Very nice find. Always cool to see old machines given a new life. On the graphics card, you might look at getting a GF6200 - supposedly those are still being made (eVGA shows an AGP 512MB model, for example).

obobskivich wrote:

Very nice find. Always cool to see old machines given a new life. On the graphics card, you might look at getting a GF6200 - supposedly those are still being made (eVGA shows an AGP 512MB model, for example).

Yeah, I was considering buying one of these. They are 50 euros, quite expensive, but since they have been in production for 10 years, it's a reasonable price. I just don't want to spend that much on one component for a old PC.

Others I saw:
Club 3D Radeon HD 3450 512MB DDR2 AGP 8x (does support DirectX 10.1, very nice) 51,90 euros
MSI GeForce FX 5500 256MB DDR AGP 8x 35,99 euros

Club 3D Radeon HD 5450 512MB DDR2 PCI (not really a fan of PCI GPUs, but this one still gets updated drivers) 52,90 euros

But I might go for the FX 5500. It's quite cheap, and fanless. However, FX cards are definitely not the most stable out there.

The first question before videocard buying is - will you want this PC Xp only or XP/Win9x dualboot?
Because for Win9x you can't use anything above Radeon X850 or GF 6800. And Intel Extreme Graphics 2 is, well...

Nice rig,also I noticed you use the same board as me! 😁

Wonder if your system loses CMOS,as mine does no matter what CMOS battery I put in.

An AGP card that may be great for it is the Radeon X1950Pro (yes,it came in AGP package) from Sapphire.

Also,here's a BIOS for OC options if you want to do that. I use it on my Pentium 4 rig and so far I don't have any problem with it.

WARNING:Make sure you use a backup PLCC BIOS chip (do a Google search if you didn't see one) so you can revert to the old BIOS in case it doesn't work.

I won't be responsible if your PC won't boot (however there's a very small chance it wouldn't boot (I'd say about 5-10%) as I tested it with my P4P800-VM and it POSTs fine.In fact I use that BIOS instead the original AMI BIOS)

Also use Uniflash to flash it as AFUDOS/AMIFLASH won't work as the BIOS came from a Foxconn motherboard and it's Award BIOS.
Tested both AMI flashers and neither worked.Tried Uniflash and it worked.

I'd pass on any "bridged" AGP or PCI cards. Stick to something native and from the P4's era - GeForce FX, GeForce 6, Radeon 9, Radeon X, or older, and you should be good to go. Another note - DX10.1 won't function without Vista or higher (doesn't matter if the card supports it or not, it requires Vista or higher to install).

You meant to put "Maxtor" hdd right?

LunarG wrote:

You meant that put "Maxtor" hdd right?

Yeah, I always get the two confused.

Also, I didn't have problems with the original CMOS battery. Guess I am lucky and got a good board.

And indeed I'd like to stick to cards like GeForce4 to GeForce7.

And Intel Extreme Graphics 2 is horrible. I tried to play Super Crate Box (free indie title on Steam), and it didn't work. It did run on the GeForce2 GTS.
I only run Windows XP, but for security measures I might dualboot it with Lubuntu or something. I don't really like it's interface, not as easy to use and less user friendly.

But I am not really wanting to pick a card up from eBay or some other site. By the time it arrives it's dead and I need to go repair it after spending about 15 bucks on one.

Also, the games I currently run are various titles in DOSBox, as well as Half-Life Uplink, Counter-Strike 1.6 and Condition Zero (Steam) and of course Super Crate Box.

Also, I'd like to add that I might install a sound card in there (for more ease of use and MIDI in and out), or maybe Yamaha S-YXG50 softsynth VST (the program itself doesn't work, as it takes XGlite's samples instead of it's own).

Can anyone suggest a really good PCI sound card?

It all depends on what you want out of that PCI sound card. I always liked my old Terratec DMX 6Fire 24/96. It had proper DIN midi in and out connectors, good low latency ASIO drivers, hardware phono- and microphone preamps. Only reason I'm not still using it for my main PC is the lack of Windows 7 drivers. I do have the USB equivalent though. It's got no midi synth though, as it was inteded for semi-pro usage, which generally means you'd be likely to use VSTs or external hardware midi synths. But as it's no longer being manufactured I guess the only place you can find one is eBay, and you said you weren't really interested in buying anything from there.
I've so far not had a single dead piece of hardware via eBay, including sensitive things like cache chips and CPUs, so I wouldn't really be worried.

LunarG wrote:

It all depends on what you want out of that PCI sound card. I always liked my old Terratec DMX 6Fire 24/96. It had proper DIN midi in and out connectors, good low latency ASIO drivers, hardware phono- and microphone preamps. Only reason I'm not still using it for my main PC is the lack of Windows 7 drivers. I do have the USB equivalent though. It's got no midi synth though, as it was inteded for semi-pro usage, which generally means you'd be likely to use VSTs or external hardware midi synths. But as it's no longer being manufactured I guess the only place you can find one is eBay, and you said you weren't really interested in buying anything from there.
I've so far not had a single dead piece of hardware via eBay, including sensitive things like cache chips and CPUs, so I wouldn't really be worried.

Could just be the local mail. Someone told me that they asked if the postman knew what was inside the box. They have no clue, so they might've actually broken some hardware by accident.

I was thinking of repurposing this machine to host CS 1.6 through HLDS. I have always wanted to have a home game server, but since that hardware is so outdated, hosting anything newer than CS:S will be a pain. I have sufficient storage to do so, and can add a bunch of custom maps and plug-ins. I'll put up an update if I decide to do this.

I have a P4C800-E Deluxe currently in storage. It's a backup for the ABIT IC7-G currently in use on my video capture box. 3.4 GHz P4, 4 GB RAM, Windows 2000 Server, Matrox Marvel G450 TV card, and RocketRaid 454 with 8x400 GB IDE hard drives. Yes it's so retro it doesn't use any SATA drives.

2fort5r wrote:

I have a P4C800-E Deluxe currently in storage. It's a backup for the ABIT IC7-G currently in use on my video capture box. 3.4 GHz P4, 4 GB RAM, Windows 2000 Server, Matrox Marvel G450 TV card, and RocketRaid 454 with 8x400 GB IDE hard drives. Yes it's so retro it doesn't use any SATA drives.

Cool. Mine doesn't use SATA either, but apparently my board does support PATA and SATA. I only had IDEs around though.

Also, I have a Creative 3DBlaster Voodoo2 which I might put in here along with the GeForce2 GTS. Is this a good choice?

I had a big stack of old IDE drives and didn't know what to do with them, so decided to build a system around them. I wouldn't put any vital data on this machine though, it's used only for temporary storage of uncompressed video.

When I used a P4 as my main gaming machine it had first a GeForce 6200, then a 7600GS, both 256MB. They were good cards as I recall, but then I mainly played older games so never really stressed them. You should definitely be aiming higher than a GeForce 2.

I also like Zalman coolers. All my P4 rigs used the CNPS7000-Cu.

TwOne wrote:

2fort5r wrote:

I have a P4C800-E Deluxe currently in storage. It's a backup for the ABIT IC7-G currently in use on my video capture box. 3.4 GHz P4, 4 GB RAM, Windows 2000 Server, Matrox Marvel G450 TV card, and RocketRaid 454 with 8x400 GB IDE hard drives. Yes it's so retro it doesn't use any SATA drives.

Cool. Mine doesn't use SATA either, but apparently my board does support PATA and SATA. I only had IDEs around though.

Also, I have a Creative 3DBlaster Voodoo2 which I might put in here along with the GeForce2 GTS. Is this a good choice?

My P4P800-VM has SATA too. However I use a 80GB SATA HDD on it.

And wanted to ask out of curiosity,can a FX5200 128MB 64 bit AGP video card run GTA San Andreas on Windows 7? Sorry if this is not a retro question but I was planning to do so and I wanted to know if it will work.

PcBytes wrote:

TwOne wrote:

2fort5r wrote:

I have a P4C800-E Deluxe currently in storage. It's a backup for the ABIT IC7-G currently in use on my video capture box. 3.4 GHz P4, 4 GB RAM, Windows 2000 Server, Matrox Marvel G450 TV card, and RocketRaid 454 with 8x400 GB IDE hard drives. Yes it's so retro it doesn't use any SATA drives.

Cool. Mine doesn't use SATA either, but apparently my board does support PATA and SATA. I only had IDEs around though.

Also, I have a Creative 3DBlaster Voodoo2 which I might put in here along with the GeForce2 GTS. Is this a good choice?

My P4P800-VM has SATA too. However I use a 80GB SATA HDD on it.

And wanted to ask out of curiosity,can a FX5200 128MB 64 bit AGP video card run GTA San Andreas on Windows 7? Sorry if this is not a retro question but I was planning to do so and I wanted to know if it will work.

It runs San Andreas fine. Best performance is in XP SP2/SP3. Windows 7 only has really outdated drivers that were originally designed for Vista use only. The drivers you will most likely want to use are 96.85 or 97.34. Do disable Aero effects for good fps though.

TwOne wrote:

It runs San Andreas fine. Best performance is in XP SP2/SP3. Windows 7 only has really outdated drivers that were originally designed for Vista use only. The drivers you will most likely want to use are 96.85 or 97.34. Do disable Aero effects for good fps though.

The Vista driver is 96.85 and it's WHQL,according to the nVidia site.