Gear Seekers, seen above needing his tracking adjusted, has built a mATX socket 370 Pentium 3 powered retro PC. He uses a Fractal Pop Mini as his case as it has a 5.25 drive bay. Interestingly, the motherboard he chose is actually a replica of a vintage Compaq board. It uses harvested chip-sets while all other parts are new.
Specs include:
Pentium 3 – 1GHZ
Voodoo5 -5500 / Nvidia FX5200
SoundBlaster Live
Crucial SSD for a dual boot to Windows 98 and Windows XP.
For those too young to understand why this is popping up on SFF.N, it’s because building a powerful retro PC from that era in an mATX form was SFF back then. Virtually every component was an add-in card, and hard drives were all classic 3.5 inch spinners. You absolutely had to have a floppy drives, and most people ran a read only DVD drive and a CD-Burner. Want sound or networking? Those are add-in cards as well. A high-end gaming PC back then might have looked like this:
Athlon or Intel 1GHZ
256MB of SDRAM
AGP Slot GPU
2X PCI Slot Voodoo2s in SLI for GLIDE API compatibility
MPEG DVD Decoder card for DVD playback
PCI Network card.
PCI Modem
ISA or PCI Sound card
DVD-ROM
CD – Burner
Zip Drive for Backups
1.44MB floppy drive
2X 20GB PATA drives in Raid 0
Non-modular 350 watt PSU
For those counting, that’s SEVEN expansion cards, two full size hard drives, and two 5.25 drives, two 3.5 drives, and a full size ATX PSU. Squeezing that down into mATX was a miracle of miracles back then. Today it’s a bit easier thanks to advancements in drives, no need for Internet access, SSDs, and being able to use far more advanced GPUs then what was available.This has allowed these systems to shrink to just mATX sized.
Check out his video below.
