Show off your old and retro computer parts

[8tg]

Soltek SL-85

Early socket 478 board with a glorious white pcb

 

also got a 2ghz Pentium 4, not pictured because it’s a 2ghz Pentium 4 and nobody cares

 

[BrianTheElectrician]

On 12/31/2021 at 6:22 AM, DJRuno said:

I am visiting a friend for new years and i found a box with some of his computer parts. In there were some of these RAM sticks with thicc boi chips on them. I found out every one of them is 1MB. The other side has 10 chips. Has anyone ever seen those?

I've got lots of 72 pin Simms. I think the lowest capacity stick I have is either 4 or 8mb though. Mattias is correct on how many modules you would need and the generation. 486's having a 32 bit external bus only needed a single 72 pin Simm, whereas a Pentium required them to be in pairs (due to it's 64 bit external bus). 72 Pin Simms also came in several speed grades and generally either in FPM (Fast Page Mode) or EDO (Extended Data Out). The majority that I have seen is either 70ns FPM or 60ns EDO.

 

You might be able to find some early Pentium pro or PII boards that would use it but by that point SD ram was becoming common, I think the 440FX chipset supported it but 440LX and later dropped support for it if memory serves. There are lots of Pentium boards that can use either 72 pin Simms or SD ram though, they have slots for both.

 

I have also seen 168 pin EDO ram, but it seems to be fairly rare and I've only seen it used on a pentium pro system.

[Bitter]

Had a weird socket 7 system with a SIS chipset in an AT case built like a bunker that used either 72pin, SD, or a combo of both in a specific configuration (I think). Had a big row of jumpers to tell the CPU what ram was where and what speed it was. Being SIS it was of course super stable/s

[luckybob77]

On 1/8/2022 at 3:00 AM, BrianTheElectrician said:

I have also seen 168 pin EDO ram, but it seems to be fairly rare and I've only seen it used on a pentium pro system.

 

Also the early power macintosh line use edo dimms as well.  I want to say, just the first generation PPC ones.  Its a shame those systems have plastic that's as fragile as spun glass.

[HQuan]

I hope this count (re repost again)

 

NVIDIA GeForce 210

(the fan are spinning because the microphone wire actually is power line to give power to the fan LOL)

 

[BrianTheElectrician]

7 hours ago, luckybob77 said:

 

Also the early power macintosh line use edo dimms as well.  I want to say, just the first generation PPC ones.  Its a shame those systems have plastic that's as fragile as spun glass.

Ah your right! Come to think of it my Power Mac 7600/132 uses it. I forgot about that!

 

I also recently grabbed the pass-through cable I needed for my voodoo so that should be going into the micron at some point hopefully in the near future.

[Bitter]

On 1/8/2022 at 7:09 AM, Bitter said:

Had a weird socket 7 system with a SIS chipset in an AT case built like a bunker that used either 72pin, SD, or a combo of both in a specific configuration (I think). Had a big row of jumpers to tell the CPU what ram was where and what speed it was. Being SIS it was of course super stable/s

I'm quoting myself because I'm on desktop and I can tell the full story.

 

A long time ago my father worked with a fellow who's twin brother worked in a cancer research lab at the University of Chicago. Upstairs they had offices, in the basement they had an extremely powerful research MRI machine, about 5x more powerful than what you'd get for a human in a hospital and with about 3x the resolution (it was the 90's so this was a cutting edge machine at the time). It was in it's own room with a Faraday cage built around it in the walls of the room to further isolate the building from it's RFI. What they did there was give different cancers to rats then research the progression and regression from different treatments using the MRI to map it all out and monitor changes over time. I remember visiting the lab once, it was very cool. Got to see some top tier cancer researchers from around the world fragging each other in Quake on the high speed academic only internet. The Germans they were playing against were pretty good!

 

So every few years they'd get new computers to keep up with new software and technology, one of the times upgrade rolled around some of the older machines were deemed to obsolete to reuse so they were either chucked out or given away to staff who wanted them. This is how we got this absolute TANK of a PC. It was an AMD K6 233mhz CPU with 64MB of RAM (EDO I think?). The case was like 1mm thick steel painted with that weird textured paint they liked to use on appliances. It had a big chrome AT PSU with a big clunky red power switch on the side, dual 5.25/3.5 floppy drive, and some big loud HDD (probably Seagate). It was a huge upgrade from our 100mhz Pentium clone Acer with 40MB of RAM. It however was old, and weird, and old. We got this around the time that the Pentium 3 was hitting 1ghz and had it up until the 2.4hz Northwood was commonplace. Eventually I broke it by putting some jumpers where they should not be knowing it would cause it to not boot and knowing my dad wouldn't know how to fix it, forcing him to upgrade the family PC to something from the current century. Dick move, but having a 233mhz K6 in 2002 was pretty untenable, it loaded images a line at a time not because we had slow internet but because the PC could only draw the fast on the screen. It had character though!

[da na]

14 minutes ago, Bitter said:

it loaded images a line at a time not because we had slow internet but because the PC could only draw the fast on the screen. It had character though!

Reminds me of my K6-2 380. Not sure if it's the CPU or ATI Rage Mobile graphics chipset with 1 shader, but when x-ing out of an application the desktop renders in in 3 chunks, with bigger wallpapers it takes like 10 chunks. 

[Bitter]

29 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

Reminds me of my K6-2 380. Not sure if it's the CPU or ATI Rage Mobile graphics chipset with 1 shader, but when x-ing out of an application the desktop renders in in 3 chunks, with bigger wallpapers it takes like 10 chunks. 

I think this had an ATI Rage PCI graphics card, there was indeed a lot of RAGE involved between unstable drivers and it's horrible performance. That's why it took me almost 20 years to buy another ATI product, a RX580 (AMD I know but still the ATI stigma persisted).

 

Wait no, it had a Trident ISA video card originally and we upgraded it (downgraded?) to a Rage XL so we could have 3D graphics that weren't software render only. Still a lot of things ended up using software render I think. Board was some weird SIS board with ISA, PCI, and I think an AGP slot. No clue why we didn't get an AGP graphics card, maybe that slot was dead or something.

 

I think my dad wanted the 3D graphics so he could use Google Earth to look at maps of places or something.

 

Edit: If my memory is right that it had ISA, PCI, and an AGP port then it was a SiS 5591/5592/5595 based board. I might be wrong about the AGP slot though and be confused with a different PC.

[pwarrow88]

I guess 1 year is considered old ? Rtx 3080 

 

[da na]

3 minutes ago, pwarrow88 said:

I guess 1 year is considered old ? Rtx 3080 

 

 

Typically this is for double digit age hardware... 

[Bitter]

6 minutes ago, pwarrow88 said:

I guess 1 year is considered old ? Rtx 3080

No, this is for things like Core2Duo and DDR2 or older. Even those are borderline cases.

[da na]

Sleeper workstation WIP. Honestly the parts in it are old enough to fit this thread arguably but that's beside the point... 

First full custom PC, sidegrade from a HP z620 workstation. Part list: GTX 980 (currently has 670 for testing in case something explodes, don't want to lose good card but this one draws around same power), Xeon e5-2690 v1, Chinese x79 board, 4x4gb Hynix/IBM DDR3 1333, 128gb NVME, EVGA 500w PSU, Antec CPU cooler. I'll later add lost  of drives and etc, another ODD, memory card reader, and an IDE card for floppy. First I'll do thermal tests to make sure the 180w GPU and 135w CPU can be satiated by 2x 80mm fans. 

(I dislike RGB but that is the only decent 2011 heatsink with minimal RGB and under $50 I could find)

This case was from an abandoned PC but I just really loved it. OK airflow, spacious, heck ton of front bays for people like me who use those. 

[adarw]

6 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

Sleeper workstation WIP. Honestly the parts in it are old enough to fit this thread arguably but that's beside the point... 

First full custom PC, sidegrade from a HP z620 workstation. Part list: GTX 980 (currently has 670 for testing in case something explodes, don't want to lose good card but this one draws around same power), Xeon e5-2690 v1, Chinese x79 board, 4x4gb Hynix/IBM DDR3 1333, 128gb NVME, EVGA 500w PSU, Antec CPU cooler. I'll later add lost  of drives and etc, another ODD, memory card reader, and an IDE card for floppy. First I'll do thermal tests to make sure the 180w GPU and 135w CPU can be satiated by 2x 80mm fans. 

(I dislike RGB but that is the only decent 2011 heatsink with minimal RGB and under $50 I could find)

This case was from an abandoned PC but I just really loved it. OK airflow, spacious, heck ton of front bays for people like me who use those. 

bruh, post this on the show off thread, not here!! anyway, i think you should clean that fand and fix your cable management!! but who am i to talk about cables and dust....

[da na]

1 minute ago, adarw said:

bruh, post this on the show off thread, not here!! anyway, i think you should clean that fand and fix your cable management!! but who am i to talk about cables and dust....

Perhaps it should be there, my bad

It's not done yet, the spaghetti mess is temporary

And the dust from weeks on the side of the road is like stuck on it

[adarw]

1 minute ago, Mel0nMan said:

 

It's not done yet, the spaghetti mess is temporary

thats what many have said, (including me) yet we havent fixed it. dont follow this path young fellow. XD 

 

also did you get any cuts yet?

 

[da na]

15 minutes ago, adarw said:

thats what many have said, (including me) yet we havent fixed it. dont follow this path young fellow. XD 

 

also did you get any cuts yet?

 

Well I have things to add such as HDDs, ODDs. The spaghetti mess is there until I put them in, no point in estimating lengths of cables then having to untie later when I put HDDs in lol.

Yes I've sliced my palm on this case but that was months ago when I picked it up. I then cut myself on the GTX 670, which I didn't know was NOS lol, pulling it out of the bag. But other than that I've figured out the tricks of PCs

[adarw]

11 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

NOS

i honesty dont know what that means.

[da na]

25 minutes ago, adarw said:

i honesty dont know what that means.

New Old Stock. It's been sitting on a warehouse shelf for years, unopened

[da na]

Noticed something cool about that old case - it had mounting holes I didn't recognize. The holes were labeled A, B, or AB. Found a guide stamped into the back of the tray that said A = ATX   B = AT         That dates the case a bit, AT board mounting holes! 

[adarw]

44 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

New Old Stock. It's been sitting on a warehouse shelf for years, unopened

wow, i would have at least made a video about it lol, how much did you buy it for if you dont mind me asking.

[da na]

1 minute ago, adarw said:

wow, i would have at least made a video about it lol, how much did you buy it for if you dont mind me asking.

$110, sold some old laptops to buy it. 

[da na]

Look ma, I’m computing!

Picked this nice Trinitron up yesterday. Has an ominous hum but looks great and is 75hz. Native res is 1280x1024. Has lots of good picture controls too. 

[WhitetailAni]

1 hour ago, Mel0nMan said:

Native res is 1280x1024.

How are you liking 5:4?

[da na]

Just now, FakeKGB said:

How are you liking 5:4?

Like 4:3 but bigger and more square. I run at 1024x768 since it can do 75hz at that