Part 02:

This part will be about the graphics cards used in this main retro build a Matrox Parhelia AGP 256MB DDR and a PC flashed Voodoo5 55000 PCI Macintosh 64MB SDR and a lot of photo's and screenshots will be displayed in this post, just literally revealing everything these cards are capable of doing and how they work as well in the best optimal ways and it's nice to share with you guys here that also may have these cards.
Graphics cards have always inspire me and my Autism goes all balls to the wall when it's especially about graphics cards, good lord of the Force!

So here to begin with is the main graphics card of this build; the Matrox Parhelia AGP 256MB DDR; this is a Universal AGP 2.0 x4/x8 model of the Parhelia AGP 256MB DDR, this was a gift from a Matrox Employee from Matrox HQ for the EU market, he told me only 1500 of these were made and the much more common AGP 3.0 x8 model went by the millions from 2003 right on down to 2008.
He had asked me to make an offer I was like well let's start at 45 Eur, he was like that is okay by me actually, I'll add an other 6 cards, and for 45 Eur incl first class shipping from Ireland to the Netherlands this is what I got from that kind guy!

Matrox Millennium G400 Dual Head AGP 32MB 128Bit SGR Rev.B 4399

Matrox Millennium G400 Dual Head AGP 32MB 128Bit SGR Rev.B 1800

Matrox Millennium G450 Dual Head AGP 16MB 64Bit DDR SGR Rev.A 4500

Matrox Millennium G550 Dual Head AGP 32MB 64Bit DDR SGR Rev.A 4102

Matrox Parhelia AGP 256MB 256Bit DDR Rev.A 5103

Matrox Parhelia LX P650 AGP 64MB 128Bit DDR Rev.B 4505

Matrox Parhelia LX P750 AGP 64MB 128Bit DDR Rev.B 0905

About 6 months later I also got this G400 MAX as a major respected gift from my friend SWZSSR from x-3dfx;
This card is in use in the P3.E 850 Slot 1 build:

Matrox Millennium G400 MAX Dual Head AGP 32MB 128Bit SGR Rev.B 4399 + Soltek Brass Orb

Matrox Parhelia AGP Universal 256MB 256Bit DDR Rev.A 5103

As drivers go for the Parhelia to get the best optimal performance from it but with the most laid out control panel this is what needs to be done to get this to work:
To get this working at it's most optimal performance and speed. I had to tinker with the drivers to get a best of both worlds kind of scenario.

So what I did first was install the September 2003 driver which is Matrox Power Desk 1.5.0.107:

Here the September 2003 driver installed with it's awesome control panel, that to which will come in great handy later on.
Also note it's classic gaming control panel, it doesn't have many options, it's something to do with:

Here the performance of Descent 2 with D2X Rebirth 0.58.1 and D2X Retro 1.3a with the September 2003 driver kit:

Them frame rates aren't too bad right!, But of course I know there can be some improvements here and there, that which you'll see later on in this post 😎
So it was time to make things a lot better! 😁

Likewise then I downloaded the May 2007 driver which is Matrox Power Desk 1.13.0.158 and just installed the driver package, more not.
Then I went to the Device manager and updated the WDM drivers of the Parhelia AGP 256MB then did a reboot and this gave me the control panel from the September 2003 driverkit as well as the most up to date gaming performance WDM driver kit from May 2007!

This also gave me a lot more OpenGL options in the control panel as well, as with the later control panel all the gaming options were removed, so this little workaround did wonders and I also helped others with this ideal little solution of mine 😀

Here the info tab of the May 2007 driver

Here the May 2007 WDM driver with the September 2003 control panel combined, for the card it's self this is a best of both worlds solution:

Here the performance of Descent 2 with D2X Rebirth 0.58.1 and D2X Retro 1.3a with the May 2007 driver kit:

So nice gains here and there for both drivers I used the following settings:
Max in game settings with Super Sampled Rotated grid FSAA x4 + AF x2 from the Matrox Power Desk control panel.
If anyone ever needs help with this I have archived all drivers for all Parhelia cards, this is after all my favorite

Here two 3-way runs I did of 3D Mark 2001ASE Build 330 with the Parhelia AGP 256MB DDR with the May 2007 WDM & September 2003 Control panel and the V5 PCI Mac using the SFFT Alpha 41 driver modified by ps47 & myself:

Here the Parhelia running the famous Matrox Parhelia Reef Demo version 1.1

Here some other games I ran with the Parhelia:

Freelancer by Digital Anvil & Microsoft which was released on March 04, 2003 in the US & April 11, 2003 in the EU
This game gets the max out of the Parhelia P512 GPU thanks to Pixel Shader 1.3 for the 3D objects & Vertex Shader 2.0 support for the Nebula's
My Parhelia ran this game @ 1024x768x32 max ingame settings with FAA x16 & AF x2 and it looks glorious!

Command & Conquer Red Alert2 which was released on October 25, 2000 in the US and October 27, 2000 in the EU
With Command & Conquer Red Alet 2: Yuri's Revenge by Westwood Studios & EA Games which was released on October 09 2001 in the US & October 19, 2001 in the EU
With Purple Alert Mod 4.10.28 fmade by Marshall Carnis and released on May 02, 2006.

Last pic was the final score of this battle after a game run time of 9 hours 37 minutes and 45 seconds, no crash either.
RA2 is very CPU heavy which makes this the ideal game to use for stability test runs for long term workloads.

And that is just with the main graphics card, now on with the secondary graphics card the pc flashed Voodoo5 5500 PCI Macintosh 64MB SDR.
This card went through the following nice reworks that were done by two great people from x-3dfx & Voodoo Alert

3dfx Voodoo5 5500 PCI Macintosh 64MB Rev.A1 2900 + PC Bios 1.18_DVI
------------------------------------------------
SWZSSR's friend's Recap & Modifications:
01. Full Polymer Recap
02. Burnt Copper Heatsinks for the VSA's rear side
------------------------------------------------
Backfire's Repairs & Reworks:
01. Renewed Ceramic SMD's on the rear
02. 6ns Hynix VRAM renewal for the main VSA-100 Graphics Chip
03. Renewed Heatsinks & Fans for the VSA's topside
04. Renewed Power Supply Controller Chips
05. Fixed the IC U510 Chip's pins
06. Replaced 4x TSOP-86
07. 6ns Hynix VRAM renewal for the slave VSA-100 Graphics Chip
------------------------------------------------

Here the control panel of the V5 PCI Mac that was made by my friend named "KoolSmokey". he from the 3dfx Zone Forums, Italy:

Here the max FSAA setting for both OpenGL/Glide & Direct3D is FSAA x4, hence being a Voodoo5 5500 series of graphics card and by having two 3dfx VSA-100-200 graphics chips:

The Voodoo5 5000 & 5500 series both have two 3dfx VSA-100-200 chips, this makes the max FSAA setting as 4 samples
A Voodoo5 6000 has four chips, those do FSAA x8 as max setting, yet a Voodoo4 4500 only has one VSA-100-220, these only have a max setting of FSAA x2, sae rule goes for the 3dfx Daytona cards named Voodoo4-2 4000/4200 & 4800, all of these do FSAA x2 as max FSAA setting as well.
Alas I have worked with all VSA-100 based graphics cards single Dual & Quad SLI setups.
The people from EVGA seen me post my Voodoo5 6000 a few times, this system is kind of a memory to my Voodoo5 days, the PC flashed Voodoo5 5500 PCI Macintosh is the only Voodoo5 I currently have.

Here that V5 PCI Mac running some games, such as these:

Descent 2 by Parallax Software & Interplay which was released on March 13, 1996 in the US and March 29, 1996 in the EU
Descent 2 is using the mods D2X Rebirth 0.58.1 & D2X Retro 1.3a for improved game play & 3D rendered graphics mode with OpenGL ES 1.2:

Star Wars Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight by LucasArts which was released on October 09, 1997 in the US & October 17, 1997 in the EU:

Hexen II 1.11 by id Software & Raven Software which was released on September 11, 1997 in the US & September 17, 1997 in the EU:

And this is the end pf Part 02, Part 03 is about sound cards LS-120 drives and the cassette tape convertor drive.

And here the final part 03 of this first retro build, a lot was done as reworks to recaps and other needed renovation methods but all in all it truly did pay off and that all made this system my main retro system it's ideal for gaming but also workstation related tasks, the Audigy2 ZS Platinum Pro is where Part 03 starts off with, read onward!

Here the Sound card of this system, also quite a hard one to find, major thanks go to SWZSSR for helping me find one of these fr a nice deal of just 48 Eur / 60 USD which was around 100 AUSD back in the time I bought it which was somewhere in 2018.

Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro SB0360 Rev.A 2703

The card is named the SB0360, the Audigy2 ZS Platinum and other Audigy2 ZS boards carry the board name SB0350 or an even lower number.
The lesser the features, the lower the number.

Here the LS-120 Super disk drive, these have a read/write speed of about the same from that of a 6 speed CD-RW drive, which is very impressive, I also manage to play a 1080p Test video with it and even a 4K Extended Trailer of the Aquaman movie from 2018 which is around 90MB in size in 4K DivX format, the Audigy2 ZS was ideal for the hardware accelerated HD audio acceleration, to get this right I used a 3dfx Voodoo3 3500 TV AGP 16B Rev.A 3199 the one that is used in the AMD K7 Athlon Thunderbird 700Mhz build, to get a fluid motion for the video and perfectly synced audio, OS I used was Windows XP Professional USA + SP3.

This LS-120 drive was a very generous gift from my friend nick named "SadTropher" from the 2CPU forums

Mitsubishi Electronics Australia F200 D0 LS-120 Super Disk Drive

And here the final part which is something you don't see every day either and also rarer than the LS-120 left alone LS-240 drive even being,
This is a Cassette Deck Convertor drive that can also record and play tapes as well, the drive is quite long, because the tapes entire it lengthily wise.
My dad used it to convert all his cassette tapes to 256Kbps MP3, tapes from 1980 - 1990, also the time we lived in Australia.
Back in 2018 he passed it on to me to make good use of in this retro gaming /workstation system.

BTO Plusdeck 2C Cassette Deck Convertor Drive

Here the drivers for the Plusdeck 2C and the USB to Comp Port converter dongle, whch can be seen in the device manager as well;
This also indicates that the Plusdeck 2C has been correctly installed:

Here the software that comes with it, it works quite well and has tons of options as well, always nice to see put much care to it:

And there you have it really, this took like a full day for me to get it all sorted out, including the countless edits before making the final post here, since this forum has oddly no edit function, which is a major downside if being truly honest...
it has been a long time that I made a topic of this size though, just surprised I remember most of it, even I did grab some notes from topics I made in other places, I just have to in such cases because there isn't really much else to add to it.
Plus most of the screenshots are new that I did make a few weeks ago, just making them more up to date in that sense and I have used these pics in other forums as well, so some of the text and info for them was copied and pasted from previous reviews of the same case from other forum, because again there isn't much else to add to that kind of information.

But hey, enjoy this one, the next build will be quite different, that makes topics such as these a lot of fun, retro PC's will always fascinate and blow my mind.
All the photo's were made by myself all the screenshots were also made by myself with the specified systems posted.
The Camera I used was a 2003 built Sony CyberShot DSC-V3, this was roughly 6 hours of work, I took the entire day to get this done, but it's worth it for sure.

Friendly regards,

Obi Wan Kenobi / Gold Leader-B747

cards were so much bigger back then, look at that to scale with an airliner! 😀

very good tour and pics, can appreciate the painting more now too

and just seeing red alert 2 screenshots makes me want to play it again !

gerry wrote on Yesterday, 09:40:

cards were so much bigger back then, look at that to scale with an airliner! 😀

very good tour and pics, can appreciate the painting more now too

and just seeing red alert 2 screenshots makes me want to play it again !

Hey many thanks! 😎

And yea sorry for all the pics but some often be like pictures say a lot more than word, well even a lot of words were also added, yea I can get very carried away and this is just one computer, got two more to go, but I am waiting for some upgrades to arrive, for the P3/E 850 my second Gainward V2 got a new Chuck Frame Buffer chip and a full recap of 13x yellow KEMET capacitors they look like polymers but I think they are either ceramic or aluminum capacitors, at least the ones that don't leak deadly acids over time, I did this for quality of life reasons.

The Western Digital WD400EB 40GB 7200rpm HDD with 8MB Cache just arrived for the K7 Athlon Build so I am going to build that in and get afresh installation of Win98 SE + UnOfficial Service Paco 3.2 installed so it has decent NTFS file support which also makes it more user friendly for my network, yea before I post a system I will always try to make it as complete as possible, just for the better outcome, if parts are missing it just won't feel complete enough, in that sense.

Stay tuned for more though and that Lufthansa Boeing 747-430 is scale 1:200 the Matrox & 3dfx graphics cards are scale 1:1 🤣 xD
Here that wall paper with that Lufthansa B747-430 with the Matrox Parhelia AGP 256MB DDR Rec.A 503 & 3dfx Voodoo5 5500 PCI Macintosh 64MB Rev.A1 2900 + PC Bios 1.18_DVI:

Speaking of model aircraft all 56 scale 1;200 diecast metal B747's are on display in my living room as the main display goes and two more cabinets in my bedroom/computer room;
The modelkits on top of the main display are model kits at scale 1:72.

And here the singular display in my hallway for the Military jets that are all scale 1:72

For the K7 build which is named Nighthawk Is till seek a nice Hobby master Lockheed Martin F-117A Nighthawk diecast model to go with it, may pick up one later in the year as mascot for that build.
For the K7 I also managed to get hands of 5 Original AMD Athlon Aluminum decals, where of one will be used for the build and I'll have 4 spare for other future K7 projects.
They look like this and seem to be authentic, they weren't cheap but when it comes to details it comes to all the details right down to the original case badges.

Here the wallpaper I use for the K7 build named Nighthawk, 2nd pic is on the K7 it's self, Win2K Pro + SP4 is always very tempting though, just don't forget o Press F5 during the setup and right it starts up, it's a thing you need to do quickly, then select Standard PC for the installation choice, same goes for WinXP Pro + SP1/2 in such a case.

Night Stalkers by Peter Chilelli

So what I'll do now is install Win98SE + USP 3.2 on that build and see from there.

Well I got the K7 Installed with Win2K pro, 98SE was too much of a hassle somehow, also two ram sticks died along the way, luck wasn't much on my side with this one, the new 40GB HDD runs great so that's something, it's playing music atm with Winamp 2.81 + a FLAC file update
I have all components installed, just odd that the system ram doesn't always post or count up during boot, the system does run fine in Win2K and win2K does show that 1x 256MB is installed, yea kind of worried for that.

K7 Slot A Builds are finicky things, the mainboard is the Micro Star International MS9195 K7 Pro, it's capacitors all look fine, it was recapped 2 years ago.
Just weird this morning all three ram sticks worked fine and now I am stuck with one, one is better than nothing, I also refitted the 3dfx Vooodoo3 3500 TV AGP 16MB Rev.A 3199, for this card I ordered one of these:

M1-A to VGA convertor cable, this should give the V3 a ton less strain that what it's original pod does give, finding a V3 3500C + TV-Out would be an ideal fix, but this is a more affordable solution, some folks from Voodoo Alert also bought these and they seem to work well for V3 3500 TV AGP cards.
https://www.ebay.ie/itm/387155543843

Here the system when I installed the new 40GB HDD and it formatting and installing Win2K Pro, this was before 2 of the 3 ram sticks failed to function, gladly 1 survived.

Name & Current specs:

Nighthawk

AMD Athlon Thunderbird 700Mhz Slot A
1x 256MB PC-100 Legend / Hynix @ PC-100
MSI MS-6195 AMD Irongate AM751 Chipset
3dfx Voodoo3 3500 TV AGP 16MB Rev.A 3199 (Eur PAL variant, mint in box)
Vantec Cooling Spectrum Slot cooler card for V3 3500
Samsung 3.5" FDD Drive
1x 40GB Western Digital Caviar WD400EB 7200 rpm HDD Main drive + 8MB Cache
NEC 1300A DVD RW Drive
LG 40x/16X CD/DVD RW Drive
NEC 5 port USB 2.0 PCI Card + Front Panel 3 in PCI Card 2 in Front Panel
3-Com 3C 905C 10/100Mbit Ethernet PCI Card
Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold CT4390 4MB ISA PCB Date 3197
(Gold Recap done for CT4390 by by Backfire from Voodoo Alert Forums, Germany)
2002 A-Open H-600-B ATX Case
A-Open FSP350-60PN 350 Watt PSU
Compaq S710 17" Blackshade CRT from 2001
Reso @ 1024x768x32 ! 85Hz | 0.22.5 Dot Pitch

Win2K Pro UK + SP4
AmigaSport 3.0 for Win2K/XP by AmigaMerlin for V3 3500

So here the system as it is now, it's progress for the least right, but it has seen happier times.

Here the start menu, the CPU & ram identification and all installed parts neatly addressed:

So yea it could of been worse, what I am going to do next is to get the PSU recapped and that M1-A to VGA Dongle cable should also do miracles for the V3 3500 TV AGP, getting the V3 3500 recapped is also very much on my mind.

Welcome!
I actually saw your pics in the computer area post before here. I'm surprised how much I like the artwork on your cases.
I prefer things being "stock" and not really into customisation so would never do such a thing myself but did think the camouflage looked really good.
Checking the pictures here was bit of a nostalgia trip with the LED fans and UV cords. I remember then from big LAN party days.

I also own an Audigy 2 Platinum Pro, cost me £35 back in 2017 off ebay for my Dual slot 1 Voodoo 2 SLI build, It already had an Audigy 2 with the LiveDrive! but I needed the front bay for a fan controller.
Back then £35 was about double what the card alone would cost, but glad I did it. Have you seen prices for Creative I/O boxes both internal or external now!

Given your interest in aviation you may enjoy this. My friend from high school who I used to play LAN games with (mostly C&C1/2 and RA 1/2) became an electrical engineer and got a job maintaining the Navy Seakings helicopters at the local base. I used to (still do) take most my soldering jobs to him as said if he can work on helicopters he can fix a motherboard no problem. He would always reply my work was always more complicated vs the early 70's electronics in the helicopters.

I never had a 3Dfx card back in the day, I kind of missed out going from a 486 to a P2 400 with a 16MB TNT card. Not keeping up with tech another friend who had just tested a Voodoo 2 recommended I get a 16MB TNT given my budget. It was probably good advice, but that TNT card isnt worth nearly as much as the V2.

I've made up for it now though, with a pair of both Diamond Stealth V1 and V2's as well as an AGP Banshee and PCI V3 2000 I scored from a Slot A computer I saved from a skip!
Anyway welcome, with your hardware you'll definitely fit in!

chinny22 wrote on Today, 07:09:

Welcome! I actually saw your pics in the computer area post before here. I'm surprised how much I like the artwork on your cases […]
Show full quote

Welcome!
I actually saw your pics in the computer area post before here. I'm surprised how much I like the artwork on your cases.
I prefer things being "stock" and not really into customization so would never do such a thing myself but did think the camouflage looked really good.
Checking the pictures here was bit of a nostalgia trip with the LED fans and UV cords. I remember then from big LAN party days.

I also own an Audigy 2 Platinum Pro, cost me £35 back in 2017 off ebay for my Dual slot 1 Voodoo 2 SLI build, It already had an Audigy 2 with the LiveDrive! but I needed the front bay for a fan controller.
Back then £35 was about double what the card alone would cost, but glad I did it. Have you seen prices for Creative I/O boxes both internal or external now!

Given your interest in aviation you may enjoy this. My friend from high school who I used to play LAN games with (mostly C&C1/2 and RA 1/2) became an electrical engineer and got a job maintaining the Navy Seakings helicopters at the local base. I used to (still do) take most my soldering jobs to him as said if he can work on helicopters he can fix a motherboard no problem. He would always reply my work was always more complicated vs the early 70's electronics in the helicopters.

I never had a 3Dfx card back in the day, I kind of missed out going from a 486 to a P2 400 with a 16MB TNT card. Not keeping up with tech another friend who had just tested a Voodoo 2 recommended I get a 16MB TNT given my budget. It was probably good advice, but that TNT card isn't worth nearly as much as the V2.

I've made up for it now though, with a pair of both Diamond Stealth V1 and V2's as well as an AGP Banshee and PCI V3 2000 I scored from a Slot A computer I saved from a skip!
Anyway welcome, with your hardware you'll definitely fit in!

Hey many thanks for the warm welcome and very cool about the Helicopters maintenance friend you have, I can imagine that maintaining retro PC's from the 1990's to early 2000's can be far more complex than choppers from the 1970's, still something I at first would never of expected though, pretty wild 😎
As the TNT cards go I never liekd the image quality I am used to using ATi rage or Matrox G200/400 series I'm an Image quality hog so even after having a Riva TNT & Riva TNT 2/Ultra model I got annoyed by the poor image quality output heck even the S3 Savage 2000 was better for the eye, but the G400 MAX like the ATi Rage Fury Pro 128 yea this was a pure healing to my eyes, 3dfx's Voodoo3 3000 & 3500 also have top image quality, an other issue I found with the TNT/TNT2 line of cards is that these lack 8 bit per pixel rendering meaning dos games won't show the accurate color palettes this can be an issue for 8 bit games, cyan would display as lime green for example, of very off set color fidelity issues, games like Unreal or Quake II were find but if put next to a Voodoo3 3500, a Rage Fury 128 pro or a G400MAX you'll notice that the color depth and the image fidelity is much deeper and color rich, it's a worlds difference, well it was for me anyway, which is why I chose Matrox to be the main graphics card of choice for all my retro builds and 3dfx as secondary for 2D 3D or as slave cards, the K7 has the 3dfx Voodoo3 3500 TV AGP 16MB 128Bit SDR Rev.A 3199 as this has an on par image quality as that of the Matrox Millennium G400 DH MAX AGP 32MB 128Bit SGRAM Rev.A 4399 😀

Hmm yea. better late than never right for joining this awesome club of people, I am glad I can fit in here, it's just very difficult to find a good retro based forum/community that is only aimed for retro and vintage computers, I'm glad the owners kept this one alive, so much beautiful topic s here, I hope it's all well backed up, this is history we are all keeping alive and well maintained, it's important to keep this intact as long as we thrive to do so and as long as we can and hoping newer generation of people will continue the vibe.

And I always had a heart for this old stuff, the new-gen stuff just feels like waste of money and time, the Triple A Games are just bad to compare I still prefer a game of Descent II, Doom v1.666, Heretic, Hexen, Strife, marathon, Command & Conquer Red Alert2 + Yuri's Revenge with Purple Alert Mod 4.10.28, Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom, all the Star Wars DarkForces/Jedi Knight games the X-Wing vs Tie Fighter games, yea there is just so much choice ( Even that is just a mild example on what was made rofl) In that sense we will never get bored in life ever again, as for emulators hell no, I tried all of them, nothing beats the real deal.

These were the computers fro the Golden Era of PC Gaming which was 1992 to around 2004 my favorite time line is 1996 to 2003 as hardware goes, just staying within the x86 field of things, ISA sound card from 1994 to 1997 truly fascinate me the Audigy2 / Audigy2 ZS line are from 2003 I think or was the regular Audigy2 from 2002, I could have this wrong, as the ZS goes I have a SBo350 the Audigy2 ZS and the SBo360 which is the Platinum Pro model with that external digital interface, as how Terratec would name those things.

There is no emulator of the Terratec EWS64 XL for example, for modern PCs though, f I want to play Midi music I use Cool Soft Virtual Midi Synth, which is this handy program my main system has a Creative AE-5 Plus sound card and this program works well with it, goes well for them onboard Realtek ALC 1200 chips as well:
https://coolsoft.altervista.org/en/virtualmidisynth

I use these two:

Yamaha XG_Sound_Set.sf2
yamaha tyros 4_just_t4_fixed.sf2

Those two are very decent for improved midi music on modern hardware, but still if I Power up my Terratec EWS64 XL or even the Creative Labs AWE64 Gold, it's just hard to beat the originals.
If anyone needs help as sound fonts go feel free to ask I made a guide for this somewhere on my discord 😀

You can grab the free sound fonts from here
https://archive.org/download/free-soundfonts-sf2-2019-04

Also don't forget to add the Coolsoft Midi mapper:
https://coolsoft.altervista.org/en/midimapper#download

As 3dfx goes yea I now run the official x-3dfx community at Facebook, normally I am no fan of FB , but considering it doesn't matter what people use every company every software is spying on personal data I am just truing to ignore than and just be where I can be.
Keeping the 3dfx dream alive is it all for me and building date correct computers that were there when these cards came out justifies it all, it's not just the 3dfx cards it everything that goes with them, it all needs to be there AMD 7 Athlons Intel Pentium3's , AMD AthlonXP's and Intel Pentium4's I wanna be all part of it, I also have a Dual OpteronMP 850 CG build with a Micro Star International MS9130 K8T MAster2-FAR mainboard with it's glorious deep red PCB, also something you don't see anymore these days, colored PCBs in that sense:

This system is from 2004 and that is as late I will call retro really.

My mid aged project is a Dual Six-Core OpteronDP 2435 with a pair of EVGA GTX 480's in SLI this system needs a new Power supply a good one like a Super Flower or a SeaSonic Platinum rated 1000 to 1250 Watt Digital PSU.
Here four pics on how this system will be to what I am working on , the 2nd EVGA GTX 480 should arrive on October 08 next week.


The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 PCI-E 1536MB 384Bit GDDR5 is my favorite GeForce of all time, so it deserve a place here, the Fermi Architecture was fascinating those cards in SLI with Flight Simulator X I did a ton of Boeing 747-400 flights in real time and it didn't lag at all.
But I do seek an EVGA GTX 480 Backplate btw, if anyone has one feel free to DM me about it 😀
aka one of these:

Even the system had a pair of EVGA GTX 295 Red Editions before these, the 480's added 640MB More VRAM per chip and the new GDDR5 year that was a wild time.
The problem now is that the onboard NF200 chip died, so finding a Supermicro H8DAE-2 or H8DA8-2 is my plan to progress, not easy sadly, there are a few on ebay but the prices aren't fun 🤣, like all of us retro people all know the ebay problem, so for now this system is just dormant for now, just gonna get the parts I can get to make it usable, but for SLI I'd need anew board or a new NF200 chip and yea for such a repair, you may as well replace the entire board.

Cutting corners was never my thing the Audigy 2 ZS boards will get Nichicon Gold MUSE capacitors, that is something I really want my friend Backfire to do, so they too will improve when it comes to sound quality, they get rid of signal noise and sound distortion, they literally filter out the sound and make it sound much cleaner and that with a nice pair of Edifier RT1280 speakers and I'm all set.

Anyways regarding the memory issue with the K7 build, I Cleaned the gold connectors of the 3x 256MB Legend/Hynix SDRAM with a clean cloth and alcohol and presto! 😁 I now have 768MB again, I looked back and thought well it could just be dirt and grime blocking the system for reading out the system ram and yea this was certainly it:

Here the system it's self:

But yea there ya go, more updates will be posted, the Western Digital WD800JB 80GB 7200 pm HDD with 8MB Cache will be ordered later today, now I know the ram is healthy, was a scary bit but I 'm glad I was able to clean the ram and get things back to how they should be.