Question Abit VP6 Fully refurbished

[zapbuzz]

Hi,
I have just finished building an Abit VP6 PC Tower.
I Built it out of new old stock and refurbished motherboard.
Heres whats in it:
1000 watt PSU
Abit VP6 motherboard
2 gigabytes of PC133 SDRAM
2 X Pentium III cpus with gold orb heatsinks.
128mb Albatron Nvidia AGP GPU @ 2X
2 x maxtor diamondmax 40gb ATA133 disks on ATA100 bus
48x CD Burner
Is running XP PRO retail legit activated.
So first up I have installed Yamaha's software synthesizer the XG50 for XP
and i have put dosbox into it for dos games.
I haven't bothered making a dual boot win9x / xp system and i skipped 2000 because XP is like 2000 mk2 anyhow.
I have run the disks in raid2 from BIOS it has been interestingly responsive
The motherboard RAM is the low density single sided type thus it is probably the fastest available (especially now)
So now I have this dual cpu system whats some good things I can do with it?
I can do low res video encoding thanks to nero 7, audacity can record audio, i can record midi music through anvil studio and i have dosbox up and played duke nukem and commander keen side scrollers but I'm in need of ideas of what I can do with it like is there any pentium III era games still played online?
i think all up the system is worth $1200 just for the tower setup so the old stuff held up in value being almost entirely new.
Whats a good SATA PCI Card I can use to boot SATA with? perhaps a 4 port PCI RAID i gots lots of SATA disks than PATA.

 

[Iron Woode]

seems like a 1000 w PSU is way too much. Would run fine with a HQ gold 450 or so PSU.

I have one with 2 PIII 1000s. I haven't used it in years.

 

[Magic Carpet]

Whats a good SATA PCI Card I can use to boot SATA with?

Something like this. You want Sil3114 chipset. 1k PSU is definitely an overkill. My retro box consumes less than 100 watts full load for example (PIII-S 1400, 1 stick of 512 mb ram, Voodoo 5500 and Awe64, 1 spinner and 1 cdrom). I only have Windows Me on it.

is there any pentium III era games still played online?

Good question. Maybe quake or doom? Definitely UT99, though.

 

[zapbuzz]

Something like this. You want Sil3114 chipset. 1k PSU is definitely an overkill. My retro box consumes less than 100 watts full load for example (PIII-S 1400, 1 stick of 512 mb ram, Voodoo 5500 and Awe64, 1 spinner and 1 cdrom). I only have Windows Me on it.


Good question. Maybe quake or doom? Definitely UT99, though.

I used the 1000 watt supply that it was around and new I've run wime on this box it was surprisingly good though it couldn't do 2 cpu's. Thanks for the games advice It'd be dissapointing putting all the effort without some fun time.
I actually own 2 of those SATA cards that look like that so i'll dig them out and see if I can boot with them.

 

[zapbuzz]

seems like a 1000 w PSU is way too much. Would run fine with a HQ gold 450 or so PSU.

I have one with 2 PIII 1000s. I haven't used it in years.

I think the VP6 is near its 10 year anniversary and there isn't many around anymore because those people who injected microcode into the bios and ran tullatins only had them running for about a year before they burnt out their chipsets. I built it up because I was around when they were released it wasn't just a buisness class thing its still got potentual as retro stock for NT windows I did run linux but its just the same old gnome

 

[zapbuzz]

Its latest BIOS is 1 version behind in its built in RAID module so I want to make my own MOD the thing is where the heck am i going to find the correct version of bios modding tools its been like almost 10 years since this thing hit the market!
The last time I did a BIOS mod it was from a infamous package called BORG's BIOS tools that dude vanished luv to get his offering again *sigh*

 

[Iron Woode]

I think the VP6 is near its 10 year anniversary and there isn't many around anymore because those people who injected microcode into the bios and ran tullatins only had them running for about a year before they burnt out their chipsets. I built it up because I was around when they were released it wasn't just a buisness class thing its still got potentual as retro stock for NT windows I did run linux but its just the same old gnome

there's not many around because they were expensive and only worked properly with NT based or linux OSes so Abit didn't sell a lot of them, either.

The cool thing is it takes either regular or ECC ram modules.

 

[Magic Carpet]

Thanks for the games advice It'd be dissapointing putting all the effort without some fun time

Also, check out this list. I still play Diablo 2 and StarCraft, occasionally.