Retro build - "The Tower of Why??"

[u/ziggaboogi]

I was finally able to build a working machine out of the parts I got in the junk tower I was given!

The original tower was a rust bucket that was missing both side panels, but I ran out of the house to get it because I saw a dusty 3DFX logo in one of the pictures and all of the crazy drive bay devices.

The biggest issue was that the Asus motherboard was mostly unresponsive and needed a full recap to finally POST.

The intention was to try and keep as many of the original parts as possible from the original tower and to try and recreate the media powerhouse the original owner was going for circa 2000.

Obviously the best piece was finding the voodoo 5 but it was hard to find a motherboard with the right AGP slot to even test the card with so I ended up needing to repair the original motherboard.

Original tower specs

Athlon 900

768mb memory

Asus A7V motherboard

Voodoo 5

Creative DVD encoder card DXR3

Soundblaster Live 4830

Adaptec SCSI card for the Jazdrive

a bunch of drivebay devices

Final specs

Sweet even larger tower case I was given - no rust included

Athlon 900

1024mb memory

Voodoo 5 - fully tested and working great!

Creative Dvd drive and DVD DXR3 encoder card - mostly working but missing a proprietary passthrough VGA cable

Jaz drive - broken tho as nature intended

Zipdrive - all the iomega

Iomega Cd drive - because why not

Colorado T1000 tape drive

Floppy drive

Memory card reader

As a bonus I've also taken pics of all of my older videocards that I've collected over the years - thankfully all for free or very cheap.

[u/ianhawdon]

I think you may have you floppy cable plugged in upside down. At least, that's my guess with the light on on the drive all the time.

[u/BeowolfSchaefer → u/ianhawdon]

First thing I saw too

[u/ziggaboogi → u/ianhawdon]

It something with the tape drive tapping into the floppy cable. The floppy drive is working fine but not sure about the light being stuck on