Plans for builds

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been mulling over my thoughts on what to do about some of these systems.

Voodoo

I've had a spare Voodoo2 sitting on my shelf for quite some time and I had planned to use it in MoreVoodoo but after doing a whole bunch of research that involved swapping Glide DLLs and other convoluted tricks, I concluded that having multiple Voodoo cards in a single machine was going to be pretty problematic, so the idea was scrapped and I left the machine with just the Voodoo3 card.

With this in mind, I have decided to resurrect Voodoo and do a build that is close to the specification of the computer that my father owned way back in '96.

I've been on the lookout for a Chaintech 6BTM but have not found any that are in good condition, in this country/continental Europe¹ or at an acceptable price. Ideally, I would like to have had one new in a box (NOS) but these appear to be extremely rare. Also, I am not 100% convinced that the mainboard in my fathers' computer was this exact model, though it seems to fit all the details that my memory can recall, given that I last saw that board in 1997, some 25 or so years ago, I was reluctant to spend such a huge amount on what might not be completely accurate.

To that end, I decided that I would instead pursue an alternative board, the ASUS P2B-F, one that I have already used (also in MoreVoodoo) and found to be very reliable, relatively cheap and also very fast. I have secured one (along with a few other free bits) from Italy in very good condition and it is in transport right now.

Whilst searching for a mainboard I also have found a suitable ATX case to put all this hardware in and so I hope to have this machine completed by the middle of December.

Dominator

Currently, Dominator is sitting on a shelf, still partially assembled after its last soak test and the reason for this is that I don't have a suitable chassis to install it in. I need to move some of the other machines around to free a suitable chassis for it, then I need to get a power supply and a suitable form of storage, probably a SCSI drive of sorts.

Cold Fusion

The desire to resurrect Cold Fusion has come from my Nostalgia for the Intel Core 2 range of CPUs.

The Core 2 Duo was a huge step up from my Athlon XP processors. It had a lower TDP and better instruction sets, when tested in PassMark it was more than twice as fast for single-threaded operations and nearly 5 times faster overall.

Cold Fusion was my daily driver for nearly 9 years from 2008 right up to late 2016 and I think it deserves some TLC.

So I'm going to bring it back to life, give it a new case, and a nice set of upgrades which includes an SSD.

Most likely I will also stick with water cooling but this time I will use an AIO rather than an expensive custom loop.

Footnotes

1. I have excluded buying from the USA on eBay because the so-called import tax is just a scam, in the UK we do not pay import tax on products under £150, not only that but the delivery charge from the "Global Delivery Programme" is extortion.

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