Thermalwrong wrote:It depends on the person you ask, for me, my interest in retro computing was brought on by my overall dislike for the noises hard drives make and the small, fast and not-speed variable fans of the 486/pentium era.
My hearing is quite sensitive though and certain noises really bother me, so nostalgia for some computer activity sounds is less enjoyable for me.
It can even go both ways in the same person. On the one hand I'm nostalgic enough for old crap to like hearing RAM test clickings, hard disks spinning and whirring etc. But on the other, when it comes to vintage systems I actually intend to use on a regular basis, they get the full silent treatment even if that's not strictly period correct.
Case in point: my idiot Packard Bell system, with MS-6168 (yep, you triggered me 😉 ), active fan on the Voodoo replaced by a big-ish passive heatsink, CPU fan replaced by a Zalman CNPS6000, Zalman's original small 80mm fan replaced by a 120mm Noctua, and the 80mm in the PSU also replaced by a quiet Noctua 80mm. Oh, and an SSD instead of a HDD. So now it's almost silent - except for some coil whine I couldn't hear before 🙁
After a random search, I finally found an MS6168! hopefully working? though looking at the socket A motherboard it's bundled with, I suspect it *may* need some work:
s-l1600a.jpg
Putting this thing in a custom case is something I have wanted to do since I missed out on getting hold of one ~16 years ago. Perfect combo of odd hardware and extendable capability.
Nice find. That looks like the rev.1.0 with i440ZX chipset. The power regulation circuitry is different to the rev.2.0, which is bad news if you want to run a Coppermine (at least in theory), but good news that they didn't use the suicidal caps on the rev.2.0. Your pic isn't good enough to be completely sure, but it looks a lot better than my two rev.2.0 boards did when I got them.
Interested to hear if you could get a Coppermine running on this baby.