Chieftek is back?

No DFI and ChiefTek are not the same
That's not what he was asking. He wanted to know if the DFI that made this embedded thing is the same one from the 90s. That was my question too when I read the article.
 
No DFI and ChiefTek are not the same. If you have to ask you are not OG from the 90s LOL!

DFI was famous for the even more famous LanParty line of Motherboards. Yellow PCI slots etc... miss them dearly.

Young adults even today have no idea what a Lan Party is anyways

I still have a Chief Tek case with a DFI Lan Party board with the Q6600 here at home. Was my main PC years ago and passed down to a family member which gave it back after they upgraded. I use it as a display piece now, but thought about firing it back up at some point.
 
That's not what he was asking. He wanted to know if the DFI that made this embedded thing is the same one from the 90s. That was my question too when I read the article.
Yes, DFI stopped making the consumer grade boards like the LanParty and shifted to mostly industrial and embedded applications.
 
No DFI and ChiefTek are not the same. If you have to ask you are not OG from the 90s LOL!

DFI was famous for the even more famous LanParty line of Motherboards. Yellow PCI slots etc... miss them dearly.

Young adults even today have no idea what a Lan Party is anyways

Yeah. The LanParty board was THE board to have.
 
I still have one of these in my office...aluminum, so light! used it for a full tower LAN rig. held a 7800gtx card back when they first came out.

They made both steel and aluminum versions of the case. Chieftek sold both under their brand name, Antec was all steel and I think the Xaser III was aluminium. The case was solid as a horse in steel, but they did not modify the design to account for aluminum being a weaker metal, so to me they felt fairly flimsy when building in comparison...
 
Oh my, gotta love the Britney poster.
Did you have one too?
This pic of my desk is 20 years old, can't believe it's been that long.
desk-2000.jpg
 
I had this exact same case. Nothing but good things to say about Chieftek

What's with all of these [ S ]oft hads? I need to walk about 15 feet to look at my blue case. Currently has a Q6600 setup in it.

I liked the case and the removable 3.5" bays were kind of unique for their time, but my experience with the mid tower was it is a bit cramped. I think mine housed 3 or 4 different builds over the years, and it was always a challenge to work in. There weren't SSDs and we had PATA cables to try to route, so some builds worked well, but I had to get creative when SLI became a thing.

Here's the last configuration of single card, an XFX 6800GT AGP circa Feb 2006. You can see how that card's cooler just barely clears the HDDs.

Since someone will ask, of the top of my head:

AMD 3800+ X2
Gigabyte GA-K8NS Ultra-939
2GB DDR-400
XFX 6800GT w/ Arctic Cooling NV5 Silencer (AGP)
2 DVD+RW drives (Both PATA)
Maxtor 120GB boot drive
Maxtor 120GB x 3 RAID0 on PCI RAID card
500W Ultra PSU
Blue cold cathode tubes (CCFL)
Kingwin liquid cooler which wasn't any better than the Zalman cnps9500 I took out to install this (It was my first attempt at liquid cooling and it was a kit with 1/4" tubing. Neat to play with but nothing special)


Ultra dragon case.jpg



The thing I will say about that picture is that it really shows you how the OEMs were just starting to take computer customization seriously. The IDE cables I was able to get round sleeved cables for, but I sleeved all of those power cables myself. (There's probably a few people on [H], myself included, who had the pleasure of sleeving IDE cables before you could buy those) Lights were just starting to become a thing, but we didn't have commodity LEDs. Those are florescent lights. I think a couple of those fans did have lighting in them, which was relatively new. There are actually two radiators for that cooling loop, one is in the 5.25" bay where the reservoir is, and the other is attached to the back of the case. I had to mount the second fan outside of the case because the radiator was too big for it to fit. There's even a PCI tuner card in the bottom, which is why those two beige parts in the bottom left are where they are. I had cut slots into the free area so I could retain the USB and extra audio connectors present on the board. This is more or less a maxed out version of this case, but there weren't 10 slot cases that I'm aware of, so you had to make due.

After that board it had a DFI LANPARTY UT nF4 SLI-DR Expert with basically all of the same parts so I could use two XFX 6800GTs in SLI. Thankfully that board was more advanced than my friend's ASUS setup we had put together before this, which required you to flip a card over in order to switch between normal and SLI modes. (Long time [H]'ers will know what I'm talking about) Those GPUs fit okay, but it was when those darn 8800GTX card came out, they were so long this case couldn't fit them without being modified. So in order to run 8800GTX SLI in that case, I drilled out the rivets that held the bottom HDD bracket in place and moved it to the bottom of the case. I could still keep a couple of HDDs in there if they were staggered between the 8800GTX cards as the cards would stick past the end of the drive. So I went to a monster CM stacker which I still have, although now with SSDs and not running SLI the case is practically bare inside. I've definitely thought about getting a smaller case as it's way too big for what I have now.
 
Mine was a purple Antec one. I used it for many years but in the end I ended up giving it away (couldn't even sell it for $5 at a garage sale)

And nostalgia is cool and all... but little 80mm fans and meh airflow isn't cool. I remember having to take the side off of mine during lan parties so it wouldn't overheat and throttle. And who bought rounded IDE cables, I made my own with a razor blade and electrical tape LOL
 
I had a Chieftec. It was a great case, but in the end it had to be retired as I couldn't fit full length modern graphics cards in the thing when fully populated with HDD's. The case itself was actually pretty expensive in the day.
 
Damn, I recently retired my koolance pc2 case, modded Dragon. Still have it and love it.


View attachment 233114
Hot damn, i thought i was the only one in the world who had one of those beasts! The fact that you still have the loop is friggin amazing...and in such good condition! That...is a piece of koolance history ;)
I sold mine off along with a box full of 80 and 92mm fans 10ish years ago.
 
I had a Chieftec. It was a great case, but in the end it had to be retired as I couldn't fit full length modern graphics cards in the thing when fully populated with HDD's. The case itself was actually pretty expensive in the day.

Wholesale cost on them was about $40 iirc... Sold for $60. Add more for the aluminum version...
 
Wholesale cost on them was about $40 iirc... Sold for $60. Add more for the aluminum version...

Back in ~2000 the case cost me far more than that. Remember, we aren't all located in the US and outside the US anything related to tech tends to incur higher charges.
 
Got my old system back up and running the other day. Chieftec case and DFI Lan Party P45 board. Still looks pretty good for being this old.

side.jpgfront.jpg
 
Uggghhh I miss my DFI Lanparty Ultra D mobo.. Did the ole pencil trick and got SLI.. Was soo badass with 2 6800gts LOL.. BF2 FTW!!
 
I remember I bought the koolance case which was a dragon with a radiator built into the top. Call me crazy but I think the dragons are always going to be in style.
 
Awshit, here we go:

Quiz: WHo can name that raid card?

No clue, it's a half height PCI card though, so that probably narrows it down some.

However you're over here like look at my RAID card, and I'm like did you pull that case apart and spray paint it all black? Is that a backside mounted heatsink and fan on your GPU? You're running an external liquid cooling loop?!?
 
You ain't [H] if you never had a blue Dragon with the side window.

Holy flashbacks... I built many-a-PC in those dragon cases... back in the days of yore when people wanted car lighters and tachometers and front panel bay sound adapters for their sound blasters. I think the Antec 900 was another super popular one to come along in the later 2000s I haven't seen mentioned in this thread.

--That new case looks like every other case I've seen since 2015 sadly. Not that it's bad, just that it's ...just another case... at this point
 
What's with all of these [ S ]oft hads? I need to walk about 15 feet to look at my blue case. Currently has a Q6600 setup in it.

I liked the case and the removable 3.5" bays were kind of unique for their time, but my experience with the mid tower was it is a bit cramped. I think mine housed 3 or 4 different builds over the years, and it was always a challenge to work in. There weren't SSDs and we had PATA cables to try to route, so some builds worked well, but I had to get creative when SLI became a thing.

Here's the last configuration of single card, an XFX 6800GT AGP circa Feb 2006. You can see how that card's cooler just barely clears the HDDs.

Since someone will ask, of the top of my head:

AMD 3800+ X2
Gigabyte GA-K8NS Ultra-939
2GB DDR-400
XFX 6800GT w/ Arctic Cooling NV5 Silencer (AGP)
2 DVD+RW drives (Both PATA)
Maxtor 120GB boot drive
Maxtor 120GB x 3 RAID0 on PCI RAID card
500W Ultra PSU
Blue cold cathode tubes (CCFL)
Kingwin liquid cooler which wasn't any better than the Zalman cnps9500 I took out to install this (It was my first attempt at liquid cooling and it was a kit with 1/4" tubing. Neat to play with but nothing special)


View attachment 231668


The thing I will say about that picture is that it really shows you how the OEMs were just starting to take computer customization seriously. The IDE cables I was able to get round sleeved cables for, but I sleeved all of those power cables myself. (There's probably a few people on [H], myself included, who had the pleasure of sleeving IDE cables before you could buy those) Lights were just starting to become a thing, but we didn't have commodity LEDs. Those are florescent lights. I think a couple of those fans did have lighting in them, which was relatively new. There are actually two radiators for that cooling loop, one is in the 5.25" bay where the reservoir is, and the other is attached to the back of the case. I had to mount the second fan outside of the case because the radiator was too big for it to fit. There's even a PCI tuner card in the bottom, which is why those two beige parts in the bottom left are where they are. I had cut slots into the free area so I could retain the USB and extra audio connectors present on the board. This is more or less a maxed out version of this case, but there weren't 10 slot cases that I'm aware of, so you had to make due.

After that board it had a DFI LANPARTY UT nF4 SLI-DR Expert with basically all of the same parts so I could use two XFX 6800GTs in SLI. Thankfully that board was more advanced than my friend's ASUS setup we had put together before this, which required you to flip a card over in order to switch between normal and SLI modes. (Long time [H]'ers will know what I'm talking about) Those GPUs fit okay, but it was when those darn 8800GTX card came out, they were so long this case couldn't fit them without being modified. So in order to run 8800GTX SLI in that case, I drilled out the rivets that held the bottom HDD bracket in place and moved it to the bottom of the case. I could still keep a couple of HDDs in there if they were staggered between the 8800GTX cards as the cards would stick past the end of the drive. So I went to a monster CM stacker which I still have, although now with SSDs and not running SLI the case is practically bare inside. I've definitely thought about getting a smaller case as it's way too big for what I have now.
This is a thing of beauty. I am actually proud of your cable management considering what you had to work with.
 
No clue, it's a half height PCI card though, so that probably narrows it down some.

However you're over here like look at my RAID card, and I'm like did you pull that case apart and spray paint it all black? Is that a backside mounted heatsink and fan on your GPU? You're running an external liquid cooling loop?!?

It's supposed to be a quick question. I can't give you ALL the clues. But we've already got a winner

1) Yes, I painted the inside of the case black
2) Yes, it's a 60mm fan on the backside of the GPU, and No, no heatsink, just several heatsinks on key components.
3) Yes, it's an external loop, with a modded medical water chiller
 
Yeah those are DIY brackets to mount thin 60mm fans under the HHD's to keep them cool. I ran out of 80mm fans in the HDD cage so I had to make due with what I had
i was pointing out the mangled plain ol grey ide cable ;)
seriously though, that build look just like the numerous ones i put together back then. the round ide, the loom, the power wire routing, even the way you bundled up the front panel cables at the bottom. minus the external loop of course. we built that one for the shop use/display only. :)
 
This is a thing of beauty. I am actually proud of your cable management considering what you had to work with.

Thanks man! I really appreciate the comment because I wasn't sure if I wanted to post a picture because it's not as clean as some of the builds you see on here. But considering there are 4 PATA cables, no tray and no way to physically reach from the RAID card to the drives without going over the top you don't get too much of a choice. I'm also quite sure I had initially tried to hide the bottom drive pata cable but there isn't enough clearance to get that cable connected between the GPU and HDD.
 
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