As to why I never buy such items on eBay at all. Not even on the european part of eBay. 😉

bjt wrote:

Yep, that's a throttle. It's not that nice to use though, hard to make rapid changes in throttle setting.

Huh, then I guess I should rip open the bottom to see why it doesn't work.

I recently picked up a 5.25 floppy drive, as I only had one 😲 and a Roland SC-7 for some General MIDI gaming.

The drive looks like it could use a clean, and the SC-7 need some de-yellowing done though.

GoblinUpTheRoad wrote:

I recently picked up a 5.25 floppy drive, as I only had one 😲 and a Roland SC-7 for some General MIDI gaming.

sc7.jpg

The drive looks like it could use a clean, and the SC-7 need some de-yellowing done though.

Nice catch. 😀

The SC-7 is a great piece of equipment! 😀

Indrid Cold wrote:

Today, at local flea market, I've found external Creative SoundBlaster Live! with remote, I didn't know about this particular mo […]
Show full quote

Today, at local flea market, I've found external Creative SoundBlaster Live! with remote, I didn't know about this particular model - and a little PS/2 keyboard I must clean, small layout:

Then, a friend of mine, knowing about my love for old pieces of PC history and their preservation, gave me this big monster:

CMOS battery already coin (no Dallas chip fortunately), backup on MC tape, and much more! Now I'll investigate more on the content, I think it's a 386/486, the fact that the CPU has active heatsink makes me think that it might be good clocked... can't wait to give it a good cleaning and use it!

woot! I'm glad to see someone with that tape drive intact! I sent you a PM about it. It looks like a 100mhz 486 class system. nice score!

luckybob wrote:

Indrid Cold wrote:

Today, at local flea market, I've found external Creative SoundBlaster Live! with remote, I didn't know about this particular mo […]
Show full quote

Today, at local flea market, I've found external Creative SoundBlaster Live! with remote, I didn't know about this particular model - and a little PS/2 keyboard I must clean, small layout:

Then, a friend of mine, knowing about my love for old pieces of PC history and their preservation, gave me this big monster:

CMOS battery already coin (no Dallas chip fortunately), backup on MC tape, and much more! Now I'll investigate more on the content, I think it's a 386/486, the fact that the CPU has active heatsink makes me think that it might be good clocked... can't wait to give it a good cleaning and use it!

woot! I'm glad to see someone with that tape drive intact! I sent you a PM about it. It looks like a 100mhz 486 class system. nice score!

Thank you Bob, mail received - I'll try to help you as I can, but maybe the disk is dead... I can do more photos of drive + cable + controller for you, instead

Indrid Cold wrote:

Thank you Bob, mail received - I'll try to help you as I can, but maybe the disk is dead... I can do more photos of drive + cable + controller for you, instead

I appreciate it. I have a usb > ide converter that works GREAT for things like this. Paid for itself many times over.

luckybob wrote:

Indrid Cold wrote:

Thank you Bob, mail received - I'll try to help you as I can, but maybe the disk is dead... I can do more photos of drive + cable + controller for you, instead

I appreciate it. I have a usb > ide converter that works GREAT for things like this. Paid for itself many times over.

Here you are more pics about MC tape driver and controller card:

I've swapped the ISA video adapter found inside - REALTEK QUADTEL 87-90 RTG 3105 iEH - with a S3 Virge DX PCI card. I've installed one of my SoundBlaster 16 models (this one is the CT2890) and mounted CDRom drive in second IDE channel - slave of the first IDE channel I've mounted IDE2CF adapter instead... after I've put manually the correct config for the disk (Seagate) in the BIOS, now it is recognized well. Now the problem is with the CF set as slave of primary channel: It can not be properly recognized as commond disk (it's a 128MB model)...

Got this the other day! Tested and works great 😀

The fan produces a very unique sound.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

The fan produces a very unique sound.

Don't know if this is a good thing or not 🤣

MrEWhite wrote:

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

The fan produces a very unique sound.

Don't know if this is a good thing or not 🤣

I really like it. I should really start doing some cooler recordings. Might come in handy one day...

These little babies arrived in the mail today:

One to replace the incredibly noisy reference heatsink on the GF4 Ti4600 in my Athlon XP rig, and a spare one that might go on a GF FX 5900 I got in store, haven't really decided yet.

Not really a steal at ~$12 each, but those are getting hard to get your hands on brand new in box here, don't know of any Swedish retailer still keeping them in stock at this point. Brand new fan bearings and knowing for sure that no accessories are missing is well worth the price premium compared to getting used heatsinks, if you ask me at least. Oh, and look at it whichever way you will, $12 is still only about 1/3 of the normal Swedish retail price back in the days 😀

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

I really like it. I should really start doing some cooler recordings. Might come in handy one day...

Thought I'd heard everything when my old boss started talking about recording different hot bulb engines, but this takes the price really! You, sir, have reached the pinnacle of perversion 😁

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Got this the other day! Tested and works great 😀

These cards use leadless soldering so they will all die and go to an owen...

I believe X850 XT is not ROHS, at least mine looks that way.

It's been a productive week for me - retro-hardware wise. Incoming wall of text and pictures:

I bought 5 beige ATX cases really cheap - they have a classic (if not retro) look about them. I've installed my Abit ST6 and BE6-II machines in two already. Five is actually 3 more then I needed, but they looked so cool and I got them so cheap I couldn't help myself.

Apart from the beige ones I bought two black Antec (Two Hundred?) cases for my classic builds (LGA775, socket 939, etc) - same seller, very very cheap. A little scratched up but nothing a can of matte black, a grit 400 sanding sponge and some elbow-grease won't fix:

Component-wise I got lucky and found an AMD K5-PR133 + PC-Chips 519 mainboard equipped with an Opti VIPER chipset:

The K5 benchmarks a little over a 133Mhz pentium in speedsys - the Opti viper isn't bad either. Contrary to what I read here on the forums on it being very slow compared to the i430, it gets a respectable ~110mb/sec memory read speed. I haven't run any game benchmarks on it yet, but as soon as I get some more variety I'll make a socket 7 chipset benchmark thread.

Two Abit AS8 and two AS8-V i865 LGA775 mainboards - unfortunatly two have bent pins - one's really bad, the other one seems salvageable.

A box of CPU's from a friend (used to be part of his collection but he gave up on the hobby):

The box contains several socket 478 CPUs, from 1.5 to 3.2 GHz, a socket 939 Athlon 64 X2 3800+, a socket 940 2.8GHz opteron, a 1200Mhz tualatin, a socket 370 750MHz PIII and 566? MHz celeron, a 300MHz K6-2 (66MHz FSB model), two Pentium MMX chips, one 166 and one 233, a 1200MHz duron and a few mobile CPU's. Not pictured are socket A CPUs ranging from 1500+ to 2500+.

Also present in the same box are some SLOT 1 CPUs - 233Mhz PII, 550MHz P3, 600MHz P3, 800MHz P3, 9333Mhz P3 and 1000B P3 - the last 3 having 133Mhz FSB 🙁

Some 40 and 80GB ATA and SATA drives:

And some video cards:

- AGP Radeon X800XT (500/1000, 16p) by Powercolor mislabeled as x800PRO:

- MSI Geforce4 Ti4600 - an nvidia reference design:

- ECS SiS 315 - unfortunatly dead - I have a hunch the mosfet is kaput. I'll try replacing that and see maybe I can get it going.
- S3 Savage4 - working

- Hercules radeon 9800PRO - artefacts 🙁 - needs a reflow. It will run and complete benchmarks tough.
- Radeon 9600 - working

- Hercules Radeon 9000PRO
- Hercules Radeon 7000VE

- Riva 128ZX AGP

And now my proudest acquisition (drum roll please) - a working 386-DX40. Haven't had time to mess around with it, but I did runs speedsys and it scores about 10.something.

kanecvr wrote:

I
The K5 benchmarks a little over a 133Mhz pentium in speedsys - the Opti viper isn't bad either. Contrary to what I read here on the forums on it being very slow compared to the i430, it gets a respectable ~110mb/sec memory read speed. I haven't run any game benchmarks on it yet, but as soon as I get some more variety I'll make a socket 7 chipset benchmark thread.

It's orginally an early Pentium Socket 4 chipset upgraded for Socket 7 usage by a super-cheap dodgy mainboard manufactorer (PC Chips). It's the slowest board I've ever tested:
Socket 5 & 7 Motherboard VGA Benchmark comparison

Also if you could bench boards, please feel free to add to the bench linked above (requirements are not hard to meet). Need more than me and RacoonRider 😉

PCbench result sounds about right - I got about 26-27 fps. I remember thinking my Cyrix 586 can do better.

OPTi Viper!!!! Thats's awesome, I had one of those with a Cyrix 6x86(I don't recall the speed grade but possibly 150+) We had that for years until the house was hit by lightening and it got well and truly cooked down the ISDN line. Thankfully the HD survived as i kept all my word documents on it(& tapes, but the tape reader was cooked too!), was replaced by a IDT winchip C6 system still on win 3.11 that was solid as a rock too. Wasn't into gaming at the time but we did have a SEGA Dreamcast at home, Soul Calibur was great fun! Wasn't until 2001 I went modern with a Pentium 4 1.5 GHz Compaq willamette when I started as staff for a posh magazine from the newspaper I worked for previously, at the same time I bought a AMD Duron 650MHz system with windows ME & S3 TRIO 3D/2X(LOL) for my own private work and family stuff. I swear that Duron was at least as quick as the P4!!! Looking at my PC history, I've always been a cheapskate, even today I use a AMD FX system(that i also think is brilliant!).
Have fun with the Opti Viper, that brought back some memories.
Best,
Chris

Scored a XFX 7900 GS agp for $25 shipped 🤣, came in the mail and was pretty much mint 😎