Retro'03 (Later '04)

[EldarNi]

Hello. Even that I don't like to write I want to show you guys that you can have a lot of fun and not pay that much.

The idea was to build my old pc to play what is in my memory the best games of that time.

I've spent hours and days playing them and I kinda wanted return back in time.

So I went on ebay and bought AMD Athlon 2600+ CPU, some MB, ram and cpu cooler.

I picked up a case at work, it was some old HP pc.

GPU I wanted was nvidia 6600GT AGP or Radeon 9800 Pro, it was pretty expensive on ebay, sometimes reaching 35 GBP.

But then I found a deal on 2 gpu's 6600GT and 6800 Ultra for 20 quid.

 

So let's dig into the case. It has 300W PSU, dual core E4500 processor, sata DVD and 320GB hdd. I left psu, dvd and hdd. Everything else going away.

 

 

The layout is horrible, no front intake, noisy 92mm fan at the back. I might mod it in the future.

Front power button and led's introduced as single 9 pin connector, similar to front usb. It could be a problem. 

So the case options for you are some Inwin cases, I find them to be pretty good with a standard layout.

I choose matx size since I don't want another full atx pc, but simply want to play an old games.

Such us this one and it's only 24GBP

[EldarNi]

So let's look now into the components that will go in.

Athlon 2600+ cpu, socket 462, 1.93GHz =6.49GBP

Unfortunately I have not found any nforce2 400 M/B, so I got the cheapest one with support of 333/400 MHz BUS

AOpen VKM400 AM-S  (no overclocking capabilities, but at least 2 sata ports and I could save on PATA HDD and use mine) =7.99GBP

 

 

Then GPU's arrived, here is what I had in 2004-2005

Nvidia 6600GT 128MB AGP =10GBP

It requires 1 molex connector as additional power.

 

 

Everything look tidy 

 

 

After that a cooler and ram showed up, I choose as massive heatsink as possible and some fancy ram modules

AMD Athlon XP Cooling Fan Heatsink for XP 2800-3000-3100-3200 Socket A-462 =0.99 + 2.35GBP postage

1GB DDR RAM GeIL PC3200 2x 512 MB, 400 MHz 184-pin =4.00 + 1.19GBP postage

 

 

 

all cleaned from dust and new thermal paste applied.

 

 

only to discover that both GPU's are dead.

So back on ebay for replacement.

[EldarNi]

I followed a theme a bit and purchased a HP keyboard and mouse =5GBP

And possibly I would need a good PSU to power up nvidia 6800 cards (another one was on the way)

A-Open Z450 450W =9.78GBP

 

 

 

And then I got 6800GS for 12 pounds and 80mm led fan and it was a wrong size,

 

 

and gpu had artifacts so I returned it, got refund and bought 6800 Ultra,

 

 

and that one was dead as well. When I got refund again I found ATi 9700 Pro and it was finally a working card.

 

[EldarNi]

After installing a gpu I discovered that sata ports weren't working.

So I replaced it with Gigabyte GA-8S661FXMP Socket 478 800MHz motherboard

And Pentium 4 3.2 GHz processor (I always wanted to try P4 with HyperThreading), that's how I moved into year 2004 

 

 

But the cooler on video card was annoyingly winy and this is what I was going to do

 

 

It was really hard to remove, the heatsink was glued with cement-like paste and while trying to remove it with a credit card from a chip my hand slipped and I scratched a few surrounding resistors off the gpu... cry me. I needed a new card. Luckily there was one, ATi Radeon X800 Pro for 15GBP in total. Not bad and it suits my 2004 build perfectly.

 

 

 

The cost of the new components was 15 for the mb, 9.95 for a cpu cooler, 6 pounds for P4 processor.

 

And this is my final system, my Retro'04 dream PC.

 

PS: I know it's not X800Pro in the pic, I have to take a new one yet.

 

I have installed a few games that I loved back then, such as TES Morrowind, NFS Underground 1 & 2, Starwars games (Commando, KOTOR etc), Halo and my favorite No One Lives Forever. I've spent a few days playing NFS and I can't stop, it's so addictive. Even with a 1024*768 resolution on 21" display .

I think I'll keep this system forever.

 

Thanks for visiting my build log. I hope you enjoyed scrolling down this page.

[Atomicnerd64]

-snip-

duuuuude that's so cool...now I really want a computer like that (to put pfsense on it but whatever)

[EldarNi]

Thanks, mate. It was enjoyable to build it as much as to play on it! 

[baldee]

Sweet.