patreon.com/Epictronics Join me on Twitter: twitter.com/epictronics1

I loved my ABIT board back in the day. It's such a shame the company destroyed itself.

I love the design choice to put delicate tiny SMD components _inside_ the heatsink clip mechanism scraping zone.

I absolutely love your choice of colour. If the green was a bit darker, more metallic British racing green, it'd be my favourite colour. Your case looks amazing

This has just given me flashbacks for my Abit based machine which used a Abit BX6 motherboard 😀

I still have my VP6, you're making me worried I might need to recap it before I run it again. I'll cross that bridge when I need to.

Still got one of these, and a BP6 up in the loft. Happy days...

I had this system back in the day. I bought it thinking it was going to be crazy fast... not so much to be honest. Applications were not optimized to be multicore in those days. Still, nice system.

I loved those Chieftec Dragons. In fact, I still have two in opperation, though with more modern systems inside.

That case you used in the video was also sold by Antec and Raidmax, and manufactured by Chenming.

Ive been slowly collecting parts for my brothers abit bp6 dual tualatin. He took his own life many years ago now. Ive been getting back into retro, and was thinking of building out his setup.

Had almost the same comp back in late 1990s, but using a gigabyte board with 2 coppermines, which i still have lying around somewhere. Was great to watch, great work!

Ah ABIT. Legendary board maker. Shame they disappeared. This looks so cool!

I must be a hoarder, I still have my original cheiftech dragon case in silver lol it housed many builds over the years.

Love the color, really appropriate for the ABIT board!

Love the case and colour, great job. Was very happy to see the board come to life I've a soft spot for ABIT my first ever build was a BM6. I threw this machine away fully working about 10 years ago, breaks my heart now! Was an overclocking beast!

First dual proc pc I built was on a VP6. Thanks for the memories.

Great video. You could consider doing clear coat over the top of that green to protect it and bring out the sparkles

I had to comment on how absolutely immaculate that painting job is. Whatever the angle, no overspray whatsoever, as good as factory. How did you manage to do that? Would love to know for future projects. Could you please tell me what spray paint did you use? Did you apply a clear coat after to protect it? If yes, what did you use? Thanks a lot, awesome job!

You have pretty good soldering skills with those surface mount components. I never really gave it much thought... preheat the board with a heat gun to solder & unsolder through hole components in those nasty, mean, uncooperative ground plains. Thanks for the tip. I probably won't use it but, if I do.... I really enjoyed watching this. Much better than I thought it would be. WE NEED PART 2 !

Awesome job! So glad you were able to get your VP6 running again! (Thanks for the shout out)

This looks great! Had a dual slot 1 build back in the late 90's with a Tyan motherboard, but your build would have smoked it. The color is a great touch. Lots of memories of colored cases from that time. Now everything is what, just black?

Great looking tower. Like a pearly green Testarossa.

Love that GREEN color!

You might want to check the wayback machine to see if it's cached some details about your original case. If you bought it from an online computer store, they might've cached the page from around the time you bought it. I managed to find out some details about computer parts from my old PCs by looking up the computer stores I used to buy from. I lost access to my old email account for the invoice they emailed when I purchased it, but I could remember around the time I bought the parts, so I just looked up the sites on the wayback machine and could browse the categories until I found the parts that jogged my memory. The bonus is that it also shows about how much I would've spent on the system at the time, although prices fluctuated pretty frequently so it's not 100% accurate, and I'd often wait a couple of weeks until I found parts on special, which the wayback machine might not manage to catch.

This is awesome! The whole build brings back a lot of memories for me! Back in those days I used the Antec version of the same case from the start of the Pentium 3 all through the Athlon XP days. For the P3 I also used one of those Golden Orb coolers and it seemed to do a good job for the price. That case served me well for almost a decade of continuous use! Funny enough just yesterday I pulled the now empty old case out of storage. I'm planning on using it as a DAS with 12-16 HDD's to start with. I just need to figure out a good way to mount the SAS expander & PSU breakout board I will be using higher up near the PSU along with probably 2 extra HDD cages on the bottom. :)

I wish all my dead boards were as "easy" to repair as this one... pretty enjoyable video.

I had a VP6 back when, might still have one of my modified bios rom's in a backup.

That painted case looks surprisingly good. I would probably choose a dark color for the sheet metal parts to create a two-tone look but of course it's not my build. It probably looks a bit different in person.

It is very satisfactory when you repair a dead motherboard or VGA. I bought a few tools to help but I really want to get a de-soldering gun and one of those microscope with LCD devices (eye sight getting bad)

It is quite normal that boards from this era have caps from different manufacturers. I just recently recapped EpoX 8rga+ Socket A board low ESR VRM caps, and it had few Sanyo’s (left those on board) and crappy GSC caps which I replaced. In addition to these, it has bunch of TEAPO general use filter caps. These multilayered board can be tricky to work with. I did the decap like this this: I soldered big blobs of fresh solder on the legs so that gun has a large surface area of melting solder, added flux and with 375C and around 10 sec from desoldering gun was enough.

This makes me really want to get a modern case and custom paint it.

Cheiftec dragon cases! Heck, I had a few of those for my SETI farm way back when! Black, silver, blue & purple IIRR

Oh wow - my Dad and I went through five or six of the 30 or 60 GB (Can’t fully recall) DeskStar HDD’s. I had forgotten about that lol

My first sefl built PC was a P4 2.6 with RAMBUS memory and a top tier AMD GPU, all in an Abit board. My power supply was a generic delta I trhink. Abit motherboards were better than Asus, MSI, Intel, or anyone back then. Love your work!

I had one of the VP6 boards. Don't remember what CPUs I used on it though. I'm not gonna lie, I love purple but that green looks amazing!

Today I learned that Antec and Chieftain cases were both made by Casetech. I was so confused since I have an Antec case VERY similar to this one :)

The PC case paint job is magnificent! It's tempting me to paint my own PC case too now. :D

Yes! Recreating my year 2000 abit kt-7 raid has been my long term goal!

You did a fabulous job painting the case! I probably would have put screws in the place of the pop rivets you removed.

I really need a case like yours for my dual P3.. just perfect!

I still use the Chieftec Dragon case for my PC. Since years. It's a really sturdy case. Although it's a little bit heavy.

Really enjoyed the video. With Vaseline being petroleum based I would be a little worried about it damaging the paint. Maybe try a silicone based grease instead? Just a thought.

I still have three of those cases. Legends. Two of Soho fileserver versions that are steel and the chieftec ripoff that was aluminum

I found, that using "greasy" flux (cream??) works great, to fix the cap in place, before you add any solder. Use ceramic tweezer to gently push them onto the board while applying using the iron with some fresh solder on the tip.

fantastic resuscitation!

Now, let's pause to reflect and realize this is not just watching entertainment and admire what a good job and what kind of effort is going into this build.

Electrolytic caps, who'd have thought. Even the when the boards were new these gave trouble, abit sent me some under warranty to fix my BP6 back in the day

oh wow. i have a case just like that . its green as well . got it at a flea market. i have a old quad core dell motherboard in it. this takes me back thank you for posting this.

Still love the Chieftec Dragon, I still have one of my old ones. But I had a couple that I recycled that I regret getting rid of.

Awesome video and repair, love the iconic dragon case in that color! So much Nostalgia! ☺❤

I don't think I ever saw a VP6 back in the day! must have been way out of our budget, saw plenty of BP6 machines though.

If the part is faulty and you just want to get rid, don't just use *some* solder, use enough that the ends are bridged and you can heat them both via the same metal blob

You are right! Awesome case.

You're trying to solder to a heatsink Yeah, I recommend using a hot air station at low temperature (100°C, maybe 150°C) for preheating. That helps a bit against the heatsinking for the CPU VRM of the boards...

This is truly Epic, subscribed!

I LOVE these kind of videos! I've been doing the same here, and it's so satisfying ❤ I know the feeling of recreating the past with accurate parts

OMG this is the coolest retro pc ever!!! I LOVE IT!!! That green is so sharp!

I have a serious fetish for the 1080 style cases.

The always on floppy drive LED is usually caused by the ribbon cable being the wrong way round. The HDD corruption on the primary IDE channel could be because your cable is too long. Try using a shorter cable. It must an 80 wire cable.

Nice, we will fix so we can see a green metallic Zip drive ;)

That color gives SG vibes.

I personally think, the case looks better with the tilting/rotating feet. Love the colour, though. I personally had one in blue, of course with the cutout and acrylic window on the side panel. And I added an acrylic panel with engraving and LED highlights to the door (cut out the centre thingy).

Two 133MHz FSB 1Ghz PIII Coppermines are good in the beginning, but for dual S370 CPU project, the creme de la creme version are two 1,4GHz Pentium III Tualatins!

A riveting restoration.

I have VP6 with 2x 1GHz PIII, 768 MB RAM, SB Audigy 2 ZS, FX5900 + VooDoo2 8MB. I can advise you to triple check BIOS settings for floppy and for IDE - it's a bit unintuitive with some additional options, which you may have accidently turned on (such as A: and B: drives swap, which caused errors in single floppy drive configuration), also IDE HDD autodetection is also a bit wonky (you may increase initial IDE timeout if HDD is too slow for autodetect, built in RAID is a bit slower so it's more stable). Btw. if you're using AGP in 4x mode, you may need to set AGP driving value manually (otherwise it's unstable).

Ohhhhhh those coolers look amazing! I have got to try and get my hands on one of those!

I had a case similar to that one but it was made by antec, and it had 2 usb 1 firewire ports in the front just below the door with a little flap and a windowed side panel. I do miss being able to pop in the fans with ease because of the brackets that the case had but 80mm fans were very loud and even with many of them my pc struggled to stay cool. Still for my first pc it was a beast back then.

This thing looks amazing!

I had one of these with two p3 1.4ghz Tualatin cpus... used an ATI 9700 all in wonder... kicked ass..

A persistent FFD light and drive fail is normally an inverted cable. However your board has other problems 🙁. Perhaps use a PCI controller card if you can’t find a fix. Best of luck.

awesome work!

I wonder if the shop thought you were spray painting a honda civic with that color choice lol

There's something else with old cases. Maybe it's their «form follows function» vision: It's a computer case, and you should be comfortable working on it. I've lost my taste for big towers, but that one looks really interesting, and the paint job is top notch. As for the motherboard, a half-dead southbridge looks difficult to diagnose. Do you plan to change the chip entirely?

amazing as always

Back in this period I had a batch of Sony branded floppy drives that had the floppy cable connector reversed. I had to cut off the tab and insert it backwards or the drive would do exactly the same thing yours does.

Great video. I'm McLovin' it.

I had a BP6 with two Celeron 466's installed in it.

nicely done 👍🏼👍🏼

You should spray a CRT green next. :-)

I used to have a BP6 system with two Celeron 433's. I would love to recreate that system but the prices of the BP6 on eBay are insane. So that won't be happening. 😛

The Tower/Case is from Antec

I also had one of these back in the day (I think, or perhaps it was a BP6). I sold it but I did recently find my old Abit BH6 in my late father-in-law's attic along with my old AWE32

Piece of art!

Alienware Dragon is not the case type. It's an Antec full tower case. Alienware used Antec.

In order, to find an old product you can not remember the name or model too, photograph the item from your video sauce use Google lense to scan, then hit Google images go from there.

I might be in the same boat as you, regarding the failing IDE controller. In my case (no pun intended), it's an MSI KT3 Ultra-ARU (Via KT333+8233A) but the symptoms are similar. Regarding the FDC, I find it weird that it's also behaving given that it is integrated in the Super IO, not in the southbridge or the northbridge... I'm looking forward to watching your next video!

I am having a very similar problem with my 486DX machine. The IDE sockets quit working and the ISA bus is dead too. The machine has three 32bit PCI slots so I was able to boot up its hard drive using a Promise Technology 66 controller card inserted into one of the PCI slots with a PCI video card. I'm glad I have that option, but that leaves the CD ROM dead in the water.

this is the kind of build i would have killed for back in the day!

Green giant 🦖

At 30.08 it sure looks to me like the floppy cable is the wrong way round. Number 1 wire should be at the opposite side that any IDE seems to have it. That's assuming Your floppy drive's connector is somehow not the opposite way round to normal. Anyway very enjoyable video. Love that Sparkly green paint.

Would be interested to see period correct software actually utilize dual cores

wow 2 processor motherboard most people dont know about it Sir like FSB story

I remember having a pair of those cases... they were kind of nice😊

I have two or three Dual-Slot-1 (Slot-A) motherboards, one of them will only go up to P3-550, one is P2-only, and the last one will take 2x P3-1133mhz cpus. Sadly all three of these boards are essentially "too fast" and/or "too new" for the stuff I usually like playing around with. (I have matching P2-300s, matching P3-550s, and matching P3-850s) I *_had_* a slightly newer dual-slot-1 motherboard that I had running stable with 2x P3-1133mhz CPUs that I built for a roomie to use to play FinalFantasy-11 Online WAAY back in the day, think the video card in it was something like a GF4ti-4600 or something similar.. FFXI didn't run /great/, but since he was mooching off me, playing for free, and even got ME to pay his monthly subscription -- I think he got more than enough. Edit: Twat moved out one night after I'd been up late working on my boat, stole my xbox, ps2, about 40 games AND MY CAT that I'd had for like 6 years, got it at ~4wks old and had to bottle feed it. I'd have murdered that guy with a smile on my face had I ever found him after that. That cat was my PTSD-therapy animal after the Army screwed me up pretty bad.. cat slept against my chest with his head under my chin, every night.. ~18 years later and I STILL miss him profoundly.

Hey there! Greetings from Argentina 😁. Thank you SO MUCH for your great detailed videos that gives me the encourage to affront new projects on this beatiful hobby! I have a question for you: What temperature do you use with the hot air station to remove those caps? Because i have a similar motherboard (Gigabyte Dual Tualatin) that needs a full recap like yours, and i don't have a desoldering gun yet. I only have solder wick, desoldering pump, an Amtech flux (great one), a hot air station and a T12 soldering iron. Any advice for this struggle?

I have this pc case, dark grey color

Are KX Audio drivers compatible with your SB Live!? If so, itd be a good video if you dig into all the numerous customizations you can do with those drivers.

BEST !

Dual 300a s370s did 450mhz in smp