Show off your old and retro computer parts

[Guest]

4 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

Explains the banks of DIPs. Any clue what those change?

That I am not sure about really. I'm afraid to move any of them lol. It's not like I can just replace this thing! XD

[Guest]

4 minutes ago, Bitter said:

Oh neat, I remember when that stuff came out. By the time I upgraded my graphics card it was already just baked into the card lol.

Me too! I actually purchased one (the original PPU found in Dell XPS rigs back then) and ran it with an FX-55 and 2x GT760's in SLI. I had a very stout gaming rig back then! 

 

3DMark Vantage also implemented physx into their benchmark. If you had one of these cards, you killed everyone's scores! XD

[Guest]

Couple more pictures since we are on another page.

 

[da na]

3 minutes ago, ShrimpBrime said:

Couple more pictures since we are on another page.

 

Wow that's a very different die than my PhysX card.

How much VRAM? Think the OG has 256mb

[Guest]

Just now, Mel0nMan said:

Wow that's a very different die than my PhysX card.

How much VRAM? Think the OG has 256mb

It's clocked higher as well. (Might be what the DIP switches are all about) 600mhz.

 

So it's got a bit more horsepower than the OG card.

 

I think that was a result of a certain game specifically made for the physics card called Cell Factor Revolution. 

 

The game had a physics monitoring over-lay. For starters, it runs much better on older Intel than AMD. That I confirmed many years ago. but at any rate, a lot of the physics numbers where in the red, barely rendering all the particles (that game had thousands, much more elaborate than software rendering) with a lot of specs in the red. 

 

Graphics cards with Cuda cores would render physx without issues on top of redering visuals. That's why this never lifted off as a separate entity. Which I wish it would have.

 

Games like Cell Factor revolution is literally a game changer. I could see hardware rendering really lift off Virtual reality. Particle count and the infinite randomness of particle interactions. Particles unbound from the laws of software.

[Bitter]

Original one was...PCI not PCIe, right?

[da na]

1 minute ago, Bitter said:

Original one was...PCI not PCIe, right?

Yes the first were PCI but dell OEM ones were PCIe x1. PCI are the rare ones

[Guest]

3 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

Yes the first were PCI but dell OEM ones were PCIe x1. PCI are the rare ones

The PCI ones used to be cheap. Much cheaper than the pci-e. 

 

I've gone through a small handful of these cards through the years. I just sent one out to a buddy in Cali to play with. 

 

I paid 30$ for 2 PCI (legacy) cards maybe 6 years ago or so. 

[da na]

3 minutes ago, ShrimpBrime said:

The PCI ones used to be cheap. Much cheaper than the pci-e. 

 

I've gone through a small handful of these cards through the years. I just sent one out to a buddy in Cali to play with. 

 

I paid 30$ for 2 PCI (legacy) cards maybe 6 years ago or so. 

got a PCI one for about $40 a few years ago, looks like they're selling for like twice that now. Mine needs a cap replaced but else works fine

[Andrew Spradley]

just found a load of old processors and bios chips

[BrianTheElectrician]

2 hours ago, Andrew Spradley said:

just found a load of old processors and bios chips

That's a nice collection of chips... I even spy a 486 DX50... those flew for their day if you had cards that would handle the 50mhz bus, if not, then well you had a lot of system instability. A DX2-66 should be similar in performance but far more stable due to the 33mhz bus, though I'd imagine a dx50 would still beat it for memory performance.

 

Definitely a neat collection. I myself only have one each of a 286 and 386... my 386 is a DX33, which I see you have several of.

[da na]

This massive controller on an '03 SpinPoint disk I pulled out of a retired PC. 80gb, IDE. 

Considerably larger than the controller of this 40gb SpinPoint from '01.

I use all Samsung disks for my retro systems. These early 2000 models of Spinpoints are ridiculously reliable. Came in SATA and IDE (although I believe some SATA models were not called Spinpoint but are the same drive with a different board), better drive health than most <5 year old modern HDDs I find. 

[Bitter]

GTX 760 showed up, fan bearing is loud so I'll grab a new fan at some point. Way more performant that the GTX 650 it replaces but quite a bit warmer at full power and louder because of the fan bearing and it's a blower card. Ran Heaven benchmark where it easily does 1000pts better than the 650 could ever do. A couple minutes to set a more aggressive fan curve and a 25mhz OC, it'll hold full clocks throughout and scored 3100pts, more than double the 650!!

Cabling tho, 650 was out the back power and 760 is out the side soooo glass panel is right right.

[da na]

Let's not ask why this floppy drive from 2006 looks like it was submerged for several years. Wondered why it scratched up my disk and wouldn't read, look at that mess! 

Spoiler

Spoiler

Today has been a 6 hour saga of trying to get XP on this machine... first HDD dies, then can't get SATA working, then it won't install to a SATA drive so I go to load the driver from a floppy and... looks like I'll need to swap the drive! Luckily the broken one scratched the part of the disk with no actual data so it's not totally gone

[Bitter]

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32273769740.html I think I found my replacement fan, need to measure tomorrow and make sure.

 

Not the fan, I need 22mm tall by 65mm diameter. Crud...

MEASURED THE FAN BLOWER HEIGHT NOT OVERALL HEIGHT. Peeled the foam off the fan base and got the number, yep Delta BFB0712HF. BFB stands for Badass F'in Blower I guess? $15 and on the 21st of $8 and slow boat from China? Hmmmm.....I'm impatient. Ordered and re-pasted with Kryonaut, smoothed down the heatsink copper base with some 800 grit, had like a 220 grit surface finish on it. Probably won't make any difference but every little bit helps with a blower card.

What's killing me is the spacing looks the same for my 3 dead 10 series cards I have here but the Z height of the 760 is much taller and the rest of the card components are in the wrong places. My ITX 1070 cooler would probably fit the GPU and might even have good mount pressure but the power chokes are too tall without cutting the fin stack a bunch (don't have the right tools to do that cleanly) and the VRM probably won't contact the cooler well enough to survive long term. Blower card has a fairly beefy VRM cooler on it. Otherwise the 1070 cooler would be much quieter, probably close enough in TDP to work well too.

[da na]

Can anyone tell me if this massive list of drivers was in any other build of Windows (from around the NT 5 era)? It's not in XP or 98... been messing about with Windows Neptune and this is one of many unusual features. This VGA card list has some from really obscure manufacturers as well - Creative Labs (VIDEO cards not sound), and Western Digital, plus some I'd never even heard of. 
I have reason to believe the driver files are stored on the HDD and it's not a redirect to download the driver. Popped in a Sound Blaster and it worked plug and play - same card needed drivers installed on 98 and XP. 

It's not just for video, also shows up for sound and USB drivers. I know some basic drivers were integrated into xp for stuff like video card, some sound and of course keyboard-mouse but I've never used its closest relative, Windows 2000, so unsure if it did.

It comes up in regular old Hardware Wizard windows, you have the option to install from this list or a specific location. I'm used to other Windows versions just saying nope couldn't find driver files when I click install from this PC but nah, Neptune is too good for that? 

 

EDIT: Yes it is loading the drivers from a location in C:\\. Look at the file count. Full path is C:\\WINNT\Drivercache\i386\driver. (There's no Windows folder, it's called WININT instead, took me some time to figure out)

[Bitter]

I mean that looks pretty normal from what I recall using 98, 2000, XP.

[da na]

1 minute ago, Bitter said:

I mean that looks pretty normal from what I recall using 98, 2000, XP.

OK thanks, do you remember anything called Microsoft Channels or MARS in 2000? Pretty sure MARS was Neptune only. 

Also Neptune has a strange assortment of MIDIs. Couple Beethoven, a Tchaikovsky, and a Debussy as well as Passport and one other 9x midi I forgot. 

I don't recall any of the others being in other releases. Perhaps older NT versions. 

[SimplyChunk]

2 hours ago, Mel0nMan said:

one other 9x midi I forgot

canyon.mid

[Bitter]

2 hours ago, Mel0nMan said:

OK thanks, do you remember anything called Microsoft Channels or MARS in 2000? Pretty sure MARS was Neptune only. 

Also Neptune has a strange assortment of MIDIs. Couple Beethoven, a Tchaikovsky, and a Debussy as well as Passport and one other 9x midi I forgot. 

I don't recall any of the others being in other releases. Perhaps older NT versions. 

That's not ringing a bell. I didn't use NT 4.0 or 2000 a lot.

[da na]

Thanks for the help on Windows 2000!

Sorry to ask more but does anyone have (or know of) any free PhysX tech demos/game demos that will utilize an Ageia PhysX card? With the cap replaced mine gets into the OS but I don't know how it'll hold under actual load. 

[Bitter]

37 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

Thanks for the help on Windows 2000!

Sorry to ask more but does anyone have (or know of) any free PhysX tech demos/game demos that will utilize an Ageia PhysX card? With the cap replaced mine gets into the OS but I don't know how it'll hold under actual load. 

Yes. All the old Nvidia tech demos are still online! But you need to Google old 8800GT card stuff I think. There's a bunch of old ones and they all still work I think even on 10!

[da na]

4 minutes ago, Bitter said:

Yes. All the old Nvidia tech demos are still online! But you need to Google old 8800GT card stuff I think. There's a bunch of old ones and they all still work I think even on 10!

I've tried those, but there aren't any that take advantage of PhysX, just the other GPU things AFAIK... The first PhysX demo I could find from NVIDIA was for the 200 series with built in PhysX, not using the PPU card...

[Bitter]

The first Arkham game maybe?

[SimplyChunk]

Mafia 2 had physx too i believe.

 

not sure if you've found this on your hunt

 

https://ageia-physx.software.informer.com/versions/

 

That lets you download the 'stand alone' physx drivers without it being wrapped in nvidia graphics driver