My $40 Rig: "1GHz of Fury"

Tandyman100

Baseband Member
Messages
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Okay, every single part in this computer was second hand, most from garage sales and friends, and a couple from Ebay. I would get a craputer, strip it, and put the best parts into what is now '1GHz of Fury'. I paid a total of $40 for the whole shebang, including case, drives, RAM, mobo, video card, capture card(s), sound card, thumping 2.1 speakers (massive sub on that one, cost $5 for that), mouse, keyboard, etc.

Specs:
Processor: 1.2GHz Pentium III
Mobo: Asus P3B-F (I believe it's based on a 440BX)
RAM: 3x 256 1x 127 (or whatever, I really forget..)
Drives: 80GB WD, 40GB seagate, DVD combo drive (white, need to get a black one), 3.5" floppy drive (black)
OS: Windows XP Professional SP3
Case: Black aluminum with plastic front bezel. Tooless design. Three external bays and four internal HDD bays in a removable caddy.
Video card: I have an AVerTV capture card, a Radeon 7200 All-in-wonder, and an NVidia GeForce FX series as main. Two monitors currently hooked up, am going to ditch the GeForce and Radeon for a new card soon. ATi, probably.

I love this thing to pieces, and it runs lots of games really fast. I just tried Test Drive Unlimited, and got 7FPS. Get 25-35FPS in NFS:MW, and 14-20 in NFS: Carbon. Get 40+FPS in Urban Terror 4.1, and 30+FPS in MSFS9.
 
More power to ya. If you can get a rig to do what you want for less, you keep on keeping on.
 
More power to ya. If you can get a rig to do what you want for less, you keep on keeping on.

HELL YEAH! :D

I'm intending on using this computer for the next few years. This summer I'm going to probably buy a new machine, but I'm still keeping ol' 1GHoF around for a while :)
 
Haha. I ditched my P3 rig as fast as I could for a P4. Ran that for years on an MX4000 PCI graphics card. Until it died in summer 2008. Then I built a quad. The performance jump was like...wow.
 
Haha. I ditched my P3 rig as fast as I could for a P4. Ran that for years on an MX4000 PCI graphics card. Until it died in summer 2008. Then I built a quad. The performance jump was like...wow.

In reality, my P3 is TONS faster at running most games than my friend's P4 2.5GHz rig. And it runs a few games faster than his dual-core.
 
I like it, it's nice to have an older rig around to play around with. I have one, it's an amd athlon XP 2600 with an asus motherboard and an nvidia geforce 4 mx 440, it's currently my fileserver so it's got 3 hard drives in it.
 
You should give one of the smaller Linux distributions a shot. You'd be surprised how much faster things will move!
 
You should try the new version of ubuntu when it comes out Lubuntu version, it's supposed to be great for old pcs like that but if you want to game just stick with windows.
 
You should try the new version of ubuntu when it comes out Lubuntu version, it's supposed to be great for old pcs like that but if you want to game just stick with windows.

NFS games do not run well in WINE.

I mean, the old ones will run fine, but newer ones run like hell.

BTW, ubuntu is an unstable cluster$%&#. Give debian 5 a shot. 6 month releases are killing ubuntu.
 
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