Agreed, the RedStorm overclocking was rather simplistic but was a cool test you could run, even if it wasn't all that effective. Soltek, as a brand wasn't very well known however, they did have some very unique board designs along with a SFF cube called qBic.

Ya I know right? I was working with a computer shop out of Florida who was sending me boards and stuff to review (before the actual Soltek sponsorship). Seems NCIX was where they sourced their components.

@@Hardwareasylum I live on Vancouver Island and NCIX was my go-to back in those days because cheap shipping would get orders from Vancouver to me in a day instead of waiting a week.

I am sorry for your loss. To be honest, I have killed a number of "retro" boards due to capacitors exploding, more often than not, the cap was perfectly fine, until it wasn't. That is part of the fun. :) Bulging caps can cause problems but in this situation they just prevented the board from booting until they got charged.

Thanks, The video card has them too, though I didn't show that. Just a sign of the times, and maybe being stored in a hot storage unit didn't help much.

Thanks. that is the plan.

Same, I had two of them, the regular golden and the version of onboard video but, I sold that one off years ago, never to be seen again. As memory serves, you only need two sticks to enable dual channel and adding a third would kick it back to single channel, or was just super super slow. Either way, not a bad build. I'll be revisiting that board and others in the coming months and may even pull out the Vitesta DDR and 9600 pro just to be "that guy"

​@@Hardwareasylum Not really sure but whenever I boot it, there's a notice saying "Dual Channel Activated, 200MHz" right after the memory count, that being with the above mentioned config. It'll do dual channel regardless if the black DIMM slot is populated apparently - removed the PQI stick and it still said Dual Channel Activated. If you want to do the same, I would advise going with a 9700 Pro instead of 9600. I nearly pulled my hair out until I found Catalyst 6.2 (and its subsequent modded Omega driver) to work crash-free on nForce 2 chipsets in general. (mind you, I had 9600 crash across 4 different boards - Epox 8RDA6 Plus, ABIT NF7 v2.0, MSI K7N2 Delta-ILSR, and recently the SL-75FRN2-RL) 9700 runs right out of the box - you might even be able to squeeze some more out of those with the Omega drivers, since I noticed the Omega drivers kinda specifically target 9500/9700 GPUs. I'm currently awaiting a Geforce 7800GS AGP to see how will it fare against a 9700 Pro. I've done more silly stuff than that (P4 Northwood HT 2.8GHz paired... with a HD4870 PCI-E. Thank Asrock's crazy azz P4Dual-915GL mobo for achieveing that feat 🤣) so I suppose a 7800GS on an Athlon XP isn't too out of the ordinary lol Oh and I almost forgot - aside from the mobo and GPU recap, do an PSU recap as well. Those Enermax units are getting less and less common... and they aren't bad at all. Just watch out for conductive glue and bad caps in them, and you should be golden. I'm thinking of picking one Enermax as well to have a beefier "retro" PSU for those Socket A mobos - my 350W Seasonic SS-351FS ain't really young anymore, and my other unit, a Chieftec GPS-450AB-101, is quite overkill for the job. (ahh Delta, you crazy mfs, building a total bricc unit of a PSU 😂)

To know for sure about the memory, you'd have to run a memory benchmark, it is a night and day difference. Since "dual channel" was hardware based the notification will activate when those slots are populated, despite what the chipset does internally. As for the graphics card, I'm sure I have a 9600 laying around, if not I'll go with something NVIDIA based. The point of the "vault" videos is to use what I have, not buy new stuff that I'd never use. :) Thanks for the info, I'll look into the driver support when it comes time. I haven't looked at the 75FRN in years so, it might need a recap before it is fired up.

That is what I figured, considering the board works already there shouldn't be any surprises.

I used Epox on a couple of occasions, wasn't all that impressed. Abit had always been a diamond in the rough when it came to performance tuning. However, many of those pale when compared to Soyo, the marketing behind that company created some iconic designs that are still highly sought after to this day. DFI boards were also amazing but only after the designers came over from Abit.

@@Hardwareasylum Never bad messed with Soyo boards, except for a couple of socket 7 and 486 board... But their Dragon Ultra series were very cool boards... I have a Abit NF7-S and AN7 nForce 2 boards, and they are very good (except for the caps, but that is to be expected for the time frame)... Also have a SL-74KV+ (KT133), a White PCB Socket 478 Via board, and a purple Intel socket 478 board... All of them had to be recaped ... That Hercules GeForce card also needs caps! Nice video!

very nice! I acquired a Voodoo 5 and Voodoo 3 in a box of parts that I am hoping to get running again. the V5 had some artifacts which I suspected was driver though could be memory, difficult to know at this point. I'm not sure if I have a KT133 board anymore, I'd have to look.

You know, you are right, I'm certain you can see the logo, and I just assume that everyone knows that the KT266A chipset requires DDR memory. I mean, seriously, Corsair only released silver heatspreaders like this on their DDR line so, to me, it seems obvious. However, I will concede that I'm never quite sure how much hand holding I need to do with my audience while I try to strike a balance between my less than enthusiastic delivery of "amazing" content and the education value of my videos. Apologizes for my oversight, I will attempt to do better during the "recap" video. :)

a GF3 Ti200?? Maybe to the right person but, in the big picture "that" card is kinda slow. It has some bulging caps that I plan to replace but at least the fan is in good shape.

@@HardwareasylumI remember these being the more premium sought after cards though yours looks like it is missing a dvi connection, so I suppose it is a lesser model. Still, I bet its worth a hundo at least. Not bad.

@@ItIsNot1984 It is, and they are. However, from a performance standpoint, the Ti500 and regular GF3 are considerably faster (and rare). I'm fixing to replace the three caps that have expanded on this card and then do a Hercules 3D Prophet round up video. I currently have 3 cards that might make for some interesting content.

@@HardwareasylumCool. I don't remember models and all that from back then. I know that when you see things unpopulated, it usually means something better exists that does have it populated. I do remember that hercules was seen as the overclocker's card and fetched a premium though. Probably why I never had one.

@@Hardwareasylum I mean the hercules card - AGP - they are sort after

The overclocking features would be an interesting video. If memory serves, the processor in the machine only did 146FSB stable despite it locking up at 152FSB on the video.

So much to digest with this comment :) I'm honestly curious to know what brand fan is on the cooler since I rarely kept with the factory options.