Slot-A Athlon build!

[Kai Robinson]

As i'm as old as the dirt beneath my feet, when Slot-A stuff came out, I was rocking a Pentium II 233Mhz (running at 266MHz), on an Intel i440LX board. Over the years I couldn't afford anything on that side of things despite being in AWE of the Pentium III crushing device from AMD, the perennial underdog in the x86 race at the time - instead getting a Celeron 333A and overclocking that on a slocket adapter, swapping the graphics card from a Matrox G400 MAX to a Riva TNT etc.

When I got word that Analogic Computers in the UK had NEW-OLD-STOCK Motherboards AND Athlon CPU's (Original Argon core), I jumped at the chance!

I had enough SDRAM in a box to give it plenty (2x128MB PC100 sticks), already had an AWE64 sound card and PCI Network card, @mitchkramez sent me a 32MB Diamond Viper V770 nVidia Riva TNT2 (period correct!) and after 3D-Printing an ATX Testbench to set it up, i found a 6.4GB Seagate IDE drive and a floppy drive and connected it all together.

Made a Windows 98 boot floppy and made a Memtest86 v4 floppy and...

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It works! Literally first time boot up, it worked! As you can see, I used Memtest86 for a few passes to see if it was stable and it was. As this board was new in the box, it's never been powered on and the capacitors are in minty fresh condition.

Problem though is that it doesn't support USB booting (i didn't even consider that!). No matter, I have a Sony IDE CD-ROM drive! Which...doesn't work.

Ah crap! I've got a Hitachi GD-2500 DVD drive on order for £7 from eBay which should allow me to install Windows 2000 from scratch, then it's a case of shoving it all back in the InWin A500 case that @Stinkerton18 rescued for me from an eWaste auction...

 

[Trash80toG4]

Very cool, love boards with PCI AND !SA slots on board. Beautiful case, one of my favorites here.

edit: found this, didn't realize they were still in business. CRAZY Cool stuff!

 

[Kai Robinson]

It took a few more days but...IT'S DONE! Needed to wait for the Hitachi GD-2500 4x DVD drive (same one I had back in the day, OMG the tray noise was a ratatouille/anton ego memory/flashback!) in order to load Windows 2000 off of CD.

I swapped the GPU for a GeForce 2 Ti - kinda appropriate age for this thing, too, as the GTS )which it essentially is) released early April 2000.

Decided to load it up with Windows 2000 and a generic Realtek RTL8169 NIC and...it just worked, the drivers for the NIC were the only thing i really needed! I enabled SMB 1.0/CIFS on my network so they could talk, created a file share on the Athlon machine and used Daemon Tools to mount a few ISO's i might have been hoarding for a while...

It runs Quake III Arena like a dream - look! LOOK!!!

BUTTERY SMOOOOOOOTH! Damn, 18 year old me would have been bouncing off the walls with this setup!

I think the only thing i'll do at this point, is swap the hard disk for a 20GB model and leave it otherwise as-is. OK, maybe i'll spray paint the case to get rid of the rust...OH GOD I CAN'T HELP MYSELF!

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Awesome bit of TOTC kit.