TPU's Nostalgic Hardware Club

[Bungz]

Some more bits I have managed to find.

Post cleaning all the nicotine out of it

Ati X800 XT Platinum Edition

The ram thermal pads had made the card near impossible to take apart to clean it, thought I was going to kill the poor thing slipping a thin blade between the sink and ram chips. All done with new pads and cleaned up.

A normal 9800 Pro I have been after for a while with the standard diddy heatsink. This is pre cleaning

Am currently working my way through restoring this relic

Filthy, all fans need stripping and oiling its taking me ages.

 

[Trekkie4]

Nice ones @Bungz Speaking of Radeons, I posted a question not so long ago, but apparently no one knew the answer (or wasn't motivated to give me a proper answer), which one of the two ATI cards was better - 9550 or 9600? Because I got both, tried looking at the benchmark results & technical specs, but in the terms of results they are more-less identical. 9550 is apparently newer, but according to online database, 9600 will outpower 9550 in most of the games.

 

[Bungz]

They are very similar, the core clock on the 9600 is usually quite a bit higher so should be faster.

I have a couple of 9600XT's which are nice cards, don't seem to be too popular 2nd hand either which makes them cheap

 

[uuuaaaaaa]

Some more bits I have managed to find.

Post cleaning all the nicotine out of it

Ati X800 XT Platinum Edition

The ram thermal pads had made the card near impossible to take apart to clean it, thought I was going to kill the poor thing slipping a thin blade between the sink and ram chips. All done with new pads and cleaned up.

A normal 9800 Pro I have been after for a while with the standard diddy heatsink. This is pre cleaning

Am currently working my way through restoring this relic

Filthy, all fans need stripping and oiling its taking me ages.

Those X8X0XT PE cards so sexy, cheers! I have a PowerColor X850XT PE AGP with a similar cooler on my "Purple Haze" rig, best card I have ever had! Gotta love these cards!

 

[Bungz]

Any of the 3dfx gurus in here know the best way to test a Voodoo 5500, as in to make sure both cores are working?

Just observe frame rates or is there something that can monitor the cores?

Cheers.

 

[biffzinker]

How about this motherboad with ISA, and PCIe slots?

Evaluation Board (EVB) for Vortex86DX2 Processor

Seen CPU-Z list support in version 1.79 for the Vortex86DX3 went looking to find out what it was.
http://www.vortex86dx.com/

 

[stinger608]

Any of the 3dfx gurus in here know the best way to test a Voodoo 5500, as in to make sure both cores are working?

Just observe frame rates or is there something that can monitor the cores?

Cheers.

That is actually a good question @Bungz

I would personally like to know that myself. I have an AGP version that I haven't actually had the opportunity to test yet.


Picked this up recently. Had to pay just a little over the cost of shipping!!!

HD3850 AGP card!!!

 

[biffzinker]

Would one of these converters work?

 

[dorsetknob]

Picked this up recently. Had to pay just a little over the cost of shipping!!!

HD3850 AGP card!!!

Lucky Bar-Steward
my ATI 3850 (512 meg ver) cost me £48 + postage had to have it because it was lots faster than my 9800se AIW AGP and it was for retro rig

 

[uuuaaaaaa]

Would one of these converters work?

Good luck finding one for sale... I have never ever found one on ebay or retailer.

 

[biffzinker]

Good luck finding one for sale... I have never ever found one on ebay or retailer.

Found it for $19.00. Uses Nvidia's bridge chip so no luck with that.
http://www.gamedude.com.au/prod_show.php?art_no=viALatop

Edit: Also found W1zzard old news post for it. @Dippyskoodlez
https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/more-albatron-atop-info.3272/

 

[stinger608]

Lucky Bar-Steward
my ATI 3850 (512 meg ver) cost me £48 + postage had to have it because it was lots faster than my 9800se AIW AGP and it was for retro rig

I haven't fired this up to know for sure what ram it has on it.

 

[uuuaaaaaa]

Found it for $19.00. Uses Nvidia's bridge chip so no luck with that.
http://www.gamedude.com.au/prod_show.php?art_no=viALatop

Edit: Also found W1zzard old news post for it. @Dippyskoodlez
https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/more-albatron-atop-info.3272/

for 19$ I would give it a spin and try some old 9600pro or something, it could be fun! (even if it will not most likely work)

 

[biffzinker]

for 19$ I would give it a spin and try some old 9600pro or something, it could be fun! (even if it will not most likely work)

Would only work with a ATI board if it used ATI's Rialto PCIe to AGP bridge chip.

Had a ATI card with the bridge chip on the back like above. Thought it would be a good idea to touch the exposed chip. Turned out to be a bad idea, ended up burning my finger.

 

[uuuaaaaaa]

Would only work with a ATI board if it used ATI's Rialto PCIe to AGP bridge chip.

Had a ATI card with the bridge chip on the back like above. Thought it would be a good idea to touch the exposed chip. Turned out to be a bad idea, ended up burning my finger.

I am aware of the rialto, my 3850 has one of those! Since that albatron adapter is directly AGP to PCI E with the chip in the middle I thought that it might work, after all the geforce 6200 agp should work if connect to just the agp right, maybe it is not a dumb connector... :/

 

[Trekkie4]

Time to reveal my "secret" board


Well, OK - to be honest, it wasn't really THAT secret, since I already mentioned it several times before, even posted a pic of inside the case. However, the entire board was in total mess & had to be recapped before putting it back in service. I finished the soldering job yesterday, cleaned up all the contacts & finally tested it earlier today ... from what I can tell, it seems to be working OK. Don't worry, I had the CPU heatsink/cooler when I tested the board, as you can see down below!


Now, I did some modifications, mainly with the CPU. The previous chip, Celeron D was removed & replaced with P4 3.00 Prescott, which was a leftover from my very 1st custom build, back in 2007. In fact, I still have a receipt for this thing, so I might dig it up later on


I know many of you here would probably just keep this Celeron instead of the Pentium, but trust me - I have big plans for this system & will need as much power as I can get, mainly because I'm going with the gaming theme and not something more simpler & easier.

These two RAM sticks are what came with the board, it's a matching pair of DDR400, 1GB each! More than enough for what I have in mind, so this will make a perfect combination


So, the game is on! Time to add in that 7600GT AGP card & see if it works... Again, so far so good!


The main storage will be this Barracuda drive, 160GB:


I'm also going to re-use this WiFi card, as (unlike all other retro systems) this one WILL be going online & download stuff, so I'll be needing the WiFi adapter either way


Now, the ONLY problem I've encountered so far is this warming message upon boot... Not sure what it means, but the system DOES boot up normally, so I guess that (whatever it is), it's not crucial and vital for the system performance


Speaking of problems, I also found out the reason why the system got so damaged to begin with - it most likely cooked itself! IDK why, or even if it's supposed to do so, but this thing is spewing enormous amount of heat, it burnt my finger just from touching the northbridge heatsink! And then there's the stock CPU heatsink, which does the job, but blows hot air all across this small board, warming it even further to the point where things are ought to fail sooner or later! And remember, this is also mATX case, so things are going to be cramped inside, so the only thing I could do was to replace the exhaust 92mm fan with something more powerful & faster, and switch the "quiet cooling" off in BIOS, bypassing the PWM feature. Which was also bridged to the 3-pin exhaust fan header, so both of them were slowing down equally, barely having any effect on the air inside the case.


On a side note, I'm also finishing this Celeron 2.00 system here which I mentioned several times, but never uploaded the pic until now. It started out as just a standard office machine & had a Radeon 9200 inside by default, but I upgraded it to Radeon 9600SE & replaced the RAM with matching pair of two 256 DDR modules. 9600 barely made it inside the custom case, which was obviously not designed for larger expansion cards, so I had to unscrew the screws, standoffs or whatever they are called from DVI port, in order to squeeze the card inside the case & then mount them back into the bracket (and DVI port) once the card was inside. It took me some time to do it, but it was worth it!

 

[stinger608]

That's great stuff @Trekkie4 !!!!!!!

I knew, just from the color, that the motherboard was an Asus.

 

[Bungz]

That is actually a good question @Bungz

I would personally like to know that myself. I have an AGP version that I haven't actually had the opportunity to test yet.


Picked this up recently. Had to pay just a little over the cost of shipping!!!

HD3850 AGP card!!!

View attachment 86799

I have the exact same card, its really silly powerful for a agp card!

One thing I did find is it would crash in a Athlon XP system, something to do with SSE3 instructions but not being supported by the Athlon XP range.

If you plan to use it on a Socket A platform I can dig up the fix/patch, not so easy to find now but works by disabling SSE3 instructions.

 

[Trekkie4]

That's great stuff @Trekkie4 !!!!!!!

I knew, just from the color, that the motherboard was an Asus.

Right?! But seriously though, it didn't have to be Asus... I can tell you at least 3 other brands which also made the yellow/gold motherboards! (Abit, iWill & Soltek)

 

[stinger608]

If you plan to use it on a Socket A platform I can dig up the fix/patch, not so easy to find now but works by disabling SSE3 instructions.

Oh man, if you can find it, that would be amazing bro!!!!!! Plus, I'll post it in the original post so that it can easily be found at later dates for anyone else looking!

Right?! But seriously though, it didn't have to be Asus... I can tell you at least 3 other brands which also made the yellow/gold motherboards! (Abit, iWill & Soltek)

I guess that's true. I forgot that Abit and Soltek made the yellow and gold boards.

 

[Bungz]

Here it is

http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=72173157623687684646

A good test is to run 3dmark 2003, would crash without that patch, runs perfect on a socket A system with it.

There are some threads still around the web with reference to the problem but the only host I could find for that had err questionable at best pop ups!

 

[biffzinker]

Now, the ONLY problem I've encountered so far is this warming message upon boot... Not sure what it means, but the system DOES boot up normally, so I guess that (whatever it is), it's not crucial and vital for the system performance

Problem loading from BIOS the Intel Microcode for the Prescott? As far as the heat problem goes Prescott rightfully earned the name Preshott for a reason. That Celeron D you have is based on the gimped version of the Prescott die if your not aware.

 

[Trekkie4]

Right, that much is what (and how) I understood myself... Not sure what the actual Microcode does though *shrug* Either way I'm going to flash the board with newer version. But since I don't have any storage devices hooked up at the moment, it has to wait

Edit
And nope, wasn't aware of that, for the Celeron... It's a nice chip by all means, and I'm definitely going to keep it for some other occasion, but since I'll be running intense 3D animations & games on this thing, it makes sense to go with 3GHz chip instead.

 

[biffzinker]

I managed to some how remember the ATI card I had with the PCIe-AGP bridge chip. Thought it was a Diamond brand but it turns out I had the ATI Radeon Visiontek X1950 Pro AGP. I believe I switched the OEM heatsink for a third party cooler that allowed me to use the backside plate. Was a interesting modification I did at the time all in the pursuit of overclocking.

This backplate:

Front if anyone is curious without searching for it.

 

[stinger608]

Here it is

http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=72173157623687684646

A good test is to run 3dmark 2003, would crash without that patch, runs perfect on a socket A system with it.

There are some threads still around the web with reference to the problem but the only host I could find for that had err questionable at best pop ups!

Awesome man!!! I edited the original post and included that link. If you do find a better source, shoot me a PM or post it up here and I'll edit the post again with the new link.

And of course, thanks a ton for sharing this with everyone man!!!!!!!