TPU's Nostalgic Hardware Club

[Ruru]

Installed 10 the day it was released and never went back except for older machines. I have four systems, three has 11 and X58 rig has 10 as 11 won't install without tweaking and I'm fine with it as it is.

XP was good back in the day as was 7, but personally I don't like hanging with ancient OS's, though I did skip Win8 and used 8.1 for maybe ½yrs before 10 was released. But I guess these are just opinions.

 

[oobymach]

You mean, something like this?


Already ahead of you!


It's a Q6600, featuring 4GB (DDR3), GTX 550Ti & 500GB WD Caviar Blue, running Win7 Premium

Ouch that drive cable overlapping the gpu fans, it needs the cable management, take it out and use a box cutter or a decent small knife and carefully cut between the wires (depending on the cable you may just need to make a small cut and spread the resulting gap with your fingers) right down to the socket and you can just bunch them together by twisting a couple times in a nice tight bundle which can be easily routed around things.

 

[Ruru]

Yeah, I remember doing DIY round cables back in the day as well. Just do like said above and use some electrical tape or zipties.

 

[Trekkie4]

Ouch that drive cable overlapping the gpu fans, it needs the cable management, take it out and use a box cutter or a decent small knife and carefully cut between the wires (depending on the cable you may just need to make a small cut and spread the resulting gap with your fingers) right down to the socket and you can just bunch them together by twisting a couple times in a nice tight bundle which can be easily routed around things.

No need to - it works (and performs) surprisingly good actually

I should point out that this isn't the original heatsink for the card. The factory one was removed & replaced with ugly looking 80x80 fan, ziptied onto the heatsink.


So... I removed the whole thing & replaced it with this one, which came off AMD Radeon. Don't ask me which model, I forgot! Also, the actual fan is recessed inside the plastic shroud, housing so the floppy cable does not interfere with the fan in any way. As for the temperatures, it only goes up to 85C (185F) and that's under the full load during the intensive gaming. At this stage everything (CPU, chipset, RAM) becomes an issue really, because it is a fairly small case without any fan mounts and/or decent airflow so it tends to heat somewhat higher than you'd expect. But still within the safe margins and does not throttle down.

And before anyone suggests, no - hacking or drilling any holes or mounts inside that case is out of the question as it's very rare, almost impossible to find & very special to me. Besides, I may eventually decide to revert the whole thing back to its "vintage" self again, so I don't want any permanent decisions

Edit
Can't believe I forgot to mention the obvious. One more thing, there's a network, WiFi PCI adapter card under that GTX 550, which also acts like a barrier, protection for the fan. It may not look that way from the pic, but if you take a closer look you will notice additional card right under GTX, and this one overlaps with the floppy cable. Because MSI put the floppy interface way down, on the very edge of the motherboard, so in order to hook up the floppy I had to route the cable this way - there was no other way around the issue, I'm afraid.

 

[Ruru]

That new Intel stock heatsink looks sweet with an older platform.

 

[framebuffer]

long time postponed, it's finally time for cleaning / caps check / reorganisation of my mainboards

 

[Trekkie4]

That new Intel stock heatsink looks sweet with an older platform.

I'm confused... The one from i5, 1155? Or the Pentium one, S478? Because you said "older platform", so I'm guessing you meant P4...

 

[MaxiPro800]

Probably the 1151 cooler on the 1155 board.

 

[Trekkie4]

Probably the 1151 cooler on the 1155 board.

Oh... Thanks! To be honest, I didn't even realize that was 1151 cooler, I'm only familiar with 775, 1155 & 1156 sockets.

As for the ASRock motherboard from that photo, it was given to me for free. Unfortunately, due to the lack of ATA/IDE & PCI interfaces it's pretty much useless to me, so I repurposed GTX 550 instead. All I know is that it has i5 under there, but I have no idea which generation.

 

[DR4G00N]

Probably the 1151 cooler on the 1155 board.

Close but it's an lga 1200 one. (not that it really matters)

I'm confused... The one from i5, 1155? Or the Pentium one, S478? Because you said "older platform", so I'm guessing you meant P4...

I mean lga 1155 is pretty old now, over a decade. The time span between when socket 7 and lga 775 was released is 9 years for reference.

 

[Trekkie4]

I mean lga 1155 is pretty old now, over a decade. The time span between when socket 7 and lga 775 was released is 9 years for reference.

You're absolutely right! Geez, I must be getting really old

 

[stinger608]

I must be getting really old

LOL, man, I know that feeling. Seems like a couple of years ago the Socket 1155 was the hit.

 

[Trekkie4]

LOL, man, I know that feeling. Seems like a couple of years ago the Socket 1155 was the hit.

Nevermind Socket 1155 ... it seems like a couple of years ago the Slot 1 was the major breakthrough & "must have" standard when it comes to modern, high-speed computing

 

[lexluthermiester]

Nevermind Socket 1155 ... it seems like a couple of years ago the Slot 1 was the major breakthrough & "must have" standard when it comes to modern, high-speed computing

Time flies when you're having fun, and the last 25 years have been great fun in the tech industry!

 

[Trekkie4]

Time flies when you're having fun, and the last 25 years have been great fun in the tech industry!

Ha! Not so fun when you're stuck in the past & heavy nostalgia...

 

[lexluthermiester]

Ha! Not so fun when you're stuck in the past & heavy nostalgia...

The great thing about tech life is that you can embrace the future without completely leaving the past behind.

 

[Ruru]

Probably the 1151 cooler on the 1155 board.

Yeah, that black one.

 

[Dinnercore]

Time flies when you're having fun, and the last 25 years have been great fun in the tech industry!

Realistically I have only experienced 15 years of the whole progression as an enthusiast user. And just looking back these 15 years, the progress feels so surreal.

Slightly off-topic thoughts:
If we keep politics and company behavior aside and focus on the good parts, the pure technological advancements are insane. This thread and my collection constantly remind me of where my journey started and what was available back in the day.
I currently do a deep dive into 3D-Software and focus especially on Blender, and this has opened my eyes like nothing else about how far we have come and how far we can potentially reach in the future. First of all, Blender is a free and open-source software that starts to catch up and overtake the big ones in the industry. There are tons of CC0 licence resources available today, literally terabytes of 16K textures with normal, roughness, displacement, bump and occlusion mapping. We can access and utilize thousands, if not millions of hours, of work and leverage that for fun hobby projects for free. Actually for free, not like the other 'free' services that profit from your data and ads.
Second part is the hardware. I use Blender on my laptop. A laptop that I configured to 100W max. power draw for GPU and CPU combined, so that no part exceeds 60°C when rendering over night. This small laptop with mobile low power chips just recently completed a complex fluid simulation with ~860.000 fluid particles and ~3.600.000 whitewater particles (foam, bubbles, spray) interacting with each other. It took only 7 seconds per frame. The geometry data for the mesh of the fluid reached 11GB.
For the final rendered scene I set up a water material with realistic volume ray scattering and each of the bubble particles was using a glass shader. I used CUDA due to a mistake, so no RT core support, and it still spit out full HD frames with 4.000 samples per Pixel in 8 minutes. With RT cores utilized by OptiX this dropped to 4 minutes per frame.
Early animated films could not even hope to achieve effects like this, even tho they used large computing clusters. Today I sit on my couch and have my laptop run the simulation in a couple hours and render it overnight.

 

[Ruru]

I guess I'm kinda young in this thread (32 in the end of this month) but I remember clearly the launch of Preshott, DDR2, GF 6800/Radeon X800 and these days that hardware is perfect in this thread. Damn how fast 18 years have went.

And PCIe cards came also in 2004. Still feels like it's not that long ago when we stopped using AGP graphics cards.

 

[onemanhitsquad]

What's in the box?...I dunno

Slot 1 PIII

ultra badazz PIII cooler ! ...hahaha!

some miscellaneous items

Asus flip chip slotket

some memory

some vid card (have fun identifying it ! )

creative sound card

and a mitt full of flip chips

and a spare VP6 motherboard

like a Viking gold hoard !!

 

[Mussels]

What board?
I have P5QC. Runs way better on DDR3 than DDR2.

P5G41C-M LX
Without the latest 0702 (2011) BIOS, it wouldnt run DDR3 above 800Mhz, now it runs the same ram at 1500 when OC'd, i got bored
Just one version older, and the DDR3 support was total garbage.

long time postponed, it's finally time for cleaning / caps check / reorganisation of my mainboards

View attachment 246562

I think your posters having a stronk

Imagine cops raiding your house thinking theres suspicious packages lining the hallways, and finding nostalgia nerd porn instead of drugs

 

[stinger608]

The great thing about tech life is that you can embrace the future without completely leaving the past behind.

That is an F'n great statement Lex!!!!!!! I'm going to quote that on the OP!!!!!

And OP edited for that quote.

Also added color and size to help the OP out a little.

 

[Mussels]

That is an F'n great statement Lex!!!!!!! I'm going to quote that on the OP!!!!!

I wanna fill in on that with an experience last week: I had a cleaner come over, she's early 50's and never got into any sort of gaming stuff. Kids are girls, so zero experience other than TV advertising.
She saw me playing Dying Light 1 with all ultra settings at 160FPS/Hz, and was blown away by how fast it all was... and that her 'old eyes' could keep up with it and marvelled at modern games and technology

Once i told her it was a 7 year old game, she pretty much had a stronk. Her limited experience with console gaming was garbage because she gets nausea and eyestrain from the low FPS and motion blur, and seeing how PC's let you play the old games years and decades later looking and playing better at 'faster speeds' as she understood it totally explained the appeal to the platform.

If you embrace a platform with backwards compatibility, you get to keep enjoying the past as technology improves.

Unlike my view of game consoles which seems to be aimed at buying the same game again every year, since once the hype does down the servers are empty


(For context, i've got nerve damage and medical issues in my lower back and feet from it - otherwise it'd feel too damn weird to be playing games while someone cleaned for me)

 

[Fouquin]

some vid card (have fun identifying it ! )

Dell GeForce 256 64MB DDR.

Actually quite timely of you to post that. I have a very specific request to anyone who might be willing to help...

I need some benchmark results from a stock GeForce 256 SDR, PCI version if you're a baller, running on Aladdin V or (M)VP3, with a K6-2+ or K6-III+ 500/550. 3DMark99, 2000, 01SE, Deus Ex, Half Life, Quake 3 Arena, whatever you got. I know that's a super specific ask but I only have a GF256 DDR AGP, and I kept the wrong version of the P5A so all of my 180nm K6 chips run slow as heck on it. This data will be extremely helpful for a small review I'm working on.

 

[MaxiPro800]

and a spare VP6 motherboard

View attachment 246690

like a Viking gold hoard !!

Definitely recap that beauty. I'm seeing Jackon capacitors that are utter garbage, even if they're new.

My BE6-II surprisingly came with Tayeh caps. Maybe the earlier rev 1.0 boards had Tayeh all round and switched to Jackon (plus that slightly cheesy "BE6-II (RAID)" sticker, so you couldn't really tell which HPT controller you had - 366 or 370.) though neither are good cap brands.