kanecvr wrote:

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

That's some cool stuff you got there. Congrats.

kaputnik wrote:

These little babies arrived in the mail today: […]
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These little babies arrived in the mail today:

DSC_0043.JPG

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 😀

Nice.... They look cool. I really love these type of coolers were the fans are "sinked" into a ring.
Especially those copper CPU coolers from North-Q and Zallman.
Must look cool with both these VGA coolers and a CPU cooler in a build.

@Indrid Cold

Thanks for the pics! nothing comes from google searches, but at least I have something to compare to visually. Any luck with the hard drive? no pressure, but having the right drivers would be nice. put them into the vogons database too! ^.^

@kanecvr

That x800 is probably NOT mis-labeled. It was VERY popular of the time (and still is to a degree) to use the bios from a faster card to make the budget cards faster. People would take the faster xt bios and flash it to their pro card to see if the GPU can handle unlocking the extra pipes and speed. This never worked for me personally.

BSA Starfire wrote:

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 th […]
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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

Thanks, I will. First time seeing an opti chipset on a socket 7 board - I wonder if it's the last chipset they made.

brostenen wrote:

That's some cool stuff you got there. Congrats.

Thanks - it was a good week 😀

luckybob wrote:

That x800 is probably NOT mis-labeled. It was VERY popular of the time (and still is to a degree) to use the bios from a faster card to make the budget cards faster. People would take the faster xt bios and flash it to their pro card to see if the GPU can handle unlocking the extra pipes and speed. This never worked for me personally.

I'm aware of that but I think this is an actual X800XT. The PCB reads R42-TVD3B and the dirty label on the back barely reads "X800XT 256MB" 😉 It is indeed almost identical to my X800PRO, but my PRO version (also by powercolor, but it has different heatsink graphics) lacks the yellow connector and it has Samsung GC20 vram as opposed to GC16 on the XT. On the other hand pn 109-a26100-1 corresponds to X800SE, X800PRO AND X800XT models. Maybe they all use the same PCB?

It scores allmost 20% more then my Leadtek A400 (6800GT AGP 256MB) in 3dm03 too.

I bought some more crap! 😀

First a Radeon X1950XTX, I already have one but wanted one more for Crossfire benching. I have missed at least 3 X1950XTX cards going for 1-10 euro on the Swedish Ebay clone Tradera but this time I diddnt miss it, the price was ~8 euro.

I also won this ASRock K7S8X with a minimum bid of 1 SEK = ~0.1 euro. I only wanted the cooler as its perfect for many Socket-7 boards but Im sure I will find some use for the rest of the stuff.

Now people are beginning to take in XP-Era stuff as retro, just as I wrote about for aproximately 1 year ago. 😁
Personally I really have no interrest in this, after I tried to build a Socket 754 rig a couple of month's ago.
It really does not speak to me, yet I still drool on all these nice pieces of hardware. All look so sweet.

Skyscraper wrote:

I also won this ASRock K7S8X with a minimum bid of 1 SEK = ~0.1 euro. I only wanted the cooler as its perfect for many Socket-7 boards but Im sure I will find some use for the rest of the stuff.

Allways liked Asrock from the day I was hired to build computers for a living. I remember the K7S41 as a great board for what it was.
That board, looks a bit like a longer version of the K7S41. Hope it is just as stable.
Anyway... As a retro-XP rig. You can not go wrong with Asrock. Just be prepared to recap it after a couple of years of use.
Great find. Really a steal at that price. 😜

brostenen wrote:

Now people are beginning to take in XP-Era stuff as retro, just as I wrote about for aproximately 1 year ago. 😁
Personally I really have no interrest in this, after I tried to build a Socket 754 rig a couple of month's ago.
It really does not speak to me, yet I still drool on all these nice pieces of hardware. All look so sweet.

To me there is no good definition of whats retro or not!

This ASrock Socket-A board has official Windows 98 support so I guess it is a about as retro as an i845E motherboard or some other single channel memory Socket-478 motherboard. 😀

PCI-E DX9 cards are not that old but utterly useless by todays standards. The Radeon X1950XTX a somewhat rare video card however so I would not be surprised if the 8 euro I paid will rise to something like 50+ euro in 10 years time.

True...
I actually recall that almost all Socket-A boards from Asrock, have Win98 drivers.
Some of them, even has Os/2 drivers, and settings in the BIOS.
When moving into Asrock 478 boards, it is a different story.
As some of them do not have Win98 drivers. (Of course some have)

Skyscraper wrote:

I bought some more crap! 😀

First a Radeon X1950XTX, I already have one but wanted one more for Crossfire benching. I have missed at least 3 X1950XTX cards going for 1-10 euro on the Swedish Ebay clone Tradera but this time I diddnt miss it, the price was ~8 euro.

Very nice!

I remember reading some of the old reviews on GeForce 7 and X1800 series and AMD had the lead in terms of texture filtering quality.

These cards deliver some serious performance. 100 fps at 1600 x 1200 is not unusual depending on the game. PC gaming at its finest.

I should keep my eyes out for such a card, though I doubt it will be as cheap as yours on eBay Australia.

Still, compared to older stuff, you can get these newer XP era parts for little money. Now is the time to stock up a bit 😀

Given the stability issues I had with three brand new ASRock Z170 boards... safe to say I've sworn off them.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Very nice! […]
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Skyscraper wrote:

I bought some more crap! 😀

First a Radeon X1950XTX, I already have one but wanted one more for Crossfire benching. I have missed at least 3 X1950XTX cards going for 1-10 euro on the Swedish Ebay clone Tradera but this time I diddnt miss it, the price was ~8 euro.

Very nice!

I remember reading some of the old reviews on GeForce 7 and X1800 series and AMD had the lead in terms of texture filtering quality.

These cards deliver some serious performance. 100 fps at 1600 x 1200 is not unusual depending on the game. PC gaming at its finest.

I should keep my eyes out for such a card, though I doubt it will be as cheap as yours on eBay Australia.

Still, compared to older stuff, you can get these newer XP era parts for little money. Now is the time to stock up a bit 😀

When it comes to ATI cards from this generations the Radeon X1950XTX is the card to have just like the Geforce 7900GTX is the Nvidia card to have.

The Radeon 1950XTX is really worth to add to the collection as it's the fastest single GPU DX9 card ever made! 😀

I have the 7900 GTX and also the GTO. Nice cards, and with an extremely quiet cooler too.

Lukeno94 wrote:

Given the stability issues I had with three brand new ASRock Z170 boards... safe to say I've sworn off them.

They must have "lost it" somehow, it happens.... Socket-A from Asrock are good for what I have tried.
Get a K7s41 NOT the GX model, and you will have a good Win98 machine, if you want a cheap/ok Athlon machine.
I have had it running Win98, using a Matrox G400. I had it dual booting Os2/Win98.

When it comes to Socket478 they are good, still has some quirks, and generations after that, I can not say anything about.
I simply lack the hands on experiences regarding post Socket-A, using Asrock motherboards.

Lukeno94 wrote:

Given the stability issues I had with three brand new ASRock Z170 boards... safe to say I've sworn off them.

I believe it depends largely on "which" asrock motherboard you use, there are very distinct differences between the their bottom-end basic boards and their exotic ones, even for Z170. I haven't tried them myself but supposedly the asrock extreme series are some of the best motherboards sold today.

Skyscraper wrote:

First a Radeon X1950XTX...

Very nice. 😀 Is it possible to run CF without the ultra rare CF master card? In theory it should be... but last time I tried it using two X1900 XTX it didn't work very well.

havli wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

First a Radeon X1950XTX...

Very nice. 😀 Is it possible to run CF without the ultra rare CF master card? In theory it should be... but last time I tried it using two X1900 XTX it didn't work very well.

Yes and no, you still need the master card with the special cable to get crossfire working. People can go with the x1950 pro as they use the normal bridges that people are used to using but most cards usually only come with 256mb vram.

nforce4max wrote:

havli wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

First a Radeon X1950XTX...

Very nice. 😀 Is it possible to run CF without the ultra rare CF master card? In theory it should be... but last time I tried it using two X1900 XTX it didn't work very well.

Yes and no, you still need the master card with the special cable to get crossfire working. People can go with the x1950 pro as they use the normal bridges that people are used to using but most cards usually only come with 256mb vram.

You are correct, I had temporarily surpressed that fact.

Well sooner or later I will stumble on the master edition of the X1950XTX, until then the vanilla X1950XTX is still totally awesome. 😀

Crossfire without a master card should be possible though but it's probably not working very well as havli experienced.

http://it-review.net/article/hardware/gpu/686

http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/1000/softwa … ers/index3.html

Skyscraper wrote:

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Very nice! […]
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Skyscraper wrote:

I bought some more crap! 😀

First a Radeon X1950XTX, I already have one but wanted one more for Crossfire benching. I have missed at least 3 X1950XTX cards going for 1-10 euro on the Swedish Ebay clone Tradera but this time I diddnt miss it, the price was ~8 euro.

Very nice!

I remember reading some of the old reviews on GeForce 7 and X1800 series and AMD had the lead in terms of texture filtering quality.

These cards deliver some serious performance. 100 fps at 1600 x 1200 is not unusual depending on the game. PC gaming at its finest.

I should keep my eyes out for such a card, though I doubt it will be as cheap as yours on eBay Australia.

Still, compared to older stuff, you can get these newer XP era parts for little money. Now is the time to stock up a bit 😀

When it comes to ATI cards from this generations the Radeon X1950XTX is the card to have just like the Geforce 7900GTX is the Nvidia card to have.

The Radeon 1950XTX is really worth to add to the collection as it's the fastest single GPU DX9 card ever made! 😀

agreed , its a great card, if a little noisy. Ive actually found that apart from Doom3 and Source engine games , the X1900XT I was testing wasn't that much slower than the 7950 GX2 (it was slower, but not significantly) , while lacking all the compatibility issues the GX2 has.

Ive even ran Fallout3 at 1280X960 on the 1950XTX , can reach 60fps in alot of places .

Darkman wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

When it comes to ATI cards from this generations the Radeon X1950XTX is the card to have just like the Geforce 7900GTX is the Nvidia card to have.

The Radeon 1950XTX is really worth to add to the collection as it's the fastest single GPU DX9 card ever made! 😀

agreed , its a great card, if a little noisy. Ive actually found that apart from Doom3 and Source engine games , the X1900XT I was testing wasn't that much slower than the 7950 GX2 (it was slower, but not significantly) , while lacking all the compatibility issues the GX2 has.

Ive even ran Fallout3 at 1280X960 on the 1950XTX , can reach 60fps in alot of places .

That's all subject to each person's thoughts.. personally I've found the nvidia GTX 400 series to be the last fastest DX9 parts.. after that and starting with the 600 series, nvidia DX9 performance started to go down hill as cards got newer, at least in all my testing experience. And these cards still have native windows XP drivers so good for XP-DX9 setup. I have 3 water cooled (and big overclocked) GTX 470's, myself. But sadly different revisions as they don't all 3 work together, only 2 work together.