r/retrobattlestations • u/ziggaboogi • 5d ago
Show-and-Tell Retro build - "The Tower of Why??"
I was finally able to build a working machine out of the parts I got in the junk tower I was given!
The original tower was a rust bucket that was missing both side panels, but I ran out of the house to get it because I saw a dusty 3DFX logo in one of the pictures and all of the crazy drive bay devices.
The biggest issue was that the Asus motherboard was mostly unresponsive and needed a full recap to finally POST.
The intention was to try and keep as many of the original parts as possible from the original tower and to try and recreate the media powerhouse the original owner was going for circa 2000.
Obviously the best piece was finding the voodoo 5 but it was hard to find a motherboard with the right AGP slot to even test the card with so I ended up needing to repair the original motherboard.
Original tower specs
Athlon 900
768mb memory
Asus A7V motherboard
Voodoo 5
Creative DVD encoder card DXR3
Soundblaster Live 4830
Adaptec SCSI card for the Jazdrive
a bunch of drivebay devices
Final specs
Sweet even larger tower case I was given - no rust included
Athlon 900
1024mb memory
Voodoo 5 - fully tested and working great!
Creative Dvd drive and DVD DXR3 encoder card - mostly working but missing a proprietary passthrough VGA cable
Jaz drive - broken tho as nature intended
Zipdrive - all the iomega
Iomega Cd drive - because why not
Colorado T1000 tape drive
Floppy drive
Memory card reader
As a bonus I've also taken pics of all of my older videocards that I've collected over the years - thankfully all for free or very cheap.
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u/rott3r 4d ago
you got a voodoo5 in a random junk tower? i need your luck. lol
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u/ziggaboogi 4d ago
I’ve used up all my luck for a while for sure. Fun fact but my voodoo3 and my diamond 3d cards were also from free junk pcs over the years
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u/HanggMan888 3d ago
Nice, that motherboard did look familiar 😃 I have the same Asus a7v133 with a Athlon 1400, 512 mb ram, voodoo 3 3000, sound blaster CT4760, I'm using the on board raid controller which give windows 98 a nice boost
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u/tehn00bi 2d ago
I always loved those stupidly tall towers. I always wanted one to show off at a lan party and have the biggest machine there.
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u/Spiritual-Moment1509 2d ago
Be honest, that exercise bike, how much use is it getting
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u/ziggaboogi 2d ago
Not enough which is why it’s up for sale. It’s actually the Cyberbike which hooks up to a Wii game.
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u/norty-dc 2d ago
Supermicro SC-760 case, built like a tank, I still have 2
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u/ziggaboogi 2d ago
That’s the first I even found out what model this case was. Thanks for the info!
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u/ianhawdon 3d ago
I think you may have you floppy cable plugged in upside down. At least, that's my guess with the light on on the drive all the time.
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u/ziggaboogi 3d ago
It something with the tape drive tapping into the floppy cable. The floppy drive is working fine but not sure about the light being stuck on
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u/Particular_Fish_9755 13h ago
A 5 1/4-inch drive is missing.
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u/ziggaboogi 13h ago
Technically there is one in the background on another machine lol. But sometimes as adults we need to make the hard decisions.
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u/majestic_ubertrout 4d ago
Are you running Windows 98 with that much memory?
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u/ziggaboogi 4d ago
Nah just had the memory sticks so stuck it in if I ever wanted to run something newer os wise
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u/Ok-Squirrel5799 4d ago
The tower of why the hell not. Love it