Dual Athlon MP Build Up & MSI K7D Master Cap Replacement

[Ben333]

I jumped the gun with this thread and don't want to crowd it with pics of this build. I'd rather keep it for tossing around general ideas, and figured this could be it's own thread.

So, to get everyone up to speed:

So this past week, I've been looking on eBay using "Price + Shipping, lowest first" and "time ending soonest"... and sometimes that will lead to a chain reaction!

I found a dual socket 462 motherboard for $30, and I'm sure you already know what that means...

Line up for the new retro machine:

MSI K7D Master, Dual Socket A, DDR 266 RAM, AGP Pro, two PCI X slots, onboard LAN $30 Shipped
Athlon MP 2200+ CPUs (Pair) for $50 Buy it now, mind you, NEW IN BOX. Offered $35 shipped, and offer was accepted
4 GB (4x 1 GB of PC266 Registered ECC Memory) for $16, made offer of $12 shipped, accepted
Dell PERC 4 SCSI 320 RAID Controller (128 MB) for $8.50 shipped

To finish that off, I'm thinking a pair of 36 GB 15k RPM drives... for RAID 0. Then some other drives for storage of more important stuff. Also a nice soundblaster and maybe something along the lines of a 6800 Ultra.

I've finally got a camera again! So let's get into some pics...



There's the board in mostly original state. I've already replaced a few caps down by the bottom of the board... But those weren't even the bad ones, I just did them because I bought new ones.




^ Those are the bad caps, and they were preventing stability under a heavy load. (With a small overclock)



So... There were multiple brands of caps on this board. These were a different brand, none of these were swollen at all, and I'm not going to replace them




^ All of these size caps were fine, but I already bought them so I replaced all of them but one small group. Before & after above.

 

[Ben333]

I replaced those smaller caps first, not realizing that my "kit" only had one value of capacitors in it.

When I got new ones, I ordered 10 Rubycon 105C rated low ESR caps. This only cost about $5 shipped. For replacing caps, I'd say the flowing are essential: (and inexpensive)

60 Watt Iron
60/40 Rosin core solder
A wet wash cloth to clean iron tip
Solder sucking bulb



I was anxious to fix this board, and ended up replacing the bad caps with Sanyos off another board that I'd never use again. Don't do this. Replacing the caps more than you need to adds a lot of additional heat, and I could see that I'd gone just a bit too far and was starting to damage the board. It still works totally fine, but still I should have just waited till the new caps showed up and only replaced them once

So, here we are with the impatient fix, bad caps replaced with physically good looking ones... But when you have bad caps, you really should replace every cap on the board. In the very least all of the ones near the bad ones / the brand of caps that went bad. Bad caps overwork your good ones.



And now all but one replaced with brand new Rubycon caps. (One Sanyo is left because I needed 11 and ordered 10.) So far, I've had no issues.




Ready to go back in the case!


My 7800 GS


Small updates... Now using a PCI soundblaster (the on board was horrible!) And using some non-ECC, non-Registered... good 'ol regular RAM. Works fine! This Corsair should be better than the no-name server RAM I was using. This is also 400 MHz RAM as supposed to 266. I run 300 MHz FSB, so I figured it might be easier on 400 MHz RAM?

 

[Mr.Scott]

Nice! Board was a great buy. You were lucky, I paid much more for mine.
We have different applications though. I built mine mostly for speed, for dual MP benching. Not running ECC ram. Running 2x512's of BH-5 and a pair of modded 2800+'s at 2600MHz.
Subbed because I'm interested.

 

[DanFraser]

Oh my, this takes me back. About 14 years or something for this board right?

Modding Athlon XPs to be MPs was fun as well.

 

[Ben333]

Nice! Board was a great buy. You were lucky, I paid much more for mine.
We have different applications though. I built mine mostly for speed, for dual MP benching. Not running ECC ram. Running 2x512's of BH-5 and a pair of modded 2800+'s at 2600MHz.
Subbed because I'm interested.

Thank you sir! And I do consider myself lucky... It's old technology but getting any board on eBay for $30 shipped if you're looking for it specifically is a fair deal. And I'm not using my 4 GBs of ECC RAM. On the board it said DDR slots 1 & 2 can take unbuffered. So I'm running a 2x 1 GB corsair kit But yeah... #1 reason is nostalgia. I've got several S775 boards lying around, I could build a couple Core 2 Duo rigs that would run all the same software and SMOKE this setup. But this thing is pretty damn fast! So far it's been a pleasure to use, and runs fast. Considering the technology here (32 Bit CPUs < 2 GHz & DDR 1 memory) you don't even notice you're on something over 10 years old. I'll probably keep this a long time, as my designated XP machine.

Oh my, this takes me back. About 14 years or something for this board right?

Modding Athlon XPs to be MPs was fun as well.

My board says ver 1.0 on it, and has a sticker on the back with 2003 on it, so this one would be about 12 years old. Plays UT 2004 maxed out! lol. In the UT setup, a voice says "Holy S**T!" when you crank the video settings.

 

[Ben333]

Finally... Got some SCSI RAID action! Feels faster than my IDE drives, surprised it didn't show a bigger increase in the benchmarks. Running a stripe on three 10k RPM 72 GB drives.

One or both of my 15k drives are junk, and I would have five 10ks but one won't respond and one is slightly bigger than the rest.

Running on Windows 2003 Server now, had the PERC drivers included...

IDE Benches

 

[Ben333]

I thought that first benchmark seemed quite poor. I changed the block size in that program from 64k to 1MB and got much better results...
View attachment Disk-3DriveStripe10k1M.bmp

 

[Silver_Pharaoh]

Nice re-build!

I wouldn't mind having an old server one day.
Would totally save a bunch of space on my RAID and backup disks

 

[Audioaficionado]

I have 2 Iwill DH800 dual Xeon socket boards. The first one is over 11 years old. The second is over 10 years old. I had a lot of fun overclocking them. One is running 24/7 @3.3GHz as my HTPC so I can use our 47" LCD TV as the monitor and play my music files through the main house stereo system. The first one had bad caps too. Used Rubycon as well. It's sitting in it's original box waiting for a pair of Nocona 3.6GHz Xeons. ~$40 on ebay. Then I'd just need some good coolers to keep 'em from burning up. Huge thread over at 2CPU.com.

I almost went with dual AMD like you are doing, but the dual Xeon system was too good to pass up. Still have my old dual socket Pentium Pro200 system too. Don't know what I'll do with it, but it's hard to give it up.

 

[Ben333]

I've got an IBM Netfinity with four Pentium Pro 200 MHz chips (1 MB cache each!)

I love that thing but it draws around 250W from the wall socket idle.

If you wanna treat yourself to some nice nostalgia, throw NT 4 on that dual P Pro box. With 64 - 128 MB RAM on it you'll be able to multi task like crazy. I put NT4 on a thinkpad with a PII 233 and 64 MB of RAM and it's a champ for playing MP3s and word processing lol.

I had to go dual Athlon MP. It almost feels like a slower C2D (that's a compliment), but it's retro enough... and still totally usable for 95% of what I do on a PC.

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

Random seek very poor! Looks the same as 7,200 RPM IDE.

A 10,000 RPM'er is usually 8 ms without any short-stroking.

I would try some other settings in the RAID BIOS. Wipe the RAID array and recreate a RAID array with different options.

I would try 64 KB block size in the RAID BIOS.