First post, by jakethompson1
- Rank
- Oldbie
I once had a bunch of old systems (ranging from a PS/2 model 30-286, Compaq Deskpro 386/20e and 386/25, plus various 486 systems) but unfortunately got rid of them about 10 years ago... One of the items I kept was a Sound Blaster card, and I recently pulled out some old games with distinctive MIDI music (SimCity 2000, Wacky Wheels, etc.) and was getting nostalgic for the "real" FM synthesis based sound. DOSBox does a good approximation, but is a bit glitchy.
So then I built a Pentium III system w/ ISA slots from a mix of new, refurbished, new-old-stock and used parts. I was going for new wherever possible (unlike those builds aiming for appropriate for the time) and thought the list and things I ran into might be useful.
Specifications:
- Thermaltake V3 case, new, from MicroCenter
- StarTech 250W ATX Power Supply, new, from Newegg
- Intel SE440BX-2 motherboard, new in box, from eBay
- CR2032 battery, new, from MicroCenter
- Intel Pentium III 800 MHz Slot 1 CPU, new in box, from eBay
- 256MB PC100 memory, double sided, 8 chips per side, new, from Amazon
- ATI Radeon 9000 PCI graphics card, new, from Newegg
- Gigabit Ethernet PCI card (Realtek 8169), new, from MicroCenter
- Creative Sound Blaster 16 PnP CT-2950 ISA sound card, used, on hand
- Bytecc internal floppy drive, new, from MicroCenter
- StarTech 18" floppy cable, new, from Newegg
- 80GB IDE hard drive, refurbished, from MicroCenter
- IDE ribbon cable, new, from Newegg
- IDE DVD+-RW drive, refurbished, from MicroCenter
- PS/2 keyboard, new, from Unicomp
- PS/2 mouse, new, from Newegg
- ViewSonic 1280x1024 LCD monitor, used, on hand
- Windows 98 Second Edition, used, on hand
Issues:
- I'm not sure if the power supply needed to have the -5V supply; I got it just in case since I was using an ISA card. I do know that the division between 5V and 12V is also done much differently in new versions of the ATX standard.
- I got the Thermaltake V3 case because the front USB and audio ports, useless for this system since the motherboard does not have these headers, were kept in a 3.5" drive bay and were detachable. However, the holes for these ports are molded into the front cover. I ended up sawing away this part of the front cover, though without the steadiest hand, it didn't go as neatly as I hoped. You can see the result in the pictures. The drive bay cover below the FDD looks a bit weird since it has fingerprints and is reflecting another screen, but it looked better in person.
- Since old motherboards were designed for top-mounted power supplies, the power connector is on the opposite end of the motherboard from the power supply, and the main power connector must stretch across the whole board to fit. The cabling on the supply I chose was barely long enough when bottom mounted.
- I first tried memory labeled as "PC100 low density" from Newegg. It turned out to be single sided with 4 DRAM chips, and was detected as half capacity by the board, so I switched to the Amazon memory instead.
- I suppose I should have looked harder for an AGP graphics card, but I wanted new and this board used an early revision of AGP that doesn't appear to have any new cards available for it.
- I used Catalyst 6.2 drivers from ATI's website. The setup.exe programs refused to run. I was able to install the drivers directly, but had to use the "show all drivers" option or similar as the .INF file with them must not have the PCI ID of this card inside.
- Ribbon cables have become a speciality item, not stocked at MicroCenter and when ordered online ship slower.
- The board came with 1 IDE cable and 1 floppy cable, but the floppy cable was too short.
- BIOS shows hard drive as 65535 MB, but it works fine otherwise.
- FDISK and FORMAT from Windows 98 SE CD can't handle drives > 64 GB. I know there are third party replacements, but I just used a Linux live CD to partition and format the drive, then the DOS SYS C: command. I believe this board could have gone up to 128 GB or so.
- The SB16 drivers built in to Windows 98 showed an "Unsupported Device" in Device Manager, replacing them with the ones from Creative.com (hard, but possible to find) fixed this.