I've had a few.
One was a Stepmania system I made named Stephanie - I don't know why I did it, I hate Stepmania - it involved a PS2 dance mat connected to a dead USB Joypad who's cable ran to a coin collecting box I made where you could actually put anything that would fit in there and it would connect the joypad to the USB Ports on the MS-6340 motherboard. It used an AMD Athlon 1000 and connected to a television, the whole thing lived in a wooden palette. It was a fun thing until it collapsed and my foot landed up inside the PSU.
The second was a similar system, I named it Spectre, an ITX motherboard (I believe it used a Via CPU) that lived in an old drawer, the drawer was modified with a lid and a friend helped me cobble together some software to mess with Windows 98 and just display a splash screen and simple menu that could be operated with a USB joypad unless a DVD was in, effectively we built the world's most inefficient games console but it was small and light enough that I could take it with me and play PC games when I was away from the home. I remember Blood ran horribly on it for some reason. The OS ran from a USB stick soldered to a header on the motherboard. The system used to overheat and shut off as I never put any air holes in it.
I have two left. They both have a story (wall of text mode on) which might bore you. I shall mark the start and end incase you don't want to read it.
Story
The first one is an AMD Athlon XP I refer to as Flandre (as in Touhou 6). I used to run a Duron based system as my workstation but it had died a few times and eventually, as with all things, it ended up beyond any state of repair. It needn't have gotten to that stage, when it had run well for a few years I decided it was time to replace it and began working on an Athlon XP 2600+ system which lasted all of five minutes before there was a pop from the case, a nasty smell and I found the CMOS battery had actually exploded... LeadTek K7NCR18D mobo in case you want to know which to avoid... All-in-all a nasty motherboard which quickly started screwing up and for some reason SB Compatible cards don't work with the nForce 2 (They detect and install, software can see them, but you get no sound) and I wanted that so when the PSU died and took most of the machine with it it went in the trash (A bonfire bin) and I wasn't too sad.
The Duron still worked at that point (limping a little) so I went back to that to save up (I was about 12 or 13 at the time... I have a photo of me with the Duron whilst it was being built if anyone wants to see it) - I tried again, the Duron used an MSI motherboard (KT3 Ultra II) so I ordered an MSI one for the new machine (KT6 Delta 2 FISR) which I was mis-sold by PC World Component Centre because they claimed it had RAID onboard and it did not, I decided to try it anyway but it was DOA so I had to pay to send it back. I kept my Athlon 2600 CPU and everything else on hand. I'm sure there were more attempts with this, but eventually I ended up with a DFI NFII Ultra motherboard. Nothing but trouble. The man in the shop said that last time the PSU might have been problematic so he sold me a costly Seasonic which were good, I used them at work all the time... I was kinda working for free at a local company because their IT guy was in hospital... The motherboard exhibited the same compatibility issues as the WinFast. Completion of this build was done as I went into the care of social services.
The machine started out looking OK, it had neons and everything (because I was an idiot when I was a teenager) and some pretty nice hardware but it was unstable, prone to crashing, a volt-reg burned out and scared the crap out of health and safety at the home but before they could stop me using it I had discovered that there was a compatibility issue with my video editing gear (Both hardware and software) so I dismantled it, out came the Duron again. The 2600 isn't done and we'll get onto what happened to it in a second.
Aging horribly with a single RAM slot working, onboard IDE defunct, a burnt-out diode replaced with a piece of foil and very noisy fans and hard drives who's bearings were likely a silvery powder by now, the Duron carried on for some time. I'm sure we all know that eventually you get a feeling when things aren't doing what they are supposed to that the machine you are using is irreversibly heading to it's grave, I would miss the Duron but it was time to move on and get something else, an Athlon 64 X2 3200+ (The chip is on my desk right now, labelled ADA3200DAA5BV, AMD do not recognise this model. It is similar to the X2 3800+) and this one appeared to be rather good, I swore because of issues with Windows 98 but I was prepared for that and ran Windows 2003. There were a few more systems between the duron failing and building this but nothing noteworthy aside from one that went missing. Under increasing pressure and threats from social services I had to put a lot of systems into storage leaving only this, a 386SX-16 I was using as a server (LANTastic!) and my Dual-P3 workstation. The Athlon 64 has a few records attributed to it; it made only one video in it's lifespan, it destroyed enough RAM that I could build another one-and-a-half of the same machine and it was the final machine built to use a Co-Axial network. Part of the reason being that the 386 died a little while after this, that had been shaky for a long time. The Athlon 64 eventually burned out some more RAM and it seemed to take it's toll on the chipset, I replaced the RAM with some really cheap nasty stuff that I had to sell some cigarettes for, the system was only a few weeks old. I was in the process of setting up the Dual P3 as the server when the RAM in there failed and SDRAM cost a hell of a lot at the time (I also wasn't aware non-ECC would work) so everything hung on the Athlon 64, would it finally give up trying to kill itself?
What do you think? The same evening the RAM died and I was left with no computer, luckily I had my SNES to keep me entertained but my telly had no sound and I needed the computer for work, for a video editing course I was doing and for college which I would soon start... The last of my money had gone on the RAM that had just died, what was I to do?
Anything that worked in the Athlon 64 was sold (except the mobo and CPU, I wouldn't wish those on anyone) along with a few pieces of the 386, some of which I repaired but had to sell "As Is" as I was unable to test them (I hope they worked and went to a good home, I really miss that machine) though a fair amount of the Duron survived this selling. I sold an Athlon 2400 I had kept in the cupboard as I had no desire to touch AMD ever again after the experience I'd had although it wouldn't have been hard to fix that one. The bloke who sold me the 64 let me test an Athlon FX but it kept locking up as did his ow identical system, he later told me those were from the reject bin, so he took it away again.
#EOF
Now stuck with a huge gap where my PC should be I set out into my own garbage boxes and found a spare motherboard, JK-042A - a 486 board, and two CPUs, one was an Intel 486DX-33 the other was a UMC U5S Super33 which was currently installed in the board. In a wave of hatred for AMD and newfound fanboyism for Intel I used the Intel chip and tracked down the case from the first family PC (I still have the parts from that system, a Pentium, but they were elsewhere and I couldn't get to them) and mounted the board. I bought a graphics card (QuickWorks 24i, a TSeng ET4000W32i board) from a man for the price of three cigarettes and a 512MB hard drive in exchange for a 20-pack of Richmonds. The battery leaked on the motherboard so I just pulled it off, I developed a knack for knowing how long to turn it off for without the CMOS being wiped as it used to freeze on reset as I had no idea how the cache jumpers were meant to be set. I used the DVD RW from my Pentium III and a few junk parts from elsewhere or what people would sell me for pennies or cigs. The Hooker was born - it is called the hooker because for some reason when I think of it I get a vision of a middle aged hooker standing on a street corner, one who's voice sounds like she smokes a million cigs a day, not to mention everything inside the machine is quite loose - for reasons I can't remember I ran Windows Chicago, possibly the only OS I had to hand that would work on it and work it did!
I had to sell my music CDs to afford some parts (or more cigarettes, can't remember) so I was stuck with only a single music disc (as I'd been going MP3 anyway), that being the Eminem show... I probably started to miss Megadeth after a while to be honest, I remember being overjoyed because I found Eve 6 and any rock was better than no rock. Problem being that using the CD drive used to make the mouse stop working. To cut a long story short, I had to do video editing and DVD authoring on that until I got my Pentium D built, sometimes this took days and it was hard to make VideoFactory run at all. A lot of things could have been better, but my money was focused on saving for the Pentium D and not doing fancy things with the 486.
Now, that 2600+ (Assuming you followed it's beginnings in the story, though you needn't) - today it's a mangled and rusty mess, recently deceased, it's YouTube appearence was it's final run. Fans are held in with duct tape, nothing has screws or as many as it should, the PSU has no lid as such, just a piece of metal from another PSU that falls off. Only one port of the IDE controller works, the RAID controller does not work, the GPU is just about dead (FX 5500 my friend threw in the trash), the power switch header doesn't work (DFI provide a button on the mobo, maybe they knew the board was rubbish?) there are red LEDs on the baord and most have stopped working or gone dull. The 486 smells faintly of urine for some reason, always has, but this thing, no matter what I do, smells like something died in it. One Ethernet port could never recieve, only send packets though oddly plugging either in makes the whole LAN drop out for a second, sometimes the router reboots. If you send/recieve more than about 950MB over the network, the system will BSOD or the network on it will cease to function (amount seems proportional to the amount of RAM installed, implying a leak?) and there are a million other problems. If you put a PCI card in, it detects about 50 "PCI Card" devices (The post-POST configuration table is fun when this happens) that have an ID of 0 on IRQ 11. Also the BIOS Logo is corrupt so if it is switched on you have to cause an error so it is not displayed or else the system locks at POST.
A few of the systems mentioned (
P3,
486,
2600) can be found on my YouTube channel if you want to see them.
Lastly, damn this is long but you're the one that asked, the most frankenstein PC I ever
saw belonged to a friend of mine, his name was Tim and he was weird; Obsessed with Japan and hentai, listened to 90's JPop all the time, played too many JRPGs and always wore gray, he also spoke like Neil from the young ones. I was a teenager at the time, hanging around with an American called Derek who was crazy in a good way (though a bit of a pyro), Tim was his buddy and we went to his place one day. It seemed fine until he said he wanted to show us some new RPG he'd imported and he sat at a desk where I noticed a Baby AT tower underneath (This is mid 2003 BTW) on which he pressed the power switch. A loud grinding sound began and he explained that it was the pump, he was liquid cooling it... Fair enough, he wants to run a busted pump. That was before the smell started, you know when you forget to clean the fish tank for a while? It was like that but worse! Tim was the oldest of us and had a head start on building computers, he was secretive over what was in it, a lot had card covering it over and there were wires that shouldn't have been there. He was running a Baby AT board with a K6 550MHz which was often overclocked to over 750MHz, he had a GeForce 2 MX PCI (No AGP slot!) and was using EDO RAM (32MB) two of which were from his old P5, a SB16 from the same old P5 and two small HDDs. He built it in 1998 and had done little to improve it since. The watercooling
would have been impressive except that had also been there since 1998 and was only topped up, never cleaned out, and the loop had an open T-Point at the top letting the smell out (and mosquito larva in). He was reluctant to upgrade but in 2004 began building an Athlon XP based system, near completing that the pump rattled it's last and the system split a tube, one of the few times I saw inside the thing, it was covered in dust in there and the tube that broke was not leaking water, it was leaking algae, green slime and larvae... He had a cream carpet in that room and the stain never came out.
Now your brains are all numb
(I know my fingers are)
