Show off your old and retro computer parts

[XGoodGuyFitz]

I have a question. What is the metal grate looking thing under the cpu?

[TehDwonz]

1 hour ago, xXFitzXx said:

I have a question. What is the metal grate looking thing under the cpu?

It helps to quote at least part of the post you are replying to... I assume you mean the last set of images posted, and this item?

That's the northbridge chipset heatsink. We don't have those anymore - only the "southbridge" remains on modern boards, but just called the chipset usually. The NB used to be a memory controller (and some PCI/e) before that moved into CPUs.

[XGoodGuyFitz]

2 hours ago, TehDwonz said:

*snip*

Yes that.

[Dabombinable]

3 hours ago, xXFitzXx said:

Yes that.

What @TehDwonz said. I might install my active north bridge cooler (Coolermaster Ice 2?) since there is a header for a NB fan. I bought it years ago for my second LGA775 board - I was overclocking it hard.

 

The CPU will be left with the default 100MHz FSB as well, since the cooler is from my Duron 1000. When I get my Athlon XP cooler though it will be running at 133MHz FSB.

[Dabombinable]

46 minutes ago, Schnoz said:

I took a quick look on Amazon, annd it looks like people are still actually selling these, which is pretty cool. I think they'd work well as a Raspberry Pi heatsink or something:

They were kind of needed back in the day. If only there were RGB 40mm fans...

[Dabombinable]

9 hours ago, Schnoz said:

There are non-controllable 5V RGB fans for the Raspberry Pi. I think you could have it run at the correct voltage with maybe a Noctua Low Noise Adapter cable (basically a resistor) or some plain resistors.

 

I think I heard of an Intel chipset that had a 30-watt TDP or something like that, though.

Intel P45 cooks when overclocking the FSB (aka the Northbridge) to nearly 500MHz. Boards like this need active NB cooling if you want to overclock:

The chipset cooler I used is called the "Blue Ice":

[TehDwonz]

11 hours ago, Dabombinable said:

They were kind of needed back in the day. If only there were RGB 40mm fans...

AliExpress is your friend... almost. Blue LED 40mm fan.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32712791863.html
 

[Bitter]

Pfft back in my day we overclocked everything, even the PCI and AGP busses! Data integrity be damned! I do miss the fun of just cranking up the FSB to overclock anything. My 4ghz E8400 was fun on the Nvidia 780i chipset. I think if I knew more what I was doing back then I could have gone harder with it but I just kind of quit when I found a stable spot at 1600mhz FSB with 1:1 divider. Even ran SLI for a bit with dual 7800 GTX single slot hair dryers. 

 

What was so fun about FSB is any board that let you adjust it and CPU voltage meant you could OC any CPU. Got a 2.8ghz Pentium? Well now you have a 3.5ghz Pentium. It was so easy, and often with very little power and heat penalty with a reasonable OC.

[Dabombinable]

12 hours ago, TehDwonz said:

AliExpress is your friend... almost. Blue LED 40mm fan.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32712791863.html
 

Kind of redundant though when the Blue Ice already has one.

 

3 hours ago, Bitter said:

Pfft back in my day we overclocked everything, even the PCI and AGP busses! Data integrity be damned! I do miss the fun of just cranking up the FSB to overclock anything. My 4ghz E8400 was fun on the Nvidia 780i chipset. I think if I knew more what I was doing back then I could have gone harder with it but I just kind of quit when I found a stable spot at 1600mhz FSB with 1:1 divider. Even ran SLI for a bit with dual 7800 GTX single slot hair dryers. 

 

What was so fun about FSB is any board that let you adjust it and CPU voltage meant you could OC any CPU. Got a 2.8ghz Pentium? Well now you have a 3.5ghz Pentium. It was so easy, and often with very little power and heat penalty with a reasonable OC.

TBH the best FSB overclock that I've ever managed as been with my Celeron "500A". Of my 2 Celeron 333 I got a gold one.

The dual PIII 1000 at 1.2GHz though is pretty close - they were similar to an Athlon XP 2600+ in performance, despite the Apolo Pro 133A chipset.

[Jazziam]

Hi all!

 

So I do not know if this classes as retro enough?

 

I sadly do not have the amazing pictures of my prebuilt Acer PC our family used with a Nvida 6800xt 256mb AGP which I was able to pipe mod in rivatuner (those were the days were additional Pixel and Vertex Shaders could be unlocked with software). 

 

However, I recently upgraded/built a new PC after 12 years since I had last built a PC. The pictures below are the old motherboard, processor and ram from my old PC. This is a Core 2 Duo E7200, DFI Lan Party X38 Motherboard and 4GB of Corsair 800Mhz DDR2 Memory. Any thoughts of what to do this with this?

 

The last picture is of the current Ryzen Setup (typical faire - Ryzen 5 3600, B450 Motherboard and 16GB Corsair Vengance DDR4 3200mhz.

 

Ow an the Nvidia 260 GTX 896mb (192 not the 216 variation) which is still going strong (apart from the rubber cover protecting the SLI fingers and the spdif input crumbling to dust...and the fact it sounds like it is going to take off).

 

 

[Cirga]

so Linus did his "last time AMD was on top" video today. and I watched it thinking, "Hey! that's almost my system from 2005" (though late 2005 or so)

 

Athlon 64 4200+(I remember at the time deciding a 4400+ was not worth the extra money over the 4200+)

Zalman all copper cpu cooler.

Asus A8N-SLi Deluxe

OZC Platinum DDR 400mhz 2-3-2-6 1gbx2 memory kit

BGF Tech GeForce 7900GT video cards x2 in SLi

 

cheating slightly as not going to bother with a hard drive, I have spare SSD's I will use those SSD's.

 

and while I don't have the case I used at the time, the Antec sonata 3 I had laying about is reasonably close. date wise.

 

So I decided to go pull it all out of the closets, and throw it together. as you can see, no effort has been spared for cable management(lol). next, find my Samsung 213t monitor, and try and find some older peripherals if I can. and see if it even boots anymore, and what's living or dead. Both the CPU, and Both GPU's have been re-pasted. the CPU clearly had artic silver of some form, while the video cards used a generic white paste. witch was surprisingly soft, pliable, and not dried out. 

[Cirga]

It's alive! Mwahaha!

[dominic03]

It's not that old, but I do have a 2010 laptop with an AMD Athlon II P320, 4GB DDR3 RAM, ATI Mobility Radeon 4250.

 

It's hot as hell and pretty slow. Hasn't shown signs of dying yet though, so that's cool.

 

At school right now, pictures later maybe?

[Moonzy]

I like the blue on the Die

 

64mb RAM

 

A P4

 

And a literal bin of things to go with these

 

Failed to get anything to post though, unfortunately

[TotallyNotGigabit]

I have this HP Compaq NC6320 for old software that I can't really run on anything newer than XP.

 

I have other old stuff in my bedroom somewhere. I'll eventually post the other bits I have.

 

The VTech software is the main toying purpose of this machine. And for nostalgia reasons. It can actually use a USB 3.0 expresscard which is pretty fast, and it's a 13yr old laptop with 4:3 1024x768. I can count the pixels on it. And I know I have three different office suites but the nostalgia takes me back to when I was growing up with laptops.

[XAIXER]

@TotallyNotGigabit If you max out the RAM and put in an SSD you might be able to run 7 with decent performance.

[TotallyNotGigabit]

Just now, XAIXER said:

@TotallyNotGigabit If you max out the RAM and put in an SSD you might be able to run 7 with decent performance.

I have a lot of machines that I've ran Windows 7 on, but not too long ago I discovered I couldn't activate Windows 7 for unknown reasons. Even then, the performance wasn't so good after it updated with an SSD. So I keep SSDs for machines newer than 2008/2009. 2007 and below I stick to mechanical drives and appropriate OS. That reminds me, I should post a picture of the Sony Vaio I also have.

[Dabombinable]

6 hours ago, Moonzy said:

And a literal bin of things to go with these

 

Failed to get anything to post though, unfortunately

With those motherboard, just replace (or get a friend to replace) the swollen caps. If they have none swollen, then maybe the RAM (or a single stick) is dead. Both are problems I've had to deal with.

  

47 minutes ago, James Evens said:

Intel 486sx is horribly slow but the IBM ps/valuepoint still works after 19 years in storage. Not even a leaked CMOS battery.

Windows 3.11 for work groups (so it also have dos 6.0 below it):

I'd be paranoid about the battery letting go at any time...I really love the vintage boards that use a plug-in-over-cable rechargeable battery pack. It's the only reason my 386 board is still functional.

[XGoodGuyFitz]

I just got a shadow box to put either the gpu from my old computer in or the ram from it in. But i found out that my parents through it out after they got me my desk for my birthday today.

[3nt0]

My wall of (mostly) old tech (partially inspired by the motherboard wall in Linus' old office):

 

The oldest thing on there - a motherboard from 1984 from an IBM PCXT, which used to house an Intel 8088:

[sloniupl]

Brought back to live

Commodore 64 on 55" OLED

[TotallyNotGigabit]

Just now, sloniupl said:

Brought back to live

Commodore 64 on 55" OLED

That looks so weird and cool with the very thin bezel of the TV.

[YT_DomDaBomb20]

@sloniupl that keyboard do be looking nice

[BrianTheElectrician]

Built an Athlon 1.1Ghz in an old Antec case today using a MSI K7T Pro2 motherboard, 256mb PC-133 SD Ram, ATI Radeon 8500LE 64mb AGP video card, Sound Blaster Live CT4870 and an old 40gb IDE Seagate hard disk. Installed Windows 2000 Pro on it but then it was blue screening. Discovered that the cooler I was using on the CPU isn't enough and the choke on the motherboard interferes with the larger heatsinks that I have :/. Sigh. Back to the drawing board I guess, either need to find another cooler or swap in one of my other Socket 462 Motherboards. 

 

So then I pulled down my iMac G3 to boot up for the first time in 6 months or so and downloaded some games for it.

[TotallyNotGigabit]

Here's another oldie. A Handspring Visor Prism from 2000.

I need to find the charger though.