Show off your old and retro computer parts

[da na]

1 minute ago, Dabombinable said:

I may have a new favourite video card. The 6600GT. TBH hard to choose between it and the FX 5700:

My mum's retro PC may end up with the FX 5700 when it's KT400 board arrives.

That's wacky that a 6600 GT gets a Molex but my 6800 GTX PCIe doesn't... jealous! 

[Dabombinable]

1 hour ago, Mel0n. said:

That's wacky that a 6600 GT gets a Molex but my 6800 GTX PCIe doesn't... jealous! 

It's all about the slot. TBH I actually wanted to get an FX 5700 with a molex connector just so I could use it on my Intel 440BX-2. The power delivery to the AGP slot isn't beefy enough.

[Bitter]

The 6800 Ultra had TWO Molex connectors for power, my old AGP 5900XT had a single molex. PCIe can give 75W through the slot. I had to google AGP, here's a snippet from Wikipedia. I never had a board with AGP Pro, just AGP 4x or 8x, I did know about the different voltages and how cards were keyed differently.

[da na]

9 minutes ago, Bitter said:

The 6800 Ultra had TWO Molex connectors for power, my old AGP 5900XT had a single molex. PCIe can give 75W through the slot. I had to google AGP, here's a snippet from Wikipedia. I never had a board with AGP Pro, just AGP 4x or 8x, I did know about the different voltages and how cards were keyed differently.

AGP Pro is incredibly rare. I know of only one card which uses it, the ATI Fire GL4 (an odd card in and of itself, the TMUs and ROPs are on two separate dies. It's basically a 2D accelerator with another die for 3D acceleration glued onto it.) But it performed astonishingly well.

[Dabombinable]

I can now confirm that my "FX 5500" was actually an FX 5200 due to being NV34. Because my new FX 5200 is the second revision with NV34B, which the 5500 should have had.

I was actually shocked at how high the memory is clocked - only my FX 5700 and 6600GT have more memory bandwidth:

 

And I now have a working Ati Radeon 9550/X1050 (Asus A9550):

Considering they were sold as untested, both needed their fans oiled (FX 5500 had it done in the past and was the worst) and the fact that they had to come to Australia from Kiev - I'm happy and the FX 5500 will more than likely go in my Mum's retro PC if it benchmarks higher than the FX 5600XT (surely colour compression can't make a 1.152GB/sec difference).
 

[Aremis]

Haven't seen that orange button in a honkin MINUTE

[da na]

I cannot recommend old laptops enough, especially after today's test.

I benchmarked the most popular Chromebook CPU, the Celeron N2840, and its AMD competitor, the A6-9220E, against my Core 2 Duo SU9600 laptop. All 3 are lower end chips designed for power efficiency with the Celeron being 4w, the AMD being 6w, and the Core 2 Duo being 10w.

 

 

 

The Core 2 Duo from 2009 beat the 2014 and 2017 low-end chips by a significant margin. And by significant, I mean 18 points in Cinebench R20 and 43 in Cinebench R10. 

And of course, the Latitude E4200 with the Core 2 Duo has the best keyboard, the brightest screen, the thinnest bezels, the best upgradability, and the best I/O of the lot. Only thing it falls short on is battery, it gets around 5 hours, the AMD chip gets around 6, the Celeron gets upwards of 7.

[Dabombinable]

3 minutes ago, da na said:

I cannot recommend old laptops enough, especially after today's test.

I benchmarked the most popular Chromebook CPU, the Celeron N2840, and its AMD competitor, the A6-9220E, against my Core 2 Duo SU9600 laptop. All 3 are lower end chips designed for power efficiency with the Celeron being 4w, the AMD being 6w, and the Core 2 Duo being 10w.

 

 

 

The Core 2 Duo from 2009 beat the 2014 and 2017 low-end chips by a significant margin. And by significant, I mean 18 points in Cinebench R20 and 43 in Cinebench R10. 

And of course, the Latitude E4200 with the Core 2 Duo has the best keyboard, the brightest screen, the thinnest bezels, the best upgradability, and the best I/O of the lot. Only thing it falls short on is battery, it gets around 5 hours, the AMD chip gets around 6, the Celeron gets upwards of 7.

The C2D T9400 I put in the Compaq CQ60 my grandmother had utterly destroyed the A8-4555M that was in the second laptop my mum replaced it with (there was a Phenom II laptop in between).

[da na]

Just now, Dabombinable said:

The C2D T9400 I put in the Compaq CQ60 my grandmother had utterly destroyed the A8-4555M that was in the second laptop my mum replaced it with (there was a Phenom II laptop in between).

I totally get that, a T9400 is a decent CPU. I have a ton of other Core 2 Duos, but this was especially painful for the Celeron because this C2D is only 10 watts.

[Dabombinable]

50 minutes ago, da na said:

I totally get that, a T9400 is a decent CPU. I have a ton of other Core 2 Duos, but this was especially painful for the Celeron because this C2D is only 10 watts.

Put it this way - it itself was a large upgrade from the original Pentium T4200 that was stuck for whatever reason running at 1.8Hz after Vista Home was replaced with Win7 and then Win10 64bit.

[Crunchy Dragon]

On 3/5/2023 at 11:32 PM, da na said:

AGP Pro is incredibly rare. I know of only one card which uses it, the ATI Fire GL4 (an odd card in and of itself, the TMUs and ROPs are on two separate dies. It's basically a 2D accelerator with another die for 3D acceleration glued onto it.) But it performed astonishingly well.

I think my PowerMac G5 is the only system I've ever handled that featured AGP Pro. It also had a bunch of PCI-X which is another standard that a lot of people these days don't know about.

[da na]

Just now, Crunchy Dragon said:

I think my PowerMac G5 is the only system I've ever handled that featured AGP Pro. It also had a bunch of PCI-X which is another standard that a lot of people these days don't know about.

Oh totally. I maintain a dual 771 server, nearly every slot on it is PCI-X. It also has a few PCIe x4 if I recall.

[Crunchy Dragon]

Just now, da na said:

Oh totally. I maintain a dual 771 server, nearly every slot on it is PCI-X. It also has a few PCIe x4 if I recall.

PCI-X is fun. I enjoy how the way to make PCI faster was "add more of it".

 

Somewhere, I think I still have a really old Intel NIC that runs on PCI-X.

[da na]

Just now, Crunchy Dragon said:

PCI-X is fun. I enjoy how the way to make PCI faster was "add more of it".

 

Somewhere, I think I still have a really old Intel NIC that runs on PCI-X.

I have a really weird PCI-X card.

It's a PCI-X RAID card, which is only on servers and high end workstations.

But it's not SCSI. It's Ultra ATA. A low end consumer standard.

So I've got a card that only works in high end systems and only supports low end drives. 

[Crunchy Dragon]

Just now, da na said:

I have a really weird PCI-X card.

It's a PCI-X RAID card, which is only on servers and high end workstations.

But it's not SCSI. It's Ultra ATA. A low end consumer standard.

So I've got a card that only works in high end systems and only supports low end drives. 

I love it. That's so funny, I wonder if there was an issue with PCI-X, RAID, and SCSI.

 

Be a fine joke if PCI-X didn't have enough bandwidth to run 4-6 SCSI drives, so the only way you got all the capacity was with low end drives.

[da na]

Just now, Crunchy Dragon said:

I love it. That's so funny, I wonder if there was an issue with PCI-X, RAID, and SCSI.

 

Be a fine joke if PCI-X didn't have enough bandwidth to run 4-6 SCSI drives, so the only way you got all the capacity was with low end drives.

I've got SCSI HBAs for old Poweredge servers that are PCI-X, each can run 24 SCSI drives (12 per port). I believe that's Ultra320 SCSI too.

[ApolloX75]

After some research, I did some tinkering tonight and managed to get a SP 256GB M.2 NVME drive to work as a boot drive for my X58 Sabertooth build using a cheap Sabrent PCI-E M.2 card. 

 

It's not something I needed to do, I mean a 2.5" SATA SSD is more than fast enough for what I'm doing. This is literally a "because I can" moment. 

 

Cost me less than $50 for everything to make it work. It's surprisingly easy if anyone here hasn't tried it before, basically any system that has a spare PCIE X16 slot and can boot from USB can do it. I never thought of trying it before. The amount of info I found on it, it's obviously something quite a few people have done so no trailblazing here, just funny side projects to play around with.

[SimplyChunk]

17 hours ago, ApolloX75 said:

After some research, I did some tinkering tonight and managed to get a SP 256GB M.2 NVME drive to work as a boot drive for my X58 Sabertooth build using a cheap Sabrent PCI-E M.2 card. 

 

It's not something I needed to do, I mean a 2.5" SATA SSD is more than fast enough for what I'm doing. This is literally a "because I can" moment. 

 

Cost me less than $50 for everything to make it work. It's surprisingly easy if anyone here hasn't tried it before, basically any system that has a spare PCIE X16 slot and can boot from USB can do it. I never thought of trying it before. The amount of info I found on it, it's obviously something quite a few people have done so no trailblazing here, just funny side projects to play around with.

I keep forgetting X58 couldn't boot from M.2 NVME

[Bitter]

18 hours ago, ApolloX75 said:

After some research, I did some tinkering tonight and managed to get a SP 256GB M.2 NVME drive to work as a boot drive for my X58 Sabertooth build using a cheap Sabrent PCI-E M.2 card. 

 

It's not something I needed to do, I mean a 2.5" SATA SSD is more than fast enough for what I'm doing. This is literally a "because I can" moment. 

 

Cost me less than $50 for everything to make it work. It's surprisingly easy if anyone here hasn't tried it before, basically any system that has a spare PCIE X16 slot and can boot from USB can do it. I never thought of trying it before. The amount of info I found on it, it's obviously something quite a few people have done so no trailblazing here, just funny side projects to play around with.

Parts list? Exact model? USB? Huh??

[Dabombinable]

On 3/7/2023 at 10:21 PM, Aremis said:

Haven't seen that orange button in a honkin MINUTE

I may have a copy of XP BE from 2014...and might use it as a quick and easy update+theme install disc after setting up XP Home SP1a.

It's either that theme or the Windows CE theme that get used on my PC.

[ApolloX75]

1 hour ago, Bitter said:

Parts list? Exact model? USB? Huh??

Haha! I shall oblige!

 

x1 USB drive, I got a little micro Sandisk 16GB drive so it's low profile, you can get anything you want, the bootloader is less than 10MB

x1 Sabrent (EC-PCIE is the part number) NVMe M.2 to PCIE card (Cost me $19 CAD off Amazon)

x1 NVME M.2 drive (I used a Silicon Power P34A60 256GB drive in this case, $29 CAD off Amazon.) Literally any drive will work I think as long as it's NVME as the adapter doesn't do SATA drives and honestly why would you bother. You want that sick speed the system will never be able to saturate.

 

Use DUET + REFIND from this link, use their utility to Clean, Format, MBR your USB stick, and it'll load the files too. Use the guide, there's some extra steps for Windows 7 if that's what you're using.

Side Note-> Pay no attention to the random wacky characters that appear after you format the drive and make it bootable, I don't know why but it looks crazy. Everything works as it should, but Windows doesn't seem to know how to interpret what is going on with the USB drive lol

 

Plug USB drive into the back of your machine in a USB port you don't mind losing, this stick is now a permanent resident.

 

Boot, set your BIOS to boot from that USB stick always.

 

Boot into the DUET loader, plug in your Windows Vista/7/10/whatever installation media, select Boot Fallback Boot Loader from NTFS Volume option, it's the big button dead center above the smaller buttons.

 

Install Windows normally onto your rocketship M.2 drive.

 

Restart. Unplug your Install Media immediately. The system will boot into the DUET bootloader again, but this time the big center button will have the Windows logo and will point to your new install. Finish the installation process of your chosen OS.

 

Voila. Enjoy.

[ApolloX75]

2 hours ago, SimplyChunk said:

I keep forgetting X58 couldn't boot from M.2 NVME

And that's the best part: with what I have found, I can make this work on a Core2Quad system or even an old AM2 setup, anything with more than one X16 PCIE slot really. I bet I could get it to work on my S939 A8R-32 MVP. I think I'll try that tonight.

[Bitter]

10 minutes ago, ApolloX75 said:

Haha! I shall oblige!

 

x1 USB drive, I got a little micro Sandisk 16GB drive so it's low profile, you can get anything you want, the bootloader is less than 10MB

x1 Sabrent (EC-PCIE is the part number) NVMe M.2 to PCIE card (Cost me $19 CAD off Amazon)

x1 NVME M.2 drive (I used a Silicon Power P34A60 256GB drive in this case, $29 CAD off Amazon.) Literally any drive will work I think as long as it's NVME as the adapter doesn't do SATA drives and honestly why would you bother. You want that sick speed the system will never be able to saturate.

 

Use DUET + REFIND from this link, use their utility to Clean, Format, MBR your USB stick, and it'll load the files too. Use the guide, there's some extra steps for Windows 7 if that's what you're using.

Side Note-> Pay no attention to the random wacky characters that appear after you format the drive and make it bootable, I don't know why but it looks crazy. Everything works as it should, but Windows doesn't seem to know how to interpret what is going on with the USB drive lol

 

Plug USB drive into the back of your machine in a USB port you don't mind losing, this stick is now a permanent resident.

 

Boot, set your BIOS to boot from that USB stick always.

 

Boot into the DUET loader, plug in your Windows Vista/7/10/whatever installation media, select Boot Fallback Boot Loader from NTFS Volume option, it's the big button dead center above the smaller buttons.

 

Install Windows normally onto your rocketship M.2 drive.

 

Restart. Unplug your Install Media immediately. The system will boot into the DUET bootloader again, but this time the big center button will have the Windows logo and will point to your new install. Finish the installation process of your chosen OS.

 

Voila. Enjoy.

Oh this sounds like when I got my old dell laptop to boot off Sata SSD in the CD slot by pointing GRUB on the PATA HDD at the SSD. SATA SSD wasn't bootable in the CD slot for some reason, oddly.

[ApolloX75]

15 minutes ago, Bitter said:

Oh this sounds like when I got my old dell laptop to boot off Sata SSD in the CD slot by pointing GRUB on the PATA HDD at the SSD. SATA SSD wasn't bootable in the CD slot for some reason, oddly.

It's almost exactly the same thing, yes. Boot time is in the seconds too, just like my main rig with native M.2 support. As soon as you're done the initial setup, you don't even notice the Duet boot, it's a smooth transition.

[8tg]

Cpu cooler arrived for the old gpu test bench

new old stock, still has a dent of course

it’s very fitting, visually anyway, I need more copper items

and it works, I don’t have the psu for this yet so just to make sure it works I used the apevia which is pre pcie, so with no pcie video card I had to use the pci s3 virge for a vga output

love this card, the most excessively huge 90’s gpu