Show off your old and retro computer parts

[Bitter]

Well it wouldn't be retro at all but my Vega56 is rather large and needs all the heat sink and fans it has when I uncork the power limits and let boost run wild. 3 fans (2x92,1x80), 3 slot cooler, vapor chamber, 3x8mm and 5x6mm heat pipes, 310(L)X133(W)X 54(H) mm so not the longest card ever but it's BIG. Has 2 4 pin case fan headers on it so it can feed itself extra cooling air if it needs it, it has 3x8pin power, and I've seen it near in on 380W power consumption once or twice. So I use all this to like sometimes mine etherum and play Endless Sky which basically can run on a potato. My case though is so big the card looks almost normal sized. Last time I had it out I took a picture of it next to something for scale, but I can't find it on my phone now and heck if I'm taking it out. That anti-sag bracket is a pain to get set just right in my case.

[Felipe9999]

Not too old hardware but since it was the first computer I interacted with, it still brings some memories

It has a Core 2 Duo and used to run vista but got an upgrade to 7. Now it's only being used to control the printer below it.

[Corrupt_Liberty]

Is a ten year old Westmere server old enough? 

 

Dual Xeon X5675 with 72 GB ECC RAM

 

 

 

[FruitOfTheLum]

I was going to start a new thread, but I thought it would be better off in here.

 

I posted in here a few days ago with that 386 processor I still have, but that's a sentimental item so I'm not including it in this! Anyway, I've been thinking about some of the archaic technology I/my family still have lingering around, either in my loft or in storage back at my mum's house, lately. It might have something to do with recently seeing that tech hoarder video LTT did a while back. I'm not that bad, but... I feel like I need to have a clear-out, all the same.

 

A lot of it is beyond being useful to anyone except for maybe retro-enthusiasts (and in one at least case, probably a museum!), but I was thinking especially about some of the (comparatively) more recent stuff I have lying around. 

 

I still have my old machine that was built in 2005. for instance. It died on me and I didn't have the funds to test/repair it before I was distracted by relationships and careers and such. I was never able to figure out exactly what was wrong with it - I suspect a motherboard problem. But if any of the components in that, for example - like the AMD FX-55, the DDR(2) RAM, or the GeForce 6800 Ultra, etc - still worked, would they be of any use to anybody? Organisations running legacy equipment maybe, or developing countries via one of those charities? I also have a few more recent laptops running around (2008 is the oldest one), but I don't know if those kinds of charities have an 'age limit' on donations, and none of their websites say anything about it.

 

My mum also still has a bunch of stuff filling her loft that my dad kept from his old business in the 1980s/early 90s. Nixdorf green-screen monitors (I think they were for mainframes), dot-matrix printers, magnetic data tapes, a horde of 5 1/4" floppies, and goodness-knows what else. With her being ill pretty much since my dad passed away, I've not really had the chance to climb up in there and take an inventory of everything, so I only know what she's told me for now (and she's not a techy herself). I suspect those sorts of things are all fine to toss in the recycling skips, but you never know. 

 

Obviously they're of no use to people running modern gaming or productivity systems, but it seems a shame to toss them out if they might be of some value to someone somewhere. 

[Helpful Tech Witch]

12 minutes ago, Corrupt_Liberty said:

Dual Xeon X5675 with 72 GB ECC RAM

 

That server could get some serious work done tho, 12c/24t total, 72gb ddr3 ecc, could do a lot with that.

Use like 20gb for a MC server, allocate the first 2 cores on cpu 0 to just it, take the rest of the cores on that, use another 20gb for a nas, 4 cores of  cpu 1 for just a plex server, give it 25gb ram, 2 cores and 7gb of ram for the os

[NoCarrier]

Pentium 233 MMX with 3DFX voodoo 3 and a ton of midi gear, playing Kings Quest VI

[FruitOfTheLum]

3 minutes ago, NoCarrier said:

Pentium 233 MMX with 3DFX voodoo 3 and a ton of midi gear, playing Kings Quest VI

Oh! Can we see a photo of the insides?! Such nostalgia - the Voodoo 3 was my first ever graphics card!

[Kilrah]

19 minutes ago, FruitOfTheLum said:

My mum also still has a bunch of stuff filling her loft that my dad kept from his old business in the 1980s/early 90s. Nixdorf green-screen monitors (I think they were for mainframes), dot-matrix printers, magnetic data tapes, a horde of 5 1/4" floppies, and goodness-knows what else. With her being ill pretty much since my dad passed away, I've not really had the chance to climb up in there and take an inventory of everything, so I only know what she's told me for now (and she's not a techy herself). I suspect those sorts of things are all fine to toss in the recycling skips, but you never know. 

It's kind of the opposite, nobody cares about a 15 year old system since it's kinda useless at anything today yet not "interesting" in the sense that PCs back then were pretty much using the same architecture and components as today.

 

The 80s stuff however is highly interesting due to the wide diversity back then and valuable to people doing restorations etc or just wanting to see how things were back then. In general the older the more interesting.

[FruitOfTheLum]

4 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

It's kind of the opposite, nobody cares about a 15 year old system since it's kinda useless at anything today yet not "interesting" in the sense that PCs back then were pretty much using the same architecture and components as today.

 

The 80s stuff however is highly interesting due to the wide diversity back then and valuable to people doing restorations etc or just wanting to see how things were back then. In general the older the more interesting.

Not that I have a hoarding problem, but I took from that "so you should keep your 2005 hardware for another 20 years" 

 

Yeah, I didn't think of the architecture of the stuff. I thought people might still be running the more recent hardware, but I suppose there's no reason to stick to 2005-era hardware when pretty much anything from then should work on modern machines without much issue.

 

My dad had a Nixdorf-badged Panasonic Senior Partner, which I technically inherited but left behind as it's bloody heavy, which might be interesting to someone if it still works, and that would be easy to test as it's a self-contained portable computer (I don't know if I'd want to part with that though... again, not a hoarder!). The rest of it... I don't know what to do with. I'd have to get up into my mum's loft and have a look at it all properly to know exactly what's there first, but even if I do, I have no way of testing most of it to see if it even still works. I'm 99% certain that everything up there uses ports that haven't been on I/Os for many years now...

[Kilrah]

28 minutes ago, FruitOfTheLum said:

I'm 99% certain that everything up there uses ports that haven't been on I/Os for many years now...

That's what makes it interesting  Figuring out whether it works and trying to repair it too.

 

Most of those I know of are in the US but there must be a few tech youtubers in the UK as well who do restorations and demos of such old stuff that we then all get to see and the history explained, could always donate to some of them. 

 

People WILL go through unordinates amount of effort to be able to find parts and get some old machines running again... really don't throw any of it in the garbage before giving them an opportunity to assess it

 

 

[Corrupt_Liberty]

51 minutes ago, HelpfulTechWizard said:

That server could get some serious work done tho, 12c/24t total, 72gb ddr3 ecc, could do a lot with that.

Use like 20gb for a MC server, allocate the first 2 cores on cpu 0 to just it, take the rest of the cores on that, use another 20gb for a nas, 4 cores of  cpu 1 for just a plex server, give it 25gb ram, 2 cores and 7gb of ram for the os

I have it running Plex right now through Unraid. 8 2TB HDDs (2 are parity) and 2 480 GB SSDs for cache. 

[FruitOfTheLum]

30 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

That's what makes it interesting  Figuring out whether it works and trying to repair it too.

 

Most of those I know of are in the US but there must be a few tech youtubers in the UK as well who do restorations and demos of such old stuff that we then all get to see and the history explained, could always donate to some of them. 

 

People WILL go through unordinates amount of effort to be able to find parts and get some old machines running again... really don't throw any of it in the garbage before giving them an opportunity to assess it

 

 

Thanks for the advice! I'll look into finding some local retro YouTubers, maybe they will know what's good and what's not once I've got a list of what I'm dealing with. I'd hate to scrap all that stuff if someone's going to get some fun/use out of it. 

[da na]

3 hours ago, NoCarrier said:

Pentium 233 MMX with 3DFX voodoo 3 and a ton of midi gear, playing Kings Quest VI

Wow - nice Roland gear. What's the thing with the 3 1/2' drive to the right of the monitor? Just an external drive or does that store MIDI samples? 

[BondiBlue]

3 hours ago, Corrupt_Liberty said:

Is a ten year old Westmere server old enough? 

 

Dual Xeon X5675 with 72 GB ECC RAM

That's nice! As an owner of a rig with a single X5675 I can say that those are still some impressive little chips. 

[NoCarrier]

2 hours ago, Mel0nMan said:

Wow - nice Roland gear. What's the thing with the 3 1/2' drive to the right of the monitor? Just an external drive or does that store MIDI samples? 

Its a Roland mts90. It's... Weird. It's a metronome, with a built in 3.5 floppy drive and a sound canvas inside. I use it as a nice midi jukebox

[Corrupt_Liberty]

10 hours ago, BondiBlue said:

That's nice! As an owner of a rig with a single X5675 I can say that those are still some impressive little chips. 

And cheap as chips too!  The server originally had a single E5520. I picked up the X5675s for $21 each.  Not the most power efficient these days but plenty of grunt.  Considering none of my media is above 1080p they mostly sit idle.  I need to figure out a few more things it can do for me since it's on 24/7 anyway. 

[da na]

8 hours ago, Corrupt_Liberty said:

And cheap as chips too!  The server originally had a single E5520. I picked up the X5675s for $21 each.  Not the most power efficient these days but plenty of grunt.  Considering none of my media is above 1080p they mostly sit idle.  I need to figure out a few more things it can do for me since it's on 24/7 anyway. 

Get into rendering. 

[da na]

School is retiring this TINY core 2 duo system. BIOS won’t tell me about the hardware and for some reason it’s running Windows 10, and as soon as I get to the login screen my monitor says the mode is unsupported so I’ll try and get it working on one of the it departments displays. It’s not SFF, it’s about 2/3 sff size.

 

[Kilrah]

This is sweet! Love that it has both lenovo and IBM branding

[BondiBlue]

5 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

School is retiring this TINY core 2 duo system. BIOS won’t tell me about the hardware and for some reason it’s running Windows 10, and as soon as I get to the login screen my monitor says the mode is unsupported so I’ll try and get it working on one of the it departments displays. It’s not SFF, it’s about 2/3 sff size.

Those are SFF systems, they're just really small. Lenovo made a smaller design that used an external PSU. 

I own one of the SFF models like you've got, and it's a decent little machine. It's beyond slow on Windows 10, but Windows 7 works alright, and it runs Linux well. They use standard C2D chips; mine had an E8400 in it at one point. 

[da na]

5 minutes ago, BondiBlue said:

Those are SFF systems, they're just really small. Lenovo made a smaller design that used an external PSU. 

I own one of the SFF models like you've got, and it's a decent little machine. It's beyond slow on Windows 10, but Windows 7 works alright, and it runs Linux well. They use standard C2D chips; mine had an E8400 in it at one point. 

Interesting, held it up to a pentium 4 PC I had that was sff and it was much smaller. It uses a proprietary motherboard with only 1 pci slot, and the expansion card in it goes in sideways - there’s a riser that can plug in from 2 directions that either gets you pcie 1x or PCI.

[BondiBlue]

1 minute ago, Mel0nMan said:

Interesting, held it up to a pentium 4 PC I had that was sff and it was much smaller. It uses a proprietary motherboard with only 1 pci slot, and the expansion card in it goes in sideways - there’s a riser that can plug in from 2 directions that either gets you pcie 1x or PCI.

SFF isn't universal in size across all systems. Lenovo had a similar system to Dell when it came to their ThinkCentres: Tower, Desktop, Small Form Factor, and Ultra Small Form Factor. You've got the SFF model, which includes a full height expansion slot and an internal PSU. Also, I'm not certain about your system (which type & model is it?), but you might not have a PCIe slot. It could be limited to ADD2 cards, which offer a second display output from the integrated graphics. 

[da na]

Just now, BondiBlue said:

SFF isn't universal in size across all systems. Lenovo had a similar system to Dell when it came to their ThinkCentres: Tower, Desktop, Small Form Factor, and Ultra Small Form Factor. You've got the SFF model, which includes a full height expansion slot and an internal PSU. Also, I'm not certain about your system (which type & model is it?), but you might not have a PCIe slot. It could be limited to ADD2 cards, which offer a second display output from the integrated graphics. 

I’ve got no idea what model it is, but the connector it’s got on the other side of the pci has pcie 1x and then some. It has 3 extra large holes and may be what you’re talking about. 
Edit: doesn’t look like add2.

[da na]

27 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

This is sweet! Love that it has both lenovo and IBM branding

Reminds me of that 2-3 year era where Radeons said AMD on the board but the die was still etched ATI

[Kronoton]

I got a girlfriend in my closet 

 

And she still needs some  love