Half-Life too much, though. Sounded kinda scratchy, and the positional audio (is that the term?) was kind of off.

Also, some bonuses to this post! Hope thats okay.

In my Slot 1 Rig thread, next to the machine is another case, the black Logisys Area 51. A product of low-budget and poor decision-making. It's not a very good case. Mostly plastic and the airflow is poor. Broken front USB and door, too. That case housed my main PC.
However, I decided to retrofit a Pentium 4 based IBM eServer I had around with my main's components.
Not only does it look a lot more subtle and refined, it stays much cooler, too! And lots of room to manage cables and whatnot.


Again, apologies for the graininess. The machines are actually quite clean. Those pesky cell phone cameras. All I have.

The specs of that:
CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 965BE @ 3.8GHz
Mobo: MSI 970-G46, Socket AM3+
RAM: 8GB Corsair Vengance DDR3-1333 (2 x 4GB)
Video: 2GB MSI NVIDIA Geforce GTX 660
Audio: Onboard HD Audio
Optical: 48x Lite-ON DVD+/-RW Drive SATA
Network: Realtek RTL8168B Gigabit Ethernet, and Realtek RTL8192CU 802.11n WLAN
HDD: 500GB WD Caviar Blue 7200rpm SATA
OS: Dualboot, OpenSUSE 13.1 and Windows 7 Professional (both x86-64)

And another IBM retrofit!
The particular mobo in this ThinkCentre originally, also a Pentium 4 (mPGA478B) actually had caps that burst!
Suppose IBM's quality control for their consumer-oriented hardware was somewhat lacking in their last few years before Lenovo came along.
No matter!
A friend of mine generously gave me two mobos earlier last week. An Asus LGA775 mobo, which I was missing an appropriate HSF for, and an ASRock AM2 mobo, which works well, and is now in here:

Could use some Goo-Gone to remove the sticker residue. Might pick some up at the store today if the snow melts.

Specs of that:
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000 @ 2.2GHz
Mobo: ASRock ALiveNF6G-DVI (1 PCI-E, 3 PCI, 4 DIMM)
RAM: 2GB SuperTalent DDR2-667 (4 x 512MB)
Video: 512MB ATI Radeon HD 3600 PCI-E
Audio: Onboard Realtek HDA
Optical: 48x Lite-ON DVD+/-RW Drive SATA (I have a few of these)
Network: nForce 10/100 Ethernet, Ralink RT2500 802.11g PCI WLAN
HDD: 320GB Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm
OS: Windows Embedded 2009 POSReady (for fun, I guess, not really much different from normal XP)

No plans for this machine as of yet. I'll make sure it gets put to good use.

SNEAK PREVIEW OF NEXT WEEKENDS PROJECT: