That is amazing! I like the sleeper idea with PCs. In my case since I'm surrounded by too much modern useless stuff, I decided to go the opposite route and take retro guts but use it with as much modern tech as possible.

So far that's resulted in the socket 370 rig in my sig - but it's in a modern case with tempered glass side panel to bask in the glorious early 2000's PCB colors, due to +5v rail demands it's going to end up with a Corsair HX1200, already has working USB 2.0 under both Windows 98SE and 2000, and technically working USB 3.0 under Windows 2000 (although performance is limited to the PCI bus speed of 133 MB/s). SATA2 controller is used for a 256gb SSD.

Anyway this is your thread, and again I have to say well done and I'm very impressed!

That is a very nicely built sleeper build. And I love your choice of case I have a few of them and just love how they look and building in them.

Not to throw a grenade in the air, but you could name it "The Silent One" Also with a engineering degree, and I know how much noise can so many small vents make in a claustrofobic enviroment. 😉

I forgot to ask how are your thermals in that case with all the fans.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-04-28, 11:27:

That is a very nicely built sleeper build. And I love your choice of case I have a few of them and just love how they look and building in them.

Yes, I had fun building it. I've been using it for two years now without issue except for a very annoying sound driver issue that finally got resolved. Took me awhile to narrow that down because it was very intermittent and never left a crash dump log. Luckily, Creative released a new driver that resolved it and worst case scenario I could have rolled back a version as that never gave me problems either. The biggest win for me was finding that beige SATA optical drive. Those are not easy to find especially at a decent price.

That's awesome. And that CD drive looks to be a perfect match to the case

Cyberdyne wrote on 2021-04-28, 12:05:

Not to throw a grenade in the air, but you could name it "The Silent One" Also with a engineering degree, and I know how much noise can so many small vents make in a claustrofobic enviroment. 😉

I'll keep that name for this system.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-04-28, 13:51:

That's awesome. And that CD drive looks to be a perfect match to the case

Almost. If you look closely it's not exact, but close enough for sure. If you look up in my post you'll see my first attempt at a beige SATA optical drive and it was more brownish. Not a lot of options out there. That 3½" USB 3.0 media drive is ufortunate being white, but I can live with it.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-04-28, 13:37:

I forgot to ask how are your thermals in that case with all the fans.

I can't remember which 3DMark version this came from (not 2001 haha), but this was from a few weeks after I did the build in 2019. This was smack dab in the middle of the benchmark while under load. I just reformatted the NVME boot drive recently so I'll get some real world temps for you later this week or next when I have some time and some games installed.

Wow those temps are impressive you did an excellent job with the build.

I was curious of how you like the sound blaster card. Been going back and forth on adding a sound card to my Ryzen build.
Keep hearing how mobo sound is good enough, but is it really?

Its good enough for the common rabble.

I'm guilty of having one of these cards too, and once you experience good sound, with good headphones and/or speakers. You don't go back.

buckeye wrote on 2021-04-29, 15:03:

I was curious of how you like the sound blaster card. Been going back and forth on adding a sound card to my Ryzen build.
Keep hearing how mobo sound is good enough, but is it really?

If I am completely honest with myself I stopped hearing the difference between sound cards years ago. Probably has to do a little bit with me getting older.

I mostly bought it because:

a.) It's Creative Labs (nostalgia machine kicks in)
b.) The box & card looked cool and that nifty knob that sits on your desk
c.) What good is a sleeper build if you don't buy a separate sound card like the good ole daze?

Terrible reasons for some, but they work for me. I mean, over my headphones everything sounds great, but so does my five year old iPod Touch. For my music creation I use a MOTU breakout box and bypass internal sound, but for games it works really well. As always, Creative has great control software for the card where you can mix the sound, add effects, etc

Ok, forget everything I just said. The real reason I bought it is Luckybob forced me to.

liqmat wrote on 2021-04-29, 15:55:

If I am completely honest with myself I stopped hearing the difference between sound cards years ago. Probably has to do a littl […]
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buckeye wrote on 2021-04-29, 15:03:

I was curious of how you like the sound blaster card. Been going back and forth on adding a sound card to my Ryzen build.
Keep hearing how mobo sound is good enough, but is it really?

If I am completely honest with myself I stopped hearing the difference between sound cards years ago. Probably has to do a little bit with me getting older.

I mostly bought it because:

a.) It's Creative Labs (nostalgia machine kicks in)
b.) The box & card looked cool and that nifty knob that sits on your desk
c.) What good is a sleeper build if you don't buy a separate sound card like the good ole daze?

Terrible reasons for some, but they work for me. I mean, over my headphones everything sounds great, but so does my five year old iPod Touch. For my music creation I use a MOTU breakout box and bypass internal sound, but for games it works really well. As always, Creative has great control software for the card where you can mix the sound, add effects, etc

Ok, forget everything I just said. The real reason I bought it is Luckybob forced me to.

Heh, forgotten about this to be honest. But since you brought it up and I haven't made any improvements to my build lately so might look into this yet again.

Forgot to ask regarding the sound card. There's a cable shown running from the top of the sound card to another "breakout card" of some sort?

buckeye wrote on 2022-11-30, 15:26:

Forgot to ask regarding the sound card. There's a cable shown running from the top of the sound card to another "breakout card" of some sort?

I no longer own this system as I moved into an ITX build since I'm on the road a bit, but yes, the ZxR has a daughter board with additional ports.