Sometimes They Come Easy - Socket 7 Pentium Build

Lately I've had several projects in my backlog that keep stalling out due to broken parts on the original machine, broken accessories, or broken replacement parts.  I've been wanting to complete projects for an original Mac 128K, a Sun Ultra 5 Workstation, and an Amiga 500 among others but these projects are on hold for parts.

So, in the meantime I was looking for something fun, easy, and low cost.  Once again, Free Geek Twin Cities has come to the rescue!  One of the gaps in my collection has been a nice Socket 7 Pentium.  I've had this on my wish list for some time, but watching Phil from Phil's Computer Lab go over his "daily driver" retro gaming PC really got me thinking about this again.

So, a couple of weekends ago I was in Free Geek and purchased a New Old Stock AT tower case that came from a computer store that had recently closed in our area.  The case was still in the box and it was immaculate.  It was an AT / ATX convertible case, and I had to do a bit of drilling and Dremelling to get an AT Power Supply fastened down inside the case.  I also had to drill out the power button and cut it a bit shorter, but I was able to get an AT power supply in the case and it looks really nice.

The Motherboard, CPU, and Memory came from a Socket 7 Build at Free Geek that had sat for a couple of weeks. Perhaps it didn't sell because the case wasn't perfect but since I was swapping the case anyway I didn't care about that.  The mainboard is an Asus P/I-P55T2P4.  I found a nice generic looking CD drive and I had to replace the Floppy Drive on it because that wasn't working well.

The other upgrade per Phil's video was to put an upgraded video card into the machine with a Digital Interface.  I don't have an Nvidia card (with the hardware scaling that Phil mentions), but I do have an ATI Radeon PCI graphics card with both VGA and DVI outputs on it.

For now, I've paired the computer with a Samsung SyncMaster Beige LCD panel that also came from Free Geek...

I've installed Windows 98 and all the Windows drivers on this machine, but I've also loaded DOS drivers and DOS games as well.  It's a build I'm very happy with and certainly allowed me to "scratch the itch" of completing a build with minimal pain and effort.

Now back to that Amiga 500...