Sega SC-3000H

Careful now, it'll bite! Click for more images!

Fast forward to 2003. Y2K was a bust and Microsoft had wisely condensed the product lineup to two versions of the same operating system in what would become one of the most-loved operating systems of all time - Windows XP. Now built on the NT codebase for all variants, XP was an absolute revelation coming from the 9x/NT era with its rather old fashioned looking plain grey windows and taskbars. It was bright, friendly, full of features and most of all... it was stable.

In hardware land there was some furious battles going on. Intel had given up on the P6 architecture (for the time being...) and had gone all in on the shiny new NetBurst architecture, known at retail as the Pentium 4. AMD had been making some very strong moves with their Athlon line, the AthlonXP currently being the king of the hill.

ATI had finally started competing more aggressively again with their new Radeon line and NVIDIA had launched the GeForce FX - which hindsight actually said was a bit of a plopper. NVIDIA had also started to make moves in the chipset game...

And in the gaming sphere of the time? We were absolutely still pounding Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament... but a NEW UT had just launched and there was this other new game from EA that sounded quite cool... Battlefield 1942. And it was excellent. Sadly it also ran better with a faster PC...

Specifications

AMD AthlonXP 3200+ "Barton" 2.2GHz

2GB DDR400 SDRAM, dual channel

Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro2 nForce2 Ultra 400 mainboard

20GB ATA hard disk (Windows)

120GB ATA hard disk (Storage)

Samsung DVD-write drive

Leadtek WinFast GeForce FX5900 Ultra 256MB GPU

Creative SoundBlaster Live! 5.1 sound card

Intel PRO/100 ethernet card

D-Link 802.11g wireless card

Hauppauge WinTV-Express capture card

Evercool WC202 water cooling system

Thermaltake Shark aluminium chassis

Windows XP Home Edition SP3

Unique features

There's so many whacky features it's hard to list them all! The Gigabyte board in question is the full cream milk maximum tomfoolery version which includes SATA support, AGP 8x support, a PATA RAID controller... the LeadTek card is the fanciest model they made at the time and looks like a flaming VHS tape for size... and the cooler! It's a big Zalman flower with a honking great 140mm fan on a custom mount! 9/23 update: the cooler is still amazing but the Zalman was not, a 3hr stream session of VtM:Bloodlines would have the CPU around 75°C and throttling. Chompy now sports an even more exotic Evercool WC202 custom loop water cooling system and even under maximum load for long durations, struggles to get over 50°C... great success! Even the power supply is a matching ThermalTake unit to go with the chassis!

Personal history

Lockdown was hard for a lot of folks... I didn't know what to do with myself as my occupation was most certainly not covered as being 'essential' so I was stuck at home for the foreseeable. I'd also just bought a Creality Ender 3 and was learning how to use Fusion 360 to design things and print them.

So logically I went out to the shed and started fussing around to see what parts I had and what cool things I could assemble. I started with the Thermaltake Shark, which I'd had sat aside specifically thinking I could do a sweet Athlon build with it. The ThermalTake Pure Power PSU was a natural fit for this build, so in it went. Then I had to find a board... there were two to choose from, a Soltek SL-75-MRN-L aka "Golden Dragon" or a Gigabyte GA-7N400Pro2. The choice was decided for me as the SL-75 needs recapping badly and wouldn't have made for a very dependable build!

Once the chassis and board was finalized I needed to sort out the guts. The 7N400 demanded a high end AMD and I had exactly one on hand... the best one they ever made, the AthlonXP 3200+ Barton. AMD's "+" numbering system was meant to be an equivalency to a Pentium 4 type deal and this particular CPU traded blows directly with the likes of the Pentium 4 Northwood 3.06 with HyperThreading. RAM was basically decided by the board, I had four modules of 512MB DDR400 that matched and would work but sadly due to a dicky RAM slot on the board, I had to stick with 1GB... which is fine, 2GB RAM in 2003 would have been very much baller status - even 1GB was show off stuff back then!

Next was picking out a GPU. I dug through my box and found exactly two that would possibly be matches - both Leadteks, both GeForce FXs - one an FX5950XT, the other an FX5900 Ultra. Benches proved that although the 5950 was a bit newer, the Ultra was certainly faster!

Cooling is provided by a big honkin' Zalman CNPS6500Cu all copper flower cooler, with a 3D printed mounting bracket that picks up on three points on the Shark chassis and holds a 140mm fan approximately where the original Zalman bracket would suspend one. The original chipset heatsink and fan have also been replaced with a Zalman ZM-NB1 in glorious anozied blue to match the PCB.

Audio duties are handled by a Creative Labs Live! 5.1, allowing all the nice EAX stuff since there was plenty of titles that handled that at the time.

It's an interesting system that fits a specific gap and lets me play those classics exactly as they were meant to be.

9/23 update: Having been given a wild trial by fire during a full week's streaming some weaknesses in Chompy were revealed and mostly rectified. Thermals were wildly out of control under 3hr heavy loads - the CPU temperature ended up well over 50°C at idle and peaking 75°C under load, high enough to trip thermal limiters.

I had the Evercool setup kicking around intended for a totally different project but realized it had a Socket A block... oh bother let's do it! Temperature now fluctuates gently between 40°C idle and 50°C load. I'd like to add the GPU block that was included too, but very reticent to cut up the 5900 Ultra.

While it was apart I also popped a pair of 1GB DDR400 modules in for a total 2GB - more than it needs but has helped with performance in newer games that are a bit of a stretch for the old hardware.

Copyright © 2023 Carcenomy's Lair
Last modified: January 01, 1901