Maes

After my Athlon 939 mobo died (a combination of latent bad caps and probably some dead transistor), I had ordered a new Athlon II X640 beast, but alas, shipment was stalled for nearly a month and I had other shit to do, so I cancelled the nearly Eur. 500 order (the PC was meant for use in my hometown, which is not everyday as of now).

Frustrated, I picked up the "best" components I could find amongst my recovered junk PCs. After some tinkering, here's my new desktop "beast":

• Pentium III @ 1000 MHz
  
• Jama M7693V motherboard. In case you're not familiar with it, it's one of the least well designed and most unsupported VIA KT133-based mobos ever made :-p
  
• 640 MB of PC-133 SDRAM (probably worth a fortune on eBay).
  
• SATA 500 GB HD (ha! You didn't expect that!) hooked to...
  
• ...some noname Fasttrak 378-based SATA RAID controller. Had to slipstream special drivers into an XP installation to get it to work.
  
• Some nVidia FX 5200-based graphics card with 128 MB of RAM. It's an AGP 4x card forced to work at AGP 2x because of the extra crappiness of this mobo -_-. This results in some interesting behavior: stuff that relies on just using a lot of onboard memory/rendering bling works fine, stuff that requires too much geometry pushing from the CPU to the graphics card is a real dog.
  
• 3Com TX 10/100 Ethernet adapter, for extra awesome or something.
  

It's not actually a bad gaming system: it plays Doom 3, Battlefield 1942, World of Goo, GZDoom, etc. its only sore point is that some MPEg4 videos don't seem to play smoothly, and flash-based players are nearly unusable inside a browser, because they require so much more raw CPU horsepower. But in any case...hey, it was almost free, and it has a vast new hard disk to play with ;-)