[sdiy] OT: PC's for audio, PC100 RAM to barter? Want my 900MHz PIII? Coolness of certain Diamond AGP graphics card?

[anthony]

I have recently acquired four PC's that their former owners.

One was a huge Compaq Proliant, which must have been intended to be some 
sort of server, with a 900MHz Pentium III still in it, but none of the SCSI 
drives that it needs to operate and no RAM - and the RAM this thing uses is 
nothing like anything my K6-2 and older Pentiums use. (I don't know about my 
everyday Dell - I bought it in 2004, but I don't plan on cannibalizing any 
RAM out of it for a lesser machine). Then there's a Dell Dimension XPS R450 
that /had/ a Pentium II with no HD and no RAM, but it does use PC100 RAM. I 
tried to stick the Xeon (PIII) into the Pentium II slot, but it wouldn't go. 
I'm not sure if it's really designed that way or if Dell just decided to jam 
a bunch of tall electrolytic caps RIGHT on the edge of the slot. It also has 
what looks like a pretty slick AGP Diamond video card that has its own 
little fan on its processor and 8 KM4132G512Q-8 chips (how much video RAM is 
THAT?). The copyright on the board is 1998 so that makes it pretty dated. 
Heck as far as I know, being AGP makes it pretty dated too... Third is a 
generic but nicely sized PC with a K6-2 400, some RAM (1 8x64 & 1 16x64 - 
how much RAM is that???) and a Seagate (yay! not Western Digital!) 4.3GB 
drive and a CD-ROM drive. This is the one I will try to make a decent 
computer to run my Yamaha YMF724 audio card and use to send sysex commands 
to my MKS-50, although I may use the following one for that: It's a 
rinky-dink HP Pavilion with only a 336MHz Celeron (but a big enough heat 
sink a the fan that said AMD - ha!). This thing looks like a crappy Compaq 
with the HP name on it. The soundcard was part of a modem and the audio 
in/out was on a satellite board that did make it easy to access, but gave 
the computer a bush league look. This one had a PC66 RAM card which doesn't 
make a good frisbee. But it also had an ATI 3D Rage Pro AGP 2X video card 
which seemed a tiny bit cool, but was also date 1998 as was the 
aforementioned AGP card with the fan on it. This one had 4 VRAM chips and I 
really don't like typing out those big long part numbers that newer RAM's 
seem to have. It looks like either 4Meg or 8Meg total - I can never make 
head nor tail of 'em. Another 4.3GB Seagate. Being really small makes this 
box sort of appealing, but it only has 2 PCI slots along with one ISA. If 
I'd had to choose I'd have said, "fuck the ISA slot and put in all of the 
PCI slots you can fit." I can't think of anything ISA that I'd HAVE to have 
except maybe a SCSI card or certain ethernet cards. But I don't /do/ SCSI 
anymore. Too much hassle: expensive cables mysteriously and suddenly dying? 
USB is where it's at and all of these machines have it (which ones are 2.X I 
dunno...) I wish they'd leave a little more room between the AGP slot and 
the PCI slots too.

Anyway, I was wondering if anybody had some PC100 RAM they'd want to barter 
or maybe even a motherboard that will let me use that 900MHz PIII in another 
machine besides that Compaq monstrosity. I want to try to run Arturia's Moog 
Modular Sytem on it. What's the fastest Pentium II? The fastest K6-2? I 
think I have a 450MHz K6-2 around somewhere.

In the near future I'd like to have 2 machines up and running. They needn't 
be incredibly fast or have a lot of RAM. I'm just going to be doing MIDI 
work and soundcard specific stuff with the YMF724 card. I wanted to run the 
900MHz Xeon machine on Win98SE, but it looks like it's going to want NT or 
something with the SCSI RAID setup. I suppose Win98 could do RAID0 without 
trying, right? Isn't that where each drive is just used as a drive with no 
redundancy. I could put something like Linux on it as well, but I haven't 
messed with Linux since Red Hat 6.2

I'd be willing to barter the PIII and its little power module for some 
stuff. I understand the little power module is pretty expensive. But it's 
probably also sadly obsolete. I suppose I could wait and find a motherboard 
on eBay to run a PIII, but I actually want one that'll do 1.2GHz or faster. 
So if someone would like to trade my 900MHz PIII, I'm game.

cheers,
Anthony