Show off your old and retro computer parts

[SimplyChunk]

fyi.  Windows 3.1 isn't an operating system it'll be running on DOS 6.something and have windows installed seperately

[flibberdipper]

18 hours ago, da na said:

Meet my "New" optical drive, the Hewlett-Packard CD-Writer Plus 8200.

 

This is a slightly modified (and very long) Hewlett-Packard IDE drive enclosed in a plastic case. It reads and writes CD-R and RW disks at 4x, and can also play audio CDs through the front headphone jack or passthrough in the rear. Connects to the computer via USB (and soundcard Line In through the 3.5mm jack if desired). 

 

I picked this up with the intention of harvesting its IDE drive, but I love it as an external device so I think I will keep it that way. Although very large and not particularly fast by today's standards, it is nice and quiet, works with every OS I have tried, and burns disks flawlessly. 

I really wish you could get external drive enclosures that don't cost $50+. I want to get one and a BluRay drive for ripping reasons, but that's damn near $120 for convenience. Can't even just throw a drive into my Very Legal Obtaining™ PC since I'd need a slimline for that.

 

On 8/5/2023 at 10:31 PM, iHardware Shelden said:

Oh sweet! Yeah I should pick another one up for this build actually... don't tempt me! 

Don't be a baby. Copy the single greatest build ever dropped on this forum.

 

[SimplyChunk]

12 minutes ago, flibberdipper said:

Copy the single greatest build ever dropped on this forum

I have that exact motherboard with an 1100T in it in a PC up my locker.

 

@iHardware Shelden  I'll happily donate if you want to go for it XD

[SimplyChunk]

23 minutes ago, flibberdipper said:

I really wish you could get external drive enclosures that don't cost $50+

 

23 minutes ago, flibberdipper said:

since I'd need a slimline for that

Then get a slimline and put it in a slim enclosure?

[flibberdipper]

37 minutes ago, ChonkerFox said:

 

Then get a slimline and put it in a slim enclosure?

 

IIRC if you want one that'll rip 4K discs you're spending basically double that of a regular ol desktop drive which kinda puts you back at square one.

[iHardware Shelden]

4 hours ago, ChonkerFox said:

I have that exact motherboard with an 1100T in it in a PC up my locker.

 

@iHardware Shelden  I'll happily donate if you want to go for it XD

 

4 hours ago, flibberdipper said:

I really wish you could get external drive enclosures that don't cost $50+. I want to get one and a BluRay drive for ripping reasons, but that's damn near $120 for convenience. Can't even just throw a drive into my Very Legal Obtaining™ PC since I'd need a slimline for that.

 

Don't be a baby. Copy the single greatest build ever dropped on this forum.

Oh man that is awesome!

 

Too bad the case I have won't fit more than 2 cards at most, heck even the GTX 260 barley fits!

[Kilrah]

5 hours ago, flibberdipper said:

Don't be a baby. Copy the single greatest build ever dropped on this forum.

Gotta love those old SLI setups. Cooling for [all GPUs minus the bottom one] = No. 

[iHardware Shelden]

54 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Gotta love those old SLI setups. Cooling for [all GPUs minus the bottom one] = No. 

It's sad that it doesn't even feel that long ago for me.

 

I was always jealous of my buddies twin GTX 670 setup in SLI or when the 700 series came out going dual 780/780 ti

[WhitetailAni]

A Dell PowerEdge 2850. Side of the Road edition.

Spoiler

The front panel sports a total of six drive bays (not all are pictured), a floppy drive, and an optical drive.

Spoiler

The left side features the a VGA port, two USB ports, indicator LEDs, the power button, and a little LCD readout to tell you system status and info! The right side features a small little Xeon sticker.

Spoiler

The rear panel features two redundant 700W power supplies, three PCI-X slots, a VGA port, a serial port, PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports, dual gigabit LAN, and two USB ports.

Spoiler

It has a total of 1348GB of storage across two 10K RPM 74GB drives and four 15K RPM 300GB drives (all SCSI).

Spoiler

Interestingly, the drive trays go in upside down.

Spoiler

Yes, they're rusty. This is from 2004. I will clean it, don't worry.

 

I'm not sure what it did in its past life, but apparently people put stuff behind it.

Spoiler

It comes with 4x1GB of registered ECC DDR2 RAM. And another 256MB registered ECC DDR2 stick as a cache for the RAID controller (no picture).

Spoiler

Booting it up was VERY loud without the top panel.

Spoiler

It probably has a dead CMOS battery but I have none at the moment, so I'll need to get some.

Spoiler

 

Currently it's sitting on a table in the basement - my dad said I'm not allowed to power it up until I can run it off a 240v outlet.

[da na]

4 minutes ago, WhitetailAni said:

A Dell PowerEdge 2850. Side of the Road edition.

  Hide contents

The front panel sports a total of six drive bays (not all are pictured), a floppy drive, and an optical drive.

  Hide contents

The left side features the a VGA port, two USB ports, indicator LEDs, the power button, and a little LCD readout to tell you system status and info! The right side features a small little Xeon sticker.

  Hide contents

 

The rear panel features two redundant 700W power supplies, three PCI-X slots, a VGA port, a serial port, PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports, dual gigabit LAN, and two USB ports.

  Hide contents

 

It has a total of 1348GB of storage across two 10K RPM 74GB drives and four 15K RPM 300GB drives (all SCSI).

  Hide contents

 

Interestingly, the drive trays go in upside down.

  Hide contents

 

Yes, they're rusty. This is from 2004. I will clean it, don't worry.

 

I'm not sure what it did in its past life, but apparently people put stuff behind it.

  Hide contents

 

It comes with 4x1GB of registered ECC DDR2 RAM. And another 256MB registered ECC DDR2 stick as a cache for the RAID controller (no picture).

  Hide contents

 

Booting it up was VERY loud without the top panel.

  Hide contents

 

It probably has a dead CMOS battery but I have none at the moment, so I'll need to get some.

  Hide contents

 

Awesome, Pentium 4 gen? Looks like it from the sticker. Looks even older than my dual 771 PowerEdge. Nice find

[Bitter]

3 hours ago, iHardware Shelden said:

 

Oh man that is awesome!

 

Too bad the case I have won't fit more than 2 cards at most, heck even the GTX 260 barley fits!

If you remove the 3.5 hard drive holder you can fit some pretty long cards in there with direct cooling from the front fan. Looks like just a couple rivets to drill out and it's easily reversible, often the holes are sized such that you can put case screws back in to hold things together later.

[iHardware Shelden]

8 minutes ago, Bitter said:

If you remove the 3.5 hard drive holder you can fit some pretty long cards in there with direct cooling from the front fan. Looks like just a couple rivets to drill out and it's easily reversible, often the holes are sized such that you can put case screws back in to hold things together later.

Yeah it's just a few rivets holding it in. Honestly should have done that before I started the build since I don't have the drive sleds for it anyway, plus blocks air flow from the front fan. Next time it comes apart that's exactly what I'm doing!

[WhitetailAni]

4 hours ago, da na said:

Awesome, Pentium 4 gen? Looks like it from the sticker. Looks even older than my dual 771 PowerEdge. Nice find

Believe so. Xeon 80551s, 2.8 GHz 2c/4t, 90nm. They cost a whole $1043 at release and you can get them for $15 on eBay now.

[Bitter]

13 minutes ago, WhitetailAni said:

Believe so. Xeon 80551s, 2.8 GHz 2c/4t, 90nm. They cost a whole $1043 at release and you can get them for $15 on eBay now.

Will anything else fit in the chassis or ONLY that board?

[WhitetailAni]

3 minutes ago, Bitter said:

Will anything else fit in the chassis or ONLY that board?

You can probably upgrade it, I just don't want to as I kind of like how old and slow it is. It has PCI-X slots which means I can probably run my Xserve RAID off of it once it arrives (my Power Mac G4 is 400 MHz and therefore too slow)

 

EDIT:

I'll probably upgrade the RAM, it supports up to 16GB. 4 is not quite enough.

[Bitter]

Just now, WhitetailAni said:

You can probably upgrade it, I just don't want to as I kind of like how old and slow it is. It has PCI-X slots which means I can probably run my Xserve RAID off of it once it arrives (my Power Mac G4 is 400 MHz and therefore too slow)

 

EDIT:

I'll probably upgrade the RAM, it supports up to 16GB. 4 is not quite enough.

Interesting. I've been wanting to build a home NAS with more storage than what I have cobbled together now but I might just get one of those N100 boards and a PCIe to SATA card for it instead. I still need something to put it all in though.

[BondiBlue]

23 hours ago, flibberdipper said:

I really wish you could get external drive enclosures that don't cost $50+. I want to get one and a BluRay drive for ripping reasons, but that's damn near $120 for convenience. Can't even just throw a drive into my Very Legal Obtaining™ PC since I'd need a slimline for that.

Last year I decided to just bite the bullet and pay up for an OWC Mercury Pro 5.25" drive enclosure. I also purchased a Blu-ray drive to put in it (I went with the LG WH14NS40), and it works fine. It definitely wasn't cheap (around $130 for both items), but it's convenient, and it rips 4K Blu-rays without issue. If you don't want to pay so much for an enclosure (and I certainly don't blame you for that) you could just use a cheap USB to SATA adapter. Doesn't look very nice but it'll work. 

[flibberdipper]

19 minutes ago, BondiBlue said:

Last year I decided to just bite the bullet and pay up for an OWC Mercury Pro 5.25" drive enclosure. I also purchased a Blu-ray drive to put in it (I went with the LG WH14NS40), and it works fine. It definitely wasn't cheap (around $130 for both items), but it's convenient, and it rips 4K Blu-rays without issue. If you don't want to pay so much for an enclosure (and I certainly don't blame you for that) you could just use a cheap USB to SATA adapter. Doesn't look very nice but it'll work. 

Yeah I was ultimately going to be going the same route, it's expensive but it'll be camped out with the rest of my setup in plain sight so I'm going to want it to look nice too. A small price to pay for... Salvation, I guess?

[Dabombinable]

6 hours ago, BondiBlue said:

Last year I decided to just bite the bullet and pay up for an OWC Mercury Pro 5.25" drive enclosure. I also purchased a Blu-ray drive to put in it (I went with the LG WH14NS40), and it works fine. It definitely wasn't cheap (around $130 for both items), but it's convenient, and it rips 4K Blu-rays without issue. If you don't want to pay so much for an enclosure (and I certainly don't blame you for that) you could just use a cheap USB to SATA adapter. Doesn't look very nice but it'll work. 

I take it you had to flash the firmware to read 4K BD - my LG WH16NS40 needed that.

[BondiBlue]

7 hours ago, flibberdipper said:

Yeah I was ultimately going to be going the same route, it's expensive but it'll be camped out with the rest of my setup in plain sight so I'm going to want it to look nice too. A small price to pay for... Salvation, I guess?

I wanted to have an external drive to use for ripping my Blu-rays since I didn't want to leave the drive in one specific computer, and the OWC enclosure does look pretty nice. Expensive, but nice. 

1 hour ago, Dabombinable said:

I take it you had to flash the firmware to read 4K BD - my LG WH16NS40 needed that.

Correct. The firmware mine came with couldn't read 4K discs, but that wasn't hard to solve. For the life of me I cannot remember how I ended up flasing the drive, but I did, and it works well. 

[ApolloX75]

Our competition has heated up quite a bit. Jeffro has thrown in the towel on his X58 attempts realizing his 920 can't match my 975 (even though it's dead, I have the broken spare that actually overclocks better) and has brought in the big guns with an Asus Z87-A and a 4770K, which he is now combining with a pair of 290Xs. Bravo Jeff, taking a note from my playbook.

 

I'm not worried.

 

He managed to overclock the 4770K to 4.6GHz (with my help haha) and has made a little custom loop (his first, aww, using my spare parts of course) to cool it. Respectable.

 

However. The skies are darkening over his short-lived victory dance as my secret weapon has not yet been revealed.... It arrives next week and I shall call it the Jeff Crusher.

 

Also my 780 Ti's are not worried by his 290X reinforcements, as they overclock like mad and run at 24C all day with the Heatkillers on them. Also I can add a third in at will now, I have the stuff to do it.

 

In other news, one of my spare Ti's has bit the dust for now, but I managed to repair the other malfunctioning one. However it dislikes it's stock cooler, I'll find a workaround for that. I also have a Heatkiller IV Pro arriving this week for my secret weapon as my cheapo Amazon blocks likely don't have the surface area or cooling ability to handle what's coming. I have also secured high speed 2400MHz DDR3 with excellent timings to add to the mix.

 

We have both agreed the competition stops here, as we are getting a little nuts and we're both stubborn as hell and don't know when to stop haha. Either way it's going to be a hilarious reveal when he comes down in a couple weekends for the final benchmarks.

[WhitetailAni]

On 8/8/2023 at 4:37 PM, WhitetailAni said:

A Dell PowerEdge 2850. Side of the Road edition.

  Reveal hidden contents

The front panel sports a total of six drive bays (not all are pictured), a floppy drive, and an optical drive.

  Reveal hidden contents

The left side features the a VGA port, two USB ports, indicator LEDs, the power button, and a little LCD readout to tell you system status and info! The right side features a small little Xeon sticker.

  Reveal hidden contents

The rear panel features two redundant 700W power supplies, three PCI-X slots, a VGA port, a serial port, PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports, dual gigabit LAN, and two USB ports.

  Reveal hidden contents

It has a total of 1348GB of storage across two 10K RPM 74GB drives and four 15K RPM 300GB drives (all SCSI).

  Reveal hidden contents

Interestingly, the drive trays go in upside down.

  Reveal hidden contents

Yes, they're rusty. This is from 2004. I will clean it, don't worry.

 

I'm not sure what it did in its past life, but apparently people put stuff behind it.

  Reveal hidden contents

It comes with 4x1GB of registered ECC DDR2 RAM. And another 256MB registered ECC DDR2 stick as a cache for the RAID controller (no picture).

  Reveal hidden contents

Booting it up was VERY loud without the top panel.

  Reveal hidden contents

It probably has a dead CMOS battery but I have none at the moment, so I'll need to get some.

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Currently it's sitting on a table in the basement - my dad said I'm not allowed to power it up until I can run it off a 240v outlet.

I swapped the CMOS battery, set the date, time, etc. and also enabled the storage controller.

Apparently the previous person did something kind of odd. It has two 74GB drives and four 300GB drives, but one of the 300GB drives is configured in RAID 1 with the two 74GB drives for three-way RAID 1 for the OS...

which is corrupted or the ancient version of grub that's somehow there doesn't understand it (it doesn't have the boot command).

I'm currently making a 10 LTSC flash drive for it to try and get it up and running, this time configured with two-way RAID 1 on the 74GB and RAID 0 on the 300GB because I don't really care if they die. I just wanna see how fast they go.

[ApolloX75]

1 minute ago, WhitetailAni said:

I don't really care if they die. I just wanna see how fast they go.

Words to live by in my book.

[SimplyChunk]

The start of my custom length floppy and IDE cables  

[GhostSix]

Hey all

 

Was watching the " 3dfx Voodoo 5 6000" video and it got me thinking, what old-ish tech do I still have.  As it turns out, I still had the PNY Geforce GTS 250 somewhere in my attic (and there was two connected via SLI - Lifted one out for a photo).  Which got me thinking what old tech have y'all got tucked away?