Show off your old and retro computer parts

[Dabombinable]

1 hour ago, ChonkerFox said:

Got my home made Floppy cable measured and done!  I'm not sure if it works yet but have very carefully made sure that Pin 1 on each connector matches with the brown wire in the ribbon

 

This cable will make the 5.25" Floppy Drive A:\ and the 3.5" Drive B:\ Which is what I wanted.  (I shall then 'Swap' them with the option to in the BIOS) It all loops around the back of the drives nice and keeps it out of the way of all the other stuff that's got to go in there.  

This is what it looks like fitted.  Nice, Neat and out of the way!

You mad man. I was ecstatic to find my lone cable that didn't make the 5.25" drive A.

[SimplyChunk]

17 minutes ago, Dabombinable said:

You mad man. I was ecstatic to find my lone cable that didn't make the 5.25" drive A.

I'm gonna 'swap' them in the BIOS hopefully.  Also i could always make a new cable if i run in to issues 

[SimplyChunk]

1 hour ago, Dabombinable said:

You mad man. I was ecstatic to find my lone cable that didn't make the 5.25" drive A.

I know where to get all the parts now i could always make you one if you need it

[SimplyChunk]

1 hour ago, Dabombinable said:

With that being said, if you end up doing a lot of tinkering, the same/similar type of generic silicon thermal compound can be had in 50g tubes (the brand of my stuff: Chemtools CT-R001-SI-S30-PT)

I've got a large tube of Chalnziye HY 510 also.  so might give that a try first before i bust out the MX4.  There's a Youtuber i watch called BudgetBuilds that uses it a lot.  Also on looking at my V3 3000 a bit more i may just be able to screw the 40mm fan that's on this cooler straight on to that.  saving the need to have to shrinkt the hole spacing on the other from 60mm down to the voodoo's 57mm

[SimplyChunk]

Used the Chalnziye HY 510 in the end.  We'll see how it performs.  Also decided to use the heatsink that came with it, as on closer inspection, it's already been modified to fit.  Spacing and a little bit out of the top post to allow for RAM has been done.  I was under the impression it was just a stock V3 2000 cooler on it.  So it also looks like I'll just be able to screw in the 40mm fan from the other cooler.  Happy days.

 

Got the heatsink and the die cleaned up really nice

 

Also, in other news I have my two custom IDE ribbons as well as the custom Floppy cable done and installed.  It looks a little messy and i may re-do the HDD one as it's a little short.  but it saves so much space as compared to the stock Ribbon cables i was using

[CaptainCakewalk]

A couple of my older retro iMacs: The G3 was bought about 6 months ago for a shade under £100 and the eMac is actually a one owner, boxed example which I got for £125 (including shipping) with a bunch of useful software too. I use both of these machines rather often and the screen on the eMac is seriously amazing and has a max refresh of 139Hz at 800x600 and the lowest is 72Hz. I have a lot of other retro tech as well, I'll try and post some more here in time, and even have a Socket A machine which is used almost daily for games and the like.

 

As a side-note: The eMac weighs over 20KG/roughly 50 lbs, and it has caught me out more than a few times. It's definitely a chunky little machine.

[SimplyChunk]

Little update on the custom IDE and Floppy cables.  Out of the 8 connectors i put to the three leads I got ONE around the wrong way.  It's the motherboard end of the Floppy cable.  I just need to carefully peel it off and reattach around the other way.  I know it's this cause now both my floppy drives have a light on constantly.  The IDE cables though they work a treat.  Here's a vid of it playing some CD Audio

 

[8tg]

[iHardware Shelden]

2 minutes ago, 8tg said:

-snip-

 

 

What are the specs on this again? I can't find the original post

[8tg]

2 minutes ago, iHardware Shelden said:

What are the specs on this again? I can't find the original post

2ghz P4 on a soltek SL85-MIR, with 2gb of Corsair XMS Pro LED 400mhz CL2 DDR

GPU is a 128mb pixelview PDFII GeForce FX 5900xt

it uses a 32gb compact flash card with an ide adapter for storage 

The psu is an apevia aspire 500w unit from 2003/2004, the cooler is an Activecool AC4G peltier cooler with pci slot mount power supply, and it’s inside a ZZEW c2p

[iHardware Shelden]

Just now, 8tg said:

2ghz P4 on a soltek SL85-MIR, with 2gb of Corsair XMS Pro LED 400mhz CL2 DDR

GPU is a 128mb pixelview PDFII GeForce FX 5900xt

it uses a 32gb compact flash card with an ide adapter for storage 

The psu is an apevia aspire 500w unit from 2003/2004, the cooler is an Activecool AC4G peltier cooler with pci slot mount power supply, and it’s inside a ZZEW c2p

Freaking love it! I had one of those power supplies at one point, wish I still had it. Looked so good with the EVGA 780i board I had  

[RetroSwim]

Hi all! Pretty new on this forum and thought I'd kick things off with a retro tour!

 

I posted my Teradrive last year, but y'all deserve something more meaty than just one PC

 

First is my favourite PeeCee of the bunch. My dual Pentium 233MMX.

 

With such fabulous specs as:

 

Pentium MMX 233MHz (SL293) x2

Tyan S1564D Tomcat IV (Intel 430HX) motherboard

64MB EDO DRAM

Matrox Millennium II 4MB PCI Graphics

Adaptec AHA-2940 PCI SCSI Controller

Intel Pro/1000GT PCI Gigabit NIC

Prototype Sound Blaster AWE64 Legacy (More Info)

IDE to CF adaptor + 4GB CF Card

NEC 16x SCSI CDROM

Epson Dual 3.5" + 5.25" Floppy Drive

(A normal 3.5" floppy drive, and a HDD, which are not connected)

 

Dual boots Windows 95 and Windows NT 4 SP6

 

 

My close second favourite is my Socket 370 Pentium 3 system!

 

Endowed with:

 

Intel Pentium III-S 1.4GHz (SL657)

Gigabyte GA-6OXT (Intel 815) motherboard

128MB PC100 SDR SDRAM

Leadtek GeForce 2 GTS 32MB

Creative 3D Blaster 2 (Voodoo 2) 12MB x2 (SLI)

Intel Pro/1000GT PCI Gibabit NIC

Turtle Beach Montego 2 (Aureal Vortex 2) PCI Sound Card

40GB IDE HDD

Pioneer DVD-RW

Some super nifty cold cathode neon lighting!

 

Runs Windows 98SE with Unofficial SP3

 

 

Next cab off the rank, an attempt to re-create the PC I had at the peak of my LAN phase

 

Athlon XP 2600+ CPU

Asus A7-N8X (nForce 2) motherboard

1GB PC3200 (400MHz) DDR SDRAM

AOpen GeForceFX 5600 256MB (I had a Sapphire Radeon 9800XT in the day, but hoo boy those prices!)

Onboard NIC and Sound

40GB IDE HDD

No optical (at the moment)

 

 

Something of an oddball is this AMD K6 franken-puter

 

AMD K6-2+ 500MHz CPU

MSI MS5169 Super Socket 7 motherboard

128MB PC100 SDR SDRAM

ATi RageXL 8MB PCI VGA

Canopus Pure3D (Voodoo Graphics) 6MB 3D Accelerator

Matrox M3D (NEC PowerVR PCX2) 4MB 3D Accelerator

Creative Labs AWE64 Gold ISA Sound Card

Generic Realtek RTL8139D 10/100 PCI NIC

20GB IDE HDD

 

Dual boots MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 98SE

 

 

And rounding out complete, built PCs, my little DOS gaming slugger

 

AMD Am386 DX-40 CPU

Jetway ISA motherboard (unsure model number)

16MB (4x4MB) FPM SIMMs

XT-IDE rev3 HDD Controller

IDE-CF Adaptor with 4GB CF card

Diamond Speedstar Pro (Cirrus Logic CL-GD5426) 1MB ISA VGA

Creative Labs Sound Blaster 1.5

Gravis UltraSound Classic 3.4

3Com EtherLink III 3C509 ISA NIC

 

Runs MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11

 

 

After this, there's a few "OEM" PCs and non-PC computers:

 

Tandy 1000RL:

AMD 8086 @ 9.45MHz

768KB DRAM

Tandy Graphics and Sound (IBM PCjr Compatible)

20MB 8-bit IDE HDD

720KB 3.5" Floppy Drive

 

Macintosh Quadra 700:

Motorola 68040 @ 25MHz

96MB FPM DRAM

Quantum Fireball 4.3GB SCSI HDD

Asante 10Mbps NuBus NIC

 

Power Macintosh G3:

PowerPC G3 @ 233MHz

128MB PC66 SDR SDRAM

ATi 3D Rage II+ (unsure VRAM)

 

Also an Apple IIgs, nothing to report except a 1.5MB RAM upgrade!

 

 

I have a Sega Teradrive Mk2, which I posted last year.

 

I have other non-PC computers too.

 

There's an iMac G4, a complete-in-box PowerBook G4 Titanium, my ZX Spectrum, and 1 more on top of that right bookcase! (Can you guess what it is?)

 

 

Of course I have the staples, like a C64 and Atari ST

 

 

Oh the Amiga?

 

Nothing too fancy!

 

Commodore Amiga A1200 (Stock CPU - Motorola 68EC020 @ 14MHz)

Blizzard 1230 MkIV - Motorola 68030 @ 50MHz with FPU

2MB Chip RAM, 128MB Fast Ram (on accelerator)

Generic 10Mbit PCMCIA NIC

 

 

I'll wrap this up with something really neat.

 

SiliconGraphics Indigo2:

MIPS R4000 CPU @ 100MHz

IP28 Backplane

GR3-XZ Graphics

256MB FPM DRAM

ZuluSCSI with 32GB SD Card

1x SCSI CD-ROM

 

 

Um, that's it. I have many consoles, but everyone knows what consoles look like haha.

Edited August 17, 2023 by RetroSwim
Fix some typos

[Dabombinable]

5 hours ago, iHardware Shelden said:

Freaking love it! I had one of those power supplies at one point, wish I still had it. Looked so good with the EVGA 780i board I had  

Apevia ATX-AS500W Clear Power Supply 859813001847 | eBay

I'd get it myself if I hadn't splurged on other parts.

[luckybob77]

that PSU was junk when it was new.  its only "quality" was the clear case.  I would mod it with new internals if I was to make a reliable system out of it.

[Dabombinable]

3 hours ago, luckybob77 said:

that PSU was junk when it was new.  its only "quality" was the clear case.  I would mod it with new internals if I was to make a reliable system out of it.

As long as the PCB is of good quality (binned my Thermaltake unit instead of fixing it due to that reason), it'd still be ripe for having better capacitors/ones of the correct physical size installed.

My 200W Codgen was using a lot of capacitors that were definitely the correct rating but did not even fill half of the footprint on the silkscreen (meaning that there was less area for the cap to dissipate heat - really important with 85^oC caps). Went through replacing as many as possible with 105^oC caps at the same capacitance and similar voltage (6.3V uprated to 10V in some instance), and the results have made it rock solid reliable and the voltages under load are bang on for 3.3V, and only +0.1V on the 5V and 12V rails. It also runs cooler.

[iHardware Shelden]

12 hours ago, Dabombinable said:

Apevia ATX-AS500W Clear Power Supply 859813001847 | eBay

I'd get it myself if I hadn't splurged on other parts.

This thread makes me want to spend money I don't have

[SimplyChunk]

12 hours ago, Dabombinable said:

Apevia ATX-AS500W Clear Power Supply 859813001847 | eBay

I'd get it myself if I hadn't splurged on other parts.

 

7 minutes ago, iHardware Shelden said:

This thread makes me want to spend money I don't have

Well they just upped the price on it.  i swear it was at $58 dollars when i first looked.  now it's at $69

 

My mistake.  don't know what happened there

[iHardware Shelden]

Finally got the parts I needed to throw the socket 423 board together as a system, brand new CPU cooler from cooler master. The pre-applied thermal paste was still good even for being 23 years old... I still removed it and put some new stuff on.

 

[SimplyChunk]

I now have an actively cooled Voodoo 3 3000  

[Bitter]

1 hour ago, ChonkerFox said:

I now have an actively cooled Voodoo 3 3000  

If you're going to be doing any serious OC'ing on it make sure you stick a heat sink on the power FET which on that board I *think* is the chip between the caps C25 and C50 and is labelled starting with E215 etc. On my V3 2K PCI the power FET overheating was the limiting factor, mine was screwed down so I unscrewed it and let it hang in air with a small heatsink bolted to it but idiot me bumped into it and broke it off, didn't know how to fix it and tossed the card sadly. It was only PCI though so meh. The additional cooling got me a little higher on the OC and made a nice difference. I also had an 80mm fan on long screws (stilts for air flow off the bottom of the case) at the bottom of the case to blow air at the whole card to cool everything a little extra, didn't get it to go faster but it seemed like it crashed less but it's possible that I was also cooling something on the motherboard that made it less crashy. If your board has a divider for AGP speed and you're bumping into a limit where the card OC isn't doing anything see if it'll tolerate a little more AGP Mhz, it can't hertz!

[SimplyChunk]

44 minutes ago, Bitter said:

If you're going to be doing any serious OC'ing on it

I might look in to OC'ing it one day but for now I'm happy with the performance of the whole system.  I'm tearing it all down to separate components today/tonight and I'm going to go through my checklist i got for it one by one.  by the time I've finished that it should be one hell of a Windows 98 machine.  I've still got my eyes open for an IO shield for it but that's no biggy if i can't find one.  Once it's torn down I'm going to drill the rivets on the back of the case and take the top panel off.  Clean and sand that down along with the two side panels.  mask up the unpainted areas on them and hit them with some RAL 1013 I've bought.  I got a couple of Magic erasers I'm going to use on the plastics.  I'll install the 80mm in the front for some air intake (there's no exhaust mount) There's only two 3-pin fan headers on the board so I'll have to split the front one between the 80mm intake and the 40mm on the card.  I'm going to use this other quiet new 40mm on the CPU heatsink as the one that's on their is really rattly.  I'll also spin that floppy connector around/make a new lead which ever it needs.  Then it's just a case of buttoning it up, riveting on the top panel and cleaning the monitor and keyboard and it'll be complete  Apart from all the software I'm going to have to fix to get a proper DOS mode going on it.....EMM386 anyone? 

[iHardware Shelden]

These socket 423 systems are "fun" mainly because of the power supply situation, everything works great except since I don't have the 1x6 pin connector with the 3.3v and 5v the PCI slots don't seem to function resulting in no sound card or ethernet controller being detected.

 

Guess I might need to hunt down a Pentium 4 power supply!

 

[da na]

25 minutes ago, iHardware Shelden said:

These socket 423 systems are "fun" mainly because of the power supply situation, everything works great except since I don't have the 1x6 pin connector with the 3.3v and 5v the PCI slots don't seem to function resulting in no sound card or ethernet controller being detected.

 

Guess I might need to hunt down a Pentium 4 power supply!

 

Awesome graphics card. Quadro FX 3000? 

[iHardware Shelden]

1 minute ago, da na said:

Awesome graphics card. Quadro FX 3000? 

Spot on! 

[superbike81]

My X68000 setup.