My old P3-700 that I have been using day in and day out since 1999 is finally getting retired! I have been slowly collecting parts for the new machine as they have popped up here and there.

System is built around MSI KT3 Ultra II board with onboard RAID I picked up last year around this time. I wanted to use it for a V5-6000 system but I'm still not sure about proper 3.3 volts AGP support so set it aside rather then use it for that purpose.

I liked the idea of a daily box with a mirrored RAID assembly, if one drive fails the other just keeps on going. A discarded computer from work donated a AMD 2000+ CPU and heatsink combo, and over on the HardOCP forum I found someone selling a stick of 512MB DDR400 ram for $35 shipped.

Yesterday the final pieces feel into place-

http://www.officemax.com/max/solutions/product/prodBlock.jsp?BV_UseBVCookie=yes&...

Seagate retail 160GB hard drives with 8MB cache on sale for $59 each!

Last night I spent several hours setting up Win98/Win2000Pro/Linux. I split the first drive into four parts, the OS's are each on their own partitions (5 gig each) with the last partiton (137 GB) being for storage and common Win98/Win2k programs.

After that I installed the second drive, went into the RAID bios and mirrored the first drive and it is fully up and running.

Did I mention it's fast? =)

Still have to tinker with the OS loader menu, Lispire makes itself the default and I have to figure out how to change it.

TIme to get ready for work, cya.

ah look'n great Gary, but I thought you had troubles with MSI KT3 Ultra boards?

or are there many other types that are safe?

ah okay like the Voodoo4 4500 AGP and Rampage for example okay well it's good to see you upgrad'n hehe must be alot better to work with than the P3 700 , that's for sure !

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Unfortunatly you have the possibility to blow your AGP slot (or worse) to pieces, too.

Doing some tinkering tonight- The board I have does not seem to support 3.3v AGP.

I have a Voodoo 3 board in it now and it gives an "alarm" tone on power up and a flashing red screen.

After that the machine proceeds and seems to run normal but the only time I have seen that before was on a motherboard that did support a video card proper.

AGP voltage tweaks in BIOS still only indicate 1.6/1.7/1.8V as options.

Bios looks to be the last available, dated 2/03. version. 5.7 board PN 6380E.

Just a FYI- The board I'm using has the RAID option, KT3 Ultras II's without might have 3.3V support.

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When I install a 3.3 volt card like a Voodoo 3 I get a warning tone and flashing red screen during boot, when I install a Voodoo 4 or GF4 there is no warning tone nor flashing red screen.

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I know. And I said, that I have the same mainboard, with 3.3V support (My Voodoo3 AGP boots flawlessly). Seems, there are existing different versions of this mb. (VIA KT33CE an CF)

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Well about makin new systems, I got myself an 8K5A2+ about a month ago (hopefully someday it will power a V56K)
But same case as Gary, I'm too slowly collecting the parts, so no new pc for me yet.

So Gary belive that finally is very welcome, speaking of being in a similar situation I know it is.
Anyway great system