My beloved Frankenbox was ranked in the top .5% on the 3DMark online results board 17 years ago. All go. No show. Water cooled with 2 motorcycle radiators and a 120mm fan in the freezer part of that little fridge. Aquarium pump and tubing, and the reservoir was a container from Dollar Tree. Copper water block mounted by a homemade nut and bolt system.
2 power supplies. 1 to run the core machine and 1 to run the drive array and the 11 fans that did the rest of the cooling, including the video card which also had heat sinks on the g-ram mounted with thermal cement. I got the second one to run by shorting one of the 12 volt leads on the motherboard connector with the ground and using an old drive to give it some more draw so it wouldn't burn out.
I had that AMD Athlon XP 1900+ Thoroughbred Rev-b, overclocked 970 mhz to approaching 3 ghz, which at the time was almost unheard of. I had to solder potentiometers to the voltage regulators on the motherboard so I could over volt the front side bus and memory bus to get the juice it required for those frequencies. It had to be adjusted slowly while in the bios with a small long screwdriver so I could see where it was and not blow it up. Both the graphics processor and g-ram, along with the system memory were overclocked hard as well so hence all that cooling there too.
2 512's of Crucial Ballistix memory with all the timings tweaked tight enough to snap.
4 40 gig drives in 2 80 gig arrays in raid 0. Those were in the bottom which was the shell of an old cd-rom server (Anybody remember those?) The top was the tray from another old case which was duct taped to the bottom around the edges. I had thermistor based temperature sensors on the processor, the video processor, video memory and northbride of the chipset. To start it, I had to turn on the fridge, water pump and radiator fan first, watch the temps and boot the machine when everything was cold, but not frozen. Yes, that's antifreeze in the tubing.
The power and reset buttons are on that long little white rectangular piece on top of the main power supply in front of all that wiring and you can see one of the temperature monitors that looks like a little screen (because it is) sitting on the edge of the desk.
Uglier than sin, but a rock crushing monster of a performer for the day. Powered through all the benchmarks like a rocket sled.
She was my baby. I loved that machine almost like another kid.
These are the only pix I have left.
View attachment 128507 View attachment 128508
