Show off your old and retro computer parts

[dcgreen2k]

Visited my parents' house and found the CPU my first PC came with, a Core 2 Duo E6700. I remember it being decently capable for work and light gaming, but I eventually replaced it with a Core 2 Quad Q6600 once I graduated from just playing Minecraft and flash games. I still have that system - might pop this CPU back in to see how it fares in 2024.

 

[UnseenUniverse]

Having to pull out this bad boy for my NAS Build. Still works great

 

[SimplyChunk]

Mirror from the Purchases thread. I got a few bits from my Uncle the other day when I went over there.  I won't share all the pics cause they're pretty generic looking but I'll snap the two things I'm keeping.

 

Generic internal 56k Modem PCI

 

A Trust 511 5.1 PCI Sound Card with a E3DX 6Channel chip  

 

Spoiler

 

A(nother  lol) Black Sata DVD Multi drive (I have quite a few of these kicking around now)

 

An IDE DVD Rom drive in Beige (might keep this cause of the colour but it won't be going in Frog)

 

Now the good stuff..

 

A StarTech.com PCI425USB 4 port add-in card

 

Spoiler

 

and a wonderful Liteon 40x12x48 IDE CDRW.  So paired with the Hercules CDRW (with the weird card readers built in to it)  I can finally have two CD drives both the same colour in Frog  

 

Spoiler

 

[GoStormPlays]

On 3/9/2024 at 10:10 PM, flibberdipper said:

Got this 16GB iPhone 5S with a pristine display... but beat to hell body. Not sure what I'm gonna do with it, right now it just runs a clean wipe of 12.5.7. iPhone SE2 for scale.

my 5S had glue seep under the screen after months of it being stuck in a bookbag right next to an open bottle of glue..

 

phone and touchscreen still works tho

 

 

harboring of the release dates mentioned here:

here's my piece of retro tech:

 

[GoStormPlays]

On 2/28/2024 at 7:35 PM, da na said:

XPS M2010 makes a 17" laptop look reasonable...

...and makes a 12" look like a scale model.

HDX Dragon/Pavilion 9300 is similarly massive - and all of that space is used well.

Its subwoofer alone is fist-sized.

 

 

Back to the XPS M2010, it unfortunately suffers from optical drive problems, keyboard problems, and horrendous backlight bleed.

As for the optical drive, the awesome raising/lowering mechanism works well, just the slot loading drive inside does not want to eject.

As for the keyboard, its internal rechargable battery is totally dead, and unfortunately that means it's a brick. Will try to replace it.

As for the screen, well... 

 

I can put up with the flaws of the XPS M2010 and HDX Dragon though, they're both remarkably performant machines with odd designs and I wouldn't be surprised if fewer than 1000 working units of each are still out there.

I've always thought of this laptop as if a desktop and laptop had a child... such a weird laptop.

[SimplyChunk]

7 minutes ago, GoStormPlays said:

here's my piece of retro tech:

 

My 1070 paired with my OC'd i5-6600k was perfection for 1080p@60 gaming back in the day and all for less than 700 quid (card, motherboard, CPU and 8GB DDR4) brand new

[GoStormPlays]

4 minutes ago, SimplyChunk said:

 

My 1070 paired with my OC'd i5-6600k was perfection for 1080p@60 gaming back in the day and all for less than 700 quid (card, motherboard, CPU and 8GB DDR4) brand new

oh, what a time

[da na]

18 minutes ago, GoStormPlays said:

I've always thought of this laptop as if a desktop and laptop had a child... such a weird laptop.

It's a little unfortunate that the keyboard takes up SO MUCH SPACE that the internal real estate is only about equal to a 15" laptop. Could've been such an incredible desktop replacement - could've fit two GeForce 7950 GTX in SLI rather than a single midrange ATi Radeon and a big keyboard

[GoStormPlays]

20 minutes ago, da na said:

It's a little unfortunate that the keyboard takes up SO MUCH SPACE that the internal real estate is only about equal to a 15" laptop. Could've been such an incredible desktop replacement - could've fit two GeForce 7950 GTX in SLI rather than a single midrange ATi Radeon and a big keyboard

feels like a similar concept to something you could do with a framework laptop further down the line

[da na]

Radeon X1800 die is so big Dell had to rotate it 15 degrees to fit it between the heatsink mounting holes

Card isn't all that great but it sure looks nice!

Bonus photo: 8800GTX MXM card, where the MXM slot couldn't supply enough power to run it so HP had to add 40 extra pins to the MXM connector

 

[pim69]

I have an old Seagate server hard drive, don't know it's capacity but it's HUGE and HEAVY.

[da na]

Cisco ASA5500 is just a little Windows 98 era system.

AMD Geode processor that's essentially an early Pentium 4 clone, there's the northbridge

Boots from an IDE compatible CompactFlash card and takes up to 512MB of 333mhz DDR memory

Bonus: XPS M1710 display color calibration

[da na]

21 minutes ago, pim69 said:

I have an old Seagate server hard drive, don't know it's capacity but it's HUGE and HEAVY.

Been looking for one of those that isn't outrageously expensive for years. Lovely drives. 

[pim69]

9 minutes ago, da na said:

Cisco ASA5500 is just a little Windows 98 era system.

 

 

Bonus: XPS M1710 display color calibration

I've used one of those color calibrators before borrowed from a friend. Worked really well! Even set it up on a tripod and colour calibrated a home made projector screen.

[SimplyChunk]

You may or may not remember I managed to snag my late Uncle's Baby AT machine a while back.  It's been in storage since then but today I took it out of storage and booted it up for the first time..It was quite surprising what was in there.  I was expecting maybe a 386 or a 486 with 4-8MB of RAM..but...

 

The purchase sticker on the bottom dates the PC back to '94 so my uncle must have put some serious chops in to upgrading this thing over the years.  I can't get past this screen yet as I can't find my PS/2 to AT converter for my keyboard.  I guess the next step is to stand down the monitor and open the little tower up and have a dig through the cables in there

[SimplyChunk]

I'll create a new post, sorry.  I've opened up the Baby AT system a cleared out the mess of ribbon cables to reveal the gooey goodness inside..

 

It has a Gigabyte GA 586ATV Rev 4B Socket 7 Motherboard in it. Which to Gigabyte's credit they still have the manual for online here..

https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-586ATV/support#support-manual

Compatibility in the manual list up to a Pentium 200 and a Pentium MMX 233

 

It also has this Cirrus Logic VC923/926 Fastware card with the GD5446 chipset which another forum lists as one of the first consumer grade parts with media acceleration built in

 

and finally a Creative Labs CT1690..The Creative Soundblaster Pro 2 from 1993..

 

I like this one cause it has the older Creative logo on the bigger chip and the newer one on the smaller chip

[SimplyChunk]

Also, sorry to be a pain, but I'll probably be selling most of the stuff out of these as the plan is to built one decent retro DOS 6.22 / Windows 98 SE machine out of all three of them.  Is it worth putting the stuff in the classifieds here first for a few weeks before listing them on eBay or shall I just head straight to eBay? (I know everyone is broke at the minute with the cost and living and such but then....so am I  )

[da na]

Just now, SimplyChunk said:

Also, sorry to be a pain, but I'll probably be selling most of the stuff out of these as the plan is to built one decent retro DOS 6.22 / Windows 98 SE machine out of all three of them.  Is it worth putting the stuff in the classifieds here first for a few weeks before listing them on eBay or shall I just head straight to eBay? (I know everyone is broke at the minute with the cost and living and such but then....so am I  )

It's worth giving classifieds a shot, managed to sell a few things before listing em on ebay

[Dabombinable]

4 hours ago, SimplyChunk said:

Also, sorry to be a pain, but I'll probably be selling most of the stuff out of these as the plan is to built one decent retro DOS 6.22 / Windows 98 SE machine out of all three of them.  Is it worth putting the stuff in the classifieds here first for a few weeks before listing them on eBay or shall I just head straight to eBay? (I know everyone is broke at the minute with the cost and living and such but then....so am I  )

If I had the space I'd buy the whole thing. Have 5 working retro PC at the moment, 6 if I get another AT case and an ISA VGA card (and that'd mean 2 Baby AT systems).

[Crunchy Dragon]

4 hours ago, SimplyChunk said:

Also, sorry to be a pain, but I'll probably be selling most of the stuff out of these as the plan is to built one decent retro DOS 6.22 / Windows 98 SE machine out of all three of them.  Is it worth putting the stuff in the classifieds here first for a few weeks before listing them on eBay or shall I just head straight to eBay? (I know everyone is broke at the minute with the cost and living and such but then....so am I  )

I'd definitely try the classifieds, or other circles(online or IRL) you're in where people might be interested.

[SimplyChunk]

50 minutes ago, Dabombinable said:

If I had the space I'd buy the whole thing. Have 5 working retro PC at the moment, 6 if I get another AT case and an ISA VGA card (and that'd mean 2 Baby AT systems).

I can't really sell the whole thing cause there's a couple of bits I want out of it.  Keep your eyes on the classifieds though  always open to deals for multiple items

[SimplyChunk]

Frog is starting to look even cooler now  I've installed the optical drive and the USB card from my paternal Uncle, the beige 5.25" floppy drive and the Soundblaster Pro 2 (for testing and seeing what the midi is like on it) from my maternal Uncle. The NOS beige 3.25" floppy drive from the shop haul a couple of weeks ago. and the IDE to Compact Flash (With a 1GB card in it) from eBay a while ago.  Didn't need any power extensions or adapters to get power to all the drives and cards.  Here's the pics..

 

Spoiler

 

 

yeah, yeah..I know, the colours are slightly off.  But it looks waaayy better than having the black drives in there...and not a DVD drive to worry my air cooled Voodoo 3 3000 AGP in sight  

[Skyesgaming]

5 minutes ago, SimplyChunk said:

Frog is starting to look even cooler now

Congratulations babe. I know how hard you've been working on this project getting Frog up and running. I'm so happy to see your progress and follow you along in your journey. 

Frog is looking amazing. I'm glad he's kept his little signature smile on his face. 

[luckybob77]

@SimplyChunk

 

You are likely going to want to pull out that USB 2.0 card.

 

USB 2.0 can generate SO MANY irq interrupts by just existing that it can tank cpu performance by a wide margin.  You can read more about it over here:  https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=72722

 

by all means, do test the performance.  it looks like you are running a pentium 3, so you might be okay.  But I would 100% benchmark the system with and without the USB2 card.

[SimplyChunk]

7 hours ago, luckybob77 said:

@SimplyChunk

 

You are likely going to want to pull out that USB 2.0 card.

 

USB 2.0 can generate SO MANY irq interrupts by just existing that it can tank cpu performance by a wide margin.  You can read more about it over here:  https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=72722

 

by all means, do test the performance.  it looks like you are running a pentium 3, so you might be okay.  But I would 100% benchmark the system with and without the USB2 card.

To be honest I assumed it was USB 1.1.  I'll pull it out after a few tests.  I did have a 2 port Hi Speed USB card in there before and it seemed fine.  But i was also running from an old dying ATA HDD then too so may not have attributed any slowdown to the USB.  But Quake ran superrr smooth on it with the card installed in software or hardware mode.  

 

On a side note though...reading the post you linked from vogons..my old super socket 7 failed misserably at Quake with a K6-2 so that might be why.  I'll bear it in mind while i test