A Retro PC Build in Memory of Dad - Need Your IDE/SATA Converter Wisdom! also a 3DFX Voodoo!

[Jaan]

Hey everyone,

 

As some of you might know, I sadly lost my dad to cancer earlier this year. We shared a huge passion for computers, especially building them, right from the mid-90s onwards. Going through his things has been a bittersweet journey – some items are going to charity, some to family, and, inevitably, some to the skip.

But amidst the sorting, I stumbled upon some incredible treasures: a floppy drive, a GeForce FX 5200, piles of cables... and then, the holy grail – a 3DFX Voodoo 5500 AGP!

Finding that Voodoo card brought back a flood of amazing memories from our "Voodoo vs. GeForce 3/4" days. We had some truly epic gaming sessions! That wave of nostalgia hit hard, and I've decided to embark on a special project: building an old-school "gaming" PC in his honor.

Now, I remembered the Voodoo cards were a bit particular, needing a 2x or 4x AGP compatible motherboard. After a bit of searching, I managed to snag a working Socket A AMD Athlon 2000+ (1.6GHz) with 512MB RAM and a Gigabyte GA-7DXE motherboard (complete with the right AGP slot!) for just £30. And just like that, down the rabbit hole I went!

Since then, I've already picked up some "new old stock" gems: a Microsoft Intelli Optical mouse and a replacement Socket A cooler (the original's bearings were toast).

Which brings me to the main reason for this post: IDE devices!

I'm really hesitant to rely on a 20+ year old IDE hard drive, so I've been looking into IDE to SATA converters. Does anyone have a specific brand or model they'd recommend that reliably supports U/DMA? I'd rather not go down the Compact Flash route if possible.

Oh, and if anyone knows where to find a reasonably priced, nice beige ATX or mATX case, please send me your tips! They all seem to be ridiculously expensive these days.

Thanks for any help or suggestions you can offer! This build means a lot to me.

 

PICs because

[DalekSec]

I can't remeber what make it was as was a cheap chinese one off ebay, but i had a Mac G4 cube i managed to add an SSD to via a IDE to SATA connector,

 

Also that heatsink is a work of art. 

[hallb15]

1 hour ago, Jaan said:

Oh, and if anyone knows where to find a reasonably priced, nice beige ATX or mATX case, please send me your tips! They all seem to be ridiculously expensive these days.

Thanks for any help or suggestions you can offer! This build means a lot to me.

I think I've got a lovely beige ATX tower in the loft. I'm going up there at the weekend to start clearing it out so I'll have a dig around for it.

[Jaan]

15 hours ago, hallb15 said:

I think I've got a lovely beige ATX tower in the loft. I'm going up there at the weekend to start clearing it out so I'll have a dig around for it.

 

Oh sounds promising, keep me posted, even if you aren't planning on selling. Also good to see some of these old cases.

[Jaan]

Did you manage to get into the attic over the weekend @hallb15? curious to see what you might have?

 

Cheers

 

[hallb15]

Yes, briefly but it was so hot up there I could only manage short bursts. I didn't find the PC, but I'm still pretty sure it's in there. I'll have another look as soon as I get chance. 

[Jaan]

Yeah i bet it was painfully hot!

[Dos_Box]

I too have bought an IDE to SATA adaptor my my G4 Mac Cube (I really must get around to fitting it, but need to get the DVD drive belt swapped out first, and it's a pig of a job).
This was the one I ordered - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Multibao-Interface-Adapter-Converter-Parallel/dp/B08VR9YQ3C?crid=2GG18KGMC5OUS&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.9uxpHL3StsWreSJ5wrfC7XTnH-OGlMVXQHtyb70CF2jVwN0W7s8i9HtmGmprYo_u2lis3ncwdqTqzHl_5-ByGz99tTdVBNQyUX8xaluzWcUCjzoa3uAg9tn0zrCl44_Z7toFmF41rZOShyLMFTnfnGnk5uoVH3UkCs95o9k8501fkn5t77WfvOIOw1WfVfhelknHVLkMBiT4WcvQOG7r_fNi8AnjANSdT1mB5r2yuoA.TiOMIzgYiUSMwXGJ5kGnFnWsmA_m3EGFEJdNZx5jnnU&dib_tag=se&keywords=ide+to+sata+adaptor&qid=1751295792&sprefix=ide+to+sata+adaptor%2Caps%2C87&sr=8-4

 

@JaanHow much did you pay for the Intellimouse? They go for a lot of money now and I was after one a while back, because they were a very good mouse indeed.
ETA: Excellent find with that Voodoo 5500. There can't be that many of them around these days.

 

 

[Jaan]

@Dos_Box The mouse was £33ish to my door. non retail but nos from a 10 pack business box.... he had some left but just checked and they've all sold now.

 

Does the IDE converter support u/dma? also how does it handle ide priority, cable select, master/slave. I'm trying to find one that has the jumpers on the board.

 

Cheers

[Fazza]

There are lots of different convertors out there - look on Amazon and eBay for a vast selection so if you happen to have any old (small) mSATA drives knocking around, for a few quid you can buy an adaptor to put them in that converts it to an IDE drive for example:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Docooler-mSATA-44pin-Adapter-Converter/dp/B07L89R2HK/ref=sr_1_3?c=ts&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.iULBWFmu-IzkC5aOEfyZXhjN845py1AH2SHYmHr4tjFhG5ejOPuAvZqBszUAO8-Bol6PSezX7a5v5OSzwljZUpcQu_u-tJkcjtmNXdvneUqy0ai5QVx-UxV4m2gvvN_0AY2mWOH-3q9VxALvqsp-TMX4M5Cz8PbFuN07_AyB9-4TT0YfGgLpiJI4SxYa5cLk0FworsIBa1_vlQb29vBmWSrDwyDug_SrfXRmoUZkgCysgg0Af1STHCTLelwvLtVKIydHsfUHrgublUeGMup18Dg7LPkILfCkgrQaYMya7-U.zVXFgUMS-t4uOyIXQKO6SV9TQ2UfMk-FEkGjRWCrHwA&dib_tag=se&keywords=Internal+Solid+State+Drives&qid=1751366781&refinements=p_n_feature_two_browse-bin%3A13941332031&s=computers&sr=1-3&ts_id=430505031

As the above example is a 2.5" IDE 'caddy' you would also need a 2.5" to 3.5" adaptor as well.

 

I think you can also get micro/SD card to IDE adaptors to - depends on if you have anything lying around or not.

 

Personally I like the click/clunk of an old mechanical drive so I'd buy a working one off of eBay - after installing the OS and all the drivers, get Norton/Symantec Ghost from the Internet Archive and back up the disk just in case.

[Dos_Box]

2 hours ago, Fazza said:

There are lots of different convertors out there - look on Amazon and eBay for a vast selection so if you happen to have any old (small) mSATA drives knocking around, for a few quid you can buy an adaptor to put them in that converts it to an IDE drive for example:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Docooler-mSATA-44pin-Adapter-Converter/dp/B07L89R2HK/ref=sr_1_3?c=ts&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.iULBWFmu-IzkC5aOEfyZXhjN845py1AH2SHYmHr4tjFhG5ejOPuAvZqBszUAO8-Bol6PSezX7a5v5OSzwljZUpcQu_u-tJkcjtmNXdvneUqy0ai5QVx-UxV4m2gvvN_0AY2mWOH-3q9VxALvqsp-TMX4M5Cz8PbFuN07_AyB9-4TT0YfGgLpiJI4SxYa5cLk0FworsIBa1_vlQb29vBmWSrDwyDug_SrfXRmoUZkgCysgg0Af1STHCTLelwvLtVKIydHsfUHrgublUeGMup18Dg7LPkILfCkgrQaYMya7-U.zVXFgUMS-t4uOyIXQKO6SV9TQ2UfMk-FEkGjRWCrHwA&dib_tag=se&keywords=Internal+Solid+State+Drives&qid=1751366781&refinements=p_n_feature_two_browse-bin%3A13941332031&s=computers&sr=1-3&ts_id=430505031

As the above example is a 2.5" IDE 'caddy' you would also need a 2.5" to 3.5" adaptor as well.

 

I think you can also get micro/SD card to IDE adaptors to - depends on if you have anything lying around or not.

 

Personally I like the click/clunk of an old mechanical drive so I'd buy a working one off of eBay - after installing the OS and all the drivers, get Norton/Symantec Ghost from the Internet Archive and back up the disk just in case.

 

I think the days of reliable and little used IDE drives may be coming to an end in the next few years. There is a business opportunity there I feel for anyone wishing to clutter up their house with dozens of high capacity, tested IDE drives!
I would have gone for one too if I felt that it would last, but I'll go with an old SSD and use the adaptor. For speeds sake if anything else.

[Fazza]

29 minutes ago, Dos_Box said:

 

I think the days of reliable and little used IDE drives may be coming to an end in the next few years. There is a business opportunity there I feel for anyone wishing to clutter up their house with dozens of high capacity, tested IDE drives!
I would have gone for one too if I felt that it would last, but I'll go with an old SSD and use the adaptor. For speeds sake if anything else.

 

I would rather use a fully tested mechanical IDE drive than an SSD as the OS you'll be installing wont have TRIM so potentially the SSD may wear out and fail before an old mechanical one!  I've got loads of 2.5" IDE drives I salvaged from a job lot of laptops I purchased years ago and I use them in old P2 laptops that are still going strong!

[Koldov]

I used to be a fan of getting old computers up and running and always built my own, but in the last few years of doing this job all day, my appetite for dealing with BSOD, driver incompatibility (if you can even find them), chipset weirdness, component fatigue, made it a lot less fun than I remember it... countless hours, evenings, weekends... Honestly from Windows 10 (as much as I resisted it at the time) has made vast improvements on reliability which I take for granted these days!

 

6 minutes ago, Fazza said:

 I've got loads of 2.5" IDE drives I salvaged from a job lot of laptops 

 

Probably not for the era the OP is thinking of but anyway, as for the drives, I have in the last couple of years swapped out laptop drives to an SSD for a few teachers as they brought their personal laptop to me asking if I could speed it up as it had put Windows 11 on it and killed it. Sure enough, although only a few years old, they were mechanical 2.5" 5400 RPM drives (albeit SATA)... So I didn't accept payment, but I kept their old drive, iirc one was 1TB and there was a 2TB one, so I put them in some of those old builds as data drives and never had any issues. A couple of the smaller ones I even managed to get in RAID 0...

[Fazza]

2 minutes ago, Koldov said:

Probably not for the era the OP is thinking of

 

They're exactly from that era!  The AMD Athlon 2000+ that the OP mentions that he has is the AMD equivalent of the Intel Pentium 4 and that's where the majority of my IDE drives came from, some (but not many) are older but most are from the exact era the AMD Athlon 2000+ was released in.

[PotNoodleTech]

Great idea.  Brings back some memories.

 

I Had a Matrox Millenium II to go along with the Voodoo.

 

Then I had a Matrox Millenium G200 and  2 x Voodo 2 in SLI. 

 

Does anyone remember upgrading  to the new Riva TNT card?  It was a downgrade to the SLI Foodoo 2 in terms of FPS - but it was all on one card that had excellent 2d features.

 

That was basically the start of Nvidia back in the day.

[Norphy]

Yeah, I remember those times. Before the TNT, the combined cards were dubious at best. The TNT2 was the first really good one but people still frequently combined it with the Voodoo 2 to get Glide. Then the GeForce came along and just blew everything out of the water.

 

My favourite card from the time was the Matrox G400 though. The analogue image quality those produced was second to none. I remember changing to a GeForce 2 and being disappointed with how washed out and muted the colours looked compared to the G400.

[PotNoodleTech]

Yeh the matrox cards were the best 2d cards.

 

Made my Misubishi Diamontron 19" look stunning

 

Them were the days!!!

[Koldov]

Can't remember what I went through that far back (late 90s), but I do remember at some point thinking I needed to get something better than the onboard GFX I had, the only trouble was my motherboard only had PCI slots (no, not PCIE/PCIE-X) - actual PCI) and the card choice (memory failing me now but if iirc I think Voodoo 3dfx does ring a bell) was limited as I think AGP had been the new thing for a while... but that meant changing the motherboard, CPU and RAM!!!

 

Anyway, when I finally bit the bullet (early 2000s), I took the plunge and went AGP I got the holy grail (for me at the time) and got my ATI RADEON 9800 Pro... that lasted a while until I went NVIDIA... 6800GT, 7800GTX (which was one of the last AGP cards - was still trying not to change my whole computer because... GFX).

 

And that, ladies and gentlemen is how I became an IT Tech....

Edited July 2, 2025 by Koldov

[Dos_Box]

20 hours ago, Fazza said:

 

I would rather use a fully tested mechanical IDE drive than an SSD as the OS you'll be installing wont have TRIM so potentially the SSD may wear out and fail before an old mechanical one!  I've got loads of 2.5" IDE drives I salvaged from a job lot of laptops I purchased years ago and I use them in old P2 laptops that are still going strong!

A very good point. The Cube supports OSX 10.4, but that does not have the Trim functionality. I'll stick with an old 2.5" sata spinning disk then.
Still not sure that an old IDE drive would be the best bet for longevity. Saying that, most of my old 2.5" sata drives are almost just as old.

[Fazza]

28 minutes ago, Dos_Box said:

A very good point. The Cube supports OSX 10.4, but that does not have the Trim functionality. I'll stick with an old 2.5" sata spinning disk then.
Still not sure that an old IDE drive would be the best bet for longevity. Saying that, most of my old 2.5" sata drives are almost just as old.

 

I literally have several hundred retro laptops, many of which have 2.5" IDE drives and they are still going strong!

[Koldov]

I mean... at this point you could call our current fleet retro... 😂

[Fazza]

22 hours ago, Koldov said:

I mean... at this point you could call our current fleet retro... 😂

 

People always ask us what we do with our old equipment, I always tell them that we give them to staff to use! 🤣🤣🤣