Buddy

Hi guys!

Today I wanna show you my latest Retro Build. Took some time to get this done, had some hard- and software issues to deal with.
First test with Win98 / 2000 went fine. while installing the soundcard driver, it crashed to a completly unusable state.
So I skipped the dual boot and Win 2000 was left alone.
Gonna install a SATA RAID when I find a suitable PSU.

SPECS

Motherboard: ASUS A7N8X-E deluxe (nForce2 Chipset)
CPU: AMD Athlon 2800+
RAM: 2x1 GB Kingston DDR1 @200 MHz
HDD: 80 GB Samsung Spinpoint + 120 GB Maxtor OR 60 GB Seagate in swap frame.
GFX-Card: Sapphire Radeon 9600XT 128 MB RAM
Soundcard: Creative Soundblaster PCI 128 (CT4750)
CD-R: Lite-on LTR-48256S (48/24/48)
Keyboard: Cherry G81 MY3000 R/M (QWERTZ)
Mouse: A4 Tech optical (2 scroll wheels)
PSU: Standard 300W
Case: BIG BEIGE TOWER







selfmade "benchtable" tray from an old AOpen Tower


final test setup


GFX card


Soundblaster



pre-mounted


CD-R


looks a bit empty...



found this


finished



Cherry G81


CPU-Z


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lol at the sticker on the CPU "hardware hackers multimedia" hehe

that case is a monster, as you know I'm a sucker for a beige box but that is just epic!!!!!

interested to know how you get on with it as you get time to play with it, we used the A7N8X Deluxe and then A7N8X-E Deluxe for our 2003 gaming machine and COULD NOT get the thing to run stable! - I used LOADS of these boards back in the day in builds I done for people and never had one issue but fast forward 13-14 years and it just refused to work, we then got a second -E Deluxe and went OCD with the drivers ensuring we only used the version number from 2003, we only used XP Pro SP1 as was available in 2003, and I believe it was Direct X 9b rather than 9c and eventually we got it running stable enough to bench and game but still it could be a little problematic.

we swapped PSU's, RAM, CPU's, GPU's everything!

That thing would look awesome stacked with Optical drives, Back in the day I used to use an LG 52x DVD-Rom (which I still have) as It was the only DVD-Rom I could find that would do CD's at 52x (the rest were 48x). I then ran I believe a lite-on CD-RW as none of the all in one DVD-RW drives at the time would burn CD's as fast as a standalone CD-RW and then I ran a DVD-RW for burning DVD's - back when we used optical media for everything it was all about pushing the performance to the max

Yeah, the sticker is from the hardware store I trust most, I bought the biggest part of my hardware collection there (also the mobo and all the drives in this system).

I used to play a lot of games with this board back in the early 2000s (from 98 to 2000 until XP) and never had issues like you had. strange...
I'll be doing some tests and then try to get this benchmarked later...

Took plenty of time to get this thing working with DX9c and the dotNET stuff from M$ as I had to update the M$ installer twice to get this installed.
Need to install a diffrent psu to add more drives, I've used every molex plug it has.

I COULD add those 2 dirty drives, but I'm missing a SCSI Controller card for the DAT.

OK, tried some very decent gaming with AoE 1 and it runs fine.
But I have a temperature problem as the cpu gets 60C and then reboots...

that's a strange one, an Athlon XP should be more than fine at 60c there should be a thermal shut off setting in the bios, I cant remember how low it lets you set it but its possibly set to 60c?

I set it to 80C, that's why I'm wondering...

running the latest BIOS V1013?
www.asus.com/supportonly/A7N8XE_Deluxe/HelpDesk_BIOS/

jep, flashed from1012 to 1013...
I'll replace the psu with one that has 2 fans. the actual one is pretty oldscholl with just one. I'll also check if I can mount a diffrent cooler, maybe this helps.

yea would be interested to try that, if anything to rule the PSU out if its good.

I'll do that next week and share the results with you.

I just finished upgrading Buddy...

New cooler/fan combo, added cooler to SB-Chip (!), new psu with adjustable fan, changed cd-r to dvd-rom, added dvd-rw & a DAT 72.

That's the same heatsink i had for my athlon xp 3200+ system. Mine was the blue led version is yours the same? I believe they done an led and non led version. Pretty good cooler!

forgot to mention the 3rd gig of RAM I added...

that's the one!

did you manage to get it to stop shutting off under load?

jep. thx to the new fan and thermal paste temps are now at around 42C and 20C.
but something is still strange...
Bios says, CPU temp is 44C and chip 20C, hwinfo sets the temp vice versa...
after a reboot, hwinfo displays just the gpu temp and no longer chip and cpu...