Love this system, and from the pics you posted nicely put together. Would love some external pics as well.

What a lovely little machine, I also have a thing for budget solutions from that same era, have a couple built up, a K6-2 450 on SiS 530 motherbord(basically a 6326 graphics core) & Cyrix MII PR333 with a built-in ATi RAGE PRO Turbo(memory is not shared).
I also have a Trident 3D BLADE turbo AGP card, on systems it will work in it is really decent, but it doesn't like a lot of my boards, if I remember right it doesn't post in the majority of them.
Anyhow, thanks for sharing 😀

No!!!!!!!
I cringed when I read this. No AGP, RAM stealing Graphics, just needs a soft modem to become pure evil! (ISA sound card was a nice touch btw, budget systems kept them round for years after PCI had become standard)

Still this is the kind of hardware the vast majority would have played on back then, so really is a better representation of era correct machine.

I for one though have no desire to go back to those days 😜

Overall nice rig and a nice approach of building one 😀

foey wrote:

Graphics Via VT8501 Blade3D graphics accelerator, 8mb Video RAM taken from the system RAM.

Interesting to see this. I only ever saw Blade3D as discrete graphics solutions, but those were made by Trident?

foey wrote:

I've become bored with Maxing PCs recently. Whilst it's great seeing your all time fave game run flawlessly there was always a part of me wanting to deal with period correct budget hardware.

I've always tried to also build non-maxed systems (partially because I often simply didn't have max parts available at the time), I've also tried a Blade3D rig combined with a K6-2/333 (SiS5598 motherboard) and it wasn't too bad..even though it was more of an experimental rig.

I do should have the driver somewhere (dug deep somewhere on some spare backup harddrive from years ago I presume), but I have no idea these will work with an integrated variant.

They had laptops just like this spec too 😀

To inch the most speed out of this is to disregard OpenGL rendering, stick to Direct3D where you can and wrap OpenGL to Direct3D, and avoid high texture detail as it slows down massively when rendering any texture beyond 128x128 - even ONE

It should be perfectly fine for FF7PC though. 😁

and you should still worship the badly scaled color adjustment apple

Love the build. Back when I worked for a system builder (back when you could actually make a living off building custom PCs) we built something very similar. Pretty sure back then Blade3D would have been about the best integrated graphics you could hope for. Except for maybe that one packard bell system with onboard voodoo3.

I remember back in the day when DSL first arrived on the scene and my buddy for it but my parents wouldn't. I built a PC which I left at my buddy's house so we could both play on his DSL with internet connection sharing. It was a K6-2 350 with either a Trident or S3 I forget which and an Matrox m3D. Back then you needed some special WinPeot dialup software and routers that supported DSL authentication protocols were still expensive 3 or 4 hundred bucks for even just the home model so internet connetion sharing was really the only option for home users who didn't want to pay for the network gear.

Ahh the memories.

The Blade 3D does Lithtech Engine well.
I also had this PLE IGP.
But with a VIA 800Mhz CPU with the only 1/2 Mhz C3 FPU that equals almost a 400Mhz FPU from a K6-2.

It is not so bad at all. And very combatible.

You just got to play some older games and the machine will be alright 😀

Reminds me of my first computer considered mine. (Mom gave it to me when she upgraded (I wanna say round 2003?))

Was an old HP

Celeron 1.1GHz
128MB RAM
40GB HD
Onboard Intel graphics courtesy of the i810 chipset

Later upgraded with 512MB of RAM and a PCI Geforce 2 MX400.

thats the very best example for budget in those years and a perfect capable computer to play age 2, fifa 2000, need for speed 2 and Starcraft

I run the Compaq IPAQ Desktop PC - Legacy Free with Legacy Adapter.

It also has a i810 but with integrated 4Mb Videocache RAM.
It runs Quake 3 😉

Featuring Coppermine 1Ghz P3, and 512Mb RAM (Chipset limit 🙁, i really would like 1Gb)
Its my Programming Station for EROM/EEPROM/Flash and MCU's.