Looking good, i have somewhat my own dream machine from 2001 as well.... rig info in sig.

Depends on the revision, but later V1.3 KT7A would also take Athlon XP.

God Of Gaming wrote on 2020-05-19, 10:23:

One is Asus TUSL2-C motherboard (i815E) with PIII 1266S Tualatin, other is Abit KT7A-Raid (Via KT133A) with Athlon 1400 Thunderbird. I haven't benched them against each other yet to check which is the better performer, but I would guess the Thunderbird will be a bit faster, it also allows 1.5gb ram vs 512mb for the tualatin board, and has ISA as well which is nice.

If you want to play DOS games on that rig, go with the KT7A and get an ISA card for it. Don't go over 512 MB RAM on either board since Win98 has problems with larger amounts without third-party patches.

I have here Hercules 3D Prophet 4500XT (PowerVR Kyro II), then Ati All-In-Wonder 8500DV (that I've tied 80mm fan to, because the original fan fails to keep it cool) and also an Ati Radeon 7500. I'm currently on the lookout for the full phat 275mhz radeon 8500, but these things are tricky to find.

If you're targeting early Win9x games, you'll want a graphics card which supports table fog and palleted textures. Voodoo and Nvidia cards (until the 6000 series) support both. I don't think Ati cards do, without driver tweaks. Not sure about the Kyro.

The best card for that period is a GeForce 4 Ti4600, but if you intend to play at lower resolutions (below 1280x1024) and don't care about games from 2001 onward, you can go with a GeForce MX440 which is cheaper and much easier to find.

kixs wrote on 2020-05-19, 11:29:

Depends on the revision, but later V1.3 KT7A would also take Athlon XP.

Yes, in fact I've found a modded bios that would even allow them to take and overclock a mobile barton. But to be period correct to 2001, I would use it with the Thunderbird. Actually to be technically correct, the first Palomino Athlon XPs came out October 2001, but I don't want to count them towards this build as they're a bit boring, so I should say this build will aim to be ultimate as of September 2001 when they didn't exist yet. And yes, @Bige4u, you have a really nice rig there, but it's not strictly 2001-correct as the tualatin 1400s is a 2002 cpu

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2020-05-19, 11:37:

If you want to play DOS games on that rig, go with the KT7A and get an ISA card for it. Don't go over 512 MB RAM on either board since Win98 has problems with larger amounts without third-party patches.

I don't mind using 3rd party patches, since I'm dualbooting w2K, and w2K can use the extra ram. I tend to use himemx.exe, which works well enough for this, tho since I will probably go with WinME here, might need a different patch as himemx.exe doesnt work on ME afaik? I haven't used ME yet, so this will be a first

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2020-05-19, 11:37:

If you're targeting early Win9x games, you'll want a graphics card which supports table fog and palleted textures. Voodoo and Nvidia cards (until the 6000 series) support both. I don't think Ati cards do, without driver tweaks. Not sure about the Kyro.

The best card for that period is a GeForce 4 Ti4600, but if you intend to play at lower resolutions (below 1280x1024) and don't care about games from 2001 onward, you can go with a GeForce MX440 which is cheaper and much easier to find.

Card gotta be a 2001 model to keep everything period-correct, so a GF3 might be better than the radeon 8500 for game compatibility, but the radeon 8500 is faster and has some cool features. I will have other older rigs to play the incompatible games on, anyways, check my "1999 dream pc project" thread 😉 Oh and yes, trough a registry edit the radeon 8500 can be made to support table fog, afaik

I don't know much about the Intel board but I own the Abit KT7A-RAID board and it's great. Super stable and the bios has a ton of options and is super tweakable. I'm using it for an XP Pro machine for my son. It's completely stable with the 1.5gigs of ram.

I think the best platform in 2001 would be AMD760 . Athlon T-bird and DDR make for a perfect match. IMHO SDRAM is limiting the true potential of the Athlon.
The 2001 dream PC would be something along the lines:
Abit KG7-raid
Athlon 1400
512 or 1024mb of DDRAM depending on the operating system you want to use.
Geforce4 ti4600
Maxtor single platter hard drive or something similar.

Note taken on amd760, seems to be a thing indeed, I'll keep my eyes open for one. GF4 is a 2002 card.

I thought the atcs 201 was late 2000?. Then again it can go either way.

idk, the way I research for dates is look for reviews on google, and check which one is dated the oldest, and for the ATC-201 the oldest review I found was from january 2001. BTW I've found revision 2 of the case which came out later, too.. Oh, and I'm currently following an auction for ATC-200, that I wanna take for the dream 2000 pc project. Ideally I also want ATC-100 for dream 1999 pc project, but I've never seen ATC-100 for sale, ever, its probably unobtanium. Talking of unobtanium, I decided on which would be the ultimate 2001 motherboard - Tyan Tiger MP (S2460) - amd 760MP chipset, dual socket A 😀 Obtaining it for a reasonable price will be hard, so I'll build the system with the tusl2-c or kt7a-raid for now to get it going, and upgrade it to the Tiger when (if) I ever obtain one

is that a pioneer slot loaded cd rom? love them but very hard to come by these days (most of the experiences i've read is that they die early due to the disc loading mechanics). would love to get another one myself.

yeah, turned out to be a Pioneer DVD-105S - a 2000 drive, so if I win the ATC-200 auction, I'll mount it in that. The other black drive is some shitty 2007 samsung, probably gonna sell that

If I had to come back to those years my dream PC would definetely have a Geforce 2 Ultra card. What an expensive awesome monster card...
Also that Creative panel is one of the thing I remember wanted a lot just to have it in the case. But also the original Geforce the Creative one with its awesome box.. I still remember that box one of the best ever.

yeah, I will also be doing a 2000 dream pc sooner or later, probably with p4 1.5, athlon 1200 or dual p3 1000, and certainly a gf2 ultra, but I haven't posted a thread about it yet as I have too few of the components so far

God Of Gaming wrote on 2020-05-26, 10:18:

yeah, I will also be doing a 2000 dream pc sooner or later, probably with p4 1.5, athlon 1200 or dual p3 1000, and certainly a gf2 ultra, but I haven't posted a thread about it yet as I have too few of the components so far

I remember reading every reviews of the gpu battles once the first Geforce came out and soon surpassed itself by the DDR and soon the Geforce2 GTS and soon the Ultra.. basically a market acceleration that destroyed every alternatives.

I usually lean towards the Intel side of thing but as it's dream build I think it would have to be the TBird
Not sure if Hercules is the "dream" card but it's probably the more interesting if building multiple PC's which will end up with ATI/NVida cards.

I'm pretty sure radeon 8500 is supposed to be the fastest 2001 graphics card, reviews from 2001 find its performance to be somewhat lacking compared to GF3, but thats probably because of the early drivers, Phil's review with more mature drivers found it to be consistently faster than GF3 Ti500 even. Now the problem is finding a radeon 8500, I have the 8500dv all-in-wonder that's same chip, but is downclocked to only 230mhz, and I can't OC it, even a slight OC shows artefacts. The full 8500 275mhz is so hard to find for cheap nowadays.. might have to pay up... sigh.... whats worst is only 64mb models show up, I know 128mb model exists but Ive yet to see it for sale, might be a bit more willing to pay for that one, the extra vram should help with playing at 1600x1200 I'm sure

I like both of these. TUSL2-C is a solid board with that Tualatin being a solid CPU!
The ASUS boards of that time often had this weird thinner PCI slot. Not sure why they did that.
It's nice to see the Athlon 1400 getting some love. I've build a couple similar machines (build around several ASUS A7V133 boards that I had gotten) and even though the Thunderbird 1400 performs on par with the Tualatin 1400 (of which I had also build a rig), the Thunderbird runs a lot hotter and needs a beefy 5v line on the PSU.
Good choice on the sA HSF you picked. Is that the AC copper lite? I can't make out the red text but it looks very similar and mine kept a Barton 3200+ cool enough 😜

And most recent acquisition for this build is this Cooler Master ATCS-201 case, seems like this was the ultimate pc case in 2001 […]
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And most recent acquisition for this build is this Cooler Master ATCS-201 case, seems like this was the ultimate pc case in 2001, and had a price tag of over $500 back then.

It's made out of thick sheets of aluminium so its pretty sturdy, and has decent airflow (four 80mm fans) and even dust filtration. Even a variant with a side window exists, but sadly I only found this one. Might try to mod a side window onto it myself, how hard could it be?

Beautiful case!

As for the rest of the hardware, I would go with the Thunderbird 1.4Ghz (unless you plan to get a 1.4Ghz Tualatin in the future).
Among your available GPU I´d choose the Kyro II, not because it is the best performing one (the all-in-wonder 8500 is the case) but due to its rarity.
For 2001 Geforce 3 would be ideal, wouldn´t it?

Con 2 botones wrote on 2020-06-01, 18:27:

For 2001 Geforce 3 would be ideal, wouldn´t it?

depends, if you want the best compatibility for older games, sure, but if you just want the top performance of 01, a 275mhz radeon 8500 would be faster than a gf3 ti500, here's a screenshot from a Phil Computer Lab vid:

btw, mobo trays are awesome, you use them as a test bench, and when happy just slide them in from the back and you're done, so convenient! Why dont they make such cases anymore?

p.s. I was wrong, the 120gb wd caviar SE hdd was released in early january 2002, not late 2001, judging by this article:
https://www.storagereview.com/review/western- … caviar-wd1200jb
which means the next one down, the wd caviar SE 100gb, is a 2001 model, but these seem to be rare... and, more importantly, since I'll be using a 15k rpm scsi hdd for the OS installs, these IDE HDDs will be only used for the game installs, so performance probably isnt as important as capacity, and, looks like in 2001 maxtor had 160gb 5400rpm drives, I'll probably try to find a couple of these