Show off your old and retro computer parts

[Bitter]

10 hours ago, Mel0n. said:

While we're onto drives, here is a 256GB SSD from late 2012. Very different in comparison to today's single-NAND-chip 1TB NVMEs.

 

 

I tried to pop open my Samsung SSD 830 but the lid is snapped on tighter than I want to mess with, however it's of the same vintage and still works great with lots of life left in it. I looked up some articles and it's similar to that but has higher density 8 die packages on a single side.

[da na]

4 hours ago, Bitter said:

I tried to pop open my Samsung SSD 830 but the lid is snapped on tighter than I want to mess with, however it's of the same vintage and still works great with lots of life left in it. I looked up some articles and it's similar to that but has higher density 8 die packages on a single side.

This one has reached its end, but it lasted an admirably long time for a decade-old SSD. It's got 260 TERABYTES written. 

[da na]

15 hours ago, Corrupt_Liberty said:

So I finally found a home for that Western Digital Raptor X.  I may have gone a touch overboard...

 

 

I got a hold of an Asus Striker II NSE board with Nvidia Nforce 790i SLI Chipset.  Added in an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850, 8 GB DDR3, 2x PNY Nvidia Geforce 9800 GTX+ cards in SLI, Creative XFI Titanium Fatal1ty Champion Sound Card, and some water cooling for the lolz. 

 

 

The plan was for a super sick Windows XP 64-bit build from the 2007-08ish era so I needed appropriate drives as well.  The DVD/CD Burner with Blu-Ray and HD-DVD playback was too hilarious to pass up.  And the combination Floppy/Multicard reader also fits the build. I'm really happy with how it has turned out so far.  

 

Wow that really is an everything optical drive. HD DVD, Bluray, AND lightscribe? jesus 

[Verhulstak]

On 12/19/2013 at 10:25 PM, TheTechnerd said:

 Today I thought we would do something fun and different. This is a topic about showing of all your old pc parts (or old computers). Feel free to post some pics:) It will be fun:D

 

Here's some of mine:

 

 

Kingston Hyperx DDR2 2GB 1066MHz

 

 

Intel core 2 duo 2.2 GHz

 

 

Intel core 2 duo 2.2 GHz backside

its sad that my cousin is still daily driving it but in two weeks im gonna build him a new one

[Verhulstak]

[Corrupt_Liberty]

2 hours ago, Mel0n. said:

Wow that really is an everything optical drive. HD DVD, Bluray, AND lightscribe? jesus 

I didn't even know such a thing existed until I started reading old issues of Maximum PC magazine to find cool parts for this build. I'm very much going to buy some HD-DVD movies just because of this. 

[Corrupt_Liberty]

I just noticed the embossed EK logo is facing forward on one fan but not the other.  This will bother me greatly until I have a chance to fix it...

[da na]

5 minutes ago, Corrupt_Liberty said:

I didn't even know such a thing existed until I started reading old issues of Maximum PC magazine to find cool parts for this build. I'm very much going to buy some HD-DVD movies just because of this. 

I've wanted a Lightscribe drive for a while now. 

If I sell something really esoteric on eBay that I don't have a driver disc for, I find an ISO, burn one, and throw it in the box. Might make them look a little more professional...

Have you ever tried LightScribe, does it work at all? 

[Bitter]

1 minute ago, Mel0n. said:

I've wanted a Lightscribe drive for a while now. 

If I sell something really esoteric on eBay that I don't have a driver disc for, I find an ISO, burn one, and throw it in the box. Might make them look a little more professional...

Have you ever tried LightScribe, does it work at all? 

I needs special discs tho. I think my family PC had one at one point around Northwood era. My dad used it a few times with the couple of blanks it came with but after that I don't think so.

[SimplyChunk]

1 hour ago, Mel0n. said:

I've wanted a Lightscribe drive for a while now. 

If I sell something really esoteric on eBay that I don't have a driver disc for, I find an ISO, burn one, and throw it in the box. Might make them look a little more professional...

Have you ever tried LightScribe, does it work at all? 

I've had lightscribe drives.  they work really well.  they don't fade in Sun or smudge.  they look crisp and professional.  but like @Bitter says you need specific discs for it with the coating on the top.  

 

 

[Dabombinable]

2 minutes ago, SimplyChunk said:

I've had lightscribe drives.  they work really well.  they don't fade in Sun or smudge.  they look crisp and professional.  but like @Bitter says you need specific discs for it with the coating on the top.  

 

 

My Memorex external DVD RAM drive came with a single Lightscribe CD. As slow as they are to etch - kind of worth the result.

[Corrupt_Liberty]

1 hour ago, Mel0n. said:

I've wanted a Lightscribe drive for a while now. 

If I sell something really esoteric on eBay that I don't have a driver disc for, I find an ISO, burn one, and throw it in the box. Might make them look a little more professional...

Have you ever tried LightScribe, does it work at all? 

Lightscribe works okay-ish.  It's not particularly easy to read and you need to use proprietary disks.  I really like the Casio Disk Label Printer.  It's not perfect and limited to one color at a time (and can only print on certain areas of the disk).  But it does look quite nice and can print on any disk (not recommended for ink jet printable disks).  The printer ribbons aren't easy to get in most places but Amazon Japan usually has them in stock and is where I purchase them (from the US).  

 

 

 

It only prints on the top and bottom of the disk but with some creativity can actually put logos on the sides as well.

 

[Kilrah]

2 hours ago, Corrupt_Liberty said:

I didn't even know such a thing existed until I started reading old issues of Maximum PC magazine to find cool parts for this build. I'm very much going to buy some HD-DVD movies just because of this. 

I still have mine in my daily driver, bought in 2008. Also have a bunch of HD-DVDs from when they were being discounted after losing the "format war" and you could buy a recent movie in HD for $5 while the blu-ray version would be like $35... but they didn't age well and quite a few have become unreadable, so try to get known good ones... 

[Corrupt_Liberty]

8 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

I still have mine in my daily driver, bought in 2008. Also have a bunch of HD-DVDs from when they were being discounted after losing the "format war" and you could buy a recent movie in HD for $5 while the blu-ray version would be like $35... but they didn't age well and quite a few have become unreadable, so try to get known good ones... 

I have a local used movie/music store near me that I would go to for all of them.  I know they have a huge stock of HD-DVD's but I've never really looked at them before.  I know the owner though and I'm sure he'd stand by them if they were ruined by the bit-rot. 

[da na]

So I have a project at school where I have to give up something I love for a week, or take on an extra responsibility for a week. Most people do "no [various social media app], drinking only water", that sort of thing. But because I'm a masochist I'm going to bring only my Windows 98 laptop to class for a week. I've loaded Office 97 onto it, and that's about all I need. It has no modern networking hardware, so cannot access any websites. Hence the floppies - on my break periods I'll run back to my room and submit assignments with a USB floppy drive on my workstation. 

K6-2 380mhz, 64MB of RAM, and dual 4gb CompactFlash cards for storage. A bit slower than an IDE HDD would be, but less likely to randomly die than an IDE HDD. I've got a battery in it that lasts a solid 20-40 minutes depending on use case, so it should be somewhat okay. 

[Bitter]

4 minutes ago, Mel0n. said:

So I have a project at school where I have to give up something I love for a week, or take on an extra responsibility for a week. Most people do "no [various social media app], drinking only water", that sort of thing. But because I'm a masochist I'm going to bring only my Windows 98 laptop to class for a week. I've loaded Office 97 onto it, and that's about all I need. It has no modern networking hardware, so cannot access any websites. Hence the floppies - on my break periods I'll run back to my room and submit assignments with a USB floppy drive on my workstation. 

K6-2 380mhz, 64MB of RAM, and dual 4gb CompactFlash cards for storage. A bit slower than an IDE HDD would be, but less likely to randomly die than an IDE HDD. I've got a battery in it that lasts a solid 20-40 minutes depending on use case, so it should be somewhat okay. 

I mean who needs windows for word processing, linux baby. I bet DSL or Puppy would run on that thing lol. Command line ALL the things, no GUI for HACKERMAN.

[Fast_N_Curious]

 

 

[Dabombinable]

My porn collection is getting out of hand:

Still have 3 more cards on the way. 

[Beerzerker]

Lot's of AGP and PCI goodness there!
I really need to find a couple of good PCI slot cards to have around in case I need them.

Referring back to what I had been doing, all total I have 4 working NF7's confirmed out of the 5 I have, my trusty AN7 still works, both A7N8X Deluxe 2.0's work and the lone A7N8X Deluxe 1.04 works too.
Even found a couple of chips I forgot I had while hunting these boards up to test and run, namely these being a Pally XP-1700+ and an Applebred Duron 1600 I bought new.

Only boards for Socket A I've left to test and give a bit of runtime to are my DFI's, all three Lanparty boards and the lone NF2 Ultra II Infinity.
The LanParty boards I have are different from each other, I've even posted a pic here of them on display.

One is a LanParty NF2 Ultra A, there is an Ultra B (Of course) and the VIA KT400 variant of the LanParty series of these.
I do have a couple of "Dead" Ultra B's here too and there is a bit of hope one can be fixed - Will look into all that later on one rainy day sometime in the future.
 

[NJrelictron]

I posted the gpu’s on another part of this forum already but the X cruiser pc case i just got today plus a pic of my ewaste hord

[Kilrah]

2 hours ago, NJrelictron said:

 

 

Hey, my mobo isn't "retro" yet... although 

 

 

that does hurt a bit 

[SimplyChunk]

47 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

 

Hey, my mobo isn't "retro" yet... although 

 

 

that does hurt a bit 

Feeling your age?

[NJrelictron]

5 hours ago, Kilrah said:

 

Hey, my mobo isn't "retro" yet... although 

 

 

that does hurt a bit 

It’s my new motherboard as well man lol

[Dabombinable]

A word on Windows ME. It may look like it can handle 1GB of RAM. But in the background things are breaking, files are being corrupted...basically it starts falling apart. Which is why I've spent 4 days trying to get it setup.

[Beerzerker]

It can but it's tricky - If you do a "From scratch" install with that amount of RAM already in the system it works (Normally) but the moment you reduce the amount of RAM it goes wonky.
I tried this years ago and discovered how to make it run 1GB's worth and that's how you do it. Win ME normally tolerates up to 512MB's worth no prob but once you go past that it's a problem because it cannot assign addresses (Slots) to all the available RAM you'd have, that why it's best done straight from scratch with the amount of RAM you have and once done, just leave it as is.

The real reliable limit I found was 768MB's worth, after that it's a toss up at times.

If you've already done this kind of install and it's still acting crazy, it's possible the board/BIOS may be a factor.