I ran Celeron 366a CPUs at 500mhz back in 1999. To get to 500, I had to lap the CPUs. I used a sheet of glass and 800 grit wet dry sandpaper under running water. It ran like that for about 3 years. I went to 533a Celerons at 600mhz sometime in 2004 and it ran like that until the caps failed and I replaced the system.
@@extrameatsammich I ran a 433 MHz Celeron at 540 MHz without any issues in a Lucky Star 6ABX2V board. The next step would be 650 MHz, but that was too much to ask. Still, I was happy with 540 MHz.
I ran a 400mhz celeron based laptop, bought it off ebay for college and he included a free copy of windows 98, It was a no name chinese brand i think where i saved a lot of money compared to an IBM , Compaq equivalent at the time. I remmeber thinking, i got a good chip and compontents why does the name matter? well turned out it kind of did in build quality, it didnt take long for the power connector to go on it. Great little laptop, only was able to play quake 2 on it/ Halfe life, quake 3 really needed a GPU,, and coincidentally thats when Geforce 256 release in 1999. A floormate in our dorm worked at a PC shop then and got one to play and he loaded up quake 3 arena for the fisr time and wow! seeing real GPU graphicss (shaders and what not) for the firs time was just stunning.
I have Intergraph TDZ 2000 workstation from 06/1999 running two 550mhz slot2 PIII Xeons and intense 3D 2200 graphics and 512 MB of RAM. Its a real monster!
300a celerons in both slot and socket variations were OC bangers... an 450mhz O/C was simple and could be had 99% of the time, with no issue. This is the cpu that really brought O/C'ing into the mainstream.
34 years since I've seen a cap let go like that! Power supply lab in tech school... us first-years are quietly setting up our breadboards and working our way through the lab exercise, then there was a loud POP and puff of smoke. All three instructors wandered over to two of my classmates' bench, and several second-years peeked around the corner from the TV lab. As far as everyone could figure, it was just a bad cap. The case popped off neat as you please, AND the shrink tubing was halfway off as well! The two classmates were picking paper bits out of everything for the rest of the lab period while trying to finish up with a new cap.
2003 was near the start of the Great Capacitor Plague. While rare, I have seen can sections pop or partially slip off vs the tops splitting or bursting
Uh huh. ;-) "Must've been a bad cap...", they said, sheepishly looking down at the bare legs, eternally grateful the polarity wasn't marked on them and that all the evidence of their carelessness was now strewn in tiny bits about the lab.
Marvelous! Love those old Antec cases and the wonderful paint colors you picked. That era is nostalgic for me because I was building computers by then. Intel had great yields so they routinely sold Celeron 300s that could have been sold as 450s.
@@Epictronics1 Hehe, I still have a Chieftec case, but the PSU failed many years ago. Jenpo caps... The case itself looks identical, but has a window (with a fan grille in the middle for some reason).
Man, seeing Abit brings me back, I haven't heard that brand in a long, long time. The first computer I built for myself when I was in high school for my birthday in either 2002 or 2003 was an Abit system. I got it on mwave, which is now long dead it looks like, so I don't have my old invoices... but as best I can remember I believe it was a KT7-A (non RAID), I remember it having an ISA slot. It was running an Athlon XP 2000+, 756MB of DDR RAM, and a GeForce 4 Ti 4600. I remember it being super easy to overclock, and underclock, I also remember my friends didn't have that great of computers so they asked me to underclock it whenever we had LAN parties so we were competing in games on similar playing fields. Sadly it got tossed in a move and now my oldest computer is the one i built in 2008.
A Chieftec/Antec case. Those were great. I had an Abit AW-8 Max as my first gaming rig I built and a Radeon video card. Abit were the best boards for the price point at that time.. Played Quake, Unreal/Unreal Tournament. I still have that machine and it still runs well.
That is one beautiful machine - great job. :) I'm grateful for the tip on the Golden Orbs, had no idea about those Titans. It sure looks great, and now i may be able to use one again! Looking forwards to the completion of that green box too. Dual P3 is my dream machine right now, been trying to source parts for awhile but it's not easy.
The magnetic in the lid of the PSU isn't a transformer, it's a power factor compensation choke for passive PFC. The shadiest PSUs skipped PFC circuit entirely, and the more modern active PFC runs at higher frequency so it uses a very modestly sized ring inductor on the main PCB, and then usually one big bulk primary cap instead of two smaller ones. The space saving from one of the caps makes room for the inductor. The two caps are designed to be bridged into a Delon voltage doubler scheme when used in 110V countries. This isn't necessary on an APFC, since it's topologically similar to a DC-DC boost converter with regulated output voltage of somewhere usually just short of 400 or 450V.
When I was building my 1999 dream machine, I looked up the release date of the Chieftec Dragon case, since I had one. I found a review from 2001, so I thought it must be it and bought a flimsy full tower, which was not as deep and the 3,5” drive cage (which was removable) barely cleared my SCSI cables. I was about to comment here that the Dragon is not period correct for 1999, but then I found an article, which said it was. If I knew that, I could’ve saved 30 euros on that full tower case :D (which would’ve gone towards rails and 5,25” blanks for the Dragon, since I don’t have any)
Crazy color ! My first Celeron 466 on an Abit BE6-II was running at 525Mhz. For that, another Celeron 566Mhz was able to run stably on the same board with a clock of 882Mhz (FSB 103x8.5)
My first PC build (An Athlon XP build) I used the good old Chieftech Dragon. Quite simply the finest case ever made in my opinion. Solid Steel, weighed as much as a car when completed. Wish I'd kept it!
Fans used to have a seperate monitoring lead so the motherboard could keep tabs on what it was doing. This was because older motherboards couldn't supply the power needed for some of the beefier fans. Molex for 12v and 3pin for Fan Speed.
Hm, I dunno. You would have to have a pretty darn aggressive fan for the motherboard header to be inadequate. I took a random sampling of old (extracted from late 90s to 2000-era stuff) and new (San Ace) 80mm fans, and couldn't find any rated higher than 220mA, which is not much. In fact, most were rated at 150mA, with some less than 100mA. I do have a squirrel cage blower with a plate rating of 500mA. That one might be at the upper limit of an anemic header, but it also sounds like a hair dryer while running, so that would be somewhat exceptional for a case or CPU fan. AFAIK, the Molex connector was usually there because so many early boards only had one, or maybe two headers for a fan. Why a fan would ship with a Molex connector for power, and a breakout cable for the tach is beyond me. It makes sense for the PSU to have an external 3-pin connector -- because its fan is powered internally, and possibly speed-controlled too. But a case fan? That's just bizarre. Either you have a header or you don't. I don't know when you would have half of one.
The primary IDE channel is communication to the slow hard disk drive. A solid-state drive with an IDE to SATA adapter may help with the faster timing of temp files OS dos.
Excellent build! I still have an Antec branded version of that exact case! Last year I was going to repurpose it as a DAS drive array but I found I had a different case that ended up working better with fewer modifications needed to install a large amount of HDDs in it. I still may use it for some sort of retro build in the future. It's such a well built case and it's still in good shape even after owning it for almost 25 years. I can't image tossing it!
The color is great! Copperish brown looks fantastic! I am building a same period system in a bright white Akasa case with a dual orb Thermaltake cooler silver one, an Athlon XP cpu 2000+ socket A, a Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 Kyro II blue gpu, a Terratec DMX 6Fire sound card with front panel, an Asus hybrid tv card, 2 optical drives and a floppy... It has all the parts I could not afford buying back then when I was a schoolboy and the Kyro which my mother had bought me at the time... I chose to remove the steel panel of the case and make a transparent acrylic one with 4 screws just like new cheap cases bolt them on the side. I cut it exactly at the dimensions and and drill 4 holes and now I have to decide what kind of screws to use to look nice as well... Perhaps use and some standoffs I will think about it ... I propose you, since you are really good on painting metal surfaces, to spray the inside of the case the same color or even another nice matching color and make an acrylic side panel! Great work as always! Keep up, cheers from Greece, Jim.
pretty satisfying watching you do some bclk overclocking 🎉. I recently found an old NEC case from 1998 with a whole bunch of stuff in it. It even has a raspberry blue tdk cd drive lol
It's quite funny. Circa 1999 I played a lot Unreal Tournament with a BP6 (2x433 Celeron @ 490 MHz), 256 Mo ram and a Voodoo3. I had a Sb 5.1, a rack for hard disk, Usually running Linux Mandrake, FreeBSD or Win2000 with a SCSI 80 MB/s drive. And of course I had to recap it. The case was not an Antec, but it was for the next computer, a dual Athlon XP1800+ modded as MP :) Looks a lot like what you have here.
In 1999 my computer was more inspired by Lain and Pi faith in chaos. All the trim panels were removed, extra fans were added and inadvisable jumpers were jumped. Computers were really fun back then.
Awesome machine! Had a BP6 with Celerons at 550MHz, it was a great machine but had a pretty short time in the limelight like basically everything in the late 90s and was replaced for gaming with an Athlon system. It was a great lanparty server though and lived a couple of years into the 2000s before being retired. That case is perfect if a little later than the BP6's time, those were the early 2000s accessible good case that everyone who couldn't afford a Lian-Li or Coolermaster aluminium case had.
@@Epictronics1 I think they're still quite in demand, I saw someone build a modern system in one recently and it was fine aside from slightly dated intake/exhaust fan sizes at 80mm. Lian Li should release a 2024 version, not aware of many brushed alu cases like it.
That is correct. Chieftec and Antec both sold this case. I have an Antec model that is a little smaller (mid tower rather than full), no front door, and with a USB/FW flap in the grill. They just ooze quality. Thick, substantial metal and plastic, excellent coating on the steel, good fit on all the parts, they're highly serviceable... they weigh a ton! They don't make them like that anymore. :-)
Yeah, one of the other things I've heard about running Celerons in SMP is it requires a lot of trial and error to find ones that can OC to the same degree. the 300As ran into a wall right where I thought they would: at around 550 Mhz. I'll wager the cache on one of them just can't hang at that speed in SMP. I'd focus on sourcing more 333s and 366s, you might find a pair that can work together at around 600 or so.
Totally agree. The problem ( and at the same time the merit ) of these CPU’s was the cache running at the same speed of the core. At that time Mendocino was not made to be a performant low cost cpu, but to run some experiments with integrated cache in the same die. In fact Pentium II’s were equipped with external cache chips, running at half of the core speed. Probably they somehow refined the manufacturing process later on, and Coppermine Pentium III’s were released, with much higher frequencies than 600 MHz.
Exactly this. I would usually consider that an immediate loss of value. I'm a fan of cases in all the colors: beige _AND_ black. But even I have to admit this looks stunning.
One of my favorite pc game from that period. I think I had a pentium3 450mhz lots of ram and a pretty decent 128mb graphic card, and 19" crt. Og, and a super great soundblaster card.
Looks good. I would've probably prefered the drive faces and buttons in black though. Would make a nice contrast. The all bronze has its own look though.
You cannot spray paint the optical drive volume knob, since it's made from PA not ABS, it will not take. It should however take up Rit fabric dye, if you can somehow manage to apply it without ruining the potentiometer. Or you can replace it by a black one, it goes with any colour. The windows are called lightguides. Thermaltake and Titan both sold some generic Taiwanese products, so i'm not surprised that some of them are the same. Love the paintjob! I have exploded a cap like this. It happens on reverse bias or overvoltage. The voltage endurance (forming) of the capacitor may have gone away.
Learning something new with every video. Thanks! I have actually blown up a cap just like this when installing a low-ESR cap instead of a High-Frequency cap. However, I have never seen a "correct" cap fail like this!
@@Epictronics1 Oh and having worked in computer service around that era, i wouldn't try to repair a Chieftec or Codegen PSU, i would send them straight to the bin even if they're working. They have exploded and took most of the rest of the computer with them on occasion. Whatever design faults their OEM built into this, i wouldn't trust myself to be able to find and fix it, especially since it suspect custom magnetics to be inadequate. I would only repair very custom PSUs from the era that are needed for originality, as well as FSP and Delta, PSUs designed more failsafe than faildeadly.
@@SianaGearz The problem is that if I replace this PSU with another vintage PSU, It may blow too. With fresh caps, this original PSU is probably pretty good
@@Epictronics1 They blew up when they were fresh, barely a few months old, and i don't think caps were the issue given the carnage they left behind. I have never seen an FSP blow up and kill the PC. Not back then not vintage units now, they do stop working, but they do so politely. They do need to be rebuilt with fresh secondary and bootstrap caps by now. The bulk caps on the primary can stay IMO.
I've had good success with my 366 at 550 MHz with stock voltage on 440BX. I actually just released a video about this funnily enough. I also overclocked a 433, but I could only get that one running at 541 MHz on an 83 MHz bus. 300As from what I've seen tend to be the most reliable overclockers. Also that brown/copper paint looks fantastic.
@@Epictronics1 Good luck, hopefully you win the silicon lottery with those. 600 MHz tends to be the limit of Mendocino from what I've read, and those 400s have a 6x multiplier. With enough luck you might end up with two golden samples than can run 6 x 100.
Same here with a 433@541 MHz. Unfortunately the system was not totally stable at 83MHz FSB, especially the AGP bus, since it was pretty finicky with vga cards. Probably the north bridge, a 440LX, was having bad times at that frequency.
As a few more have posted, I am suspicious about the error messages even at tiny overclocks. Maybe the suggestion to turn off Speed Error Hold in the CPU Soft Menu works, or just pressing F1?
Are you reseting the CMOS after a CPU replacement? Because the message says you have a new CPU which is correct and there's a prompt to press F1 continue or DEL to recheck your settings. Are you pressing F1? It detects both CPUs so I believe everything is working properly it's just a matter of acknowledging the CPU changes.
In the mid-2000's I was running a 366MHz Ceneron with the FSB set to 83MHz in an Epox EP-ZX370A motherboard. I did that specifically to run Half-Life in software rendering at a LAN party since I had a crappy S3 Trio3D/2X video card (essentially an S3 Virge with 4MB of memory and an AGP connector). Bummer that you had so many problems with yours.
@@Epictronics1 Fair enough, switched to the P4 as an upgrade, when I first built it, pretty sure it was a Athlon XP2600+ and a Abit NF7-S which I sold to upgrade. Looking back, not sure if it was a big upgrade.
If i come across a dual slot 1 board i'll definitely put my 2 P3 550s to good use and overclock a 300/366A on the slot 1 system i have currently with one of those P3s, i remember the slot version of those titan orb coolers being the fanciest stuff back as a kid messing with old hw reading old forum/message boards n reviews. That very same P3 i took with a V770U out of some PCs at a bootfair now have their chance to work again after a 16 year nap. Always told my dad one day this hardware will be worth silly money one day and i would scavenge from bootfairs as much as i could while people saw them as paperweights.
This is nothing compared to what was possible before the P3 was released. For a few years I ran my 486 DX 50Mhz at 200Mhz by changing the multiplier from 1x to 4x by swapping around some jumpers on the board. Obviously I did have to upgrade the cooler.
Imagine running it on a K6-2@233 ,with a Voodoo 1 in Glorious 512x384 😊 Be aware that the original retail release perform better on older hardware compared to the updated Gold Release (which uses Unreal Engine 1.5 from Unreal Tournament).
in 1999 i had a Compaq Presario i bought thru radio shack. it had a 300 mhz. i think 64 mb of memory - 2 mb of video memory & a 8gb hdd & it had window's 98 on it. i did max out the memory to 256mb i think that was the max it can hold at the time
I would stick with Windows 2000 OS as it was available to beta testers in 1999. In my experience it was rock steady and very stable, much easier to install than Windows NT 4.0 🙂👍
COPPER-HEAD PC Rebuild. Considering that ABIT (Taiwan) has ceased to exist, due to their extensive usage of counterfeit capacitors (Capacitor plaque), it is fortunate that you changed the electrolytic capacitors on this ABIT motherboard. == Tantalum capacitors are famous for “Launching” off PC boards. Safety glasses advised, when working on energized PC boards. In 1970s, an early silicon transistor “launched” off battery PC board (missing my head), when a voltage dropping resistor failed (short) !!
@@Epictronics1 Anyways... nice project with testing cpus and painting the case. I'm still watching. Maybe someday you find some huge batch of cheap reliable caps to recap such psus. Keep it up.
You should probably overclock the CPUs one at a time to find each individual cpus max overclock and then pair the ones together that overclock the best. Being limited in overclocking by the weakest core is still a problem overclocking modern multi CCD devices like the new Ryzen CPUs but there you are just stuck with the weakest core. Here if you have a weak core you can just find another Celeron to replace it 😀
It's the divider for the PCI bus, which should be as close to 33 MHz as possible. At 100 MHz+ bus speed it's 1/3, some Abit boards on Intel BX (e.g. BE6) also had 1/4 divider for the 133 MHz bus speed, that feature allowed me to use that board for several years, and 2 CPU upgrades, starting at Mendocino Celeron 300A@450MHz in 1998, upgraded to Coppermine Celeron 533A@800MHz and later to Celeron 800@1066MHz.
I wonder what Windows supports multiple CPUs or even what game, that was still kind of unheard of until about a decade later when multiple core CPUs became a thing?
Yeah, games really didn't support multiple CPUs for a very long time. It was a paradigm shift programmatically that a lot of devs even today just don't know how to leverage well. The real benefit back in the day was the ability to alt tab to another program without crashing your game. Getting instant messenger notifications would no longer slow down your game and if you had a misbehaving app there was always a CPU around to summon the task manager to kill it. It was a huge quality of life upgrade way more than it was a performance upgrade.
Those errors were not from them not overclocking - you needed to turn Speed Error Hold off. 366s@550Mhz were the classic setup and almost all were capable.
@@Epictronics1 I wouldn't expect much from a 533. 533/550 was around the limit of Mendocino. I used to run 2.3v happily but I wouldn't do that with the stock coolers and sometimes I found increasing voltage had the opposite effect! I love my BP6.
Not surprising that Celeron 300 overclocked easily, thery were legendary for overclocking and value per performance. If the motherboard can support Coppermine then most of those Coppermine based Celerons can overclock to 50% faster and more. Getting Celeron 566 to 850MHz or 875MHz is easy, while getting Celeron 667 to 1GHz will require a better cooler and slight bump in voltage. Others like Coppermine based Pentium III with 100MHz FSB are also overclockable by using 133MHz FSB.
I was not doing computers in my life during that time. But, those cases are something else. It is like they took cheap pc case and chucked some designs on them. Called it a gaming rig and sold it. I do have to admit I did see some nice design and quality builds. For instance they used metal hinges. At least the LED was not in the door. So the wires would break. Yes, I see those garbage quick release 80mm fan holders. I do approve 100% of the paint. Now we are talking custom.
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With that case color Noctua fans would fit right in! 😀
I ran Celeron 366a CPUs at 500mhz back in 1999. To get to 500, I had to lap the CPUs. I used a sheet of glass and 800 grit wet dry sandpaper under running water. It ran like that for about 3 years. I went to 533a Celerons at 600mhz sometime in 2004 and it ran like that until the caps failed and I replaced the system.
600 would be a dream for this machine. I've got a set of 400s on the way. Fingers crossed!
I also overclocked my celeron with selfmade water and peltier cooler to 600, but it was a celeron 400 ;)
@@logipilot sick :)
@@extrameatsammich I ran a 433 MHz Celeron at 540 MHz without any issues in a Lucky Star 6ABX2V board. The next step would be 650 MHz, but that was too much to ask. Still, I was happy with 540 MHz.
I ran a 400mhz celeron based laptop, bought it off ebay for college and he included a free copy of windows 98, It was a no name chinese brand i think where i saved a lot of money compared to an IBM , Compaq equivalent at the time. I remmeber thinking, i got a good chip and compontents why does the name matter? well turned out it kind of did in build quality, it didnt take long for the power connector to go on it. Great little laptop, only was able to play quake 2 on it/ Halfe life, quake 3 really needed a GPU,, and coincidentally thats when Geforce 256 release in 1999. A floormate in our dorm worked at a PC shop then and got one to play and he loaded up quake 3 arena for the fisr time and wow! seeing real GPU graphicss (shaders and what not) for the firs time was just stunning.
I have Intergraph TDZ 2000 workstation from 06/1999 running two 550mhz slot2 PIII Xeons and intense 3D 2200 graphics and 512 MB of RAM. Its a real monster!
sweet
300a celerons in both slot and socket variations were OC bangers... an 450mhz O/C was simple and could be had 99% of the time, with no issue. This is the cpu that really brought O/C'ing into the mainstream.
When we're done with all the tests, I'll probably keep the 300As in this machine
@@Epictronics1 why? 450 on 300a is de facto standard at that times ;-)
@@dim0n1 @450 of course!
This build is so cool. I love the color choice and the fact that you painted everything. It just looks so good.
Thanks :)
34 years since I've seen a cap let go like that! Power supply lab in tech school... us first-years are quietly setting up our breadboards and working our way through the lab exercise, then there was a loud POP and puff of smoke. All three instructors wandered over to two of my classmates' bench, and several second-years peeked around the corner from the TV lab. As far as everyone could figure, it was just a bad cap. The case popped off neat as you please, AND the shrink tubing was halfway off as well! The two classmates were picking paper bits out of everything for the rest of the lab period while trying to finish up with a new cap.
2003 was near the start of the Great Capacitor Plague. While rare, I have seen can sections pop or partially slip off vs the tops splitting or bursting
Uh huh. ;-)
"Must've been a bad cap...", they said, sheepishly looking down at the bare legs, eternally grateful the polarity wasn't marked on them and that all the evidence of their carelessness was now strewn in tiny bits about the lab.
That is an excellent paint job. Could you do a video short of the paint process?
Thanks, I will include the respray process in a future video
@@Epictronics1I second his statement. a lot of people suck but you sir ? Bravo
@@silfrido1768 Thanks!
Dude! I ran an Abit BP6 back in the day, and Unreal Tournament was my game of choice. Went to many a LAN party with that rig!
Good times :)
@@Epictronics1 I had, at the time, dual Celeron 400's that ran at 600MHz with a 100MHz FSB. I needed what were, at the time, really big coolers.
@@ScottGrammer I have 400s on the way. Let's see how fast they will go
Marvelous! Love those old Antec cases and the wonderful paint colors you picked. That era is nostalgic for me because I was building computers by then. Intel had great yields so they routinely sold Celeron 300s that could have been sold as 450s.
Thanks!
That cap popped off pretty clean. The cylinder was mostly intact & so was the wrapping that remained on the PSU board.
I'll put it on display lol
@@Epictronics1 Hehe, I still have a Chieftec case, but the PSU failed many years ago. Jenpo caps... The case itself looks identical, but has a window (with a fan grille in the middle for some reason).
Back in the day I could only dream of a machine like this!
Man, seeing Abit brings me back, I haven't heard that brand in a long, long time.
The first computer I built for myself when I was in high school for my birthday in either 2002 or 2003 was an Abit system. I got it on mwave, which is now long dead it looks like, so I don't have my old invoices... but as best I can remember I believe it was a KT7-A (non RAID), I remember it having an ISA slot. It was running an Athlon XP 2000+, 756MB of DDR RAM, and a GeForce 4 Ti 4600. I remember it being super easy to overclock, and underclock, I also remember my friends didn't have that great of computers so they asked me to underclock it whenever we had LAN parties so we were competing in games on similar playing fields. Sadly it got tossed in a move and now my oldest computer is the one i built in 2008.
A Chieftec/Antec case. Those were great. I had an Abit AW-8 Max as my first gaming rig I built and a Radeon video card. Abit were the best boards for the price point at that time.. Played Quake, Unreal/Unreal Tournament. I still have that machine and it still runs well.
That is one beautiful machine - great job. :)
I'm grateful for the tip on the Golden Orbs, had no idea about those Titans. It sure looks great, and now i may be able to use one again!
Looking forwards to the completion of that green box too. Dual P3 is my dream machine right now, been trying to source parts for awhile but it's not easy.
Thanks! Good luck with the Titans
PC cases have come a long way. Cool build.
Thanks!
The magnetic in the lid of the PSU isn't a transformer, it's a power factor compensation choke for passive PFC. The shadiest PSUs skipped PFC circuit entirely, and the more modern active PFC runs at higher frequency so it uses a very modestly sized ring inductor on the main PCB, and then usually one big bulk primary cap instead of two smaller ones. The space saving from one of the caps makes room for the inductor.
The two caps are designed to be bridged into a Delon voltage doubler scheme when used in 110V countries. This isn't necessary on an APFC, since it's topologically similar to a DC-DC boost converter with regulated output voltage of somewhere usually just short of 400 or 450V.
Yeah, it's a pretty dead give away that the "transformer" here only had two wires going to it. :-)
4:35 the world now knows what the inside of a capacitor actually looks like.
When I was building my 1999 dream machine, I looked up the release date of the Chieftec Dragon case, since I had one. I found a review from 2001, so I thought it must be it and bought a flimsy full tower, which was not as deep and the 3,5” drive cage (which was removable) barely cleared my SCSI cables.
I was about to comment here that the Dragon is not period correct for 1999, but then I found an article, which said it was. If I knew that, I could’ve saved 30 euros on that full tower case :D (which would’ve gone towards rails and 5,25” blanks for the Dragon, since I don’t have any)
:D
Crazy color ! My first Celeron 466 on an Abit BE6-II was running at 525Mhz. For that, another Celeron 566Mhz was able to run stably on the same board with a clock of 882Mhz (FSB 103x8.5)
My first PC build (An Athlon XP build) I used the good old Chieftech Dragon. Quite simply the finest case ever made in my opinion. Solid Steel, weighed as much as a car when completed. Wish I'd kept it!
Awesome looking case and colors and a legendary motherboard. What's not to love?
Fans used to have a seperate monitoring lead so the motherboard could keep tabs on what it was doing. This was because older motherboards couldn't supply the power needed for some of the beefier fans. Molex for 12v and 3pin for Fan Speed.
Hm, I dunno. You would have to have a pretty darn aggressive fan for the motherboard header to be inadequate. I took a random sampling of old (extracted from late 90s to 2000-era stuff) and new (San Ace) 80mm fans, and couldn't find any rated higher than 220mA, which is not much. In fact, most were rated at 150mA, with some less than 100mA. I do have a squirrel cage blower with a plate rating of 500mA. That one might be at the upper limit of an anemic header, but it also sounds like a hair dryer while running, so that would be somewhat exceptional for a case or CPU fan.
AFAIK, the Molex connector was usually there because so many early boards only had one, or maybe two headers for a fan. Why a fan would ship with a Molex connector for power, and a breakout cable for the tach is beyond me. It makes sense for the PSU to have an external 3-pin connector -- because its fan is powered internally, and possibly speed-controlled too. But a case fan? That's just bizarre. Either you have a header or you don't. I don't know when you would have half of one.
The primary IDE channel is communication to the slow hard disk drive. A solid-state drive with an IDE to SATA adapter may help with the faster timing of temp files OS dos.
Excellent build!
I still have an Antec branded version of that exact case! Last year I was going to repurpose it as a DAS drive array but I found I had a different case that ended up working better with fewer modifications needed to install a large amount of HDDs in it. I still may use it for some sort of retro build in the future. It's such a well built case and it's still in good shape even after owning it for almost 25 years. I can't image tossing it!
Thanks! I love these cases. I have a third case on the way for a Pentium 4 build!
The color is great! Copperish brown looks fantastic! I am building a same period system in a bright white Akasa case with a dual orb Thermaltake cooler silver one, an Athlon XP cpu 2000+ socket A, a Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 Kyro II blue gpu, a Terratec DMX 6Fire sound card with front panel, an Asus hybrid tv card, 2 optical drives and a floppy...
It has all the parts I could not afford buying back then when I was a schoolboy and the Kyro which my mother had bought me at the time...
I chose to remove the steel panel of the case and make a transparent acrylic one with 4 screws just like new cheap cases bolt them on the side. I cut it exactly at the dimensions and and drill 4 holes and now I have to decide what kind of screws to use to look nice as well... Perhaps use and some standoffs I will think about it ...
I propose you, since you are really good on painting metal surfaces, to spray the inside of the case the same color or even another nice matching color and make an acrylic side panel!
Great work as always! Keep up, cheers from Greece, Jim.
Thanks! I have a set of Silver Orbs too! Not sure what project they are going into, but I'll figure something out!
Gotta love that setup. I had the same celeron 300a / bp6. One of the first boards I recapped.
I bought a VP6 one year after this board came out. It was my first victim of the cap plague :/
3:49 same here, I've never seen a cap "cap" blow off like that and stay intact
Yet another superb video! Thanks!
Thanks!
that looked sick.
Looks amazing! I had this Dragon case, they came in a huge range of colours. Mines was a metallic blue. 😁
Thanks!
pretty satisfying watching you do some bclk overclocking 🎉. I recently found an old NEC case from 1998 with a whole bunch of stuff in it. It even has a raspberry blue tdk cd drive lol
Thanks, now you need to respray the rest of the case in that raspberry blue :)
I had that case in purple way back in the day, loved it!
just mega!! it looks beautiful, and that martian red... is just gorgeous! congrats, you've got an envy-er :))
Thanks!
It's quite funny.
Circa 1999 I played a lot Unreal Tournament with a BP6 (2x433 Celeron @ 490 MHz), 256 Mo ram and a Voodoo3.
I had a Sb 5.1, a rack for hard disk,
Usually running Linux Mandrake, FreeBSD or Win2000 with a SCSI 80 MB/s drive.
And of course I had to recap it.
The case was not an Antec, but it was for the next computer, a dual Athlon XP1800+ modded as MP :)
Looks a lot like what you have here.
In 1999 my computer was more inspired by Lain and Pi faith in chaos. All the trim panels were removed, extra fans were added and inadvisable jumpers were jumped. Computers were really fun back then.
Man this looks Sweet as cake love the period man Good work ;)
Thanks!
Awesome machine! Had a BP6 with Celerons at 550MHz, it was a great machine but had a pretty short time in the limelight like basically everything in the late 90s and was replaced for gaming with an Athlon system. It was a great lanparty server though and lived a couple of years into the 2000s before being retired.
That case is perfect if a little later than the BP6's time, those were the early 2000s accessible good case that everyone who couldn't afford a Lian-Li or Coolermaster aluminium case had.
Thanks! Yeah, I remember those Lian-Li aluminum cases. I should do something fun with one of those too
@@Epictronics1 I think they're still quite in demand, I saw someone build a modern system in one recently and it was fine aside from slightly dated intake/exhaust fan sizes at 80mm. Lian Li should release a 2024 version, not aware of many brushed alu cases like it.
Nice looking chassis
Thanks
Back in my day, I ran a Celeron 600 miles uphill both ways in 5 feet of snow for years! 😉
I had one of these cases! Seeing this video makes me want to track another one down and do a period accurate build in it 😭
Love the rivet gun noise! I had a HP AP400 Dual Workstation back in the day, rock solid.
I had an Antec case in the early 2ks that looked incredibly similar.
That is correct. Chieftec and Antec both sold this case.
I have an Antec model that is a little smaller (mid tower rather than full), no front door, and with a USB/FW flap in the grill. They just ooze quality. Thick, substantial metal and plastic, excellent coating on the steel, good fit on all the parts, they're highly serviceable... they weigh a ton! They don't make them like that anymore. :-)
Beautiful 😍 congrats 👏
Thanks!
Brings back such great memories 😊
Yeah, one of the other things I've heard about running Celerons in SMP is it requires a lot of trial and error to find ones that can OC to the same degree. the 300As ran into a wall right where I thought they would: at around 550 Mhz. I'll wager the cache on one of them just can't hang at that speed in SMP. I'd focus on sourcing more 333s and 366s, you might find a pair that can work together at around 600 or so.
I'm gonna have a go at Celerons 400s next
Totally agree.
The problem ( and at the same time the merit ) of these CPU’s was the cache running at the same speed of the core.
At that time Mendocino was not made to be a performant low cost cpu, but to run some experiments with integrated cache in the same die.
In fact Pentium II’s were equipped with external cache chips, running at half of the core speed.
Probably they somehow refined the manufacturing process later on, and Coppermine Pentium III’s were released, with much higher frequencies than 600 MHz.
The Celeron 300a was a killer processor back in the day. Cheap and yet it could be overclocked to the extreme!
That system looks incredible!!!!!
Thanks!
I'm not a fan generally of spraying vintage hardware, but your results are so good!
Thanks!
Exactly this. I would usually consider that an immediate loss of value. I'm a fan of cases in all the colors: beige _AND_ black. But even I have to admit this looks stunning.
@@nickwallette6201 Thanks. I feel that Alienware gave us all permission back in the day to respray these Dragon cases
The kerning on the Titan "M a je s t y" logo really f-ing hurts 😂
😆
I had a BP6 motherboard that I had two Celeron 466's on. In the early 2000s
Epic boards!
@@Epictronics1 I got rid of mine before the caps self destructed. I used it for a couple years.
A blue LED instead of the green one would be cool 😊
Me in 1999 would be ecstatic with this PC.
One of my favorite pc game from that period. I think I had a pentium3 450mhz lots of ram and a pretty decent 128mb graphic card, and 19" crt.
Og, and a super great soundblaster card.
Perfect machine for the game :)
Looks good. I would've probably prefered the drive faces and buttons in black though. Would make a nice contrast. The all bronze has its own look though.
You cannot spray paint the optical drive volume knob, since it's made from PA not ABS, it will not take. It should however take up Rit fabric dye, if you can somehow manage to apply it without ruining the potentiometer. Or you can replace it by a black one, it goes with any colour.
The windows are called lightguides.
Thermaltake and Titan both sold some generic Taiwanese products, so i'm not surprised that some of them are the same.
Love the paintjob!
I have exploded a cap like this. It happens on reverse bias or overvoltage. The voltage endurance (forming) of the capacitor may have gone away.
Learning something new with every video. Thanks! I have actually blown up a cap just like this when installing a low-ESR cap instead of a High-Frequency cap. However, I have never seen a "correct" cap fail like this!
@@Epictronics1 Oh and having worked in computer service around that era, i wouldn't try to repair a Chieftec or Codegen PSU, i would send them straight to the bin even if they're working. They have exploded and took most of the rest of the computer with them on occasion. Whatever design faults their OEM built into this, i wouldn't trust myself to be able to find and fix it, especially since it suspect custom magnetics to be inadequate. I would only repair very custom PSUs from the era that are needed for originality, as well as FSP and Delta, PSUs designed more failsafe than faildeadly.
@@SianaGearz The problem is that if I replace this PSU with another vintage PSU, It may blow too. With fresh caps, this original PSU is probably pretty good
@@Epictronics1 They blew up when they were fresh, barely a few months old, and i don't think caps were the issue given the carnage they left behind.
I have never seen an FSP blow up and kill the PC. Not back then not vintage units now, they do stop working, but they do so politely. They do need to be rebuilt with fresh secondary and bootstrap caps by now. The bulk caps on the primary can stay IMO.
@@SianaGearz Ok, so the two large genpo caps can stay if they check out good with ESR and capacitance?
Nice machine. ❤
Thanks!
There were sidepanels with acrylic window for those middle-tower Chieftecs, i had two of them.
I'm off to eBay, cheers
Also people used to make their own see through panels for cases so maybe he can find a case to try it on lol
I'm not a fan of that colour but I admit it turned out amazing! :) Well done!
You sound jealous Tony haha. You would have loved it in 1999 :D Thanks!
@@Epictronics1 ahaha Very!!
@@tony359 😅
@@tony359 🤣
I had one double (or even triple) fan of these thermaltake orbs in my AMD at 900 MHz. It was like an airport when turned on 😅
lol, yeah, they are a bit noisy, but they look pretty damn sweet :)
I've had good success with my 366 at 550 MHz with stock voltage on 440BX. I actually just released a video about this funnily enough. I also overclocked a 433, but I could only get that one running at 541 MHz on an 83 MHz bus. 300As from what I've seen tend to be the most reliable overclockers.
Also that brown/copper paint looks fantastic.
Awesome. I'm gonna have a go at Celerons 400s next
@@Epictronics1 Good luck, hopefully you win the silicon lottery with those. 600 MHz tends to be the limit of Mendocino from what I've read, and those 400s have a 6x multiplier. With enough luck you might end up with two golden samples than can run 6 x 100.
Same here with a 433@541 MHz.
Unfortunately the system was not totally stable at 83MHz FSB, especially the AGP bus, since it was pretty finicky with vga cards.
Probably the north bridge, a 440LX, was having bad times at that frequency.
As a few more have posted, I am suspicious about the error messages even at tiny overclocks. Maybe the suggestion to turn off Speed Error Hold in the CPU Soft Menu works, or just pressing F1?
I turned off the speed error hold and did a quick test now with the 533s. The machine would boot but crashed in UT. I'll do some more tests!
It's gorgeous! Maybe you should spray keyboard, mouse and monitor?? 😀
No way I'm gonna respray my precious Flatron :o (but it would look tits:)
Are you reseting the CMOS after a CPU replacement? Because the message says you have a new CPU which is correct and there's a prompt to press F1 continue or DEL to recheck your settings. Are you pressing F1? It detects both CPUs so I believe everything is working properly it's just a matter of acknowledging the CPU changes.
I found another way to bypass the error. I did a quick test now with the 533s. The machine would boot but crashed in UT. I'll do some more tests
Video editors, etc liked this board as a dual celeron 400 wiped the floor with a p3 600mhz, and for far less.
In the mid-2000's I was running a 366MHz Ceneron with the FSB set to 83MHz in an Epox EP-ZX370A motherboard.
I did that specifically to run Half-Life in software rendering at a LAN party since I had a crappy S3 Trio3D/2X video card (essentially an S3 Virge with 4MB of memory and an AGP connector).
Bummer that you had so many problems with yours.
Err... Celeron.
Stupid fat fingers on mobile.
I have ordered some more Mendocinos. We'll try some more!
Nice case still have my silver chief tech case, has a P4 inside at the moment which is probably a bit new for its era.
A Pentium 4 is perfectly appropriate for the Chief Tech Dragon. In fact, I have a third case that probably will end up as a P4 "dream machine"
@@Epictronics1 Fair enough, switched to the P4 as an upgrade, when I first built it, pretty sure it was a Athlon XP2600+ and a Abit NF7-S which I sold to upgrade. Looking back, not sure if it was a big upgrade.
I have that case in black, only problem is the top hinge for the door is broken. I have it attached with Gorilla tape and it works fine.
My coppermine 500 overclocked to 850Mhz!
Of all the CPUs, Celeron 300As are well known for exactly that kind of severe overclock.
Looks awesome! Any update on the IBM PS/2 P70?
Thanks! Yes, all the broken bits for the P70 are being printed at PCBWay right now and shipped early next week!
No DVD drive?
The DDR version of the Geforce 256 came out in mid December 1999. So it's still 1999.
If i come across a dual slot 1 board i'll definitely put my 2 P3 550s to good use and overclock a 300/366A on the slot 1 system i have currently with one of those P3s, i remember the slot version of those titan orb coolers being the fanciest stuff back as a kid messing with old hw reading old forum/message boards n reviews. That very same P3 i took with a V770U out of some PCs at a bootfair now have their chance to work again after a 16 year nap. Always told my dad one day this hardware will be worth silly money one day and i would scavenge from bootfairs as much as i could while people saw them as paperweights.
I wish I could go back in time and do the same
I had a Celeron 300A running at 500MHz with a golden orb on a slocket adapter in an ASUS Slot 1 board. Good times.
That looked like an Antec case, quality stuff, so I looked it up and it appears to be an Antec SX 1000 II Series SOHO file server case.
Yes, Cheieftec and Antec branded these cases, they didn't actually make them
This is nothing compared to what was possible before the P3 was released. For a few years I ran my 486 DX 50Mhz at 200Mhz by changing the multiplier from 1x to 4x by swapping around some jumpers on the board. Obviously I did have to upgrade the cooler.
Imagine running it on a K6-2@233 ,with a Voodoo 1 in Glorious 512x384 😊
Be aware that the original retail release perform better on older hardware compared to the updated Gold Release (which uses Unreal Engine 1.5 from Unreal Tournament).
in 1999 i had a Compaq Presario i bought thru radio shack. it had a 300 mhz. i think 64 mb of memory - 2 mb of video memory & a 8gb hdd & it had window's 98 on it. i did max out the memory to 256mb i think that was the max it can hold at the time
I bought the slightly later Presario in sparkling metallic purple in 2000ish running at 700MHz :)
nice one! though drives need to go in reverse in my opinion :)
Thanks!
I would stick with Windows 2000 OS as it was available to beta testers in 1999. In my experience it was rock steady and very stable, much easier to install than Windows NT 4.0 🙂👍
W2k is my all-time favorite OS. I wish Windows was this good nowadays
Reviews at the time suggested using Windows 2000 RC1 to actually get some use out of the AGP slots, USB and PnP
COPPER-HEAD PC Rebuild.
Considering that ABIT (Taiwan) has ceased to exist, due to their extensive usage of counterfeit capacitors (Capacitor plaque), it is fortunate that you changed the electrolytic capacitors on this ABIT motherboard.
==
Tantalum capacitors are famous for “Launching” off PC boards.
Safety glasses advised, when working on energized PC boards.
In 1970s, an early silicon transistor “launched” off battery PC board (missing my head),
when a voltage dropping resistor failed (short) !!
how about socket adapters for "celermines" , "tualerons" or real P]I[ s?
I'm considering it
2003 PSU, banged caps... maybe those caps are from the era of bad cap plague
They sure are
@@Epictronics1 Anyways... nice project with testing cpus and painting the case. I'm still watching. Maybe someday you find some huge batch of cheap reliable caps to recap such psus. Keep it up.
@@hugosimoes5119 Thanks!
that empty case badge slot screams Abit sticker
Case badge is on its way in the mail :)
Hm IIRC I ran a 333 MHz Celeron overclocked to 415 for quite a while and that was the highest stable setting.
You are missing the Unreal Tournament LED Fan cover!
That paint job 👌👌👌 so good! I had a single 333 celeron in '99 running at around 500 mhz in an abit BM6 used daily for many years fantastic machine.
Thanks!
I had a slot-version of Celeron 300A. All of them ran at 450, basically.
Also had that exact case... Well, I still have an ugly yellow one of those 😁
Bring out the spray cans :)
You should probably overclock the CPUs one at a time to find each individual cpus max overclock and then pair the ones together that overclock the best. Being limited in overclocking by the weakest core is still a problem overclocking modern multi CCD devices like the new Ryzen CPUs but there you are just stuck with the weakest core. Here if you have a weak core you can just find another Celeron to replace it 😀
That is a great approach
In the BIOS under # - External Clock it says xx MHz (1/2) . Is there a (2/2) as well and what does it stand for?
That is the AGP bus speed divided by the CPU bus speed.
It's the divider for the PCI bus, which should be as close to 33 MHz as possible. At 100 MHz+ bus speed it's 1/3, some Abit boards on Intel BX (e.g. BE6) also had 1/4 divider for the 133 MHz bus speed, that feature allowed me to use that board for several years, and 2 CPU upgrades, starting at Mendocino Celeron 300A@450MHz in 1998, upgraded to Coppermine Celeron 533A@800MHz and later to Celeron 800@1066MHz.
@@konradzydron Wait... Did you run a BP6 at 1066? :o
@@Epictronics1Well, the board was still working at 133 MHz…same thing were possible with modded bios on a lot of decent level boards.
I wonder what Windows supports multiple CPUs or even what game, that was still kind of unheard of until about a decade later when multiple core CPUs became a thing?
Yeah, games really didn't support multiple CPUs for a very long time. It was a paradigm shift programmatically that a lot of devs even today just don't know how to leverage well. The real benefit back in the day was the ability to alt tab to another program without crashing your game. Getting instant messenger notifications would no longer slow down your game and if you had a misbehaving app there was always a CPU around to summon the task manager to kill it. It was a huge quality of life upgrade way more than it was a performance upgrade.
I ran dual Celeron 366s at 550 MHz on a Epox KP6-BS. It was never quite stable, even at 366. Sadly threw away that board away 10 years ago.
Oof 40gb Deskstar... Yeap that was one in the pool of models that was known as a Deathstar... I hope it lasts.
I had four 250GBs back in the day. They all died lol
When I built my BP6, I was under the impression that the only CPU that would over clock was the 300A Celeron.
Some people claim to run the 400 @600 :o
@@Epictronics1 Of course I'm trying to remember that from 25 years ago!
Those errors were not from them not overclocking - you needed to turn Speed Error Hold off. 366s@550Mhz were the classic setup and almost all were capable.
I did a quick test and bypassed the error with the 533s. The system would boot but then crash. I'll try again at all the different speeds and CPUs
@@Epictronics1 I wouldn't expect much from a 533. 533/550 was around the limit of Mendocino. I used to run 2.3v happily but I wouldn't do that with the stock coolers and sometimes I found increasing voltage had the opposite effect!
I love my BP6.
"I wish this case had a window". Period correct case-mod, next video.
Not surprising that Celeron 300 overclocked easily, thery were legendary for overclocking and value per performance. If the motherboard can support Coppermine then most of those Coppermine based Celerons can overclock to 50% faster and more. Getting Celeron 566 to 850MHz or 875MHz is easy, while getting Celeron 667 to 1GHz will require a better cooler and slight bump in voltage. Others like Coppermine based Pentium III with 100MHz FSB are also overclockable by using 133MHz FSB.
Based on the looks, it should have Coppermine CPUs. :P
Now that you mention it. There is actually a mod for these boards to take Coppermine :)
I was not doing computers in my life during that time. But, those cases are something else. It is like they took cheap pc case and chucked some designs on them. Called it a gaming rig and sold it. I do have to admit I did see some nice design and quality builds. For instance they used metal hinges. At least the LED was not in the door. So the wires would break. Yes, I see those garbage quick release 80mm fan holders. I do approve 100% of the paint. Now we are talking custom.
Missing matching monitor, keyboard and mouse in the same color :)
No way I'm gonna respray my precious Flatron! Well, maybe, If I had a spare case for it :)
I was going to say the same thing although I wouldn’t like to go to all that trouble myself 😅
@@Epictronics1 No need to spray this gorgeous monitor. For the gag maybe some cheap Proview from that era... 😀