Show off your old and retro computer parts

[da na]

Unlikely hero came to the rescue tonight. Bought RimWorld on Steam, quite excited to play it but my workstation said "no, you can't have fun!" and just wouldn't install the game. But someone would...

Now I'm happily rimming. 

Quite enjoyable. Runs excellently at 1920x1200 on the Quadro FX4800, sadly does not utilize SLI:( 

As for sound, I've attached three tactile transducers to the back of the Apple monitor - one for left, one for right, and a considerably larger one for bass. The solid aluminum back panel of the screen sounds really nice when it vibrates, although the bass sounds... metallic at times. Had to tighten the stand because the bass actuator kept making the hinge slip and tilting the screen down at a certain frequency.

I tried the TouchSmart on the left first and the game was unplayable, I don't say that lightly. Seems to require DX10 and since the TouchSmart IQ770's GeForce 7600M had only DX9 support, all acceleration was handed over to the weak CPU. Of course it has no issues with a Core 2 Quad and fast GPU, though. 

 

[8tg]

Little bit of a ghetto monitor repair

the switch for this monitor doesn’t lock toggle, ie you press it, it immediately disengages and the monitor turns off

so who needs a switch anyway?

I don’t know what I’m doing btw

yes I know the danger voltages are in here, I was in fact born yesterday, when they started handing infants the pamphlets on the dangers of tube repairs 

here’s my shitter

at some point when I’m more motivated I’ll replace this with a different switch of some variety 

I don’t know how this works, it has a blue and brown and two grounds, all I’m going to do is bridge blue to ground and brown to ground on their respective sides 

done, glad I bought a $300 soldering iron I use twice a year to poorly do things like this 

it looks like shit but

 

It works fine 

 

I’ll probably get an outlet switch, that’ll probably be the laziest solution 

or I could find a replacement for the switch to drop in, but era switches will have the same problem of ancient brittle plastic 

or I can mount a different switch somewhere on the monitor, which is the easiest idea, if I knew what the wires were for, I don’t know why there’s two different connections or how they work, maybe they’re just two things that turn on and off at the same time? Maybe it switches between them? Who knows, I don’t want to wire a switch into this and just presume I want blue and brown touching 

I am not electrically inclined, and I don’t have a print of this monitors circuitry to figure out what they’re all for

 

[Bitter]

Ohm meter my friend, you can tell what's bridged inside the switch with one.

[luckybob77]

Oh, and make sure you get the $300 multi-meter, so it won't look out of place next to the $300 soldering iron. 

 

^.^

[Average Nerd]

9 hours ago, 8tg said:

I don’t know why there’s two different connections or how they work,

Brown is live, blue is neutral, the switch just connects each of them to one of the black wires.

When you replace the switch, wire it up so brown connects to one of the black wires, and blue connects to the other one. Which black wire goes to what colour doesn't matter, because it's AC.

[Bitter]

3 hours ago, Average Nerd said:

Brown is live, blue is neutral, the switch just connects each of them to one of the black wires.

When you replace the switch, wire it up so brown connects to one of the black wires, and blue connects to the other one. Which black wire goes to what colour doesn't matter, because it's AC.

It shouldn't matter or else they would be different colors but if it's a polarized plug it could matter in theory, best to check which is to which and wire it the same as it used to be.

 

I bet you could chunk in a nice big AT style power switch on the side of the case.

[SimplyChunk]

15 hours ago, 8tg said:

it looks like shit but

if it works it works

[KoalaTeaGamer]

Customer dropped off this behemoth for recycling. Dual Intel Xeon X5570 processors, 12 sticks of HP DDR3 ECC 1333mhz RAM, Nvidia FX 580 (I replaced it with a GT 1030 in the meantime). I'm taking this baby home to play with, no way I'm letting it get recycled.

[Bitter]

I see a lot of fans and I'm confused. Is that a blower on a memory daughter board? Is one of the CPU's just raw doggin a passive cooler? Are those 10K SAS drives with heat sink housings up there?

[da na]

1 hour ago, Bitter said:

I see a lot of fans and I'm confused. Is that a blower on a memory daughter board? Is one of the CPU's just raw doggin a passive cooler? Are those 10K SAS drives with heat sink housings up there?

The CPU not under the shroud has the front case intake fan blowing across it. Dell did that on many Optiplexes of the time as well. I wouldn't be surprised if there was originally a shroud to guide airflow there but it was lost to time.

And those high-RPM SAS drives absolutely need their own cooling, it is remarkable how spicy they get Typically placing drives horizontally in the airflow path of a case intake fan does the job, but giving them their own fans is better!

[Alvin853]

Does this classify as retro yet? 

 

[SimplyChunk]

51 minutes ago, Alvin853 said:

Does this classify as retro yet? 

 

does it run fortnite? that seems to be the 'test' for if it's retro or not.  Also is that an AM2? AM2+?  What CPU is it rocking? What GPU?

[Alvin853]

6 minutes ago, SimplyChunk said:

does it run fortnite? that seems to be the 'test' for if it's retro or not.  Also is that an AM2? AM2+?  What CPU is it rocking? What GPU?

That's a Socket 939 Athlon 64 X2 4400+ with 2GB of DDR 400 CL2 RAM. GPU is a GTX 260 896MB. 

Don't think it runs Fortnite 

[SimplyChunk]

1 hour ago, Alvin853 said:

Don't think it runs Fortnite

Then welcome to the thread

 

1 hour ago, Alvin853 said:

That's a Socket 939 Athlon 64 X2 4400+

I have a dual core Athlon somewhere  I think it's a 5000+ but not 100% sure.  I don't have a motherboard or anything for it though

[Alvin853]

27 minutes ago, SimplyChunk said:

Then welcome to the thread

 

I have a dual core Athlon somewhere  I think it's a 5000+ but not 100% sure.  I don't have a motherboard or anything for it though

That motherboard is a DFI nForce4 LanParty SLI-DR... back when NVidia was still making chipsets for AMD CPUs, and DFI was still making consumer motherboards. I'm amazed it still works, but that's what high end gets you. Onboard power and reset switch, debug LEDs, and you could switch between x16/x1 and x8/x8 mode for the PCIe slots, all of that was very unusual back in 2005.

 

That generation of dual cores didn't have a 5000+, the 4800+ was the highest regular one, and then you could get the FX-60 for some absurd price if you just wanted the best that money can buy. 

[Tan3l6]

1 minute ago, Alvin853 said:

DFI nForce4 LanParty SLI-DR

Damn, that used to be the best?

DFI was the elite at some point, like Winbond BH5 RAM... old times.

 

Edit: ah, the mobo is Socket 939, but still DFI.

[da na]

42 minutes ago, SimplyChunk said:

Then welcome to the thread

 

I have a dual core Athlon somewhere  I think it's a 5000+ but not 100% sure.  I don't have a motherboard or anything for it though

K9 series are great space heaters

[da na]

5 minutes ago, Alvin853 said:

That motherboard is a DFI nForce4 LanParty SLI-DR... back when NVidia was still making chipsets for AMD CPUs, and DFI was still making consumer motherboards. I'm amazed it still works, but that's what high end gets you. Onboard power and reset switch, debug LEDs, and you could switch between x16/x1 and x8/x8 mode for the PCIe slots, all of that was very unusual back in 2005.

 

That generation of dual cores didn't have a 5000+, the 4800+ was the highest regular one, and then you could get the FX-60 for some absurd price if you just wanted the best that money can buy. 

Rad. Didn't know nForce 4 was used for K9, latest I've seen an nForce 4 on personally is a K7 Athlon XP laptop. All of my K8/9 boards use the 6100/6150/7100 chipsets.

[SimplyChunk]

3 hours ago, Alvin853 said:

That generation of dual cores didn't have a 5000+, the 4800+

I'll have to dig it out to check it

[KoalaTeaGamer]

On 4/20/2024 at 1:13 PM, Bitter said:

I see a lot of fans and I'm confused. Is that a blower on a memory daughter board? Is one of the CPU's just raw doggin a passive cooler? Are those 10K SAS drives with heat sink housings up there?

That blower is for the memory on the daughter board and on that same daughter board is the 2nd CPU which also has its own fan. The CPU on the main motherboard just has that intake fan to cool it off and it does well enough I haven't had any issues with it so far. I made sure to reapply paste to both CPUs and I cleaned out the case as best I could and now it's my dedicated Minecraft server PC.

[kooshool]

My friend recently got a hold of these from his uncle's shop, are they useful or is it all junk?

 

 

[da na]

55 minutes ago, kooshool said:

My friend recently got a hold of these from his uncle's shop, are they useful or is it all junk?

 

 

Oh boy, those are some gorgeous chips.

I love the Texas Instruments DMD chips, those are so pretty.

 

Looks like pins are bent on a lot of em; the non-working ones could be sold for gold recovery. I'm sure many are still good, though

[luckybob77]

4 hours ago, kooshool said:

My friend recently got a hold of these from his uncle's shop, are they useful or is it all junk?

 

there is a HUGE potential for quite a LOT of money there.  100X more than the raw value of the gold.

 

the key word is POTENTIAL.

 

You would need to clean and test every chip.  The pins would need to be straightened, etc.  This take a lot of time, and a lot of working motherboards to test everything.  Some of those ship are EASILY worth $100 each.  But only if they are tested, working, and clean, with straight pins.  

 

As a pile, you'd be lucky to get $1 each.

[Pccooler7506]

20 years old now, Radeon X600 Pro. Got it while salvaging some decommissioned office pcs a few years back, not sure if it counts as “retro” yet though 

[WhitetailAni]

9 hours ago, Pccooler7506 said:

20 years old now, Radeon X600 Pro. Got it while salvaging some decommissioned office pcs a few years back, not sure if it counts as “retro” yet though 

Ooh does it have the silly 59 or 60-pin connector for running 2 monitors?

 

I wonder if some manufacturer created a dual screen display type setup thing that just had a DMS-59 or whatever the 60 pin one is called connector on it, instead of requiring an adapter.

 

 

On an unrelated note, my Pentium 3 PC has received some upgrades!

Spoiler

The old optical drive wasn't working properly in Windows, and my backup never spun up discs. So I have this monster of a drive now. CD and DVD burner.

It's not period accurate, but neither is the 5.25" floppy drive right below it.

 

I also got an LS-120 SuperDrive. I wanted to get an LS-240 but there aren't any available... sad. I wanted to try out their ultramegahigh density formatting of a regular 3.5" floppy - apparently it uses some form of SMR to squeeze 36MB out of the things? There was only ever one model sold in the US, which makes them really difficult to find... This one was only $55 at an antique mall.

I also have a Zip-100 right below it. Wanted 250 but 100 was free. It does the job.

 

The empty bay will be accepting a V2000Si Jaz drive. I have a 2GB Jaz disk with mystery contents, and I always wanted a Jaz drive.

 

I also removed a random 8.3GB hard drive that was in there with... nothing but the files to install a DirectX runtime on it. It just has an 80GB drive now - I needed to make space for the Zip drive.

 

I can't remember if I mentioned this but I also upgraded it to an 800 MHz Coppermine P3, from a 500 MHz Katmai. It also has a WinTV PVR-150 though I don't have drivers yet (optical drive was broken last time I turned it on).

 

 

I did finally figure out some of what was wrong with the NEC drive... but in the process I accidentally broke it.

The mechanism to load/unload a disc caddy is triggered by a button. Button pressed: mechanism go. Button released: mechanism stop. At some point the button had been pushed just a bit too far up and so it was being held for just a bit too long... which triggered the mechanism to release the disc caddy and so it just loops continuously.

I pulled the button out and attempted to manually operate it, which did work - I was able to get a disc caddy down onto the reader. However, something with its detection is broken as it never spins up the disk or attempts to read it.

 

I then went to put it back together, but the button that triggers the disc caddy mechanism broke (it's handled by a spring, and the spring snapped...) and so it's not really useful anymore...

 

On opening it up a capacitor fell out, so I'm guessing there's damage somewhere on its logic board - but I can't figure out how to take it apart. I put its pieces into a cardboard box for the future, but it's probably dead