Custom PC - Project Duality

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Get it? Two CPUs? Ahhh... I'll see myself out.

The turn of the millennium was a very strange time. You had people in a mad flap thinking that clocks on computers would flip over to read 1900 causing planes to crash and nuclear reactors to melt down, Apple were staging a massive comeback with weird colourful computers and in PC land, we had multiple operating systems.

On the consumer side, you had the Windows 9x derived options of 98 Second Edition or Windows Me, the new hotness that everyone derided. For the corporates, the NT-derived Windows 2000 Professional was in vogue.

This machine was built specifically to represent a delicious little snapshot of time - a time when the two worlds of 9x and NT were about to collide. To make the most of the best both have to offer, it leverages two Pentium III processors and all the choicest parts possible to obtain before the toaster assaulted you.

It's also a LAN party veteran after showing some youths what's up in Quake!

Not long after moving out of home (and selling the OG Outatime) I actually built a system around the same board with a pair of 500MHz Katmais and ran it for years before upgrading to a Pentium 4... so this is almost another homage build, but done with "I can actually afford parts now" budget.

Specifications

Dual Intel Pentium III 800MHz "Coppermine" CPUs

256MB PC100 SDRAM

ASUS P2B-D Intel 440BX mainboard

160GB ATA hard disk

Pioneer DVD-ROM/CD-write drive

Diamond Viper II Z200 S3 Savage2000 graphics card

Creative SoundBlaster Live!

Iomega Buz SCSI and video capture card

Intel PRO/100 ethernet card

Iomega Zip250 drive

Thermaltake X-Ray cupholder/lighter

Sunbeamtech Lightbay fan controller

Windows Me, Windows 2000 Professional and BeOS 5.0 Pro triple-boot

Unique features

In attempting to keep it of the era, I tried to keep it with a relatively period accurate horrendous chassis. Admittedly, the chassis ended up a few years newer but because it's so ridiculous, it gets to stay! It's housed in a Sunbeamtech UV-reactive acrylic ATX tower, giving a gorgeous full view of the antique internal parts. It's also fitted with a Sunbeamtech fan controller running a spattering of UV-reactive ACRyan BlackFire4 80mm fans.

The power supply has been modified and sleeved appropriately to match so there's no excess cabling as there's absolutely no way to cable manage a machine like this!

The Iomega Buz card inside is a total fluke - I received the capture dongle with a bulk lot of Amiga stuff several years back but not the matching PCI card... then the card came up bare on TradeMe for next to no money!

The graphics card at the time of updating, is a Savage2000, the last gasp of S3 trying to beat NVIDIA. It's a beautify catastrophe, but will need to come out in due course... do we install the GeForce4 Ti4200 again? Or go for something more conventional like a GeForce2 GTS... that's what I had in my original...

Personal history

This machine was born from a beer-derived discussion in 2013 while I was between houses and moving components around in storage bins. Further discussions resulted in 'hey wouldn't it be cool if we hosted a LAN party that was entirely using machines from before the turn of the millennium?'

The answer of course was a resounding yes - it was extremely cool, aside the usual issues that come from trying to use 20+ year old computers!

The P2B-D was from an old server that a good friend was repowering. The CPUs were extracted from a client's failed server from my former occupation, the drives I'd had for years, the case from yet another friend who was tired of the rigmarole involved in changing drives and the power supply yet another friend - the remaining parts were eBay finds.

The final piece of cool personal history is the video card. A GeForce4 is way too new for this system, but this one? This one belonged to my late uncle Barry Gibbs and was in his personal machine before his passing and is a treasured member of the GPU fleet.

At time of writing, the GeForce4 is temporarily out so we could test a Savage2000 and I haven't quite gotten around to putting it back yet... but reading this again... yeah, it needs returned.

And yes, Duality was the star machine (probably because it looks so outlandish) at the Retro LAN 2024!