This Christmas I snagged a pretty nice and cheap retro PC, or should I say a base for retro PC, obviously sold as untested, so probably not working, but we’ll see about that. Socket A / socket 478 is my favourite age in PC history, even though I started my adventures with S775 and Core 2 Duo E4500. Back to S462, I love all the experimental stuff done by enthusuiasts such as very crude water cooling solutions or UV neon lamps. I absolutely adore also the challenge of dealing with these components, as pretty much nothing was plug n’ play, and Windows needed some knowledge to set up. The feeling of getting everything to work and play nice with itself is irreplacable to me.
What’s in the package?
- pretty nice looking floppy cable, Gigabyte branded
- 2x256MB DDR400 Cl2.5-3-3-6 RAM, a bit of a shame, i was hoping at least for dual 512MB sticks, but I’ll take what I get, this set still has foil on GEIL logo not taken off
- TP-Link PCI WiFi card, I’ll probably steal the antena off of this thing and forget that I have it
- PCI TV tuner, almost useless these days
- Nvidia Quadro FX 500, weird choice, but maybe this used to be a workstation, in terms of specs this is essentially a GeForce FX 5500
- Crap PSU, which I won’t even show closely
- ABIT NF7-S V2.0, main star of the show, as a collector I’m torn whether to be happy or sad about replaced NB heatsink, which seems to be a fairly popular Zalman ZM-NB47J
- AMD Athlon XP-M 2500+, very, very good find, unfortunately not IQYHA stepping, these CPUs are almost gone these days, this is probably the best find of this PC
- a bit less than generic PC case, doesn’t really strike my fancy, but it’s in decent condition, so I think it’ll be a good case for, maybe, S775 era PC
Let’s test it!
I’ll test only more interesting components and for that purpose I’ll use my trusty 550W Chieftec PSU, as it has decent 30A@12V combined for testing more modern PCs and 26A on 5V line, useful for older motherboards.
After flipping the PSU switch the board comes to life.
Success! It works!
I’m really happy about this PC. I for sure will make a follow up after dedusting it a bit, since a bit (get it?) of BIOS modding is needed to make this board to my liking.
Thanks for reading!