Show off your old and retro computer parts

[da na]

My school just retired ~10 old Optiplex 780s. (For those who don't know I work with the school IT department to upgrade some of their older systems and do things that aren't too hard but pretty time consuming, such as installing/setting up Windows w the programs they want, in exchange for getting some older/not super useful hardware that's permanently retired.) Core 2 Duos, all of them, 160gb HDD, Windows 7, 4gb RAM. They were all going to get recycled but I asked the IT teacher if they wanted me to upgrade them, they said sure after I showed them the performance of an 8gb ram, Core 2 Quad q9550, SSD, HD 8490 system I put together. So he bought 10 Q9550s, a crap ton of DDR3, 10 240gb SSDs and 10 old Radeon cards to upgrade these and keep them in service. They now have 4 cores, 16gb of RAM, and video acceleration that can handle modern websites (especially things like Youtube). Hopefully can keep them running for 10 ish more years. 

Spoiler

 

[da na]

4 hours ago, poochyena said:

Roughly 200 to be more specific. I'll potentially have around 200 more next month if things go well. Just figured you guys would be amused by this

Please make a video wall with those. Incredible... 

[BondiBlue]

53 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

Hopefully can keep them running for 10 ish more years. 

As much as I like those older Dell OptiPlex machines (the 780 is a great one in particular), hoping to get 10 more years out of them is a bit much. I'm all for using older hardware and keeping machines out of landfills and recycling centers, but the power consumption of those machines relative to their performance already isn't very good, and they're also getting rather old at this point. They're already 12 years old, so hardware failures (mostly PSUs and motherboard caps) are more and more likely to happen. 

 

Don't get me wrong - the OptiPlex 780 is still a great machine for a lot of things, and I still use mine to this day. It used to be my daily driver machine. Time just doesn't slow down, and even entry level budget computers can match and surpass the performance of an older OptiPlex. 

[da na]

7 hours ago, BondiBlue said:

As much as I like those older Dell OptiPlex machines (the 780 is a great one in particular), hoping to get 10 more years out of them is a bit much. I'm all for using older hardware and keeping machines out of landfills and recycling centers, but the power consumption of those machines relative to their performance already isn't very good, and they're also getting rather old at this point. They're already 12 years old, so hardware failures (mostly PSUs and motherboard caps) are more and more likely to happen. 

 

Don't get me wrong - the OptiPlex 780 is still a great machine for a lot of things, and I still use mine to this day. It used to be my daily driver machine. Time just doesn't slow down, and even entry level budget computers can match and surpass the performance of an older OptiPlex. 

School's buying used 4th gen i7 systems (4c8t, 32gb, 500gb SSD) for the modern computers, these are to replace dual or single core machines that are currently sufficient but probably won't be in 5ish years. Like what runs the slideshow in Assembly, etc. 

[Beerzerker]

13 hours ago, poochyena said:

Not too far off from their original use. Gambling is illegal in Alabama, and these are from an illegal gambling operation 15 to 20 years ago.

I probably could, but they will be used to repurpose into wearable monitor heads. Nearly half are completely broken though, damaged very badly, so a friend is gonna take them and scrap them for metal.

Not quite right.
Gambling in general is severely restricted BUT at the same time it is around: Victoryland Casino

Most casinos here (Not Victoryland) are on Indian reservation property so the state can't do anything about it. It is true there is no lottery here (Yet) and I suspect that will arrive one day.
TBH I'm not sure if Victoryland is the only one or not, I believe there may be a few others around but I can't put a name to them so in truth I can't say one way or the other.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As for the silicon lottery, I've played, won and lost so that in itself is like gambling, esp when buying retro parts from Fleabay.
Whether it's for chips that clock well or in the case of AM3, has hidden cores that will unlock AND be useable, I've played it from all angles.

[Just that Mario]

Saw this thread and thought it'd be the place to talk about how I have a Nvidia GT/GTO 7900 that has the custom GPU air cooler Linus was jazzed about in his retro hardware video...

[MultiGamerClub]

Man my laptop from 2003 or my old retro consoles probably have ancient tech, ill have to get them down from my loft to see whats powering them.

[da na]

ATI's real-time Animusic Pipe Dream demo. (CRT flicker epilepsy warning)

Intended for the Radeon 9700 but leave it to ATI to not lock down their demo so it runs on literally any DX9 GPU, even their competitors' cards... 

[Kilrah]

Can run it in 4K on a current setup too, and it doesn't even look that bad!

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/sqoa0xu7oy4p4tb/2022-01-29_01-06-24.mkv?dl=1

 

nods at Geforce Experience 

[WhitetailAni]

24 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

ATI's real-time Animusic Pipe Dream demo.

 

Intended for the Radeon 9700 but leave it to ATI to not lock down their demo so it runs on literally any DX9 GPU, even their competitors' cards... 

[da na]

3 minutes ago, FakeKGB said:

Still haven't found a good way to film those mfs

[Bitter]

1 hour ago, Mel0nMan said:

ATI's real-time Animusic Pipe Dream demo. (CRT flicker epilepsy warning)

 

Intended for the Radeon 9700 but leave it to ATI to not lock down their demo so it runs on literally any DX9 GPU, even their competitors' cards... 

https://youtu.be/cISY-7gEFms

 

ugh it's not embedding again.

[Bitter]

33 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

Still haven't found a good way to film those mfs

Oh now it embeds.

[da na]

1 minute ago, Caroline said:

 

Now it all makes sense.

 

How does he quietly carry CRTs... that's some devotion

[da na]

Steam install like it's '05

[da na]

11 minutes ago, Schnoz said:

It's almost surreal that Steam supports such an old OS.

It doesn't work anymore, but a lot of old Valve games including HL2 and CS:Source throw a fit if you don't have the application installed. Doesn't actually use it though

[Bitter]

Ok, speaking of Steam and old games...one of my all time favorite games.

https://store.steampowered.com/curator/37849134

The original game is on sale for 99 cents, I highly advise everyone to grab it.

[WhitetailAni]

So uh I was poking around in the basement and parting out my attempted 486 build (I don't have anything I'd use it for anyway) and I looked up the motherboard

 

I wasn't able to get mine to POST before but when disassembling it I realized my VLB video card was set to a bus speed of 33 MHz not 50 MHz for 50+ MHz CPUs

So uh yeah

I might be upgrading some things soon

[Bitter]

The problem with that is only 2 are listed and they're both from Asia, I doubt anyone is actually going to spend $1000-500 on that board. Realistic pricing is probably $200 or under in working condition, in non working condition more like $50. See if you can get it working tho. If I had to guess I'd stab at bad caps if it won't power up, should be able to check for CPU power pretty easy.

[WhitetailAni]

3 minutes ago, Bitter said:

The problem with that is only 2 are listed and they're both from Asia, I doubt anyone is actually going to spend $1000-500 on that board. Realistic pricing is probably $200 or under in working condition, in non working condition more like $50. See if you can get it working tho. If I had to guess I'd stab at bad caps if it won't power up, should be able to check for CPU power pretty easy.

It seemed to boot up fine I just got no display, pointing towards my GPU setting screwup

[da na]

Monitorception

Surprised at how well the 9400 GT handles games. Can max out early Source games, UT 2004, get consistently above 45 FPS. 

[BondiBlue]

32 minutes ago, Bitter said:

The problem with that is only 2 are listed and they're both from Asia, I doubt anyone is actually going to spend $1000-500 on that board. Realistic pricing is probably $200 or under in working condition, in non working condition more like $50. See if you can get it working tho. If I had to guess I'd stab at bad caps if it won't power up, should be able to check for CPU power pretty easy.

Yeah, with random items eBay pricing is almost never indicative of the actual value. Even $200 seems like a bit much for a working example. 

[da na]

6 minutes ago, BondiBlue said:

Yeah, with random items eBay pricing is almost never indicative of the actual value. Even $200 seems like a bit much for a working example. 

Yup, with years of selling retro items often I can assume like half to 2/3 the value of other listings 

[Bitter]

1 hour ago, Mel0nMan said:

Monitorception

Surprised at how well the 9400 GT handles games. Can max out early Source games, UT 2004, get consistently above 45 FPS. 

Good monitor picture! Honestly I'm really surprised too!

[da na]

Opened my 6800 (PCIe version) to repaste. Paste was so dry it wouldn't come off in the usual q tip rubbing alcohol way - may need to try something else. I just love the massive die and the tiny little cooler, and to think that we can squeeze something 10x as powerful into 1/2 the die size nowadays.