Bought Radeon 9100 128 MB card for replacing of my old trusty Manli Radeon 8500LE (died because children were too close to my retro PC).
Unfortunately it's Sapphire Atlantis 9100 128 MB (almost like this card but with the PSG memory chips) so it have 250/400 MHz GPU/memory frequencies, not the 250/250. *Censored*.

Gamecollector wrote:

Bought Radeon 9100 128 MB card for replacing of my old trusty Manli Radeon 8500LE

I can't remember what model it was exactly, but I purchased a replacement for my 8500 when it started to struggle and made the mistake of going 'cheap'. When I benchmarked, whatever I had bought (must have been a 9000 or 9700 - I thought the '9' meant it was automatically a generation better!) was so pathetic I sent it back and carried on with my 8500. Still my favourite ever card.

I bought another Lucky Star LS486E. The board was $38 with an Am5x86-P75 so I could not resist.

The bundle is from the seller who had a Cyrix 586 120MHz on Ebay yesterday but luckily some other (member?) had already bought the Cyrix 586 or I would probably bought it as well. I say luckily as spending $57 on a 486/586 class CPU isnt something I feel totally comfortable with. 😀

Here is the sellers picture of the Lucky Star LS486E. The board is showcased on a special Russian purple anti-static towel not found anywhere else in the world.

I love these late-era 486 boards - they cram so much into them. My first one was an Abit PB4 (not to be confused with the P4B!), a very similar looking socket 3 PCI board. Not much space for cache chips though.

brassicGamer wrote:

I love these late-era 486 boards - they cram so much into them. My first one was an Abit PB4 (not to be confused with the P4B!), a very similar looking socket 3 PCI board. Not much space for cache chips though.

Yea they are awesome, I need to get some 1Mbit cache chips so I can upgrade boards like this one with only 4 "DIP32" cache sockets to 512KB. The 512Kb cache chips can be reused on boards with 8 "DIP32" sockets like my ASUS "VL/I-486SVGOX4" VLB board as I dont think its worth going for the full 1MB cache performance wise unless I for some reason feel I need 128MB memory.

4 GPUs from Germany. A$50 shipped, not bad.

Not retro. But it has taken me what, years? Something like, just to get hold of one. I finally own something made this decade... Unfortunately, that means I am now committed so buying old hardware won't happen so often for around a year until this is finished. Sucks, but these things have to be done. Motherboard probably coming next pay day, don't know, depends if I get around to listing some old parts on eBay and they sell before that time - I have a FIC VIP board, some surplus processors (Cyrix 486 mostly) and maybe some P4/Athlon 64 stuff to get rid of.

HighTreason wrote:

Ugh... God I hope I never have children. Luckily, the odds of me having them aren't very good. […]
Show full quote

Ugh... God I hope I never have children. Luckily, the odds of me having them aren't very good.

Anyway, I bought a video card. Every time I think I have repaired my Ti 4600 something else stops working and last time it took the Windows installation with it, today it went out again and my patience has run out. I may still fix it but it has missed the boat for this system. I was instead presented with a choice between a Quadro4 980 XGL and a Quadro4 900 XGL...

I chose the latter as my motherboard only has a 4x AGP slot and the rest of the specs are pretty much identical for both cards. Plus they are overkill for what I am trying to do, though it won't be as fast as my Ti despite being the same chipset - the Ti was factory overclocked. For what time the Ti was working the system was great to work with though, it was stable and had that snappy, responsive mannerism that only an Athlon can give. I then got bored and turned off the frame rate limiter in GTA, the car scales the whole length of the map in less than a second. Should be good for my old applications too then.

Try to reflow the solder underneath the GPU.. It also saved my ass on a GF4 TI4600 128MB i recently i had bought.. But didnt give me any signal on booting up the computer..
On these cards they used solder without or less lead in it.. So because its hard it can crack to often..

I use to repair to card an SMT reflow blower solder tool

Bought a MPU-401 BOB in CA today. 😀

philscomputerlab wrote:

4 GPUs from Germany. A$50 shipped, not bad.

Sounds very expensive to me. Banshee, GF4 MX, GF2 MX and TNT2 M64 i guess. ELSA Banshee is not that common, but $50 is too much... the rest is more or less worthless (at least I usually get cards like these for free). 😀

For example these two Radeon 8500 LE I posted yesterday costed me $2 each and no shipping (local pickup).

havli wrote:

philscomputerlab wrote:

4 GPUs from Germany. A$50 shipped, not bad.

Sounds very expensive to me. Banshee, GF4 MX, GF2 MX and TNT2 M64 i guess. ELSA Banshee is not that common, but $50 is too much... the rest is more or less worthless (at least I usually get cards like these for free). 😀

For example these two Radeon 8500 LE I posted yesterday costed me $2 each and no shipping (local pickup).

Two GF2 MX, one GF4 MX and a TNT. It's great that you can get free stuff, not everyone has that luxury. On the other hand wages are much better here...

Shipping to Australia can be quite steep. These cards cost USD 36 including shipping, this is a great price. Often, shipping costs alone can be more than that. The seller is also very good. Descriptions that actually are detailed and match the product, the cards all work, good packing and no dodgy "wait 30 days for PayPal funds to clear" shenanigans.

What 8500 LE did you post yesterday?

brassicGamer wrote:

I can't remember what model it was exactly, but I purchased a replacement for my 8500 when it started to struggle and made the mistake of going 'cheap'. When I benchmarked, whatever I had bought (must have been a 9000 or 9700 - I thought the '9' meant it was automatically a generation better!) was so pathetic I sent it back and carried on with my 8500. Still my favourite ever card.

Well, I knew about the "9100 = 8500LE with the same R200 chip and slightly redesigned PCB". But Sapphire is so Sapphire. "Downgrading memory" is the main feature of this *censored* company...
Bought the 2nd one as the backup, same p/n:1024-f149-2d-sa but with Hynix memory chips. Looks like they are 4ns ones (Hynix hy5bv281622dt-4) so theoretically I can flash the BIOS with standard 250 MHz/500(250) MHz frequencies.

Another trouble with Radeon 9100 - many utils detect it uncorrectly. GPU-Z - 4 ROPs, 4 TMUs. WtF? It's not Radeon 9000/9200/9250...
Everest Ultimate - 4 ROPs, 2 TMU per a ROP. Good.
Both programs shows 1 VS and 4 PS units. Again, WtF? IIRC R200 have 2 vertex pipelines...

Aren't the 8500 and 8500LE / 9100 very close? Meaning they have the same pipelines and memory width, but the 8500LE / 9100 are clocked a tiny bit lower?

philscomputerlab:

TNT and Banshee looks very similar. From your photo is seems you have the Banshee. Of course it is possible I'm mistaken. 😀
ELSA Victory II (Banshee)...........................................ELSA Erazor II (TNT)

Well, the truth is I got most of my GF2 era videocards 5 or more years ago. Prices of retro hardware increased a lot since then. To this day I still regret I didn't buy Voodoo5 5500 AGP which was for sale in local secondhand in ~ 2007 for $10. 🤣

R8500 LE:

havli wrote:

2x Radeon 8500 LE 128 MB by Hercules. I really like these Hercules VGAs... very good looking and perfect build quality. http://a […]
Show full quote

2x Radeon 8500 LE 128 MB by Hercules. I really like these Hercules VGAs... very good looking and perfect build quality.

R8500 / 8500 LE / 9100 are indeed very similar. Usually specs are following:
R8500 = 64 MB, 275/550 MHz
R8500 LE = 64/128 MB, 250/400-500 MHz
R9100 = same as 8500 LE

Ah yes, it's a Victory II. Wrong card then 😐 Thanks for spotting this 😀

I didn't have a banshee, so I think I'll just keep it.

Mr_ppp wrote:

Lots of retro goodies picked up recently

Sweet finds, dude! If you need something specific, don't be afraid to post about it so we can try and help you out... and vice versa. 😁

Picked up some random goodies today.

another extron dvs304 upscaler for some experiments with playing console and older computer games on my sony sd tv's. i have 2 of these now.

An nvidia quadro fx4500

a Soundblaster XFi with optical in and out built in

another kvm switch. This one is an 8 port one. I also got an obscure slimline sony av switcher that may work nicely with a multiple older console setup.

I also picked up a nice old school 56k us robotics fax modem.

I bought this bad boy recently for the case, which looked - based on the dodgy eBay photo's - to be in excellent condition. It's physically perfect, but I was disappointed to find that the paint job on the top is pretty scratched up.

It was advertised as a "386 Pentium", but fell somewhere in b/w as an ISA based 486DX 50. I haven't come across a 50Mhz 486 before so... yay? It was completely original - no sound card, 4MB's RAM, and a 130MB HDD. The battery has started to go but it still boots perfectly to DOS 6.2 + Windows 3.1. The HDD yielded a couple of games I don't have, a mass of the original owners documents (high school homework, short stories, and a diary), plus some retro VGA porn 😈

badmojo wrote:

...plus some retro VGA porn 😈

Classic! Decided not to attach it though? 😉

That case it very cool. And the DX-50 is definitely the one to have from that era. Surprised there's no VLB on the board though. No ill-effects from the barrel battery then?

badmojo wrote:

It was advertised as a "386 Pentium", but fell somewhere in b/w as an ISA based 486DX 50. I haven't come across a 50Mhz 486 before so... yay? It was completely original - no sound card, 4MB's RAM, and a 130MB HDD. The battery has started to go but it still boots perfectly to DOS 6.2 + Windows 3.1. The HDD yielded a couple of games I don't have, a mass of the original owners documents (high school homework, short stories, and a diary), plus some retro VGA porn 😈

Very nice! Lots of ISA slots, SIS chipset, CL graphics, Goldstar Prime 2 IO, what else do you want!