Show off your old and retro computer parts

[Bitter]

Mine do 1600x1200 or 1200x1600 I forget, but yeah 75hz or faster at lower resolution I think upto 150hz maybe? Heavy and HOT! Two of those in the summer was rough.

[abit-sean]

I found my old bios chips whilst looking through an old box. I used these to recover corrupted bios for RMA motherboards. Abit motherboards had removeable bios chips which made easy to recover them. The oldest one I can see is BH7 which was a early 478 P4 board.

[Bitter]

On 1/12/2022 at 3:39 PM, abit-sean said:

I found my old bios chips whilst looking through an old box. I used these to recover corrupted bios for RMA motherboards. Abit motherboards had removeable bios chips which made easy to recover them. The oldest one I can see is BH7 which was a early 478 P4 board.

 

Well I know who to call if I ever run into problems with my IN9! I actually did have problems years ago, the BIOS would NOT save new settings at all because the battery had died. Put in a new battery, still nope, tried a few other things I Googled, nope nothing worked. Eventually I just resigned to it being this way and having to press a key to skip the error message about entering setup and not having my overclock, I had a 2nd PC at that point and I figured this was it's way of showing it's jealousy. Fix was...drumroll...BIOS reset jumper. Quirky old thing, I did that and from then on it worked properly again.

[rsm98]

Unfortunately, I couldn't find a picture, but I did use to own something bleeding edge back circa 1996. It was a YARC NuSprint board that I used in conjuction with my MacIIfx to render with Specular3D/BackBurner.

This was basically a NuBus ( i860 RISC processor board - I think ) that was about 10times faster to render then the native Motorola Chip in Macs at the time. Kinda of a poor mans SGI ( but actually faster then the SGI Indy of the time ).

Back then, had a lot of hope and dreams of doing 3D on the Mac, but then I discovered SGIs and Irix and never looked back.

[abit-sean]

6 hours ago, Bitter said:

Well I know who to call if I ever run into problems with my IN9! I actually did have problems years ago, the BIOS would NOT save new settings at all because the battery had died. Put in a new battery, still nope, tried a few other things I Googled, nope nothing worked. Eventually I just resigned to it being this way and having to press a key to skip the error message about entering setup and not having my overclock, I had a 2nd PC at that point and I figured this was it's way of showing it's jealousy. Fix was...drumroll...BIOS reset jumper. Quirky old thing, I did that and from then on it worked properly again.

I have no idea why but the ABIT Intel boards with nVidia chipsets were always problematic regardless of the generation. The best boards were always intel with intel chipsets, AMD with nVidia chipsets and ATI were completely random. Anything with a VIA or SIS chipsets were terrible with massive failure rates.

[ToboRobot]

My setup from about 2005-6 era.  

trayiconsbig.bmp

[Bitter]

11 hours ago, abit-sean said:

I have no idea why but the ABIT Intel boards with nVidia chipsets were always problematic regardless of the generation. The best boards were always intel with intel chipsets, AMD with nVidia chipsets and ATI were completely random. Anything with a VIA or SIS chipsets were terrible with massive failure rates.

Besides a few quirks it was a very stable system with a long term 1600mhz FSB putting my E8400 at 3.4ghz. It rarely gave me trouble beyond when I had so RAID array rebuilds due to flaky cables. It was however picky about RAM and did not appreciate mixing sticks one bit.

[Bitter]

Made my circa 2011 laptop a little less retro by upgrading it to AC WiFi with an Intel 7260 card. I've had it sitting around on my desk for a couple months and kept putting it off. I should have done this a couple months ago!  Reconnects faster, things load faster. I thought my i5 580m would be the bottleneck but 60mbit connection was the bottleneck. $15 well spent!

[Radium_Angel]

11 hours ago, abit-sean said:

ABIT Intel boards with nVidia chipsets were always problematic regardless of the generation.

While the shop I worked for didn't sell man of them, from the people I talked with who were supposedly "in the know" it was faulty programming to make the chips communicate with each other. They quickly gained a reputation for being problematic and, at least around my area, died off quickly.

[Bitter]

5 hours ago, Radium_Angel said:

While the shop I worked for didn't sell man of them, from the people I talked with who were supposedly "in the know" it was faulty programming to make the chips communicate with each other. They quickly gained a reputation for being problematic and, at least around my area, died off quickly.

I guess either I got lucky or knew what I was doing?? I used that E8400 in my IN9-32X Max for almost a decade, about 70% of that time span overclocked. Board certainly had some FSB holes here and there where it would not POST like say 330 would not but 333 would but 380 would not but 400 would. I had to monkey with the whatever was that link between the NB and SB and get that dialed in I guess. I even ran SLI for a while with two 7800GTX and had RAID 1 and RAID 0 at different points. It's like I went out of my way to make this thing super unstable and it was super stable! Also though I'm a freak for making sure my systems are stable and test for a minimum of 24hrs on each part of the system I can test for stability and have no qualms about dialing back an OC or whatever to get absolute stable.

[LavenderPhantom78139]

Got an asus a8v with an athlon 64 3500+ and 2.5gb of ddr 400 cl3. Cant seem to get thus board to boot into 64bit os's though

[LavenderPhantom78139]

Also here my thermaltake Tsinami Dream case im cleaning up for a NAS im building

[LavenderPhantom78139]

Heres my powercolor ati radeon x800

[da na]

4 hours ago, LavenderPhantom78139 said:

Got an asus a8v with an athlon 64 3500+ and 2.5gb of ddr 400 cl3. Cant seem to get thus board to boot into 64bit os's though

Board settings? UEFI? 

[da na]

3 hours ago, LavenderPhantom78139 said:

Heres my powercolor ati radeon x800

 

Miss when GPUs had floppy and Molex power connectors, not a 12 pin... 

[dilpickle]

2 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

Miss when GPUs had floppy and Molex power connectors, not a 12 pin... 

I miss when they didn't have power connectors at all.

[da na]

3 minutes ago, dilpickle said:

I miss when they didn't have power connectors at all.

If GPUs now could be like my Radeon 9200 the world would be perfect. In stock and not overpriced/scalped from launch, no insane power reqs, don't need 12 pounds of copper and steel to keep it under 200c. 

[da na]

Just now, Caroline said:

d (E:)

 

 

is it 15"?

Yes, 13.9" viewable

[XGoodGuyFitz]

On 1/12/2022 at 11:46 AM, Mel0nMan said:

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. 

More hz than most tv's..and its older than me probably. 

[da na]

6 minutes ago, XGoodGuyFitz said:

More hz than most tv's..and its older than me probably. 

It's a good 10+ years older than I am, and yeah it's decently high refresh rate. High rate on LCDs vs CRTs is very different as well - I didn't realize how much it affected the flicker! 

[Bitter]

How junk are those cheap Displayport/HDMI to VGA adapters? I kind of want to dork around with my old monitors now on a modern system. I mean I guess my A320 Ryzen board DOES have a VGA but it's just one and only for the iGPU on it so I can't really game with an Athlon 200GE. How does setting resolution and refresh rate even work with those adapters? Bad input lag? Image clarity and color accuracy?

[da na]

1 minute ago, Bitter said:

How junk are those cheap Displayport/HDMI to VGA adapters? I kind of want to dork around with my old monitors now on a modern system. I mean I guess my A320 Ryzen board DOES have a VGA but it's just one and only for the iGPU on it so I can't really game with an Athlon 200GE. How does setting resolution and refresh rate even work with those adapters? Bad input lag? Image clarity and color accuracy?

Not too horrible. One I've tried worked, brand called Moread

[Bitter]

4 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

Not too horrible. One I've tried worked, brand called Moread

So I guess the best a HDM to VGA does is 1080P 60 which is below the performance of my Trinitrons. Would DP be any better? I'm guessing there's no way to get my full 1600x1200 75hz except native VGA?

[da na]

Just now, Bitter said:

So I guess the best a HDM to VGA does is 1080P 60 which is below the performance of my Trinitrons. Would DP be any better? I'm guessing there's no way to get my full 1600x1200 75hz except native VGA?

Probably not. 

*links that thread where someone said modern monitors are useless since they don't have VGA*

[da na]

Can't believe this game is 18 years old. The lighting effects and reflections are incredible for '04. 

Interestingly it runs better on my GT 210 than my GeForce 6800... 

Also I've figured out turning the lights off = great pictures of CRTs.