wierd_w Posted April 29, 2020 Share Posted April 29, 2020 So, digging around in my closets, I have managed to scrape together the following items: Athlon 64 CPU (did not bother to look at the speed, consider it unimportant.) A motherboard with appropriate socket. (features both SATA and IDE connections, and a floppy controller. Has integrated sound and video. New enough to have PCIe 16x slot, but also has legacy PCI slots. The caps do not have blown or bulged vents, and no spooge, so visually looks OK?) An ESS AudioDrive PCI card. (which *should* do SB16 emulation) A suitable CPU cooler (and a tube of arctic silver) Some junker SATA drives (and cables) A 3.5" diskette drive -w cable An old full tower size case. Is is really worth the hassle of hunting down some DDR2 RAM, and putting a PSU in the empty chassis to get this thing working? It's too modern/fast to be a proper retro DOS game system-- But it *DOES* have a floppy controller... Should I just sit on it for another 10 years, and then claim it as a classic system? (lol) I kinda want to find a purpose for it, but... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carlsson Posted April 29, 2020 Share Posted April 29, 2020 It sounds like a "tweener". You could use it both for transferring downloaded software to floppy (other older PC's), various interfaces with serial or parallel connection if you have non-PC computers etc, perhaps an internal file server if you would have other networked systems but I think there are more power efficient solutions for that. Sure it'd run Windows XP alright, depending on driver support also Windows 98/ME if you need that. Some older Win32 software might not run on newer versions of Windows, or you'd have hardware like scanners, EPROM programmers, those serial/parallel interfaces I mentioned that require an older Windows version. However it doesn't sound like a native DOS computer to me. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wierd_w Posted April 29, 2020 Author Share Posted April 29, 2020 well no, it is not a P54 or P55 series pentium system or anything. It's early 2010s in era, iirc... If memory serves, it does have a "sane" looking adapter rom region though. Just the CPU is just waaaaaaaaaaaaay too fast for retro dos games, many of which were timing sensitive. DOS itself should run just fine though. The power efficiency thing is what has me on the fence. I already have power sipping home NAS happily serving network files for me already. I have an i5 for modern PC gaming, and my laptop is well suited to early windows games, spec-wise. It just seems a shame to let it just sit and collect dust in a drawer though, since all I really need is a few sticks of ram and a PSU, and the dinosaur will live once more. Making floppies is about the best role I can envision for it, and that just seems... underwhelming. I am open to suggestions on what to do with it. I was only half joking about holding it for another 10 years, so I can claim it as an antique. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DragonGrafx-16 Posted April 30, 2020 Share Posted April 30, 2020 16 hours ago, wierd_w said: well no, it is not a P54 or P55 series pentium system or anything. It's early 2010s in era, iirc... If memory serves, it does have a "sane" looking adapter rom region though. Just the CPU is just waaaaaaaaaaaaay too fast for retro dos games, many of which were timing sensitive. DOS itself should run just fine though. The power efficiency thing is what has me on the fence. I already have power sipping home NAS happily serving network files for me already. I have an i5 for modern PC gaming, and my laptop is well suited to early windows games, spec-wise. It just seems a shame to let it just sit and collect dust in a drawer though, since all I really need is a few sticks of ram and a PSU, and the dinosaur will live once more. Making floppies is about the best role I can envision for it, and that just seems... underwhelming. I am open to suggestions on what to do with it. I was only half joking about holding it for another 10 years, so I can claim it as an antique. Early 2010s and DDR2? My old PC had an Athlon X4 (which I ordered late 2009) and it used DDR3... My early 2000s IBM P4 uses DDR2... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wierd_w Posted April 30, 2020 Author Share Posted April 30, 2020 I haven't looked too closely at the board in years. I will have to look it up properly before I order anything. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DragonGrafx-16 Posted April 30, 2020 Share Posted April 30, 2020 (edited) I do know some of the extreme budget AMD 64 boards used DDR2... mostly Sempron builds though... the cheap crap found in HP shitboxes... If your board has DDR3 it can be upgraded and still be usable with modern OSes. Edited April 30, 2020 by DragonGrafx-16 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wierd_w Posted May 7, 2020 Author Share Posted May 7, 2020 OK, got around to looking this up. The board is a RS690M03-8EKRHFS2H. It's made by Foxconn, and was/is an OEM part for an Acer Aspire M5100. Stickers indicate it was manufactured in 2008. Yes, it uses DDR2. It has a max installed capacity of 8gb, and has an AM2 socket. The board is straight up micro-ATX form factor. I don't remember gutting and keeping parts from an Aspire... but given how long ago, I suppose that makes sense. Probably somebody wanted to do an upgrade at some point, and I hooked them up, and just closeted the leftovers. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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