Dabombinable

I should have just stuck with Puppy Linux for moving files of failing drives. It is the only distro which hasn't either frozen or thrown an error trying to boot up - so while slow I can backup everything on what was the "stable" 1TB HDD in my brother's PC.

Not doing too bad for an early 2.5" 1TB HDD (only SATAII). Was also surprised to see that it runs Wayland, and to find that everything works.

Finally able to upgrade the boot SSD in my brother's PC. Currently has a counterfeit 120GB Kingston SV300 (which is really slow) and is going to the 1TB Sandisk Ultra 3D I bought a couple of years ago. If prices weren't so insane I'd have recommended he get a gen 4.0 1TB/2TB NVME SSD to fill his board's top m.2 slot.

Looking at GPU prices, I will be telling my brother to replace my old+faulty GTX 1070 with a second hand RTX 3080 10GB for when GTA VI comes out. Every other card around it is either new+slower+the same price, older+faster+more expensive or any combination thereof.

Looked at 7800XT - more expensive. Looked at the 9060XT 16GB - more expensive and slower. And straight up - I will not have him buy a card that is several generations newer with the same amount of vRAM.
It wasn't acceptable to me during Covid, and with how poorly 8GB models of some GPU compare to their 16GB counterparts - I was vindicated in choosing my 6700XT, even if it doesn't handle raytracing well.

Nvidia's GT cards just won't die:

Also that GT 710 has far more memory bandwidth than the DDR4 GT 1030

Benchmarking a 6x86MX+Riva 128ZX in Cinebench 2003. In the graphics tests - frames per minute.

I constantly see S3's cards recommended for use under DOS, but with my experience using 3 Savage4 and a Savage3D, I can't see the "excellent compatibility".

My particular Savage3D outright refuses to run Wolfenstein 3D (hard lockup under DOS), which every other card including the Savage4 can manage. While the Savage4 are incapable of displaying games using VBE 2.0. And both are incapable of correctly displaying the menu bar in Moonbase (1992) or text in Dark Ages unlike my SiS 305, 315E and 315. All of my Nvidia and Ati (side scrolling issues not-withstanding) cards may also have issues with the menu bar and text, but they at least work in every single game.

I shouldn't have more of my DOS games working flawlessly on a Via C3 1200, SiS 315P and AudioPCI under Millenium than I do an; IBM 6x86 PR300, S3 Savage3D and CMI8330. Even Pharoh's Tomb was running way too fast with the Savage3D, while with my Riva 128ZX and SiS 315P it runs as it should.

Figuring the PS/2 pinout on old boards is fun...especially when you confuse the IR header for the PS/2 header and end up with the pinout wired incorrectly. Finally have the mouse working on my Jetway J542B after a couple of hours and finding my original multi meter.

As much as I want to use the original board in my Slot 1 PC, the P2L97 still has major issues whenever I install the drivers for any TNT or TNT2 based card, my Savage4's work fine. So I'm just going with the SE440BX-2. VRM is better anyway with some polymer caps mixed in with the large electrolytics - instead of a forest of 1000uf caps.