I built myself a new computer this Sunday, thanks to Mermaid for giving me a ride to the show in Poughkeepsie. I’ll tell ya folks, these Pentium 2 machines are a whole new ball game. Maybe it is just me, but they are a royal pain in the ass to set up. Once they’re going though, DAMN! Here is what I have:
Pentium II 350mhz
128mb RAM
Asus P2B Motherboard
Diamond Viper v550
Now understand me here folks, I’ve been building strictly AT Pentium Socket 7 machines until now. The first thing I slapped myself in the head about, the damn power supply depends on the motherboard, in fact it is CONTROLLED by it. So when I plugged in the case and turned on the power supply to test it, nothing happened. I crossed my fingers and continued anyhow. I install the RAM and the CPU, these Pentium II chips are neat looking, kinda like a Sega cartridge…. Anyhow, I jam the CPU in, and figure it is in all the way, so I mount it into the case, plug in the power, set up the drives, hit the switch, hit the power, and NOTHING. So now I’m absolutely livid (it happens when you spend $800 and the damn thing don’t work). So I proceed to check all the connections, they’re fine. I pulled the CPU, put it back in, and this time it went CLICK. I hit the power and everything starts coming up. I hop into the BIOS to set up a few things, and I see that the CPU is a 233. I bought the thing in the box, and paid for a damn 350mhz so I’m starting to flip out again, but as is the case with computers, I hold that back until I’m done. So I find out that I set the multiplier wrong (despite I did it to MATCH THE GODDAMN DIAGRAM), so I set it to 3.5x, reboot, still a 233. Bus frequency is wrong, so I set it to 100.3mhz and bam, it is a 350. Windows98 rocks, it just redetected everything to work with the new hardware. So far I’ve tried Carmageddon and a game called Motorhead. Both run superbly through the RivaTNT. Motorhead is evil in that I have the resolution set to 800×600 and TRUE COLOR. The game is beautiful. Anyhow, I think I may just toss in another fan to blow air over the expansion cards then I’m all done.
