TPU's Nostalgic Hardware Club

[xkm1948]

I just found an old K6-2 550. Will post some pictures soon. Any one have some old Socket7 MoBo around? I would love to build a retro Windows 98 machine.

 

[stinger608]

Any one have some old Socket7 MoBo around?

I've only got one Super Socket 7 board that I purchased brand new back in the day. I'm not letting that one go.

@Mr.Scott might have something though.

 

[Mr.Scott]

Nope, I only own 1 Super 7 board also.

The good one's are gettin kinda tough to find now.

 

[Trekkie4]

The good one's are gettin kinda tough to find now.

Indeed, so I've noticed... I assumed finding the replacement Socket 7 board for my Pentium 233 would be piece of cake, but I literally came up empty... if it wasn't for the pure dumb luck & fixing the mouse problem on my replacement board, this would had been yet another unfinished project/repair :-(

IMHO, Slot-1 is probably next... When I 1st got "into" old technology, back in 2012/13 these things were everywhere! And I really DO mean everywhere, you could buy truckloads for almost nothing, same thing for Slot-1 CPUs - both Celerons & Pentiums! Now these things are getting harder to find, I don't even remember seeing one for sale, ESPECIALLY offering it for free.

 

[kithylin]

Well I've been trying for a good number of years now to get some of this hardware all together and after long searching.. I have it. This was the early setup for some some pre-build testing.. probably something some of you would of dreamed and drooled of back in 2005.

Asus CrossHair-I nForce 590 SLI AM2 motherboard.
Running here on my "test bench" .. (Which is just a box on a stool.. ) with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ (K8 dual core 2x1MB) overclocked @ 3.75 Ghz, and a pair of GeForce 6800 Ultra PCI-Express 512MB cards in SLI. 2 x 2GB Kingston Hyper-X ddr2-1066 ram. Cooler Master GeminII S (the original 1st generation one, not the new one) heatsink.

 

[uuuaaaaaa]

Well I've been trying for a good number of years now to get some of this hardware all together and after long searching.. I have it. Set up in my other room for some testing.. probably something some of you would of dreamed and drooled of back in 2005.

Asus CrossHair-I nForce 590 SLI AM2 motherboard.
Running here on my "test bench" .. (Which is just a box on a stool.. ) with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ (K8 dual core 2x1MB) overclocked @ 3.75 Ghz, and a pair of GeForce 6800 Ultra PCI-Express 512MB cards in SLI. 2 x 2GB Kingston Hyper-X ddr2-1066 ram. Cooler Master GeminII S (the original 1st generation one, not the new one) heatsink.

Oh man... Those 6800 ultra's bring me back! Back in the days almost got one of those, but went X850XT PE instead! Congratz, we need to see a full build now!

 

[kithylin]

Oh man... Those 6800 ultra's bring me back! Back in the days almost got one of those, but went X850XT PE instead! Congratz, we need to see a full build now!

And sadly here's where I disappoint.. I still own all the hardware but the 6800 ultra's have been shelved and stored in a box, and the K8's been stored in a drawer. After lots of testing I came to find out that in actual games, the K8 when clocked really high (past 3.5 ghz) it gets into the dreaded "K8 timing bug" which makes games run like crud, unsmooth, jerky, etc. There was an AMD patch to address this, which I picked up and installed.. made it "Better" but didn't eliminate it. In the end I ended up finding a modified community bios from some german forums, from a post made in 2011 and put it in the board and made it run with a AMD Athlin IIx3 445 @ 3.85 ghz and switched it up for my pair of water cooled 'EVGA GTX 470 Hydro Copper FTW' cards I own and that's the result of the Crosshair system. I don't actually use it a whole lot these days but that's my WindowsXP gaming system. Runs XP-64 and has 8GB ram in it now, I picked up 2 more matching kingston sticks for it.

 

[Ruru]

Am I posting about too new hardware again?

Anyway, I'm getting a new Pentium G4560 since the first was defective and I RMA'd it, and bought a new one for that time. Now the broken one is going to be replaced, and I'll be trading it to a MSI P67A-G45 board, so I can kick my 2500K some clock!

 

[Bungz]

Hello guys

I have been having a play with one of those IDE to SD card adapters with some success. My idea was to have a card tucked away with each of the boards "ready to go" so to speak.

Works well with a class 10 card on windows 2000 on a P3 set up but with XP I am finding them rather useless, installing anything takes far longer than the same program on W2K and it has a tendency to just freeze up for periods of time. This was tested on a much faster Athlon XP system so no CPU bottleneck so to speak.

Has any one else had success with this on XP? I know the through put is capped by the controller of the adapter to around 25mb/sec but access times are decent so wouldn't have expected to have had problems like this compared to the experience on W2K.

 

[Trekkie4]

Hello guys

I have been having a play with one of those IDE to SD card adapters with some success. My idea was to have a card tucked away with each of the boards "ready to go" so to speak.

Works well with a class 10 card on windows 2000 on a P3 set up but with XP I am finding them rather useless, installing anything takes far longer than the same program on W2K and it has a tendency to just freeze up for periods of time. This was tested on a much faster Athlon XP system so no CPU bottleneck so to speak.

Has any one else had success with this on XP? I know the through put is capped by the controller of the adapter to around 25mb/sec but access times are decent so wouldn't have expected to have had problems like this compared to the experience on W2K.

Personally, I have absolutely zero experience with these things, although I always wanted to give it a try... However, what I can do is point you in the right direction, go visit Phil's Computer Lab and/or his YouTube video on installing Windows 98 on a SD card and/or comparing SD card against HDD/SSD. Hopefully you'll find some answers to your questions

 

[Bungz]

Yeah I watch some of his stuff, covers some good ground but not XP on a SD card using a similar adapter.

For now have found a lot of about 10 WD1600AAJB 160GB IDE drives, I am fairly sure they are one of the last IDE models made so hopefully will stand a chance of lasting a while ( though newer HD for me never seen to be as long lasting as drives of the past).

 

[kithylin]

Yeah I watch some of his stuff, covers some good ground but not XP on a SD card using a similar adapter.

For now have found a lot of about 10 WD1600AAJB 160GB IDE drives, I am fairly sure they are one of the last IDE models made so hopefully will stand a chance of lasting a while ( though newer HD for me never seen to be as long lasting as drives of the past).

Just so you know, Western Digital makes IDE hard drives up to 500GB and they're still sold brand new today in 2017: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIAAEE4WT8534

 

[Bungz]

When I searched found articles that they stopped production end of 2013.

Those drives are sold by EOL tech, I think they are just refurbs sold for stupid money.

www.techpowerup.com/196073/western-digital-to-stop-shipping-pata-hard-drives.html

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

 

[Robert B]

A RAINBOW OF CABLES

Tweezers for fine tuning

Wire management still in progress...front panel cables, PC speaker and a final inspection of wires and connections.

gallery: https://postimg.org/gallery/11lcpwwfs/



L.E.
https://postimg.org/image/n0fkjnirb/

 

[Trekkie4]

@Robert B Wow, I really REALLY admire your perfectionism & attention to details!

And speaking of YouTube guides, check this one out!

 

[Robert B]

Thanks Trekkie4.

I'm so anxious to finish the system because I think I have something special The wires kind of remind me of old mainframes computers and wire wrapping.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/the-accidental-artistry-of-wire-wrapped-circuitry
http://www.bigmessowires.com/2009/02/02/wire-wrap-photos/
http://drhart.ucoz.com/index/laser_show_control_history/0-136

I think I have at least 12 or 15 hours invested only in WM and preparation of cables.It was worth every second of it I lost count, that's for sure

 

[Trekkie4]

You really are taking retro gaming (and builds, in general) to a whole new level with this amount of details. Where on the other hand, I'm just aiming for decent work, but nothing unusual. I guess I'm aiming for realism, to achieve the quality & appearance similar to what you could (and would) get when & if you'd buy the system of your choice at the store. Which translates to decent cable management & component layout, but within limits

 

[Robert B]

You should've seen my original 5x86 which I gave away back in the day. CABLE JUNGLE in every aspect I opened it once to clean the CPU fan and I couldn't believe what was inside! The people who sold it couldnt care less for WM.

You have so many great systems and it would be a herculean task to make them all "show" ready.

In my case the great thing is I finish each job as it comes and I try not to get so many parts in and be unable to take the time and make them almost as new.

I keep a close eye on your posts

 

[Trekkie4]

You should've seen my original 5x86 which I gave away back in the day. CABLE JUNGLE in every aspect I opened it once to clean the CPU fan and I couldn't believe what was inside!

Thanks bunches! And right, I can only imagine But that's just the thing, cable mess was a realistic scenario & often quite expected really, especially back in day when ppl still used floppy & ATA, SCSI ribbon cables. Of course, nowdays with SATA cables & modular power supplies everyone can do a decent job more-less, especially if you got the time & patience

On a side note, I've been reading a lot online about Genius HF2020 V2 desktop speakers, and from what I've seen there's a lot of folks out there who doesn't seem to like them that much. Ppl are mainly complaining about the lack of bass and/or integrated amp shutting down & going out after 30 days of usage. This other problem was actually quite familiar, but it's related to the 1st revision which is why Genius released "V2" with updated amplifier & optical input instead of the coaxial (SPDIF) one. However, after playing several records, even CDs (in fact I just finished with GrimFandango soundtrack, from 1996) I have to say these are more than what I need. TBH, I was never really a fan of loud music, so the amount of bass that's coming through is over the top for my personal taste. And that's WITHOUT "extra bass" setting on the EQ. But that's what you get when you have 60W output, I suppose there's no way to tone them all the way down.

 

[Robert B]

I have a pair of EDIFIER R1800TIII 2.0 speakers paired with a Creative SB ZX. I keep the ZX without any enhancements and the EQ flat. Treble and Bass + 2. They sound fantastic, at least to my ears

I tried the EDIFIER R1800TIII with the Creative AWE64 Gold in NFS PU and the sound was also great.

 

[Trekkie4]

Right, but yours have bass & treble controls on the back, where HF2020 is completely automated. I suppose that's one downside to this particular model, but then again I don't like to fiddle with the controls too much. Usually I set them according to my personal taste & leave them as it is, forever

 

[Disparia]

I'm storing another motherboard in the same box as the Black Pearl. The story about it is much shorter though. I found an old Gateway 2000 Server on the side of the road about 15 years ago. Most of it was in bad shape or missing. Kept the motherboard as it would make for great wall art some day.

My first computer was a Pentium 75, so this 486 stuff is just a little before my time. I'm also 14 years old, so warez and nudie pics take up a portion of my attention. However, you learn a lot of about bandwidth, resolution, kilobytes, etc, when you only have a 14.4 modem and 730MB hard drive.

I do know from old articles that 486 SMP configurations varied wildly among manufacturers. There were simple boards like this one, but others with mixed 386 and 486 CPUs! Some had 8 CPUs!

That's kind of amazing to me because my first SMP experience is when I meet a guy with a dual Pentium Pro 180. The idea of two CPUs is new to me, I'm still unaware of even larger systems. After organizing my jpegs, I research and learn all about Pentium Pro, cache sizes, and SMP in general. I don't buy a Pentium Pro system though, because they're still pretty expensive at this time. I save and buy a used pair of Pentium II 233 and dual slot 1 motherboard off eBay years later as my first SMP system.

 

[kithylin]

4-processor and 8-processor servers have been around for a looooooooong time now. There's even an odd 6-processor Pentium-Pro system that just recently came on ebay last week.

A random 4-processor machine from 2005, based on Pentium4 Technology: http://hexus.net/business/news/ente...-details-iwill-quad-xeon-high-density-server/

I even own a Dell 4-processor Pentium-III server in the garage. I don't use it much today though because it's mostly useless.. uses about 300 watts of power without hard drives, and a little 20-watt dual core cpu from 2006 is faster performance wise.

 

[Trekkie4]

Indeed... As someone who got to experience dual-slot 1 system (even if it was for a day or two), I have to say I'm seriously disappointed with the performance. Not to mention it's only compatible with certain group of selected software and OS, which makes it pretty much useless in the terms of every-day usage or even retro gaming

I even converted my HP Kayak XU800 back to its factory specs, running single 800MHz CPU instead of dual 1000MHz ones. The reason was pretty simple, the system was overheating and consuming way too much power, and yet I didn't see any noticeable improvements in the terms of speed & performance.