Topcat's Other Misc Weird Build Thread

[Dan81]

I have a retro build in the works as well... waiting on my friend to send the board and CPU my way.

Topcat, how's KG7-RAID and an AXIA steppin' Athlon sound for such a build? 😎

That, and I also sniped a MSI ZX bugger w/ onboard V3 2000 8MB, the MS-6168. Fun times ahead, it's full of Chhsi.

[Topcat]

370forlife, very nice work! No worries posting it in this thread.

[sam_sam_sam]

Very nice restoration of this computer and one less thing in the landfill

[370forlife]

Are others allowed to post builds here too 😁?

I went on a bit of a nostalgia trip and have been building a collection that spans my childhood, starting with a 486 up to the P4/Athlon 64 era.



This is my latest build, I thought Topcat would get a kick out of this. This first part is scarce of pictures, bare with me as I word vomit. Picked up this case at a local auction along with a few other computers. I wasn't too fired up about it as I thought it was just a crap basic Vista-era build by a local computer shop, and it was, but it wound up being the one I was most excited about. Cracking it open revealed a somewhat unusual Biostar K8M800 board, a socket AM2 board with SATA and DDR2 but still rocking AGP with a VIA chipset and an Athlon 64 3500+. I thought this would make an ideal XP era build. One of the computers in the lot had a name tag with an unusual last name that I recognized, and it turns out all these computers belonged to my wife's uncle's parents, a bit of a small world I guess.

I had an AGP 7600GT on the shelf, but it would not post with it installed. It was filthy, so I gave it a bath in hot water and simple green and scrubbed it down, blew it out with compressed air and let it dry overnight. It would now post, but with terrible artifacts. This era of AGP cards are notorious for crapping out like this, so I gambled on another one from eBay that was sold as working. It was better, at least no artifacting, but Nvidia drivers refused to detect it, and in windows it was running in VGAsave mode. I also had a PCI Radeon 9000 card laying around, also unknown condition, but it had some classic blown Sacon FZ caps on it. I recapped it, however it exhibited the same behavior, windows drivers and ATI drivers refused to recognize it and it was too running in VGAsave. I gave up on this board, I don't know if it was the VIA chipset and onboard graphics interfering or if all these video cards were bad. I also noticed that AGP versions of cards from this era are fetching a huge premium over their PCI-E counterparts ($100+ compared to $20), so I decided on a different route.

In highschool I had built a supermicro X6DAL-G board and I really liked that thing as it was a dual 604 board with PCI-E that would fit in a regular ATX case. A quick search on eBay showed a few results, I fired off a few offers for reasonable amounts, but was rebuffed. I looked around at similar boards, and found the X6DAL-TB2 which appeared to be the identical board but with the Adaptec SATA Raid controller populated. I sent what I thought was an insultingly low offer, but it was accepted. I also bought the fastest Irwindale Xeon 3.8GHz and some DDR-333 registered/ECC sticks.

When it showed up, I threw it together on a test bench and ran into an issue with the ram. It turns out the X6DAL-G uses DDR-266/333, however, the X6DAL-TB2, despite being identical with the same Tumwater E7525 chipset, uses DDR2-400. I had some registered/ECC DDR2-533 sticks on the shelf I threw in there thinking they will just run at the lower DDR2-400 speed, but the system wouldn't post. Fans would spin, CPU would get hot, but no beep codes, no display, keyboard was dead. My first thought was the bios was too old to support this CPU. Supermicro's website says it supports Nocona/Irwindale, but the manual only mentions Nocona. Supermicro is of absolutely no help as well, they do not have any drivers or bios images for this series of boards on their website anymore. I put in a support ticket and was told its just too old, go pound sand, despite the fact they have still have bios images for ancient Socket 7 boards. So thinking this has a very old BIOS version that only supports Nocona, I bought a Nocona 2.8 just for testing (can I just say how nice it is how cheap hardware is from this era? I think I paid $4 shipped for this CPU). I also ordered 2x2GB of the correct DDR2-400 registered/ECC sticks just in case.

I popped in the Nocona and same deal, no dice. Swapped in the DDR2-400 and presto, it posts! Swapped that Irwindale back in, and there we go, posts just fine, recognized in the bios.

Now for cooling, we all know about Netburst and this one was running at 3.8GHz so I knew keeping these cool in a regular ATX sized case would be a challenge. Socket 604 coolers are expensive and hard to find, and when you do find them, they are often made for low profile systems like 1U or 2U servers, not ideal for a workstation. I had a pair of old Coolermaster 212 Evos on the shelf that were missing all their mounting hardware. No matter, as I was going to have to make hardware from scratch. I took some measurements and designed some brackets to mount to socket 604, printed them out in PLA to test and then in ABS. Here are how they look.

Base that goes under the motherboard. This is the first version I made in PLA to test fitment, PLA is no good for this as it will begin to soften around 60C which as we know is no problem for an old Netburst to well exceed:


Brackets for the cooler itself. They are 2 pieces that have to be bolted together on the heatsink as the bracket will not fit in one piece.


How they fit on the heatsink:


All together:


These seem to work great so far. I threaded the bosses on the bottom plate in 8-32. It seems to provide good clamping without too much pressure bending the board or anything. Time will tell how they hold up as the plastic relaxes, ABS is more resilient and should do fine, but I may need to come back and make the heatsink brackets out of something more springy and metal.

I printed a 2.5 to 3.5" adapter and threw in a 120GB SATA SSD, an old 512mb 9800GT I had bought new way back when and powered it with an appropriate 420w Ablecom tank of a power supply that appears to be made exactly for this motherboard based on the cable lengths. Ablecom being Supermicro themselves and this being the exact wattage Supermicro recommends for this board. Man I realize how spoiled we are now-a-days with cable management. Optical drives being almost non-existent and M.2 drives really clean up the interior of a build. It is now running great and boots up XP 64bit no problem. CPU temps are hanging around 70C max, but this is with a single CPU installed. A second one is on the way, along with a Soundblaster X-Fi. I have nicknamed this one the spaceheater, as the amount of hot air that comes out of it when you push it is pretty amazing. An intake fan and a beefier 120mm exhaust fan are in order.

[Topcat]

Very nice! Seems that a lot of the OGs packed their bags and went home when the forum software was upgraded. Also, Jasc PSP8? Crikey that's old! And does Windows like to eat LM's bootloader on you?

PSP8 = oldie but simple....and a goodie.

It's UEFI booting with grub, Quite a few updates and never hosed the bootloader.

[TechGeek]

Very nice! Seems that a lot of the OGs packed their bags and went home when the forum software was upgraded. Also, Jasc PSP8? Crikey that's old! And does Windows like to eat LM's bootloader on you?

[Topcat]

We interrupt your regularly scheduled build to show off Topcat's completely pimped out Precision T7910.

Yes, I know I'm a terrible former BCN owner; I don't post much now nor keep these thread going.....but I'll throw you guys a bone with this one. It's Topcat's mega pimp T7910 now, I finally tracked down a couple of the liquid coolers that were optional from Dell for these. Not an easy feat....and I actually got them cheap. I'm not sure how many of our OG's are still here that really care about my goofy builds anymore.






Made by Asetek; and their weird locking collars.



Installing them was a treat. RAM air guides and the RAM had to be removed. Yes, I did upgrade the CPU's to something that'd be a little more befitting of liquid cooling!



Installed finally.



Here we are!!



Now for some more fun! These coolers blow air from their bases outward to the case side, not AFT like the air coolers. There's a special vented side made for these cases that had the liquid cooled option. They are available but expensive. They cost $100, which is more than I even paid for the coolers!! I refused to pay that much for a piece of stamped sheet metal with a handle in it.....so now I really get to make it mine!! 🙈

If I'm going to butcher the side panel, might as well make it count!! Add some active airflow!



Checking clearances, and no problem. These are 20mm fans, not 25mm. However, 25mm would have cleared none the less. Ironically enough, these fans were rear exhaust fans I saved from a bunch of Optiplex 390SFF systems I scrapped.



Peeled the sticker off; no saving it.



Here was the only expense associated with this mod. $13 shipped for 5x 80mm fan grills with covers. I only needed 3, so I have 2 left.



Laid out with the spacing I wanted.



Everything marked.



First was to drill the holes.



...and the cutting begins!! Thanks to the thin crappy metal all the 'big box' systems use now, it was easy to cut with my dremel.



All 3 cut, deburred, and cleaned up.



Mounting the fans up....





Covers installed. These fans are exhausts, I didn't use the filter material....there's really no need for exhaling fans.



Now to wire this into the system. These are 3-wire fans @ 12v. Pretty loud. There are no unused fan headers on the motherboard, so I simply powered them off the 5v rail. They're probably running @ ~1500RPM. Move plenty of air and quiet. Considering the Dell solution didn't even have active cooling, it's a win!



Easy peasy!!





...and done!!





Ohh, and it dual boots to Linux....which anymore is my go-to OS. I've just really had my fill of what Windows has become these days.



This pimp-a-liscious T7910 now has every option available to it!!

Precision T7910
2x Xeon E5-2687W v4 @ 3GHz x12 cores per CPU. 24 cores 48 threads
128GB ECC DDR4
2x Quadro K5200 8GB GPU's in SLI; 16gb dedicated video RAM
1TB M.2 boot storage
12G SAS adapter w/ 8 bays for storage expansion
Linux Mint 22 & Win10 Enterprise

[RJARRRPCGP]

Post testing, as I'm having unexpected restrictions! (Issues with board software) (Firefox 127.0.2)

[Topcat]

I'd like to stumble upon one more of these cases and mod it with a window with modern guts....

Ask and ye shall receive. Had another red bezel XPS 630i dropped off last week (same customer that dropped off the other one). PSU bad; heard something *snap* in it when I plugged it in, no powerup and no STBY. I was not able to identify what snapped. Fuse good....all sink'd transistors good (not shorted at least, no smoke, no stink, nothing visibly burnt). Not going waste much more time on it, they can be had all day long for ~$30. This case can also take a standard ATX PSU....but anyway, retested the board with another PSU, and it works....but I'm not going to restore this one to original condition. This one did not come with the liquid cooler....and I can't seem to find another one.... Just going to store it away until I figure out what I want to do with it. Case is in fabulous condition, just the usual dirty for something approaching 20yrs old.

[sam_sam_sam]

Very nice restoration on this computer

[Topcat]

Yeah. A simple explanation: it may not POST at a range of FSBs (let's use 390-401 as example) but will work at the first FSB digit outside that range. (like 389 or 402). nForce 600 and 700 were fairly notorious of this issue.

As long as the XPS doesn't allow FSBs outside the standard speeds (e.g 333, 667, 800, 1066, 1333, 1600, and I think 1866 as well?) you'll likely be fine. It's only OC-ing that is a pain on those.

You weren't joking about that chipset being a little on the fickle side.... I've read horror stories about running more than 4gb RAM in it.... I got a couple BSoD's with memory-related errors. The modules are good and nothing is overclocked. It wasn't a big deal, only happened a couple times after days of abuse....usually happens at boot.

Anyway..... Here's to a beautiful restoration of an XPS 630i. I absolutely love these cases, so pleasant to work with, they breathe very well, and they just have a great look.

This one was filthy....and taking these apart is a chore.







Down to the bones....




Parts.



It was skuzzy enough it had to be washed. It was cold that day, so I made due with the sink instead of taking it outside and using the hose.



Everything washed....and going back together.






Repasted the NB chip after cleaning the board & Heatsink.



Power supply recapped & reinstalled.



Motherboard reinstalled with the liquid cooler.




GPU's installed.



...and away we go!!



That cleverly placed lighting....



SLI baby!



Some quick load testing & temp checking. These CPU's run miserably hot to begin with, so these temps weren't bad versus air cooling... It was still a bit warm under load but nothing to get excited about.

No load:



CPU-Z stress test loads:



...and done!!



The specs:

Dell XPS 630i
CPU: Xeon X5470 quad core @ 3.33GHz
RAM: 8GB DDR2
GPU: 2x GTX285 in SLI
120GB SSD w/ win7 pro
750W Dell PSU. Still don't know who makes these....but they're well built and very solid.

I'd like to stumble upon one more of these cases and mod it with a window with modern guts.... There's a couple of these on fleabay.....but priced more than I'd go for it to possibly be butchered....but this one is wrapped up. Nice addition to the restored retro fleet.

[Topcat]

CPU came the other day for this.....now we're cookin'!! I didn't even have to hack up hte BIOS to make this work....Dell quietly had the microcode in their BIOS for Xeons. Unusual for Dell...but perhaps done because it was their 'higher end' machine. Tested using air cooling.



Now to test the liquid cooler.



Some AS5 on the CPU.



In the oven. This was an interesting setup for testing outside of its intended environment.



...and memtesting away... Under this load, it was holding @ ~46*C, good for this CPU. Ambient temp in the room was about 85*F. These CPU's (X5470) are hot-running to begin with.


The lid wouldn't shut with the radiator shroud in there....



Now to clean this up and then ready to move onto the case.....




More later.

[Topcat]

RDRAM performed very well at the time versus PC100/133 and early DDR1 in the 400/533fsb P4 period....just a short-lived era; as Intel hosed RAMBUS over (or visa versa) with the very over-priced memory. RDRAM era hardware gets more rare every day. Love it or hate it, it has a place in the PC retro kingdom.

[TechGeek]

My Dell Precision 220 has 512MB of RDRAM. Pretty zippy for what it was back then.

[Dan81]

I think I had a chap locally that bought all 4 of my RDRAM sticks. I couldn't find a cheap RDRAM board and honestly didn't really like it either... cooling them down didn't seem like an easy task.

For me it's either PC133 SDR (dunno why most people ran away from 845 SDR - it's an rather okay-ish and cheap alternative to Tualatin IMO) or DDR. Especially with the 820's flop, I'm pretty confident of staying away from RDRAM.

[Topcat]

Speaking of weird builds... I felt like torturing a old Northwood HT today. Netburst deserves no mercy



Northwood HT 2.8, 1TB Hitachi Ultrastar I had around (7200 RPM, nothing special), HD4870 1GB, 2x512MB DDR400, SATA ODD. All running XP, powered by ASRock's funky P4Dual-915GL mobo.

There's no way the CPU would keep up with the 4870 lol

Nice. Someone dropped off a Dimension 8250 system a while back. Supports Northwoods (533FSB max) and RDRAM. I haven't done anything with it yet....but I didn't send it to the R2 scrappers either.

[Dan81]

Speaking of weird builds... I felt like torturing a old Northwood HT today. Netburst deserves no mercy



Northwood HT 2.8, 1TB Hitachi Ultrastar I had around (7200 RPM, nothing special), HD4870 1GB, 2x512MB DDR400, SATA ODD. All running XP, powered by ASRock's funky P4Dual-915GL mobo.

There's no way the CPU would keep up with the 4870 lol

[Dan81]

Yeah, then you'll likely be fine. I can see it has active cooling on the northbridge so that's good - these nVidia chipsets were really crispy.
(not that their AMD counterparts were any less cooler )

[Topcat]

Yeah. A simple explanation: it may not POST at a range of FSBs (let's use 390-401 as example) but will work at the first FSB digit outside that range. (like 389 or 402). nForce 600 and 700 were fairly notorious of this issue.

As long as the XPS doesn't allow FSBs outside the standard speeds (e.g 333, 667, 800, 1066, 1333, 1600, and I think 1866 as well?) you'll likely be fine. It's only OC-ing that is a pain on those.

Ok, thanks for the info. I don't plan on any overclocking....this one is more of a resto with a Xeon CPU mod; I won't overclock it.

[Dan81]

Yeah. A simple explanation: it may not POST at a range of FSBs (let's use 390-401 as example) but will work at the first FSB digit outside that range. (like 389 or 402). nForce 600 and 700 were fairly notorious of this issue.

As long as the XPS doesn't allow FSBs outside the standard speeds (e.g 333, 667, 800, 1066, 1333, 1600, and I think 1866 as well?) you'll likely be fine. It's only OC-ing that is a pain on those.