Show off your old and retro computer parts

[bob345]

Not a computer in the traditional sense, but I picked up this Hewlet Packard vector network analyzer over the holidays. This one specifically is from the early 90s and can perform measurements over a 3 ghz span in it's current setup, or 6ghz with the proper s-parameter test set.

[Nathan Carstens]

I don't know if its old enough to be a retro part but I have a 560ti

[Alec M]

5 minutes ago, Nathan Carstens said:

I don't know if its old enough to be a retro part but I have a 560ti

Not retro at all IMO

[Nathan Carstens]

Just now, Alec M said:

Not retro at all IMO

OK lol I also have a bunch of lga 775 mother boards and cpus with ddr2 ram 

[Alec M]

1 minute ago, Nathan Carstens said:

OK lol I also have a bunch of lga 775 mother boards and cpus with ddr2 ram 

Yeah, those are getting closer and closer to retro every day

Still plenty usable though 

[RollinLower]

8 hours ago, bob345 said:

Not a computer in the traditional sense, but I picked up this Hewlet Packard vector network analyzer over the holidays. This one specifically is from the early 90s and can perform measurements over a 3 ghz span in it's current setup, or 6ghz with the proper s-parameter test set.

Oh wow that thing looks delicious! Look at all the buttons

[Freebo]

Not exactly Retro but 10 years old and only just decommissioning... Its an Intel i7 920, Foxconn Renaissance X58, 6x 1Gb G.Skill DDR3 PC3-10666. I stuck the ATI HD5770 on so I could get video as the on board wouldn't work straight away. It's a shame to think it cost me quite a bit back in the day but did serve me and my wife well, she had it after me when i upgraded to a 4th gen i5. The motherboard box is the new Ryzen system I built the wife so she could play games better as the system was rather bottle necking her GTX970.

[NoCarrier]

spent the holidays sorting everything, got some new projects lined up.

 

First, dug out this lovely socket 7 motherboard..   PCI and ISA, (only up to 66mhz fsb support though), Pentium 166 CPU, integrated ATI Mach64 graphics.

 

 

then started a new gaming rig. nothing like a pile of parts

Socket 7 pentium 233mmx, 64mb RAM, 3DFX voodoo 2, gravis ultrasound max, 10kRPM scsi

 

 

[RollinLower]

2 hours ago, NoCarrier said:

spent the holidays sorting everything, got some new projects lined up.

 

First, dug out this lovely socket 7 motherboard..   PCI and ISA, (only up to 66mhz fsb support though), Pentium 166 CPU, integrated ATI Mach64 graphics.

then started a new gaming rig. nothing like a pile of parts

Socket 7 pentium 233mmx, 64mb RAM, 3DFX voodoo 2, gravis ultrasound max, 10kRPM scsi

 

 

 

what is that sexy looking keyboard in the background there?

[Dissitesuxba11s]

On 1/5/2019 at 3:11 AM, BrianTheElectrician said:

I can't really say exactly, they're not really supposed to let people take the machines... the manager could get in trouble. He likes me though so all's good haha. If your local though and need something ill do what I can to help. Heck, just for ram I have pretty much everything going back to the old 30 pin Simms. Even have a few of the cache ram ICs from when that was on the motherboard.

Holy cow, you're Brian the electrician (duh) from the LTT videos!

[LukeSavenije]

maybe you guys can help me? i have a old case i want to identify...

btw, parts aren't original. used to be a pentium 4 3ghz machine

[BrianTheElectrician]

6 hours ago, Dissitesuxba11s said:

Holy cow, you're Brian the electrician (duh) from the LTT videos!

Haha maybe... :P

 

Did you enjoy the videos?

[BrianTheElectrician]

@NoCarrier I swear I have that exact same motherboard (the one with the P166 in it) in one of my machines. I used it to replace the mb from my first computer that died (stupid barrel battery), and has a P100 in it. Loving your 233mmx build too! I'll have to get some pics of mine up sometime when I pull it down next. Too many projects (and computers) lol

 

Edit: Ok, I can't resist. I went and took a "few" more pictures

These are all my Socket 7 boards that aren't currently in a system. they all work, though one or two do have a glitch to sort out. I can't do many pics at once either haha this one alone was just shy of 10mb.

 

From top down, Pentium 3 900mhz, Pentium 3 733mhz, 2x Pentium 3 450mhz, Pentium 2 266mhz, 2x Pentium 2 233mhz, and lastly a Pentium 3 733mhz in a slocket adapter. Also have P2 300, 350's and a 400mhz in machines as well.

[CorruptedSanity]

I went back home just after new years and decided to pull out some hardware from my old pc that had been sitting outside for the past 6+ years. I grabbed the MSI MS 7250 motherboard, two Kingmax DDR2 667mhz ram 1GB sticks, MSI 7600GT GPU, TV @nywhere plus capture card, AMD Athlon 64 X2 CPU, and 54Mbps WiFi card.  It was more so preserving my PC gaming history but I also may do a retro build one day.

 

Out of curiosity I disassembled the GPU, which was the first time I've done such a task, and applied some fresh thermal compound.  After uninstalling my 1070ti and drivers I plugged the 7600GT into my rig and to my surprise, it actually booted!  I even overclocked it a little which I never had the confidence to do when I was in my teens and ran heaven for about 30-45 minutes with no issues (literally as I typed this I got a BSOD so I set it back to stock clocks).  I was surprised to say the least, I thought for sure 6+ freeze/thaw cycles and plenty of morning dew would've killed it.

 

Well, I guess this stuff is going on a shelf now until I decide to build an XP machine for some hardware accurate gaming.  Hope this isn't too many pics.

 

 

[BrianTheElectrician]

One of my old machines: It's an 80386 DX33 with 4mb ram, and I believe a 100mb or so hard disk. The original disks didn't work, but it had 2x 42mb 5.25 MFM drives, which I still have as display pieces. Currently there is no soundcard, as it has been borrowed, potentially for a certain Dos gaming build. If you look close in the "Biggest Tech Horder" video, this machine is just poking out of a box on the bottom of the shelf. My 486 is still there (The desktop near the middle) and the black bin full of cards where Linus pulled out the EDO ram haha.

[BrianTheElectrician]

9 minutes ago, Schnoz said:

Electronics are actually more resilient than many people think. I found a Dell Latitude D800 in my school e-waste bin about a month back that was covered in rain. I literally just dried off the outside and nothing else and it booted up fine. Maybe that was because the solid aluminum top was facing upwards when the rain started, but still. Electronics survive water just fine as long as you don't turn them on. In fact, when I soldered for a science fair project three years back (I'm the last name in this post) I washed off flux with water and dried it. 

Yeah, I've washed circuit boards in the sink with soap, water, and an old toothbrush many times. Just make sure they're completely dry before powering on.

[8uhbbhu8]

On 1/7/2019 at 11:28 PM, BrianTheElectrician said:

One of my old machines: It's an 80386 DX33 with 4mb ram, and I believe a 100mb or so hard disk. The original disks didn't work, but it had 2x 42mb 5.25 MFM drives, which I still have as display pieces. Currently there is no soundcard, as it has been borrowed, potentially for a certain Dos gaming build. If you look close in the "Biggest Tech Horder" video, this machine is just poking out of a box on the bottom of the shelf. My 486 is still there (The desktop near the middle) and the black bin full of cards where Linus pulled out the EDO ram haha.

[Dissitesuxba11s]

21 hours ago, BrianTheElectrician said:

Haha maybe...

 

Did you enjoy the videos?

I did enjoy the videos. Linus should have you on more.

[BrianTheElectrician]

45 minutes ago, Dissitesuxba11s said:

I did enjoy the videos. Linus should have you on more.

I'm glad I had a lot of fun doing them too, and would definitely like to do more in the future even if it's not electrical related. I'm also hoping Linus goes forward with his tech hoarders series, as I think that would be a lot of fun too. Might be involved with the dos gaming pc though, already loaned Anthony a bunch of hardware

 

Also the two laptops on Linus' freezer in the background of the charger video are mine. One is an old Dell, I'd have to double check the specs but I believe a 1ghz p3. The other is an old Compaq with a pentium 166. The battery in that one is even still good. He borrowed that one for nostalia's sake

 

[flibberdipper]

10 minutes ago, Schnoz said:

How do you even keep a battery alive and well for that long? My laptop is only four years old and 25% battery wear!

My ProSignia's battery was still good (an hour and a half of runtime for a P2 400/ATI RAGE LT) up until last year where I fucked up super hard and let it sit dead too long.

[BrianTheElectrician]

58 minutes ago, Schnoz said:

How do you even keep a battery alive and well for that long? My laptop is only four years old and 25% battery wear!

I guess just not letting it sit dead for too long like flipperdipper said, and I can only assume that the battery isn't original. It's actually one of the many machines that I got from the recycler's so I'm not sure about it's history. It is in pretty good shape though considering it must be over 20 years old now.

[flibberdipper]

3 minutes ago, campy said:

Different battery types. I have a nihm battery in my Thinkpad 380ED from 1997 that still holds 2.5 of its original 3 hour lifespan

Before I committed brain stupid and let my ProSignia 165 sit for too long the original Li-Ion was still doing somewhere between 1.5 and 1.8 hours, which for a laptop with this hardware and a battery with an unkown life in the school that owned this thing before me... Not bad.

[silentdragon95]

Here's my first gaming PC. The pictures are a few years old but the system hasn't changed since and is currently sitting in a storage building along with some more of my stuff including a fair amount of old computer hardware. I enjoy tinkering with this kind of stuff but unfortunately I don't have the space anymore to do so.

 

It's a Compaq Deskpro and I must have gotten it some time around '02-'03. My dads company was replacing some of their Windows machines with MACs at the time and he took one of the PCs for me. Because of my dads work I grew up using both Windows and Mac OS 9.x, later OS X. This was actually my only Windows computer until 2009, between that I also used various PowerMacs, the newest one being a "Late 2004" PowerMac G5 Single-Core, you know, the one that never worked properly and would crash at random intervals. That aside, Apple then was really better in every single way than they are now - but I'm getting off track here.

 

 

Specs:

Intel Pentium III Coppermine 1000MHz

Motherboard is capped at 768MB SDRAM, it originally only came with 128MB and was upgraded several times

Nvidia GeForce-4 TI 4200 by Creative, rather basic version /w 64MB VRAM

Creative SoundBlaster CT4810

100Mbit Ethernet card

20GB HDD which seemed huge to me at the time, lol

 

The GPU was upgraded by me, it originally came with some Nvidia Quadro which unfortunately bricked itself after a year or so. Interestingly, the Quadro did run games just fine, I remember playing Age of Empires 2 and Starcraft but also shareware versions of some monster truck and motocross game that came bundled on a Windows CD I think.

 

OS-wise I originally had Windows 98SE on it, later upgraded to Windows ME, then XP and I did get Windows 7 running on there once just for fun. It was even borderline-usable.

 

[BrianTheElectrician]

On 1/10/2019 at 12:42 PM, campy said:

Also I forgot to add, fly me to Canada so I can show off my hoard of GPUs and piles of early 2000's gaming hardware to flex on Linus and his lame first gaming pc.

Pic related

That's a pretty impressive hoard of old video cards! May have to showcase some of them, I'm sure a lot of people on here would be interested to see them myself included.

 

On 1/10/2019 at 4:40 PM, silentdragon95 said:

Here's my first gaming PC. The pictures are a few years old but the system hasn't changed since and is currently sitting in a storage building along with some more of my stuff including a fair amount of old computer hardware. I enjoy tinkering with this kind of stuff but unfortunately I don't have the space anymore to do so.

 

It's a Compaq Deskpro and I must have gotten it some time around '02-'03. My dads company was replacing some of their Windows machines with MACs at the time and he took one of the PCs for me. Because of my dads work I grew up using both Windows and Mac OS 9.x, later OS X. This was actually my only Windows computer until 2009, between that I also used various PowerMacs, the newest one being a "Late 2004" PowerMac G5 Single-Core, you know, the one that never worked properly and would crash at random intervals. That aside, Apple then was really better in every single way than they are now - but I'm getting off track here.

 

Specs:

Intel Pentium III Coppermine 1000MHz

Motherboard is capped at 768MB SDRAM, it originally only came with 128MB and was upgraded several times

Nvidia GeForce-4 TI 4200 by Creative, rather basic version /w 64MB VRAM

Creative SoundBlaster CT4810

100Mbit Ethernet card

20GB HDD which seemed huge to me at the time, lol

 

The GPU was upgraded by me, it originally came with some Nvidia Quadro which unfortunately bricked itself after a year or so. Interestingly, the Quadro did run games just fine, I remember playing Age of Empires 2 and Starcraft but also shareware versions of some monster truck and motocross game that came bundled on a Windows CD I think.

 

OS-wise I originally had Windows 98SE on it, later upgraded to Windows ME, then XP and I did get Windows 7 running on there once just for fun. It was even borderline-usable.

 

 

When my dad bought a new computer in, oh I think it was 2001 the specs were similar to that. It was a Gateway with a 1.1Ghz Athlon, and came with 128mb, though we upgraded to 384mb. It ran Windows ME, with a 20Gb hard disk and a Geforce 2 MX 32Mb. I played the shat out of The Sims 2 and Need for Speed Porsche Unleashed on that computer. I still have the motherboard and processor from that one as well.

[iamdarkyoshi]

Pre-dating most forms of computers, but still plenty attractive.

 

toooooooooooooooooooooooobs