Show off your old and retro computer parts

[Bitter]

5 hours ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

I have a PCI exhaust fan to cover airflow

How well or unwell do those work? I've been slot fan curious for a while but scared to try.

[Mira Yurizaki]

5 minutes ago, Bitter said:

How well or unwell do those work? I've been slot fan curious for a while but scared to try.

I imagine any airflow is better than none and I haven't tried out a temperature monitoring tool. But I also don't think the thing gets hot enough for it to matter.

[Bitter]

8 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

I imagine any airflow is better than none and I haven't tried out a temperature monitoring tool. But I also don't think the thing gets hot enough for it to matter.

Haha it probably does not. I recall trying to use axle grease as thermal grease on a Pentium CPU once because I thought it would 'go faster' if it were kept cooler. To be fair I was like...10. I've learned to be less scared of things running warm than I used to be, silence is golden.

 

Does it look like the fan could be reversed easily to blow air into and at a card in the slot above it?

[Mira Yurizaki]

2 minutes ago, Bitter said:

Haha it probably does not. I recall trying to use axle grease as thermal grease on a Pentium CPU once because I thought it would 'go faster' if it were kept cooler. To be fair I was like...10. I've learned to be less scared of things running warm than I used to be, silence is golden.

 

Does it look like the fan could be reversed easily to blow air into and at a card in the slot above it?

Nah. It's also a blower style exhaust fan so it wouldn't work if it went in reverse.

[Bitter]

5 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

Nah. It's also a blower style exhaust fan so it wouldn't work if it went in reverse.

Bummer. It would make much more sense to make intake fans for slots to blow cool air at cards than it does to make exhaust fans for slots drawing hot case air near to the cards.

[Mira Yurizaki]

6 hours ago, Bitter said:

Careful, might render too many triangles at once and crash your something or other lol I can't even. Mmmmm....S-Video output. It's got DVI though, that's way too new fangled fancy. Passive video cards are great though, just the gentle whining drone of your 80MM exhaust fan to help you focus on slaying demons in Quake.

Also late to responding to this but the thought crossed my mind. I half expected the PC to crash and burn while doing some testing because of ATi's infamous driver reliability issues. But nope, the thing was a champ through and through.

[Bitter]

13 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

Also late to responding to this but the thought crossed my mind. I half expected the PC to crash and burn while doing some testing because of ATi's infamous driver reliability issues. But nope, the thing was a champ through and through.

OMG those old driver problems are why I swore completely off ATI video cards for over a decade, once I found out that AMD was open sourcing the drivers though I decided to try them out again, been satisfied with my 6570 and 7570 for test duty, they've worked without hiccup and the $/'triangle' ratio for the really cheap cards is better than for the really cheap Nvidia cards. $20 gets you an 8570 or 7570 which trounces onboard graphics for Core2Duo era stuff and are readily available in either low profile or full height bracketed. For equal performance you're looking to spend more like $30+ for an Nvidia GT 630 or 730 and then have to mess with the Nvidia drivers which for older hardware seems to be buggier than AMD's drivers.

[Turtle Rig]

Oh man, this thing is classic.  I wonder what the church used it for.  

[Turtle Rig]

Drop a SSD on it and give it new life LOL!!! ,,, my 2 cents .  

[Bitter]

I have several of those cases and boards and parts, they will accept a standard mATX motherboard and other standard parts so they make a good base for a 'retro' sleeper build. Keep the rear fan, it's temp sense so it'll speed up if the case air gets hot which is a nice touch. The hard drive bay up front is weird but it puts the drive in the flow of incoming cooler air for better drive life, you can get a 3.5 to dual SSD adapter and do that or NVME on a newer board. I rebuilt one of the old Dimension 2400 into a 1st gen i3 or i5 based system for a family I do some computer work for from time to time, put some cool green LED's inside and behind the front panel. It was neat, I might ask for that one back when her parents croak.

[flibberdipper]

11 hours ago, Bitter said:

OMG those old driver problems are why I swore completely off ATI video cards for over a decade, once I found out that AMD was open sourcing the drivers though I decided to try them out again, been satisfied with my 6570 and 7570 for test duty, they've worked without hiccup and the $/'triangle' ratio for the really cheap cards is better than for the really cheap Nvidia cards. $20 gets you an 8570 or 7570 which trounces onboard graphics for Core2Duo era stuff and are readily available in either low profile or full height bracketed. For equal performance you're looking to spend more like $30+ for an Nvidia GT 630 or 730 and then have to mess with the Nvidia drivers which for older hardware seems to be buggier than AMD's drivers.

As someone who dailied a 7570 in my main rig for about a year, those damn things are troopers. For what they're meant to be, they sure as hell go above and beyond.

[Bitter]

5 hours ago, flibberdipper said:

As someone who dailied a 7570 in my main rig for about a year, those damn things are troopers. For what they're meant to be, they sure as hell go above and beyond.

It's the GDDR5 I'm sure, punches above it's weight class. The 8570 is now in the $20 range too but it's DDR3,I haven't researched it's performance relative to the 6570 and 7570. I can't imagine it's a regression, and driver support ought to be a little better.

 

[flibberdipper]

4 minutes ago, Schnoz said:

I have one in my dad's HTPC. It regularly pushes 1080p while staying quiet.

Oh boy 2D 1080p, so difficult

[Bitter]

Depends what the rest of the system is, if it's an old AMD or Intel with chipset graphics then it's way better than onboard graphics.

[Redrooster]

On 3/28/2019 at 2:52 PM, NunoLava1998 said:

Upgrade it to the best CPU you can find, give it 4GB or 8GB of RAM, put a SSD and a low end GPU in it, and you've got yourself a good web browsing PC.

In addition to a good web browsing pc, it would also be a decent retro game emulator.

[v0nN3umann]

Found an old graphics card...

[Gegger]

I have some AMD Athlon X2 CPU from an old Dell Dimension E521 that works better than my ASUS Chromebox with some Celeron in it.

[Bitter]

23 hours ago, Mr. horse said:

Probably. But I been getting rid of most of my older parts. 

 

Here is some photos of old cross billed blocks. A fan controller and radiator from around 2001.

 

for those that do not know what a cross drilled block is.

its a block with two straight holes drilled in it them. One for intake and one for discharge. Then a 3rd hole is drilled accost the two holes.  

Like this 

Weird coincidence, I'm working on restoring a Koolance system with a 200G water block, same radiator, same control board, etc. When the MSI P55 board I splurged on gets here I'm going to work on fabbing a mounting solution for holding the 200G to socket 1156 then get the system running to try to work out any issues it has running with modern hardware, my eventual plan is to water cool some Ryzen with it. I may add some 80MM radiators to the back of the case for extra system capacity, I plan on adding a dual 5.25 bay reservoir with water temp sensor to add thermal mass to the system as well to help slow temp spikes with a higher TDP processor than the P4 3.4E the system was designed around.

[Jessica.Fawkes]

Let's see... I have:

4x Dell Optiplex RAM (Crucial 1GB , no idea what type)

2x Samsung 128MB "RAMBUS" RIMM's

2x Samsung 256MB "RAMBUS" RIMM's

1x Intel Pentium 4

3x 2GB RAM sticks (DDR2/3, I think)

2x ATI PCIe GPU cards

1x AMD PCIe GPU

1x NVidia AGP GPU (Believe it's a MX400)

1x Intel i5-750 Quad-Core CPU, No iGPU

1x SoundBlaster Live PCI Sound Card

I'll try to post photos later, I can't access my "Bin".

[Bitter]

20 hours ago, campy said:

Here's the psu for my ham radio

the kind where if you touch the wrong thing you die

>inb4 "buy a new psu"

this one is 41 years old, if it was gonna die, it would have died already 

Something tells me that's probably not 80+ certified.

[Jessica.Fawkes]

9 minutes ago, Bitter said:

Something tells me that's probably not 80+ certified.

Is it even 10+ certified?

[Boarder]

I just remembered about this PC I picked up for $5 at the thrift store. It was missing a hard drive but I found an 80 gig IDE drive to put in and installed Kubuntu in it.

 

AMD64 3700 CPU and 512 meg memory. Everything still work on it.

 

[flibberdipper]

1 hour ago, Boarder said:

I just remembered about this PC I picked up for $5 at the thrift store. It was missing a hard drive but I found an 80 gig IDE drive to put in and installed Kubuntu in it.

 

AMD64 3700 CPU and 512 meg memory. Everything still work on it.

 

 

Hell yeah, those cases make for great sleepers. Swap out the power LED for a red one and put some red LEDs to make the optical drive shit light up and bam.

[Bitter]

I love complete old cases like that, I have a Gateway or something I'm stuffing a low power i5 4460S and some parts into, I just need a cheap but decent PSU for it.

[Boarder]

Ah, here's the video I made. That thing is slow and why not, only 512 megs of memory.