This is my newest build, a higher end socket 478 gaming rig for playing F.E.A.R, doom 3, cod4 modern warefare, ect...
Motherboard- Asus P4C800-E Deluxe
Cpu- Pentium 4 Extreme edition SL7CH 3.4ghz at 3.73ghz with a zalman fatality cooler.
Ram- 4x 512mb Corsair ddr500 with led indicators only running at 440mhz with lower timings.
Storage: 2 WD raptor 10k rpm sata hard drives
Graphics card- Gainward 7800 gs + silent active with 512mb gddr3 this model has the 24 pipes and 8 vertex shaders. core at 620mhz and memory at 710mhz
Sound card- Soundblaster audigy 2 ZS
Power supply: Evga 600w
Drives- A Sony ide dvdrw disk drive, sony card reader, panasonic floppy drive, creative soundblaster hub, and a thermaltake fan controller.
Misc: G-skill memory cooler, fox 2 case blower and a rosewill atx case.

Im really proud of it as its my first retro build, let me know what you guys think. I got so much help off of this forum reading old posts when selecting my parts.

7800 lacks compatability with older titles, and honestly for games like FEAR and doom3 I would have gone for a s775 system with a much more powerful card. By 2005 s478 was long in tooth. Looks great though.

Thanks, your definitely right about socket 775 being a better choice for the harder to run games. This was more of a see how hard you could push the 478 socket and see what it was capable of running, and honestly it plays pretty much everything pre 2005 extremely extremely well but as for most anything newer than 05-06 it does start to struggle a bit.

Zack_H wrote:

Nice! That’s a great Windows 95 box.

Thanks!

All of my laptops:

Laptop collection:
IBM ThinkPad 380D (DSTN display)
HP Pavilion N3350
Compaq Armada M700
HP Compaq NX5000
2x Dell Inspiron 600m (1 has a broken HDD, display hinges, batteries (Li-Ion and Ni-MH CMOS), and keys are missing, the other is functioning without issues)
Dell Latitude D600 (functions without issues)
IBM ThinkPad R40 with a docking station that had better audio out, 4 pin power connection and power brick with the key and floppy drive (drive works without issues, but the HDD needs to be replaced with an SSD method, such as mSATA to IDE)
Dell Latitude D630 (functions and is used as a Hackintosh Core2Duo)
Compaq Presario C700 (2 batteries for the system, needs a data backup and new OS as Windows 7 is about to go defunct in 2020)
ASUS X54C (Core i5-2450M, Windows 10 Pro x64, 8GB RAM (will attempt to upgrade to 12GB)

From either thrift store finds, from liqmat (thanks for the laptop), eBay, or Microcenter purchase back in 2012.

Gopher_Hole wrote:

This is my newest build, a higher end socket 478 gaming rig for playing F.E.A.R, doom 3, cod4 modern warefare, ect... Motherboar […]
Show full quote

This is my newest build, a higher end socket 478 gaming rig for playing F.E.A.R, doom 3, cod4 modern warefare, ect...
Motherboard- Asus P4C800-E Deluxe
Cpu- Pentium 4 Extreme edition SL7CH 3.4ghz at 3.73ghz with a zalman fatality cooler.
Ram- 4x 512mb Corsair ddr500 with led indicators only running at 440mhz with lower timings.
Storage: 2 WD raptor 10k rpm sata hard drives
Graphics card- Gainward 7800 gs + silent active with 512mb gddr3 this model has the 24 pipes and 8 vertex shaders. core at 620mhz and memory at 710mhz
Sound card- Soundblaster audigy 2 ZS
Power supply: Evga 600w
Drives- A Sony ide dvdrw disk drive, sony card reader, panasonic floppy drive, creative soundblaster hub, and a thermaltake fan controller.
Misc: G-skill memory cooler, fox 2 case blower and a rosewill atx case.

Im really proud of it as its my first retro build, let me know what you guys think. I got so much help off of this forum reading old posts when selecting my parts.

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That looks badass. Well done.

Thanks retronerd

Here's one of my favorite Windows 98 systems:

This is a Compaq Presario 5600i. Very similar to the 5670i my family had many years ago.

It's a Pentium II 350MHz (will upgrade to a 450 eventually), with 320MB of RAM (originally 128 I think), and the original IBM 10GB hard drive. It's very orginal; it has the original modem, video and sound cards, and the original DVD-ROM and Zip drive (which still works).

The video card is an ATi Rage Pro LT AGP with 8MB of video RAM. Actually not a bad card at all in my opinion for this machine. Half-Life, while not the smoothest, is very playable on this machine in its current configuration.

I got this machine off of eBay a little over a year ago, and was incredibly lucky to find one that still has the drive door in place, as they usually got broke off back then.

For purposes of originality, and because I'm determined, I actually have this machine set-up with Windows 98 First Edition (4.10.1998). It's pretty much worked fine on here, with a few minor issues, but nothing serious. I've never had any major problems out of Windows 98 FE myself.

Here's a screenshot from it:

I have this machine connected to my ViewSonic VA192b 19" LCD monitor, running at a very comfortable 1280 x 1024.

Some other cool features of this machine is that is has on-board LAN and 1394! Pretty neat for such an old system.

These larger-case Compaq Presarios in this style seem to be very hard to find these days. They made smaller ones that look almost just like this on the front, and those seem to be a lot more common (I actually have one too, a model 5030 which I found in a dumpster). I sat them side-by-side once, and the size difference is quite huge.

I actually can't remember now if I've posted about this machine before or not, so apologies if I have.

Zack_H wrote:

Here's one of my favorite Windows 98 systems: […]
Show full quote

Here's one of my favorite Windows 98 systems:

thumbnail_IMG_4996.jpg

IMG_3981.jpg

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IMG_3984.jpg

This is a Compaq Presario 5600i. Very similar to the 5670i my family had many years ago.

It's a Pentium II 350MHz (will upgrade to a 450 eventually), with 320MB of RAM (originally 128 I think), and the original IBM 10GB hard drive. It's very orginal; it has the original modem, video and sound cards, and the original DVD-ROM and Zip drive (which still works).

The video card is an ATi Rage Pro LT AGP with 8MB of video RAM. Actually not a bad card at all in my opinion for this machine. Half-Life, while not the smoothest, is very playable on this machine in its current configuration.

I got this machine off of eBay a little over a year ago, and was incredibly lucky to find one that still has the drive door in place, as they usually got broke off back then.

These larger-case Compaq Presarios in this style seem to be very hard to find these days. They made smaller ones that look almost just like this on the front, and those seem to be a lot more common (I actually have one too, a model 5030 which I found in a dumpster). I sat them side-by-side once, and the size difference is quite huge.

Aww I want one! That thing screams 1998 😊

Yep, these were made in 1998/99 😀

My ultimate DOS machine : 😀

ZIDA 5SVA motherboard
Intel P200MMX Cpu
16 MB Edo ram
3 Gb Seagate Medialist HDD
1.44 fdd, 52x cdrom
Forex psu 200w
1mb s3 trio64v2 1mb video card
ESS Sbpro compatible isa sound card

found this /

Here's one I got recently:

This is the Dell Inspiron 7500; a beast of a laptop from 1999/2000. You can see, I placed it next to my Inspiron 8000 (which is already a thick machine), and the 7500 is definitely a bit thicker.

This laptop has an awesome 15.4" 1280 x 1024 display.

You can also see how much bigger the display assembly is than the bottom of the laptop. Very unusual design. Another thing I have found is that these Inspiron 7500s are quite fragile laptops. Every single one I have ever seen at a thrift store was damaged beyond repair.

But this one is in very good shape as far as these machines go, so I'm very pleased with it.

This was also a very costly laptop when it was new; I think the top-end model was a little over $4000.

Neat. Which sound card does it currently run on?

bjwil1991 wrote:

Neat. Which sound card does it currently run on?

The Inspiron 7500 has an ESS Maestro2 audio chip.

Gopher_Hole wrote:

This is my newest build, a higher end socket 478 gaming rig for playing F.E.A.R, doom 3, cod4 modern warefare, ect...
Motherboard- Asus P4C800-E Deluxe

I really really like it and totally dig that period in pc parts style and design, but apart from c2d being a better choice for your target applications (which is not a problem at all, since p4 EE is simply more interesting collection-wise), I would probably go for a newer ASUS 775 board, one with the darker pcb and massive copper vrm and north bridge heatsinks all crisscrossed by heatpipes, would go nicer with that zalman and memory cooler, imho.

edit

Just realized yours is the 478 socket, still a darker pcb for the mobo and more copper would be nice.

Today I will present my old PC, a retro rig now. I have some pictures.
Specifications:
-AMD Athlon XP 2600+ Barton 1.917 GHz with AMD Stock Cooler (no overclock, stock voltage) (used Arctic MX-4 as thermal paste)
-ASUS A7V600-X motherboard (VIA KT600 northbridge + VIA VT8237 southbridge, essentially VIA KT600 chipset) with stock Revision 1002 BIOS
-Some generic grey case with blue vertical LEDs (maybe Delux but I am not sure) with front USB and Audio ports)
-400W Powerlink LPJ2 PSU
-Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1 + Mandrake Linux 10.0 Community Dual-Boot
-512MB Kingmax SuperRAM DDR400 at CL2.5-3-3-7 (red PCB)
-Palit NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440 with AGP8X 64MB video card with VGA, S-Video and RCA TV-out
-Leadtek WinFast TV2000XP Deluxe TV Tuner with Conexant BT878 chipset on PCI slot 3
-Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 8 40GB ATA133 Hard Drive
-ASUS DVD-E616P1 16x DVD-ROM Drive
-LG DVD-ROM/CD-RW 16x DVD, 52x32x52x CD-RW combo drive
-Alps 3.5 inch white bezel floppy drive
-ViPowER Super Rack with Fujitsu 1.7GB ATA33 drive

Man, if I find a case like that, I would throw my main tower in there and use the other case for a NAS box/printer and scanner server.

IBM BL3 Alaris Cougar
ARK1000VL
ESS188

Warlord wrote:

IBM BL3 Alaris Cougar
ARK1000VL
ESS188

Are you the guy who does YouTube videos with vintage computers (and his curious dog) on his desk? 😁