damn it,i just noticed 2 more caps were ripped off this board

Are Nvidia GTX295 and ATI Radeon HD5970 cards old enough now to be considered retro?

Either way, I have 2x of each of them on the way now for some old-school quad GPU fun.

At about 9% and 12% of the original price per card respectively, I think I didn't do too bad and it is the lowest price I have seen them go for. I'm not sure that the prices on these cards will go much lower at all.

BTW, the eBay seller that is selling the HD5970 cards for $74.99 has an auto-accept best price of $70 per card.

@Pabloz

oh yea that board needs a total re-cap. Looks like someone harvested caps from it for other projects. I have a similar board, but it's different enough that I can't say what caps you should use. push comes to shove, I'd replace the left two with 6.3v 1500uf and the lone one with the same size as its neighbors.

I've been enjoying my retro activities over the past few months. I've spent another small fortune, but am happy with my purchases. Thank goodness we're not allowed to discuss prices on here!

I have bought:-

1. A Roland MT-32 (finally). This was from Ebay from a UK seller with positive feedback and it was well packaged for the post.
2. Creative Labs Extigy USB Soundcard. I had one of these back in 2002/3, so this was purchased purely for nostalgia. It was in great shape with PSU, remote control and drivers CD.
3. On Gumtree I found the Creative Labs P5800 5.1 Speaker set for the above. Awesome price. Local pickup.
4. I had a SFF HP Prodesk 400 which had a faulty motherboard. This was thrown out at work. I bought a new motherboard and built it up with an i3 3.7 GHz CPU, 8 GB DDR3 RAM and a 240 GB SSD.
5. A Vortex 2 sound card - because Phil 😊
6. An Ensoniq Soundcape Opus Sound card

I tried to repair the facsia of my 386 case with some super strong glue. This didn't work.
I've set up the SFF PC above as a retro station. It works well with all that I've learnt. It' has the MT-32 attached which works beautifully with DOSBOX and ScummVM.
The Ensoniq card went in my Pentium 200 machine.
The Extigy is paired up with my P3 700 Windows XP machine.

My last "I'll put a bid on that. It probably won't win". Well it won. This is not quite what I wanted but hey. It's an Atari ST-e 1040. It comes with a monochrome monitor, lots of disks, midi stuff and a hand-pull scanner. Surely this has to be it now! 😒

I'm broke, but happy and have (almost) everything computer related I grew up with.

Pabloz wrote:

damn it,i just noticed 2 more caps were ripped off this board

pic removed

I had a 6BA+ III that died back in the day. I replaced it with a 6BA+ IV that I still have today 😀 The caps positioning looks identical.

The eight to the left of the slot 1 connector are all 6.3v 1000uf

The one below the parallel and serial ports is 6.3v 3300uf

And the one below it is 10v 1500uf

luckybob wrote:

@Pabloz

oh yea that board needs a total re-cap. Looks like someone harvested caps from it for other projects.

Robbing (shit) from Peter to pay Paul... These caps are not going to make anyone's project work well.

Fortunately the damage doesn't look too bad, I'd give it better than even odds of working after full re-capping.

The order for the pair of GTX295 cards I put it got cancelled. The seller's reason was that they had a forklift accident at the warehouse and it damaged the shelves.

Went ahead and ordered another single GTX295 for about the same price and am waiting to find another for a good price.

Also have an AGP HD3850 on the way now. 😀 Been waiting to get one for quite a while.

Shopping spree!

Bought HIGHSCREEN KOMPAKT SERIE III 286 - 16 on a whim. Intend to put Hercules card in it and replicate my old childhood computer. No time to work on it at the moment, though, so garage shelf it is for now.

Also, found another Siemens-Nixdorf PCD-4ND with working screen, so bought it on the spot in order to play with the one I have and try exchanging screens to pinpoint where the display problem is.

A thousand curses on sellers who don't bother to package things for shipping well:

That's an AOpen HQ95 ATX destop case, which was 'packed' in thin cardboard basically just stuck to the outside of the case with no further impact protection of any kind. Somebody at DHL decided to throw it around, resulting in that big dent. Fortunately a couple of minutes' bashing away with a hammer have gotten it into a state that while still not pretty at least is flat again and allows the case to close properly.

The upshot was the power supply - it wasn't advertised with one, but it was in there, a nice little FSP ATX-350PNR. Early P4 rather than P3/Athlon design, so not much on the 5V but two independent 12V rails. In other words not much use for retrocomputing but actually still more than serviceable for a modern PC. Which is good because I 'borrowed' the PSU from my daughter's i7-860 and needed a replacement before she arrives here in summer 😉

Other stuff:

An IBM 486DX4-100 (in dire need of a heatsink), two MSI MS-6905 Master Slot-Socket converters, one of which I intend to give the 3-pin mod to run Tualatin to see about completely maxing out my MS-6168 board. Oh, and an IBM Model M. Or not really 😜 - it's the 71G4644 'Quiet Touch' rubber-dome version. It's a weird experience. The mechanism of the keys is clearly squishy rubber-dome, and inferior to my regular cherry brown-based Leopold keyboard. But the shape of the IBM keys... with any other keyboard I need to be perfectly aligned in front to type blind, but without any practice whatsoever I could instantly type blind on the M even at almost 45 degree angle 😮

Of course, "no practice" is a bit misleading. No recent practice. Our first PC was an IBM PS/2, so I used Model M almost exclusively from 1988 to 1995 😉

cyclone3d wrote:

Are Nvidia GTX295 and ATI Radeon HD5970 cards old enough now to be considered retro?

I personally don't consider anything PCIe or x64 retro...yet. I imagine when I'm 50 in 2038 I'll probably be building an OTT retro version of my current Ryzen rig with a Threadripper and SLI Titans instead of the Ryzen 5 and GTX 1060 I have now though.

dionb wrote:

two MSI MS-6905 Master Slot-Socket converters, one of which I intend to give the 3-pin mod to run Tualatin to see about completely maxing out my MS-6168 board.

Be careful with that - while this board run Tualatin, VRM can get very hot.... close to 100°C. At least it did on mine 6168. Not sure why, perhaps Tualatin needs higher current than older PIII/Celeron.

These came today,

Sound blaster awe64 ct4380
Diamond stealth 2001 s3 trio64v+ 2mb

Spent about 40 euro including shipping

Hope this wil be good for DOS gaming, i managed to get my sound blaster live 5.1 working under Dos but the sound wasn't great.

Woolie Wool wrote:

cyclone3d wrote:

Are Nvidia GTX295 and ATI Radeon HD5970 cards old enough now to be considered retro?

I personally don't consider anything PCIe or x64 retro...yet. I imagine when I'm 50 in 2038 I'll probably be building an OTT retro version of my current Ryzen rig with a Threadripper and SLI Titans instead of the Ryzen 5 and GTX 1060 I have now though.

PCIe and x86-64 are over 14 years old already. That's as old as an IBM 5150 PC was in 1995. I'd call that old enough to be retro 😮

Of course the speed of development and - more relevantly - obsolescence has decreased significantly over the past 20 years. If you don't do HPC, video editing or high-end gaming you can easily use a 10-year old mainstream PC as main desktop, which would have been unthinkable 20 years ago. Nonetheless, if you take an entry-level So939 system with x86-64 and PCIe (1.x), you're beyond that horizon - running a current OS (say Windows 10) and regular productivity and web browsing software may be theoretically possible, but not with realistic usability, which makes it retro-computing in my book. Now, it's not an era that particularly interests me from a retro point of view (no more than it does you), but that's personal preference, not some hard law of what is worthy of being 'retro'.

That said, GTX295 and HD5970 cards are only a few years old and due to the effect of the current mining craze on GPU prices you even see them being used in new systems. I wouldn't call that retro - although I can imagine some people might want to collect them regardless.

havli wrote:

dionb wrote:

two MSI MS-6905 Master Slot-Socket converters, one of which I intend to give the 3-pin mod to run Tualatin to see about completely maxing out my MS-6168 board.

Be careful with that - while this board run Tualatin, VRM can get very hot.... close to 100°C. At least it did on mine 6168. Not sure why, perhaps Tualatin needs higher current than older PIII/Celeron.

Thanks for the heads-up.

It's inevitable that a Tualatin would draw more current than these boards were designed for. They were originally paired with P3-450 Katmai to about P3-600E Coppermine. That's max 19W TDP. The lowest TDP of any Tualatin is already 29W, so 50% more than that. Plus that's 29W at 1.45V. If we're effectively overvaulting the Tualatin, the current will stay the same so the total wattage will increase further.

I have a P3-1266S (and a Celeron 1400 just in case the 133MHz FSB I'm getting now proves unstable over time) I intend to test with, I'll watch the VRMs like a hawk 😀

OldCat wrote:

Bought HIGHSCREEN KOMPAKT SERIE III 286 - 16 on a whim. Intend to put Hercules card in it and replicate my old childhood computer. No time to work on it at the moment, though, so garage shelf it is for now.

That case is FANTASTIC!

AlaricD wrote:

That case is FANTASTIC!

I know, right? But in all seriousness, I liked it a lot visually and that is why I bought it. I'm glad somebody else appreciates it as well.

Put in an offer for another GTX295 and it was accepted. So now instead of 2x sandwich style boards, I should have 2x single board GTX 295s on the way. The newer single board ones are supposed to run significantly cooler and be able to clock higher as well.

So maybe it wasn't such a bad thing that my original order got cancelled.

Yes, GTX 295 single is a bit cooler (+quieter), and should OC more.
However, if you plan on dismantling them, Single PCB one has a crappy plastic cover latches (they break off really easily, when you try to mount it one side at a time).

Also : Dual PCB is A REAL PAIN to put together correctly.

Here's what I could do with my mixed QuadSLI on GTX 295s (I own both, Single and Dual PCB one 😉) :
3DMark 03 :

3DMark Vantage P-Score :

EDIT:
PS. Because of driver/software limitation, you need Windows Vista or newer OS, for QuadSLI to work on DirectX 10 class GPUs (ie. GTX 295/9800 GX2).

Currently I'm in my parents home, but even then some things managed to find me:

- Abit KN8 ultra, a nice socket 939 board, it doesn't have fancy extras onboard so Abit engineers went for a very neat and clear layout, it's a pity Abit is not around anymore. The original noisy northbridge active cooler has been replaced by a big copper passive one.
- 4 512mb high quality DDR400 memory modules, 2 OCZ and 2 Kingston. I have something already in my mind for the OCZs but the Kingstons were a nice extra not included in the original listing.
- A CoolerMasterV8 cooler, it's a triumph of form over function and nowhere near as effective as you'd expect for a big and expensive cooler from one of the best known manufacturers, but it's really nice to look at. It has an unknown Noctua fan instead of the original.
- Winfast Geforce 8600 GTS 256MB, I really like the cooler's look... and again is not as effective as you'd expect 🤣 .
- An Opteron 180, dual core @2.4 Ghz CPU, one of the fastest 939 chips available.

I paid 20€ shipping included for the lot and I'm very happy with it, everything is tested except the mobo and so far everything works; the Opteron is currently the cpu of the computer I have in my parents home although I'll probably end selling it as it can achieve very nice prices.

@dionb
I guess that a decade is only a few years as the 295 is getting on up there in age and the 5970 isn't too far behind, the cards will be rare long before the community accepts that these cards are retro in their eyes and by then they won't be easy to come by let alone cheap. I wonder how many here had the chance on getting a FX 5800 Ultra or a decent 5950 for peanuts only to pass it up and regretting it now, I wish that I was around and had the money to take advantage of those chances where the Voodoo 5 6000 was on eBay here or there for a meager $200 shipped.

*Grumbles about how ANYTHING pci-e is still too new*