revelator

well i did something rather effective with this old cabby, i threw my asrock z97 extreme6 board in there with the cooler from the core2 quad (plenty effective). the gfx card was a bit of a bummer though as i had two to choose from but both were much to large for adding an aio to the sidebracket, well actually to large for the sidebracket as well so i had to mount it a bit offset from the mesh hole in the side. i actually managed to get my well proven rm1000 corsair psu in there allthough i had to remove one drive train and move the cable wall to about the mid of the cabby (luckily this is pretty easy with the old lian li models) downside is that i now only have room for 3 harddrives unless i buy a ton of offsets and mount them in the dvd/cd trains. i removed the fan controller because this cabby only has 3 fans and no room for more unless i do some serious remoddeling, this does not matter that much as the asrock board has plenty of fan controls onboard. so atm it runs with 3 1tb mechanical harddrives and one 1 tb nvme, board has 32 gb ram and a gtx 970 (will probably throw in my 1080 ti instead once i get the dough for a rtx 3070 ti for my main pc) the cpu is a devils canyon 4790k relidded with liquid metal. it runs really well with this setup though as long as i dont try anything fancy like 4K i can run cyberpunk 2077 with 60 fps no sweat in high.

heh just realized this is actually one of the few boards from that era which can still run win98 se it has both pata and sata connections as well as floppy (unused atm), i dont really need the board so if anyone wants to toy with a retro build they can have it :) cpu and ram to ofc, though if you want to go for win9x i have a dual core for it instead as win9x cannot do multicore anyway. should also be possible to get a single core pentium model for the old 775 socket.

quite a beauty aint it back in those days cable management was not a thing though so i have some plans regarding that. the front knobs are for fan control you needed a pretty optimized setup on fans to keep these old timers from going into nuclear meltdown when overclocked into the high 4 ghz range. one of my friends had one in an alienware with an ln2 setup (basically a freezer attached to the cpu as cooler) the whole board needed to be dipped in silicone grease to keep moisture out of the components so it was a bit of a mess but his board ran a core2 at 5.6 ghz so it was lightning fast at that time. for my own setup ill probably go with an aio water cooler mounted on the sidebracket in the picture. ill probably also keep the fan controls since it allows me to micromanage a positive airflow system that wont blow your head of with the fan noise.

yep one of those bad boys i actually have 2. one from an old build the board sadly gave out in the end (one of the makes with the infamous nforce chipset "MSI board"). the nforce chipset wasnt to bad but it had a tendency of getting extremely hot, sadly at the time it was pretty much needed if you wanted to run your nvidia cards in SLI. back then the PCIE lanes were all handled by the northbridge not the cpu so maybe not so odd that temperatures exploded, hell even the memory controller was located on the northbridge . the one i got in the lian li is an intel p35 though "gigabyte board" not that i intend playing with SLI (well could be fun trying it with the gtx 560 ti since i got 2 and the card was a pretty solid performer for a midrange card back when it was new but bleargh...). as for the cpu the q6600 was a solid overclocker though far from the fastest cpu in the core2 days when overclocked it ran pretty fast.

got my hands on one of the old lian li full aluminium pc cases in mint condition even this one was back from the core2 days came fully stocked with a violently overclocked core2 quad damn thing actually runs win10 pretty fast but the gfx card was a nvidia 560 gtx ti so no directx12 and max sata speed was sata 3 so even thugh an ssd helped a bit its still on the slow side with transfer speeds. ill yank my asrock z97 extreme6 in there with a gtx 970 and use it as a media server, downside with the z97 board is that even though it does have an nvme slot it halves the pcie lanes for the gfx card due to the cpu only having 16 (this board does not have a plx chip you need the extreme9 for that and good luck finding one hehe). still if you can live with a normal ssd it runs pretty good and is one of the most stable boards i have had. it is also stocked with a devils canyon 4790k refresh which i recently delidded and applied liquid metal to the ICH instead of the gunk intel used, this lowered the core temps by > 20 degrees so i can heartily recommend doing it. (need to be carefull though the liquid metal is conductive so do not spill any !!!, best approach is to laquer the components beside the ICH with clear nail laquer let it dry and then carefully apply a small ammount of the liquid metal on the ICH use one of the cotton pads that come with it to grind it into the chip surface evenly).

at the current speeds -> 3 years went from DDR4 to DDR6 -> nvidia went bananas with cards sucking more power than two amd R9 390X in crossfire while requiring a pc case bigger than fort knox -> amd went from AM4 to LGA sockets and had a small whoopsie with the new cpu's blowing up on OC boards due to the voltage boost many of these provide by default. me having fun restoring previous gen PC's with proven technology, many of which can still put a dent in newer offerings hehe.

just a fun thought that as long as you control the electricity AI wouldnt stand a chance of taking over the world (or erradicating us) unless someone really throws all caution to the wind and makes it A control the electricity itself. B makes an AI with no way to countermand it in case shit hits the fan (a rather hillarious thought), C gives it control over a factory for making death bots.

silently goes after the power outlet take that skynet... skynet enables backup power supply oh crap lets hope someone is not stupid enough to actually forego backdoors in the software or we might indeed end up with horizon zero dawn (bummer mr dev bummer...).

heh guess i allready knew to some extent based on the fact that corsairs icue does exactly that bricking my friends PC because it crashed the machine before the bios even loads. found that out the hard way when he borrowed my older machine so we could game together and as soon as he installed the icue software it broke mine to, luckily my old machine has a dual bios so recovering it was not to bothersome still ouch.

heh id worry even more about the management engine built into every cpu out there, in essence you have a backdoor into your PC that cannot be shut by any means other than destroying it. UEFI was a good idea but all good ideas come with a downside if someone wants to use it maliciously.

true, i think it might actually be the older player bases at fault here because most of them now got wife and kids a job which lead them to just dont have the time for figuring things out themself sadly. well i was newer married got close once but no cigar, so im probably unfettered by those things to a degree (had several jobs though) and just that strain on your free time leaves a desire to just relax when playing a game even if unconscious. i suspect rasing a kid and keeping the wife happy while also working to make sure everyone has there needs satisfied really puts things into perspective.

sadly us players have been hampered for years by games that hold our hands, actually took me a while to get used to it again but it was all worth it. Gfx arent to bad, style is probably nothing the ultra natural crowd will agree to but its they're loss if that is what holds them back to each there own... i also still play omikron the nomad soul from time to time though id wish the developer would do the remake thing on this title as well (the controls are horrendous) gfx wise its not to bad for an allmost 30 year old game and it is also one of those that do no handholding. Recently picked up the new diablo 4 as well though that one has me a bit bewildered lots of handholding and some rather obscure bugs like a rare elite in the starting area who can literally oneshot a lvl 100 player (dont go there seriously...), if you play hardcore you might also get butchered in dungeons by the hmm butcher which was kinda fun untill he became a nuisance and started trailing my chars after i escaped him (which is damn f... hard as he runs faster than you even with speed buffs and if you do happen to get out of sight he has a hook which yanks you back into his targeting range) best bet is to kite him around some object but he has a lot of life and does a ton of damage so ouch. another item in the game that is kinda lost on me is the scrool of escape... its a scroll you can bind to the emote bar for an instant teleport, the problem is most monsters scale to your level the few really dangerous ones will oneshot you (goes so fast you literally die the second they notice you) so its kinda useless.

https://simplednscrypt.org/ for us windows nuts an extra layer of security

well tbh im kinda glad i waited on getting newer hardware seing as my friends less than 3 years old x570 gigabyte mainboard just gave out, atleast the company refunded the price on the board but he can no longer get one with a socket that fits his zen 3 3950 cpu (atleast none left here in denmark) so were looking for a used replacement... in the meantime we moved his rx5700 xt to my old asus x79 deluxe and it is happilly chugging along on it's 10 birthday with a 1680v2 xeon 8 core and 64 gb ram. he is a bit unhappy about the boot time but that is normal on the x79 and has nothing to do with the sata speed (bios does tons of checks before allowing it to boot) but in game it runs like oil and is quite a bit more stable than the ryzen build (not to say the ryzen is crap the mobo might have been the culprit here seing as numerous people have had troubles with the auorus series). If i could just find the riser card for the old x79 deluxe he could actually get his nvme in there as a game drive, but the x79 deluxe only ever supported one nvme drive and current riser cards have bifurcated connections allowing 4 or more nvme's and do not play well with this old mobo. There are bios modifications to the board allowing bifurcation but id rather not brick it.

guess they used DooM as the OS in the movie with the killing elevator -> you need to be atleast as old as me to know the one hehe.

happy bday just 10 more years to go here. i brought the

oh i dont wanna attempt that, just curious, also i reckon it would be asking for trouble accessing darknet from a phone your practically inviting the NSA to be all over your ass hehe.

heh just noticed they actually kept the blocky dos age gfx in the remake try going close to a wall much better gfx though. still a pain to find your way in and objects can be a little dauting to find due to the hitbox being so small, atm im stuck in engineering

overdose looks to have a bit of a metro vibe not quite dead it seems they are looking for devs.

aye quite a load of scrapped mods over the years, most mappers dont seem comfortable in the editors avaliable for the quake engine and either choose something well known like unreal or drop it. The darkplaces engine itself is more than fine for making quality games but the mapping tools are sometimes a bit lackluster.

xash3d a half-life clone engine was also based on darkplaces though on a much much older version than what is currently up for grabs. had they used the newer engine then xash would be close to source engine levels of photorealism but the newer engine sources are pretty hard to work with if you are not into toying with the darkplaces source code regularily mostly because the code no longer resemble the quake source code anymore. It was also the first quake engine to support portal culling though not the first to support real time lighting and bumpmapping that honor goes to tenebrae, havoc did catch on quickly though and his implementation was far superior to the tenebrae model which used hacked entity lights (sprites basically). darkplaces uses rtlight a variant of the old lighting tool from quake supporting real time light sources, quake itself does not however support realtime lighting so the lightsources are parsed from an external rtlight file containing the positions of lightsources in the map if you dont have these it can approximate the lightsources much the same way as tenebrae did but it is very very VERY slow, in mods it can be compiled into the map. it also supports bsp2 a new map format allowing much more complex levels and a skeletal model format instead of the blocky mdl1 format. havoc has not had much time to do work on darkplaces in later years (works for ID software now) and got married some years back to one of the other devs from the now defunct inside3d where i used to frequent, but i heard she would probably take up work on it again shortly. Would be rather cool to see where that might lead having worked with the ID dev'ils she might actually make an engine that becomes a serious contender to them heres a shot from quake 1 with all the mod bells and whistles on skeletal models real time lights hd textures you name it it is probably there.

tbh more ports have used the quake engine than i can remember though strictly speaking darkplaces is so far removed from the original source that it may as well be a whole new engine. lord havoc or as it turned out lady havoc (long story) really did a number updating the aging quake engine. you can actually make some truely amazing things with it even today.

darkplaces ! well that brings back memories though i dont recall any attempt at a system shock remake using it there was an attempt at remaking blood using it i think but cool

hehe yeah that actually does look a lot like the old game but more modern as well guess the dev had a look at the now defunct system shock 3 which was also made in unity allthough that one was more detailed and quite a bit grisly.

i would say as long as i dont need special equipment to play it that is the minimum requirement for me not meaning wrappers for older directx or opengl bungles though the casual user might have some trouble getting things to run that i have had running for years. visually im more than satisfied with how system shock 2 looked the interface however can be a bit daunting for players of today. strangely atleast some older games can rival modern games in fidelity one example being timeshift which ran on the saber engine (yes the same engine powering the newer halo offerings). Try it in 4k and be amazed at the detail . the game itself is not widely known as it came out at the same time half-life 2 came out so it was overshadowed which is a shame as it is actually rather fun to play as a protagonist with a suit that is actually a working time machine. The story is newer fleshed out all that much but in essence you were a scientist working on the suit you wear when one of the other scientists jacks an older prototype to change history and tries to murder everyone in the lab your fiance included (well actually succeding atleast untill you get to take him down and travel back to just before the bomb went off), but theres a catch the suit does not allow paradoxes so it yanks you away from your own time after saving everybody. I guess the followup would have shed some light on how to get back to your own time again but the game flopped due to not having the big exposure the devs hoped for so it newer came to pass.