So Amir’s hardware arrived today: an Asus A7N266VM (nForce 220D–based microATX motherboard), an AMD Athlon XP 1600+, a Kingston ValueRAM 256MB PC2100 DIMM and a heatsink/fan to go with the processor. It’s Friday, so the shops are all closed. If Eid is not declared tomorrow, I’ll be able to go and purchase an ATX chassis (all I have around here are Baby AT towers), a tube of thermal grease for the heatsink and a PCI linmodem.
Thank goodness. I can see an end to watching the screen repaint itself raster-line–by–raster-line. (OK, so it was never quite that bad.) I’ll keep my disk subsystem — a 36GB UltraStar 36LZX, an 80GB Maxtor DiamondMax D740X and a Western Digital AC34300L. Currently I have two CD readers in this box, one of which can read anything except CD-RWs reliably, and can’t read CD-RW media at all (defective laser, perhaps) and another reader that can’t read anything reliably (but can read CD-RWs about a third to half the time). I think I might pick up a proper DVD-ROM drive — there isn’t a single decent reader in this house. I’ll pull the floppy drive from this box. The motherboard builds in graphics (nForce IGP; the NVIDIA graphics drivers should work), audio (nForce audio; the ALSA driver will work here) and LAN devices (under Linux, NVIDIA provides NVNET drivers that ought to work, and there’s also an open-sourced forcedeth driver that is said to work better than patched NVNET under Linux 2.6).
It has only three PCI slots, but these should be sufficient. One will go to the PCI linmodem. Another will be occupied by my SCSI card. I’ll put the video capture card from my Dad’s machine into the third. No ISA slots, of course, so my old ISA PnP modem won’t work in it.
My current box has all slots but one ISA slot filled — it accommodates a 1 MB Cirrus Logic GD5430 PCI VGA card from 1995, a SIIG-branded Silicon Image SiI0680–based ATA/133 PCI card, a Koutech KW-910UW–branded Initio INIC-950P—branded SCSI card (Initio INI-9100UW workalike), a RealTek RTL8139D Fast Ethernet PCI card, a PROLiNK-branded Rockwell chipset–based ISA plug-and-play modem that originally conformed to K56flex but that I subsequently flashed for V.90 operation (using minicom and X-modem — man, I was scared) and a pre–Plug-and-Play SoundBlaster 16 from 1994 or 1995 (CT2290), the full-length kind that carry IDE ports.
All of these on a crappy 430VX-chipset board (FIC 586IPVG) that officially only supports CPUs up to the Pentium MMX 233 MHz (but for which I figured out jumper settings for 2.2V — the lowest setting in the manual being 2.8V — so the K6-2 450 MHz I’m running at 66 MHz x 6 = 400 MHz wasn’t fried.) The BIOS actually thinks I have an 80486SX at 66 MHz. @_@ The last BIOS release for it was on August 13, 1997. And I’m running 128 MB FPM RAM (for the uninitiated, Fast Page Mode (FPM) RAM was the technology most later 486es used, prior to the advent of EDO (Extended Data Out) RAM), the maximum amount of memory that the motherboard can address. (SDRAM DIMMs are limited to the 32MB-per-module density, and there are only two DIMMs, so I’d only be able to use 64MB by that route.) On top of this, the 430VX’s L2 cache can’t address more than 64MB, so half the RAM is effectively only cached by the L1 cache — so sort of like the original Covington Celerons that way, but without the overclockability.
It’d help a little if I could clock the system bus at 75 MHz. That would push the CPU up to its rated 450 MHz speed, but unfortunately, the memory is evidently not able to deal with a higher clock rate, so it’s going to be stuck at 66 MHz/400 MHz for the foreseeable future.
The components onboard the nForce board alone are a huge upgrade. Add to this the fact that things like a kernel compile won’t take two hours and change should be a pleasant improvement.
Hopefully this run of good luck will continue into the coming months. 
