Show off your old and retro computer parts

[BrianTheElectrician]

Well, I scored a keyboard that I have wanted for years today... $120 CAD off of Facebook Marketplace!

 

 

I've swapped all the keycaps from my dead Unicomp (bad internal connection on one of the boards) onto this already. The caps that came with it were fine but I figured I had a whole other keyboard's worth of nearly new caps that I may as well use. The Del key on the num pad was a different colour though so that would have bothered me haha. It even came with a PS/2 to USB adapter so I typed this post up on it too! I can definitely see why the Model M's are so loved by touch typists, the feel is fantastic and honestly while the Unicomp was similar this Model M has noticeably more heft to it.

[atxcyclist]

Stuck my old Radeon X550 into a Core2Quad Dell, and attached an old Windows (of unknown version) laptop hard drive for an OS. Display outputs, waiting for Windows to load some sort of default drivers, no clue what to expect. 
 

I’m experimenting tonight, no question about it. Also, I forgot how slow spinning boot drives are, especially low-cache laptop ones with many thousands of hours on them.

 

Edit: So who would have guessed, trying to run ancient Vista 64-bit drivers for a 2006 graphics card, doesn’t really work in Windows 10.

[SimplyChunk]

11 hours ago, atxcyclist said:

Stuck my old Radeon X550 into a Core2Quad Dell, and attached an old Windows (of unknown version) laptop hard drive for an OS. Display outputs, waiting for Windows to load some sort of default drivers, no clue what to expect. 
 

I’m experimenting tonight, no question about it. Also, I forgot how slow spinning boot drives are, especially low-cache laptop ones with many thousands of hours on them.

-snip
 

Yeah old spinners are like wading though treacle now a days

[da na]

19 minutes ago, YouSirAreADudeSir said:

Yeah old spinners are like wading though treacle now a days

Yeah, it depends on the drive of course but those notoriously unreliable HDDs from 2012-era MacBooks take 3-5 minutes to load Windows with no startup programs and the drive 1/4 full

[atxcyclist]

3 hours ago, YouSirAreADudeSir said:

Yeah old spinners are like wading though treacle now a days

When I checked, it turned out that was a very slow drive indeed, 5400 rpm SATA I with a 2mb cache.

 

I switched the video card out for something functional, a GT 520, and the system at first seemed to work fine, but then I got some random crashes. The Dell has a Pre-boot test, turned out the memory I had in there failed. Ran the test three times to a failure code, then swapped it out for the original kit. So far it’s doing the long test without issue. 2gb capacity is somewhat low, but I guess I could dredge up another pair of sticks sometime if I wanted.

 

I hear the controller in this chipset will support up to 8gb, but Dell never validated it and there’s some particular module requirements that need to be met. Begs the question if I need a Q9500 with 8gb of ram sitting around, haha.

[da na]

1 minute ago, atxcyclist said:

When I checked, it turned out that was a very slow drive indeed, 5400 rpm SATA I with a 2mb cache.

 

I switched the video card out for something functional, a GT 520, and the system at first seemed to work fine, but then I got some random crashes. The Dell has a Pre-boot test, turned out the memory I had in there failed. Ran the test three times to a failure code, then swapped it out for the original kit. So far it’s doing the long test without issue. 2gb capacity is somewhat low, but I guess I could dredge up another pair of sticks sometime if I wanted.

 

I hear the controller in this chipset will support up to 8gb, but Dell never validated it and there’s some particular module requirements that need to be met. Begs the question if I need a Q9500 with 8gb of ram sitting around, haha.

I've got a q9550 system with 4x2gb DDR2-800 and a Quadro k620. You could pop an ssd in and sell it for $150ish

[atxcyclist]

1 minute ago, Mel0nMan said:

I've got a q9550 system with 4x2gb DDR2-800 and a Quadro k620. You could pop an ssd in and sell it for $150ish

Might be worth it these days. I might have a 2x4gb DDR3 kit sitting around, but I don't know if it would work as it might be basically for old AMD systems. Couldn't hurt to try though.

[da na]

1 minute ago, atxcyclist said:

Might be worth it these days. I might have a 2x4gb DDR3 kit sitting around, but I don't know if it would work as it might be basically for old AMD systems. Couldn't hurt to try though.

Those kits don't work for Intel usually. 

[BondiBlue]

10 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

I've got a q9550 system with 4x2gb DDR2-800 and a Quadro k620. You could pop an ssd in and sell it for $150ish

I don't know why anyone would want to pay that much for a Core 2 Quad system these days. 

[da na]

Just now, BondiBlue said:

I don't know why anyone would want to pay that much for a Core 2 Quad system these days. 

Fine for general web browsing etc, and the Quadro card in there is surprisingly capable. I'm selling mine for about $100 and buyer pays shipping so total is around 150

[BondiBlue]

2 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

Fine for general web browsing etc, and the Quadro card in there is surprisingly capable. I'm selling mine for about $100 and buyer pays shipping so total is around 150

Gee, they're paying a lot for that machine. Glad you could get that much for it, but I just don't see how it's worth that much at all. 

[Deats]

This was my last build, I think I have a core 2 duo in there but I did not want to remove the cooler to check.. LOL

[Bitter]

45 minutes ago, BondiBlue said:

Gee, they're paying a lot for that machine. Glad you could get that much for it, but I just don't see how it's worth that much at all. 

If it's all you can get and you need it now I guess....

[Billy Gringo]

Just a couple of my hoarded parts!

[atxcyclist]

4 minutes ago, Billy Gringo said:

Just a couple of my hoarded parts!

 

 

 

It's wild remembering there was a time where 2.5v was normal for RAM. Looking for some memory earlier I overturned a few PC100 sticks, I guess those were from my old K6-2 build.

[Billy Gringo]

Yeah, I've had to skip most of my retro stuff but still got a few nuggets, started my days on a 386 SX 16...

[atxcyclist]

33 minutes ago, Billy Gringo said:

Yeah, I've had to skip most of my retro stuff but still got a few nuggets, started my days on a 386 SX 16...

Nice. My second machine was a hand-me-down 386 25. I finally moved up from a Hercules monochrome card straight to a 1mb Trident VGA on that setup, blew my mind after looking at my monochrome and a few CGA machines. 

[ShebuAli]

On 10/2/2021 at 6:48 PM, adarw said:

its a pci expansion card to more pci slots

Alright thanks. But was it worth it back then? I mean you get 2 more slots but wouldn't they be bottleneck due to using a single slot?

[adarw]

Just now, ShebuAli said:

Alright thanks. But was it worth it back then? I mean you get 2 more slots but wouldn't they be bottleneck due to using a single slot?

its more or less for small cases where the gpu would be mounted verticaly.

[Kilrah]

You wouldn't have been able to install a card without that, it's what mechanically brings the ports to the proper place in the case.

And with PCI all cards were on the same bus and shared bandwidth.

 

[flibberdipper]

I'd still love to find one of those PCI risers for my OptiPlex 170L. I've looked at eBay here and there for the better part of 6+ years now and haven't seen a single one come up.

[da na]

4 minutes ago, flibberdipper said:

I'd still love to find one of those PCI risers for my OptiPlex 170L. I've looked at eBay here and there for the better part of 6+ years now and haven't seen a single one come up.

Ah, one of the weird curvy P4 ones! You could probably just buy a riser cable. 

[luckybob77]

@Kilrah

 

#1 thats not PCI, its Microchannel

#2 Someone needs to clean that IBM 55sx.

 

but to anyone reading about those PCI risers, They are *almost always* unique to the system they were designed for.  There are probably 9999 different unique pci riser cards for 10000 different systems.  If you want to know how to identify the 1 universal riser out of 10000?  The connector will be standard PCI *AND* will have a "pci bridge chip".  There are a lot of different manufacturers for such chips but Intel is the most common.

[Kilrah]

6 minutes ago, luckybob77 said:

#1 thats not PCI, its Microchannel

I know, it was just to illustrate how such a riser was used to mechanically locate the ports, not to add more like OP thought. First pic I found and it does the job.

 

 

[Corrupt_Liberty]

Just finished building this bit of kit over the weekend.  Boots CP/M like a champ and I love the blinky lights.  

 

 

How about a nice game of chess?