not that bad, but certianly not "the best Intel Slot 1 based machine, EVER" in my opinion.
I would like to see less LED decoration, less PSU wattage, Tualatin instead of coppermine CPU, SLC Solid state disk instead of harddisks, another soundcard... And what is a radeon 9250 good for?

gerwin wrote:

not that bad, but certianly not "the best Intel Slot 1 based machine, EVER" in my opinion.
I would like to see less LED decoration, less PSU wattage, Tualatin instead of coppermine CPU, SLC Solid state disk instead of harddisks, another soundcard... And what is a radeon 9250 good for?

Yeah

A powerleap tualatin adapter with a tualatin celeron 1400mhz, an late BX slot 1 mobo instead, a better sound card than the crappy AWE64

Those raptor hdd's will be a waste too imho because the whole system will be a bottleneck

Must be retro games 100 that's behind thia vid sine it's a brit who's made it 😁

Amigaz wrote:

Must be retro games 100 that's behind thia vid sine it's a brit who's made it 😁

Definitely not me. Besides, I don't own a video camera, so I simply couldn't have made the video!!

I frowned once I saw the AWE64. Not good for Windows and certainly not the ideal DOS card. 😁

Besides, anyone who has sat around and tried to build an "ultimate" anything discovers that it can always be better somehow, and that there are also always trade offs.

what is the point of such a mix of components... ? bah...

swaaye wrote:

I frowned once I saw the AWE64. Not good for Windows and certainly not the ideal DOS card. 😁

I run a Awe64 Gold in my Socket 7 rig and I'm happy with it, I don't have any early 90s games.

Does seem strange in a Pentium 3 machine though, he should at least add a PCI sound card too if he must have the AWE in there.

AWE64 is just a AWE32 with maybe some cleaner output, but with very annoying proprietary RAM expansion. It works as well as a SB16 PnP for PCM and as well as any PnP SB32 or AWE32 for GMIDI. But it's no best of the best
😐 😁 Actually the FM is surely the fakey Creative wannabe OPL. I think you need to go back to SB16 to find real OPL3 but I'm not sure.

There is no "best" anyway.

I knew something's not right when I saw the words "...the best Intel Slot 1 based machine, EVER...". I wonder best ever in what way...

No, I didn't watch the whole video. I just couldn't. Not after seeing those words.

I think I'm gonna get a (F)EVER. *shudder*shudder* 😁

It seems a bit of a frankenstein system to me. I am also wondering how the lowly pentium3 will handle the sata raid calculations when its driving the two raid arrays. Must be quite some cpu overhead there with that crappy card. And whats with the 1 million usb and firewire expansion cards?

I noticed that his slot 1 project videos were uploaded 3 to 4 months ago, but do not show any recent videos with the finished working computer. Perhaps he couldn't get it to work, and has since lost interest?

Also, I don't think he mentions what he wants to do with it (eg games, office, net, etc), or what operating system(s) he intends to use on it. My guess is not Windows 98, because he is using Sata controllers. (I don't think Win98 knows what to do with Sata.) If it's not Windows 98 (but XP or more modern), then IMHO the project is a bit daft.

My guess is not Windows 98, because he is using Sata controllers.

You can use SATA controllers with 98. Hell, you can run plain DOS off a SATA drive if you really want to. In standard IDE mode, they work no differently from any other IDE drive. RAID might be a problem with some cards, but I believe SI in particular still has drivers for older OSes.

It would be pointless to run RAID, though, especially in the case of those Raptors.Even putting possible performance issues with the 'fake RAID' aside, the PCI bus would limit throughput so much that you wouldn't gain any appreciable speed over a single drive.

I'm guessing it's probably a younger guy who didn't get into computers until well after the PIII era... just from what he was saying in the video, he doesn't really seem to know much about older hardware, and he's going with the modern style parts and shiny 'gamer' crap, without really considering what would work best for the system. "Frankenstein" would be a very apt description of it. I can't fault him for wanting to play around with a PIII, but... yeah, he's kinda doin it wrong.

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

It would be pointless to run RAID, though, especially in the case of those Raptors.Even putting possible performance issues with the 'fake RAID' aside, the PCI bus would limit throughput so much that you wouldn't gain any appreciable speed over a single drive.

I tested this on my home linux server box (PIII 1GHz, software RAID5 with 4 old IDE drives) just for fun: The software RAID accounts for a whopping 2% of the CPU load, but meanwhile the CPU spends 80% of the time waiting for the bus... 🙄

Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous. IMO, if you want a fast disk system on a desktop PIII, just throw in a U2W SCSI card (Adaptec 2940U2W is the standard choice) and a 15K RPM drive, and be done with it. You're not gonna get much better than that on bulk transfer rates due to the PCI limitation, and the higher RPM will blow the Raptor outta the water as far as system responsiveness. Leave the cheapy SATA card to run a WD Green or something if you really need more bulk storage space.

Running a pair of Raptors like that for a desktop is just plain idiotic IMO. I know for certain that I would not want to game on that machine. It will be rocks in a blender. The case will be rattling away on every disk access. Yeah that will be gaming bliss alright. 😒

Any 'ol modern drive would be a speed demon more than adequate for maxing out this hardware and most of the drives out there today are nice and quiet.