badmojo wrote on 2025-10-01, 22:44:

Gold Leader-B747 wrote on 2025-09-30, 15:54:

Hey all!

Well I have three main Retro PC's at the moment, always hooping to build more, but making more room for that is always a challenge I am sure many are familiar with.

I love those crazy paint jobs! Great specs too.

Hey many thanks, yea I dd them paint jobs for the FKI FK-6043 Midi Tower, the Addtronics 6896A Entry Level Server/High Tower in December of 1999 and the larger Addtronics 7896A Server Tower in May of 2008. It's for me too hard to let things go, so I decided to keep these and now I am glad I did, some things are impossible to replace, like these three towers that I left my personal artworks on them likewise.

Gold Leader-B747 wrote on 2025-09-30, 15:54:

Sveta 2002

AMD AthlonXP 2200+ Thoroughbred-A, 1 Core @ 1.8Ghz

I like athlon XP and have a couple of machines and a few boards and cpus in waiting. Even lower range athlon XP machines are often such a great pairing with windows xp. Even if only given 512 of ram and a budget agp a machine like that can feel pretty good for early 2000's gaming. Your spec is excellent and probably allows the machine to range to later games too

gerry wrote on 2025-10-02, 10:31:

Gold Leader-B747 wrote on 2025-09-30, 15:54:

Sveta 2002

AMD AthlonXP 2200+ Thoroughbred-A, 1 Core @ 1.8Ghz

I like athlon XP and have a couple of machines and a few boards and cpus in waiting. Even lower range Athlon XP machines are often such a great pairing with windows xp. Even if only given 512 of ram and a budget agp a machine like that can feel pretty good for early 2000's gaming. Your spec is excellent and probably allows the machine to range to later games too

Yea this build was my first come back to retro computers this build I started in 2016 and it took a long painstaking 4 years and 2 months to complete so around March of 2020 it entered service and has become the mainstay of all my retro builds I still use CD-eX 1.5.1 to convert my CD's to 320 Kbps MP3 quality, albums by Sting, +The Police, Dire Straits,. Midnight Oil, Icehouse, Supertramp things like that and all my Zillion albums from 1997 - 2001, I always use the Quad Speed CD Read mode for the best stable results it takes time but it does pay off and it's a nice way to make good use of this system for the workstation side of it.

Gaming wise, I just love playing Freelancer with it's Matrox Parhelia AGP 256MB 256Bit DDR, that with C&C Red Alert 2 + Yuri's Revenge with Purple Alert Mod 4.10.28, I also play Descent 1 &2 with DXX Rebirth 0.58.1 ( this also goes well with the V5 PCI Mac)

All in all I am more of a retro gamer in general, even that this system can be very capable for newer gen games, I mostly use it to play the old ones at great frame rates.
Freelancer is newest game that I play on it, this game gets the max out of the Parhelia's P512 512Bit Hybrid GPU as it uses Pixel Shader 1.3 for the 3D objects and Vertex Shader 2.0a for the Nebula's, it's one of very few games that runs very well with a Matrox Parhelia graphics card even the Parlhelia LX based P750 does a good job in this game likewise.

Maybe I should make a thread with all my builds in it but in full detail, not sure where to do that yet though, as I don't want to go too far off topic here.

aieros wrote on 2025-09-27, 07:33:

Hello, Long time lurker. I see that several other members are posting their XP retro builds. I thought I'd post mine: For the ma […]
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Hello,
Long time lurker. I see that several other members are posting their XP retro builds. I thought I'd post mine:
For the machine, it's a combination of old parts that I kept from back in the day combined with new (modern) parts:
Specs are:
CPU: Intel Core 2 QX6700 Extreme OC @3.20 GHz Quad Core Processor / Artic Silver MX-6
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master 212 LED with upgraded fan (Thermal Right 120MM)
Motherboard: Intel D975XBX2KR (Bad Axe 2) Socket 775
RAM: Mushkin Enhanced 2x2GB (4GB Total) PC6400 DDR2 (With Heat Spreaders)
Hard drive: Toshiba 2.5 Mechanical 500GB Hard Drive SATA3
GPU: EVGA NVIDI​A GeForce ​GTX 570 1280MB PCIe
PSU: Corsair 1000HX (1000W) Modular Power Supply
Soundcard: Creative S​SoundBlaster​ Audigy 2​ ZS
Case: Be Quiet! Base 501 // Sound Dampening Case
Case Fans: 3x 140MM (2x140MM Noctua Redux 1x140 Pure Wings 3)
Other: Ageia PhysX P100 Processor

That's one very overpowered build man 😁 can't imagine anything from the XP era it won't play on max. The PhysX processor in particular is a very interesting thing, I wanted to get one to play with, but couldn't find for reasonable price and gave up.

sunkindly wrote on 2025-09-15, 20:37:

Thanks! […]
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Thanks!

The 386 build is coming along now! Here's the behemoth Syscon Consulting / Northgate Elegance AT board and how the cable management is going. Had to move the speaker to accommodate it.

CPU: Intel 386DX-25 w/ 387 coprocessor
RAM: 8MB
Cache: 256KB
ISA: GoldStar Prime-2
ISA: Video Seven VEGA VGA-16
ISA: Sound Blaster 16
HDD: 140MB Western Digital Caviar 2170

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Looks majestic and really retro to me.

The 386/486 systems always look mystical to me. I grew up in the XP era and never knew experienced DOS systems except for a few Win 98 dos PCs my friends had on their P3 or Celerons. I think it was here on this forum and on Phil`s channel where I learnt about the 286/386/486 computers.