Show off your old and retro computer parts

[stingray66]

Started off with a whopping Pentium 166 with 128mb ram in 1993 and ended up in 2004 as a Pentium 1 ghz with 1.5gb.

[Lenovich]

8 hours ago, stingray66 said:

Started off with a whopping Pentium 166 with 128mb ram in 1993 and ended up in 2004 as a Pentium 1 ghz with 1.5gb.

 

How this possible? maybe 66mhz?

[Kilrah]

What? P166 was a thing.

[Marbo]

Just picked this up. Its not mega old, but I'm not sure where else to put it.

 

Aurora R4 R1 (bit of a dog)

 

I7 950

GTX 560 ti

8gb 1333mhz (4 X 2)

60GB ocz ssd

500gb seagate baracuda

 

Original aio has been replaced at some point with a corsair.

 

Now here's the kick in the nuts, It doesn't work. Bit out of my comfort zone with this one but i'll give it a go.

 

Edit: added photos 

 

 

 

[sub68]

a motherboard that I got from a dell vostro 420

[Bitter]

4 hours ago, Marbo said:

Just picked this up. Its not mega old, but I'm not sure where else to put it.

 

Aurora R4 (bit of a dog)

 

I7 950

GTX 560 ti

8gb 1333mhz (4 X 2)

60GB ocz ssd

500gb seagate baracuda

 

Original aio has been replaced at some point with a corsair.

 

Now here's the kick in the nuts, It doesn't work. Bit out of my comfort zone with this one but i'll give it a go.

 

Edit: added photos

It should be triple channel memory, once you get it running add a 3rd stick of 4GB to it!

 

If it's no power on at all I'd start with the PSU.

[Marbo]

37 minutes ago, Bitter said:

It should be triple channel memory, once you get it running add a 3rd stick of 4GB to it!

 

If it's no power on at all I'd start with the PSU.

Sorry it's 4 X 2gb sticks so it will be another 2 sticks. 

 

It's getting power but nothing on screen apparently. I need to find a dvi to hdmi adapter before I can test further. I had a couple of them before I moved house. 

 

If I do get it running then I'll probably swap the gpu as well. 

[BrianTheElectrician]

Picked up an old IBM PS/1 recently. 486sx 25mhz, 4mb ram and 170mb ide hard disk. Works perfectly though the drive seemed to have a corrupted partition. Wiped it and installed dos and so far so good!

[seagate_surfer]

1 hour ago, Marbo said:

Sorry it's 4 X 2gb sticks so it will be another 2 sticks. 

 

It's getting power but nothing on screen apparently. I need to find a dvi to hdmi adapter before I can test further. I had a couple of them before I moved house. 

 

If I do get it running then I'll probably swap the gpu as well. 

Yep! that definitely sounds like it. Power with nothing on the screen could be related to RAM or GPU ...

[Marbo]

22 minutes ago, seagate_surfer said:

Yep! that definitely sounds like it. Power with nothing on the screen could be related to RAM or GPU ...

Lots of stuff to check.  Just going to start ruling stuff out. 

 

I've also read it could be a bios problem. 

 

Anyway it will keep me busy if I end up stuck at home because of human malware. And if it turns out to be more trouble than it's worth I'll part out the working stuff to get my money back and stick a ryzen build in the case.. 

[seagate_surfer]

  

8 minutes ago, Marbo said:

Lots of stuff to check.  Just going to start ruling stuff out. 

 

I've also read it could be a bios problem. 

 

Anyway it will keep me busy if I end up stuck at home because of human malware. And if it turns out to be more trouble than it's worth I'll part out the working stuff to get my money back and stick a ryzen build in the case.. 

Alright yeah, still the case looking good. I would keep it too...

[The King of the Undead]

8 hours ago, Marbo said:

Lots of stuff to check.  Just going to start ruling stuff out. 

 

I've also read it could be a bios problem. 

 

Anyway it will keep me busy if I end up stuck at home because of human malware. And if it turns out to be more trouble than it's worth I'll part out the working stuff to get my money back and stick a ryzen build in the case.. 

On old 775 dells I have had the PSU run the fans and nothing else. no screen no errors but the fans run. And replaceing the PSU fixed it. so don't rule it out just yet.

[Marbo]

So the old Dell Alienware. Where to start? 

 

Well, right at the very basics. Could it be as easy as a dodgy cable? 

 

Yes it can

 

 

 

[The King of the Undead]

27 minutes ago, Marbo said:

So the old Dell Alienware. Where to start? 

 

Well, right at the very basics. Could it be as easy as a dodgy cable? 

 

Yes it can

 

 

 

 

you are lucky.

[Marbo]

1 hour ago, The King of the Undead said:

you are lucky.

Yep, bought it as faulty so got very lucky.

It just needs cleaning up and a few minor issues to sort out.

[seagate_surfer]

  

10 hours ago, Marbo said:

Yep, bought it as faulty so got very lucky.

It just needs cleaning up and a few minor issues to sort out.

Cool! I am happy for you. Congrats...

[vf1000ride]

How about a trio of vintage video cards.  You've got a TNT2 M64, ATI Rage 128PRO and a Stb Systems Velocity 8mb.

[vf1000ride]

How about another classic from the roughly 20year old mark.  An MSI RX480 Neo2 motherboard with a socket 939 AMD Opteron 165 dual core 1.8ghz chip.  Still sporting a pair of Corsair 1gig, 500mhz ram sticks.

[Marbo]

1 hour ago, vf1000ride said:

How about another classic from the roughly 20year old mark.  An MSI RX480 Neo2 motherboard with a socket 939 AMD Opteron 165 dual core 1.8ghz chip.  Still sporting a pair of Corsair 1gig, 500mhz ram sticks.

 

It looks brand new

[vf1000ride]

59 minutes ago, Marbo said:

It looks brand new

If it wasn't for the fact that I stole the heatsink off the ATI chip by the sata connectors for another project I'm sure it would still work.  I have everything needed to hook it back up and I seem to think I kept this one because it was still functional.

[p13]

Well it's not really a "part", but i bring you Gary

 

[Lenovich]

OMG. What Gary can do?

[Bitter]

What is Gary?

[Marbo]

11 minutes ago, Bitter said:

What is Gary?

An overkill Doom console? 

[p13]

9 hours ago, Bitter said:

What is Gary?

 

Gary is an HP RX8640.  It's an itanium system built on an SX2000 (superdome) chipset.  It was built in 2006.

Gary has 16 sockets distributed over 4 cell boards.  Each socket has a 9140DN, giving it a total of 32 cores and 64 threads.  It's clock speed is 1.6 Ghz.

Gary has 128GB of ram, courtesy of 64 DIMMs.  Gary has no onboard storage other than a boot drive.

 

Basically, it's a huge 4KW resistor that can run linux.

 

20 hours ago, Lenovich said:

OMG. What Gary can do?

 

- Make a lot of noise

- Increase your power bill considerably

- Trip a breaker

- Act as a heated chair

- Roll around.  Gary has wheels.  It's a lot of fun.

 

On a more serious note ... It's a big machine with lots of pretty slow processors and a pretty big chunk of memory.

It runs linux quite well.  It's a pretty good machine actually, but it uses too much power, so i don't run it very often.  It needs about 3.8 KW to run.

 

11 hours ago, Schnoz said:

it can run doom

Nope.  Gary doesn't have a framebuffer.

 

Fun fact: Gary is not vulnerable to any of the speculative execution related bugs like meltdown, spectre, etc, since IA64 chips are not superscalar in nature.  IA64 is built on a principle called EPIC (explicitly parallel instruction computing).  It relies heavily on the compiler to optimize the binaries so that the cpu can execute as many operations as possible at any time.  It is in fact the opposite of what cpus are nowadays.