This was the third board I ever built on for myself (this is the original board I dug out from my stash), from the job I worked at when I was 15. It was this little no name computer shop run by this really angry Jewish guy. I went down there with my grandpa because he saw an ad for a cheap computer (I was going to be handed down the older all-in-one Compaq SX\2 66Mhz with 4Mb of memory). Well we get there, and they try to bait and switch him, fairly normal tactic at the time. "Well sir, you could buy this one, but it's not expandable it only has two PCI slots!".

My grandfather was a Korean war vet and owned a car dealership. He was not happy and started yelling at the salesman about how they are trying to pull one over on him. So the owner Juda comes over and puts his hand on my grandfather's shoulder, and my grandfather spins around with his fist balled up and was like "don't you put your hand on me!". I'm standing there wondering if he is going to punch this guy, and so he calms him down, and then I was like grandpa let me talk to this guy. I was already deep into PCs from the Apple II, to DOS and C++ and QBASIC and upgrading and digging into the Compaq like crazy with DOS\Windows 3.1. So I find one with a socket 3 PVI-486SP3 board that was setup pretty nicely, and talk him into it. The owner asks me if I want a job 🤣. I ended up working there building computers all through high school and they gave me that GA-5AX. I ran the crap out of that build and the ASUS build from my grandpa. The hand me down Compaq would barely run Doom 2, Warcraft and Diablo so I spend a lot of time over there to the point where he was getting annoyed at me for taking up so much PC time and using his phone line. DWWANGO really caused some problems 🤣. Luckily I was working because there were a lot of long distance calls to cover.

Anyway, the GA-5AX is going to need a recap, but it's working very well for the time being. Here's what it's running.

Windows 98SE, with just the shutdown update and mass storage drivers so far.

Enlight Full Tower Case

AMD K6 II+ (delidded, 256kb cache mod, 550Mhz @ 2.0v)

128 Crucial PC133 CL2 (we will see what I can get out of it regarding 100mhz+ when I start overclocking after the cap job)

Voodoo 3 2000>DX7 (I have various other cards to try, TNT2, the notorious FX5200, and also the 128-bit card, but unfortunately it's AGP 8X so I have to see if it's universal or not otherwise I'll be adding it to my future Socket 370 build.

SB16 CT 2690, SB Live CT4830 Value, AWE32 CT4520 (looking for one of those SV550 labeled Yamaha cards or if I can't find that a regular YMF724), right now the CT2960 is in there.

120GB SSD with Startech adapter

Startech USB PCI hub

Zip 100 Drive\Floppy\DVD-RW

Now that all the hardware is set up and running, it'll be time to go into my old applications and start installing software, and then clone the drive. It was fun. I haven't built one of these for over 20 years,
but I kept looking at this old stuff and wondering why not just see if it's still working. It only cost a few dollars