TPU's Nostalgic Hardware Club

[8BitZ80]

I swung by the computer recyclers and had a dig through their stuff, but unfortunately they didn't have much. Old Slot 1 stuff just doesn't really exist anymore, these days it's all LGA775 and LGA1155. Great for budget machines but really sucky for late-90's nostalgia. I did pick up a Pentium 4 3.6GHz (SL7Q2) and Pentium 3 733MHz (SL3XY) for free though so it's not all bad. First time I've had a Pentium 3 in my hands for years!

I've already bought two Pentium 3 SL35E processors online, so my plan is to just look for a solid Slot 1 motherboard and call it good.
Edit: The goal isn't really to bring back a dual-processing beast, I purchased two just so that one could be used for display.

 

[MaxiPro800]

The $6 Gigabyte EP45T-DS3R just came in today. Was advertised as not working, when in fact it POST'd on first try!
P45 chipset, 4xDDR3, SLi/XFire support, anything you need, including TPM Lock.

 

[havli]

GeForce4 Ti4200 vs GeForce3 Ti500

It seems there is some improvement of NV25/28 compared to the original NV20 GPU.
HL2 on the GF3 seems to be bugged because it really shouldn't be faster and also the water surface looks diferent (missing some shaders most likely).

 

[Nostalgic Hardware]

They were electronically incompatible.

While that was generally true, it didn't take much for the general consumer to get a single or dual Xeon if they wanted it. A single P2/P3 Xeon was compatible with Windows 98SE which is what made them appealing to high-end gamers because the performance increase of the larger cache.

Also incorrect, see below;
View attachment 129483
The CPU is the one mounted on top. The extra chip on bottom was a system interface controller that helped the CPU manage and map larger amounts of system ram and other resources not found in consumer grade equipment.

Wrong actually

The top chip is the external cache. Bottom chip is the processor.

 

[biffzinker]

Wrong actually

The top chip is the external cache. Bottom chip is the processor.

I came across that myself when I was researching. I didn't want to be the one to point out it was wrong.

 

[lexluthermiester]

Wrong actually

The top chip is the external cache. Bottom chip is the processor.

Looked into it and it seems you are correct. My bad. The thing is, the standard Pentium 2's look like the following;

So I naturally concluded that the one with the IHS on the Xeon was the CPU core.

I came across that myself when I was researching. I didn't want to be the one to point out it was wrong.

If I'm wrong on something, or I've remembered something incorrectly, feel free to point it out. The worst reaction I'm going to give is to stand my ground. Despite what some "other" users might have painted me as, I'm not a monster who can't see reason.

 

[Nostalgic Hardware]

Looked into it and it seems you are correct. My bad. The thing is, the standard Pentium 2's look like the following;
View attachment 130120
So I naturally concluded that the one with the IHS on the Xeon was the CPU core.

If I'm wrong on something, or I've remember something incorrectly, feel free to point it out. The worst reaction I'm going to give is to stand my ground. Despite what some "other" users might have painted me as, I'm not a monster who can't see reason.

That's fine

All of us are always learning something new in this hobby

 

[DR4G00N]

Grabbed a second D5400XS. It was being sold as-is for $40 cad and I decided to take the chance. So far in my quick testing it works great, just needs a bios update so I can set the memory to run 1:1 with the fsb.
It's a newer revision than my other one so it has that fancy chipset heatsink shroud. Overclocks a bit better too, boot's 420MHz FSB easily with dual cpu's whereas the other struggled to do over 405MHz.
Need to grab more FB-DIMM's so I can use it's quad-channel capability's.

 

[dorsetknob]

D5400XS. It was being sold as-is for $40 cad and I decided to take the chance

YOU WOULD HAVE TO BE AN ABSOLUTE T**t not to have parted with $c40 for that. Did it come with CPU(s) and if so what ??

 

[DR4G00N]

YOU WOULD HAVE TO BE AN ABSOLUTE T**t not to have parted with $c40 for that. Did it come with CPU(s) and if so what ??

It was just the bare board. Still, for the price I can hardly complain about it. Needs a good cleaning though.

 

[MaxiPro800]

Bought these two oldies for $4 both. One's a ASUS K8N-E with a Sempron 2800+ and 1GB RAM, and the other is a ECS 848P-A with a 2.4GHz Northwood Celeron.

Both work fine, although the K8N-E needs new caps around the CPU. Otherwise both POST fine.

 

[Robert B]

Flea market day today!

ELSA Erazor X -A32 nVidia GeForce 256 SDR 32MB AGP
10X2GB FBDIMM SAMSUNG M395T5750GZ4 5-5-5-11 DDR2 667MHz / PC5300
Pentium 4 - SL793 3.4GHz - Fastest Nortwood HT core

Less than 15 Euros for the lot.

 

[lexluthermiester]

That is a great deal! What are you going to use the ram for?

 

[Robert B]

My first thought went to an Intel Intel D5400XS Skulltrail but I'll see what will pop up at the flea market. You never know what you will find there. The guy I bought the RAM from had close to 100 sticks of ECC and FBDIMM. I was knocked off my feet so I had to buy some. An impulse buy for sure. I also found a bunch of SCSI and SAS 15K HDDs but I didnt buy anything. That stuff is still off limits for me.

Even today I was offered a complete Fujitsu Siemens Primergy TX150 S5 (2006-2007) for little over 5 EUROS but I got cold feet as the beast was huge and I dont have a use for it. I took a pic with the side panel. All the parts where in their place: PSU, CPU, Cooler, RAM, Cables, HDD.s ... the lot. (Systemboard S26361-D2399)

http://manuals.ts.fujitsu.com/illustrated_spares/content/TX150_S5/pdf/ss.pdf

 

[MaxiPro800]

I see your TX150 and raise you my Soyo SY-6BA+IV

 

[biffzinker]

I see your TX150 and raise you my Soyo SY-6BA+IV

It's been awhile since I last seen a HighPoint controller on a motherboard also Soyo.

 

[MaxiPro800]

More

 

[biffzinker]

The only reason I mentioned the HighPoint controller was because I had a Abit Socket A motherboard with a HighPoint controller integrated that I used RAID-0 with two PATA hard drives plus a third drive.

 

[MaxiPro800]

How many drives does the HPT366 support? I have lots of older drives.


By the way, this Soyo is going to bring a new life into a old Gateway GP6-400 (Desktop variant, not tower) my friend happened to come across. Currently has a SE440BX (I don't like Intel Desktop boards.)with a sorry excuse of a GPU - Rage IIC AGP. I'm going to clean the case then give it a desired upgrade to a 500MHz Katmai and enough RAM (around the 384-512MB mark) to run 2000 Pro SP4 and 98SE.

Here's a photo of it right now. It's in a basement, so it's gonna take some work. Thank god it's standard ATX tho.

 

[biffzinker]

How many drives does the HPT366 support? I have lots of older drives.

Up to four drives I'm guessing since you could have two drives assigned as master, and two assigned as slave drives. I set both drives as Master on the two separate controller PATA ports.

 

[MaxiPro800]

Up to four drives I'm guessing since you could have two drives assigned as master, and two assigned as slave drives. I set both drives as Master on the two separate controller PATA ports.

Thanks. If I'm right, it's limited to 137/128GB for each drive?

 

[biffzinker]

Thanks. If I'm right, it's limited to 137/128GB for each drive?

Honestly I don't remember, I did a stripped RAID-0 on a Abit Socket A motherboard with the HighPoint controller. I'm pretty sure the hard disk drives were Maxtor's when I did it but I'm not remembering the capacities.

80GB?

The two drives looked like this.

 

[MaxiPro800]

Well yeah, 80GB is definitely gonna work through the HPT366 (unless there's a limitation like the Award BIOS does, limiting to 40GB though that would be stupid) since it's LBA28.

LBA48 wasn't introduced until 2003, so it's probably normal for it to be limited to 137GB.

Anyways, the board works great. Will probably recap it with a proper soldering iron, unlike the 6VBA133 (which is just a 6BA+III with VIA chips) I had that bit the dust unfortunately.

 

[Trekkie4]

Awesome stuff!

Pretty sure I got HPT366 on Abit BE-6 and/or BE-6II ... would have to check. At some point I had both, but I'm not sure if I still do (or if I got two -6II)

 

[MaxiPro800]

Pretty sure I got HPT366 on Abit BE-6 and/or BE-6II ... would have to check. At some point I had both, but I'm not sure if I still do (or if I got two -6II)

BE6 is the vanilla board without RAID, and the BE6-II has the same HPT366 controller as my Soyo SY-6BA+IV.