Show off your old and retro computer parts

[Fotomac]

1 minute ago, Mel0n. said:

Although be aware, the cables for 2.5" and 3.5" IDE are a bit different. 

What's the difference?

[da na]

3 minutes ago, Fotomac said:

What's the difference?

2.5" IDE cables have fewer pins. There are adapters you can get, though

[Dabombinable]

55 minutes ago, Mel0n. said:

Hard to believe this chip consumes more power than my best Core 2 Quads...

It consumes more than my E5450 did at 4GHz (then again...Xeon FTW).

[da na]

8 minutes ago, Dabombinable said:

It consumes more than my E5450 did at 4GHz (then again...Xeon FTW).

OC'd, it hits 135w which is what my 8 core Xeon does. Gigabyte provided a lovely tool for overclocking on their old boards that I've been using, got the FSB speed up a few mhz and turned up the freq a bit. Can't exceed the 155w of a single 4 pin, or the 70c thermal limit though so I'm a bit constrained there

[Fotomac]

39 minutes ago, Mel0n. said:

2.5" IDE cables have fewer pins. There are adapters you can get, though

And the Dimension 2350 is a 3.5" IDE machine, right? Asking because the Yansen is a 2.5" IDE drive.

[da na]

3 minutes ago, Fotomac said:

And the Dimension 2350 is a 3.5" IDE machine, right? Asking because the Yansen is a 2.5" IDE drive.

Correct! 

[Fotomac]

Well, I found the plug. Turns out, it was inside the computer all along. Plus, it came with the original screws holding the original hard drive in place. Should make setting it up a quite bit easier than I thought.

 

Tomorrow, I'm going to try to order a refurbished 120 GB Western Digital IDE 3.5 HDD on eBay, since I couldn't find an SSD that was IDE 3.5, only IDE 2.5, and those that were IDE 3.5 had lower storage capacities than the original hard drive did, and I realized adapting from 3.5 to 2.5 is going to involve a quite bit more work than if I simply used an IDE 3.5 drive.

[da na]

3 hours ago, Fotomac said:

Well, I found the plug. Turns out, it was inside the computer all along. Plus, it came with the original screws holding the original hard drive in place. Should make setting it up a quite bit easier than I thought.

 

Tomorrow, I'm going to try to order a refurbished 120 GB Western Digital IDE 3.5 HDD on eBay, since I couldn't find an SSD that was IDE 3.5, only IDE 2.5, and those that were IDE 3.5 had lower storage capacities than the original hard drive did, and I realized adapting from 3.5 to 2.5 is going to involve a quite bit more work than if I simply used an IDE 3.5 drive.

Gonna pop in here and say, I've had issues with those 120GB IDE Caviars. 
I recommend a Hitachi DeskStar.

Or, yknow, a $10 adapter

Laptop IDE Hard Drive Adaptor -- DataPro

[Fotomac]

I'm going to go with the DeskStar. It's got more storage than the cheapest refurbished WD Caviar, presently at just over half the price, from what I've seen via an eBay search. As for my OS, I'm thinking about using TinyCore as my base.

[da na]

Ah, when cracked software came with cool intros, not a virus...

 

 

[abit-sean]

Updated my ABIT PC, swapped the case and added my uGuru panel. The panel is a custom version I moded, upgrading it from AC97 to HD audio. Also my WD raptor is no more, had to swap for a WD caviar blue drive.

[Dabombinable]

6 minutes ago, abit-sean said:

Updated my ABIT PC, swapped the case and added my uGuru panel. The panel is a custom version I moded, upgrading it from AC97 to HD audio. Also my WD raptor is no more, had to swap for a WD caviar blue drive.

That board supports HD audio? If so that's actually quite a surprise. Also RIP Raptor, from what I've been told (never dealt with drivers faster than 7200RPM, most slower than 5400RPM) the responsiveness is amazing.

[da na]

1 minute ago, Dabombinable said:

That board supports HD audio? If so that's actually quite a surprise. Also RIP Raptor, from what I've been told (never dealt with drivers faster than 7200RPM, most slower than 5400RPM) the responsiveness is amazing.

From experience with my WD Velociraptor (10kRPM, 2.5" server drive) it is indeed amazing.

[abit-sean]

Just now, Mel0n. said:

From experience with my WD Velociraptor (10kRPM, 2.5" server drive) it is indeed amazing.

I still have a Velociraptor in my daughters PC as a game library drive. The raptor drives were small (74gb), loud and unreliable .  It does still work but only if power cycle about 10 times and even then it runs slow. At the time I think it was the fastest drive available but cost about £200 so it was out of reach for most users. It was also only SATA I (150) and didn't play nicely with VISTA and Windows 7 x64.

[da na]

2 hours ago, Schnoz said:

The early Raptors (the 3.5" models in particular) did have a few teething issues. Especially the first-generation 36 and 72GB models, which are natively IDE but had an IDE-to-SATA chip added which is visible on the back of the drive. As such, they don't support native command queuing.

 

VelociRaptors are definitely a step up, given that they're bog-standard enterprise drives with a SATA interface instead of SAS. Their 2.5" design means that, despite being 10K drives, they run surprisingly cool and quiet. Furthermore, they support NCQ and have unload ramps, a superior head-protection technology over earlier Raptors' landing zones.  It should be noted, though, that the 2.5-3.5" adaptor that came with early VelociRaptors has the SATA port in the wrong location, and is thus not compatible with backplates. This was fixed in later versions.

 

Can confirm. The Raptors are useable as boot drives for a relatively unbloated Windows 7 install. When using a 15K drive, however, Windows 7 almost feels like it's being run on an SSD. Almost.

I'm satisfied with a fresh install + drivers of Win7 on a 320gb Scorpio Blue... can't imagine what a drive 2x the spindle speed would be like

Granted I haven't used an SSD on 7 so I'm not spoiled

[Dabombinable]

10 hours ago, abit-sean said:

I still have a Velociraptor in my daughters PC as a game library drive. The raptor drives were small (74gb), loud and unreliable .  It does still work but only if power cycle about 10 times and even then it runs slow. At the time I think it was the fastest drive available but cost about £200 so it was out of reach for most users. It was also only SATA I (150) and didn't play nicely with VISTA and Windows 7 x64.

I need a couple now, just to run them in RAID 0. My KT600 based board only works with SATA1 drives, and my 2x 200GB Seagate 7000.7 while fast (Vista feels like its on an SSD), I could still make good use of faster HDD.

[lol old teck guy]

my oldest ssd

[SimplyChunk]

4 minutes ago, lol old teck guy said:

my oldest ssd

My oldest SSD is still in use in my main rig.  An OCZ Vertex 4 500GB.  It's doesn't hold important stuff anymore but does act as a nice fast game drive for a few games

[lol old teck guy]

I am still using an OCZ Agility 3

[da na]

2 hours ago, lol old teck guy said:

I am still using an OCZ Agility 3

Had an OCZ Vertex II but it died on me last summer

[Dabombinable]

Cables managed, this is my finalised Socket A build. Excluding the Voodoo2 as will be a better pairing with my peak S370 build in a far older  case.

[da na]

Anyone know a good VGA cooler that'll fit early '00s nVidia cards? The stock fan on my GeForce 6800 ramps up to its max speed when any application is opened, which sounds like a whole rack of servers. Currently thinking the Vantec Iceberq 5 - solid copper, not too large, not too expensive, comes with some extra heatsinks too! 

[Dabombinable]

This is why I'm considering going anything not Nvidia (I know SiS cards run it correctly) for my retro PC. 32bit colours freeze the computer at the menu, 16bit makes it playable (real smooth) but as you can see...most textures are wrong (not as bad as MM2 though).

 

 

[8tg]

Posted this other places but this is also distinctly old and retro:

gigabyte GA-8ANXP-D with the udp card for the LGA 775 meme machine 

I want to put the gtx 1080 on it but I already cut the tucked away the +2 pins on the pcie connectors of the psu I’m using and honestly can’t find them in the cable disaster 

 

also got this Pixelview FX5900XT

Gonna clean up the fan grille where someone snipped it off, it’s supposed to look like this:

I figure if I can at least make it smooth it’ll look fine 

here’s the 775 build which is….

mostly old and retro? This is a Pentium 4 3.2ghz on that above motherboard with 3gb of ddr2 and a gtx 275

it just happens to be in the least retro case of all time and it has an aio and rgb everywhere

[da na]

Graphics controller in a Proliant server my roommate and I picked up. 3 texture mapping units, 1 rasterizer, 200mhz, 180NM process... but it's from 2007, 6 YEARS after the previous card in this series released. It's based on a Rage 6 series die. It's not identical to any other GPU in the series though - all of them either have pixel and vertex shaders in addition to TMUs/ROPs, are clocked differently, etc. I have two guesses why these exist. A, the manufacturing equipment for these '01 chips was still kicking around and was cheaper to use than modern equipment since no modern die could be made on it at the time. B, these were Radeon 7000 series dies that were defective and had some bits shaved off. In that case it would be an overclocked Mobility Radeon 7000 with the two pixel shaders disabled, as it has the 3 TMUs/ROPs (+2 pixel shaders) but only a 183mhz clock.