Retro build from old parts

[blackmomba]

Going through my old gear and I decided to try to put something together. I don't have many old boards but I do have this :

I have a couple socket A chips like a Duron (600 I think? crusty pasted I haven't cleaned off yet) Athlon 1333 and Athlon 2200+. I'm using a Geforce 6200. I have other GPUs but they don't seem to work unfortunately.
I have like 12 256MB to 512MB DDR DIMMs but I think most are faulty. I need to test them.

Which is why I'm trying to boot Hiren's Boot CD off USB but can't seem to get it to work. Boot options are USB FDD, USB HDD, USB CDROM, USB ZIP. Tried them all and they won't pick up the boot partition. I tried the stick in another machine and it starts well.

Haven't been working with hardware this old but kind of interested in standing this up if I can for a retro build so any insight is appreciated

I also have a lot of P4 gear and some boring OEM motherboard, but something about this red PCB says "build me, baby"

 

[Starfalcon]

Most old boards will not boot off an USB stick. Also PC chips ewww, plus the VRM on that board looks scary enemic. It looks like a single phase and lack of a P4 connector, you may have trouble with non duron chips or overclocking.

 

[blackmomba]

Not looking to overclock, just looking to get her off the ground. Everything boots fine, even the Athlon at 1.8.GHz

It's weird that I have the options to boot off usb though. I guess it's looking for some specific filesystem

 

[Starfalcon]

Yeah all those USB boots were common, but the USB stick boot was pretty rare until much later XP/vista era.

 

[Zepher]

I recently built a retro XP machine from old parts sitting around.
Mainly built it to run my old Kodak 8500 Dye Sub printer as that only has XP drivers.
I tossed in an old Matrox RT.X100 editing card and Premiere Pro CS2 just for the heck of it.

 

[kirbyrj]

Those PC Chips boards used to be like $29AR from the old Tiger Direct (Prior to the CompUSA buyout in 2008), but the only catch is you never got the rebate. TD was notorious for that back in the day.

 

[70 Polara]

I had a system I built around that same board long ago. Was very reliable and stable, and proved to me at least that not all PC Chips stuff was terrible. As I recall I ran an Athlon XP 2400+ (Thoroughbred), 1GB DDR266, Turtle Beach Santa Cruz PCI sound card, and a Geforce 4 MX460 in it. It played Doom 3 and GTA SA adequately running Windows 2000. I also ran Win98SE on it as well occasionally.

Looks like a nice start to a retro system. Unfortunately many of those PC Chips boards used OST caps that can be an issue at this point, so if board works well I'd suggest insuring good air flow around the CPU VRM to keep things cool. Those OST caps can fail without any visible signs, so if system becomes unstable I'd consider replacing the caps.

Also keep in mind that table fog and 8-bit palettized textures are not supported by the Geforce 6 series cards, so depending on what games you want to play you may want an older card. But the Geforce 6 series is the last to support Windows 9x. This is why I run a cheap Geforce FX5200 in my retro system as it has great compatibility with older games under Windows 9x.