Gigabyte GA-586DX Retro Goodness

[Topcat]

What's so special about this one? hmmm...

Closer look:



Yes, that's a dual socket 7 board....the only one ever made in standard ATX form-factor. Every other dual socket 7 board was either AT or proprietary.

Mated up with a pair of Pentium Classic 233MMX CPU's, and 256mb RAM.



Recapped of course.



Attic find.....yellowing ATX case. Looks like I'll have to mix a batch of my yellow removing serum.



I should have played the lottery!! Of all the f*cking odds!! This case had the correct IO shield for this motherboard....I'm usually never this lucky!



Not sure exactly what path this one will take....it was a bit of an unplanned/impromptu build.....

[jiroy]

One of reasons I keep similar old boards , in perfect conditions , is POS systems for many of my clients . I was saved , or better say , they were saved many times from loosing their Data's and bills .

The main idea is a matching board that can ignite their 98 or XP systems without crashes or bluescreens . Had many successes doing that and i say it was worth the results and returns ...

This one needs an Nvidia , a PCI TV and a windows 98 SE . A scusi or a 10 000 RPM Hard (they were very rare ) and it will live forever .

[370forlife]

I've been getting really into retro systems lately. The fact that it is ATX is way cool. I have been trying to hunt down a dual socket 7 AT board at a reasonable price.

[Topcat]

Originally Posted by 370forlife

I've been getting really into retro systems lately. The fact that it is ATX is way cool. I have been trying to hunt down a dual socket 7 AT board at a reasonable price.

I have one.

[Topcat]

Kind of taking some direction with this build, but pondering it a little while I get the 'usual stuff' done.

Metal parts of the case washed & dried.



Plastics bathing in the yellowing removal soup:



Starting to reassemble.





Much better!!


hardware-wise, a few interesting things have turned up in the parts boxes...such as an 8mb Matrox Millennium PCI GPU (2mb base with the 6mb expansion module). I bought this new way back when..... I also uncovered an AWE64 ISA sound card. I think there's a voodoo1 around here somewhere too. I have a voodoo2, but that's a couple years newer than this system's era.

[stj]

stick a pair of AMD K6-2 450's in it if the bios supports them!

[Topcat]

Originally Posted by stj

stick a pair of AMD K6-2 450's in it if the bios supports them!

Nope. It's intel only, 60 & 66 MHz FSB. This is too old for that. I didn't think K6-2's supported SMP either.

[Topcat]

This one is about done....except the voodoo2 VGA passthrough cable seems to have sprouted legs....but I did find a pair of AWE64's, so I have another one for another project.





...and up & running...



...but look what I found when in the attic looking for something else:





After a hotwash:





Another build to come in due time.

[Topcat]

Dug up a lot of bones with this little chunk of old PC witchcraft!!









After about an hour of digging through the dustballs of adaptec firmware archives....more later.

[kaboom]

Gotta keep it short for now, but those Octeks are neat. Bet it POSTed like it was just turned off yesterday. Don't forget to DeOx (or equivalent) the cache module's contacts if ya haven't already.

The late AT era, where chipsets became much more integrated over a short time, evolving from many individual parts with 74xx tying things together, to highly integrated subsections- DMA/RTC, CPU/RAM, IO bus(ses)/FSB, with a sprinkling for "glue logic."


A little BIOS modding I see on the GigaByte? Enjoy your AWE(some)64.

[Stefan Payne]

Too bad that K6-2 won't run in pairs on that board...
Especially a pair of K6-3(+) would be nice

[stj]

k6-III are rare as hell though.

[Stefan Payne]

Yeah, but has L2 Cache on Die.
That could rape a dual Pentium 2 System in Integer Loads.

[ratdude747]

Too late now, but I have a Still-in-wrapped-box Voodoo 3 PCI GPU sitting. Probably worth something still being in shrink wrap though. The shit people give me for free... sometimes even losers win I guess.

[Topcat]

Originally Posted by ratdude747

Too late now, but I have a Still-in-wrapped-box Voodoo 3 PCI GPU sitting. Probably worth something still being in shrink wrap though. The shit people give me for free... sometimes even losers win I guess.

I could work it in somewhere.

[brethin]

That Ocktek board looks very familiar,. Looks like one I think I sent you in a big box off goodies.

[Topcat]

^
It might be....it's been here a long time.

I tossed 4x 128mb SIMM's in it, RAM is now maxed @ 512mb. The scsi raid setup isn't playing nice, and performs awful.....but I have some more ideas!!

[brethin]

It was a great board when I used it, long long ago.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Originally Posted by Topcat

Most of the case back, especially the plugs, scream late-1990s to the Bush Jr. era, at least most of the Bush Jr. era, anyways.
In the Bush Jr. era, it was basically the same thing, but with spots for USB connectors and onboard audio was common, thus holes for the mini plugs.

For me, it's like a flashback of 2003! Like when I got my biggest PC upgrade in 2 years, on July 1, 2003!

[Topcat]

Just a little update on this system.....I was bored this morning and felt like tinkering with something....and dragged this useless but fun system out.... Win2k didn't perform that great on this, and since there's no USB, its a great NT4 candidate.... All the hardware has NT4 support, and I actually had all the drivers in my archive....so what the hell!!







Firefox 2.0.0.20 is the last version of Firefox supported by NT....and functions good (compared to FF3.8 & FF12 on Win2k). Age of Empires also functions nicely....funny thing is, it performs no better on modern hardware than this system!!