My latest 2 hardware purchases.

Both are sellers pics although I have already received and tinkered with the athlon. Very interesting (and to my ear quite good) DOS compatibility on the sound.

The SS7 board is untested but looks ok and was a good price if it works. I really wanted an ATX one. CPU is included with it but unknown spec.

About the Voodoo 5, is the excessive price really worth it? It seems one could get a Voodoo 3 (which is what I currently have) for games up to '99 or so, and a GeForce for later games.

LewisRaz wrote on 2020-08-09, 11:59:

Both are sellers pics although I have already received and tinkered with the athlon. Very interesting (and to my ear quite good) DOS compatibility on the sound.

Nice! What is the model of your Athlon board?

cde wrote on 2020-08-09, 12:15:

About the Voodoo 5, is the excessive price really worth it? It seems one could get a Voodoo 3 (which is what I currently have) for games up to '99 or so, and a GeForce for later games.

LewisRaz wrote on 2020-08-09, 11:59:

Both are sellers pics although I have already received and tinkered with the athlon. Very interesting (and to my ear quite good) DOS compatibility on the sound.

Nice! What is the model of your Athlon board?

its a Chaintech 7AJA. Without the cmedia sound chip. (It has Sigmatel STAC9721T)

I thought I posted this last night?
Yesterday was a good day. I made a long drive for this case, and ended up getting it, and ended up buying a whole collection of parts as well. This will be the future home of the Asus P4P800 system that I got as a freebie on Craigslist last year.

Nooooooo! 🙁

I bought this for my Pentium Pro build, and needless to say, it did not survive shipping.

Woolie Wool wrote on 2020-08-09, 14:37:

Nooooooo! 🙁

I bought this for my Pentium Pro build, and needless to say, it did not survive shipping.

My HD 2600xt came wrapped in news paper. 🙁

I just impulse-bought an Advantech PCA-6751 Pentium MMX ISA SBC. This model seems to be easy to find right now and it's not hard to find cheap ISA backplanes. It's a great way to have several generations of computers in the same case: just swap out the CPU card for the type of PC you want to run. I already have a 486 class ISA SBC and highly recommend this as an alternative for folks having a hard time finding a good motherboard.

Edit: ebay link got scrubbed. I guess I should have read the rules. Here's a pic instead.

Woolie Wool wrote on 2020-08-09, 14:37:

Nooooooo! 🙁

I bought this for my Pentium Pro build, and needless to say, it did not survive shipping.

I really wish sellers would actually package stuff up properly. Time to get a refund.

Got myself a nice little slug!!!

I was looking for a 5x86 for cheap and ran into this wannabe 486 for practically nothing. I never had a 486sx before so I just had to have it 😁

After unpacking I put it onto a VLB board with 8MB ram, 256kB cache, a Trident TGUI9420 VLB 2MB and some 4MB cached VLB hard disk controller.

It appears this one runs stable from 20MHz all the way up to 40MHz. At 25MHz benchmarks it reaches performance about one third of the DX2-66 the board normally has.

With int+ext cache disabled it gets to 1% to 5% of the cached, comparable to the 286. Hilarious to see PCPlayer complete in just 7 frames :p

Got two upgrades in:

An Edifier R1100 speaker set to replace my vintage, plastic, yellowed speakers. The R1100 has a reasonable price (~70 euros), at least for what I like to spend on retro gaming. The quality improvement is huge. Of course SC-55 music sounds much better, but also things like the Doom chaingun and FM music in general sound much less tinny/annoying. Also these speakers have an aux in that's mixed into the standard signal, which is great for MIDI devices.

The other upgrade was a Noctua 80MM fan for my machine's power supply. A huge pain in the ass to install as the complete PSU had to come apart, although the fan did plug right in without any soldering. The difference in noise level is huge, my retro PC used to be noisier than my main PC, now that's no longer the case.

^^ Looks like you have some more vertical space for some midi modules. MOAR ROLAND! 😀

Not everything in the pile of stuff I bought yesterday qualifies as retro, but this does.

It does have some bulging caps, and he wasn't able to find the I/O plate (and I'll have to find a northbridge haetsink). But both an XP2200 and an XP2500 were included, so I should have a Socket A system running soon.

I built my parents a system around that motherboard back in the day it was super stable and a fast system. I should still have that board somewhere in my storage area.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2020-08-10, 01:12:

I built my parents a system around that motherboard back in the day it was super stable and a fast system. I should still have that board somewhere in my storage area.

I have a soft-spot for EPoX boards. I've never had a problem with one - run stable like a champ.

Same here I always tried to get either a Epox or Abit motherboard as they always just worked with little fuss.

The 7600 GS seems to be in good working order. I intially thought it'd be a good match for my P4P800 build to replace the FX5600, only to find it doesn't have Windows 98 drivers. Still, it's a good card.

Repo Man11 wrote on 2020-08-09, 14:34:

I thought I posted this last night? Yesterday was a good day. I made a long drive for this case, and ended up getting it, and en […]
Show full quote

I thought I posted this last night?
Yesterday was a good day. I made a long drive for this case, and ended up getting it, and ended up buying a whole collection of parts as well. This will be the future home of the Asus P4P800 system that I got as a freebie on Craigslist last year.

I didn't really care about the motherboard that was in the case, but I thought I should see if I could get it working. Turned out to be an Intel D865GBF with a Q6600, and I couldn't get it to boot. After trying many different things, I finally pulled it out of the case, and it would boot. Turn out the power switch on this Lian Li case sticks on, thereby causing the board to power back off right after it turns on.

I got these on a whim because I am replacing my AT S7 stuff with ATX or AT/ATX. The YMF719 and Virge/DX were essentially free. I kinda overpaid for the SIMMs hoping some may be 8/16MB FPM sticks but all were 16MB EDOs 😒

Got this very nice 386 board this weekend for €5

Came with a 33MHz DX

As I turned on the power to test it, FIREWORKS!

Guess testing will have to wait untill a new tantulum cap arrives

Repo Man11 wrote on 2020-08-10, 05:14:

The 7600 GS seems to be in good working order. I intially thought it'd be a good match for my P4P800 build to replace the FX5600 […]
Show full quote

The 7600 GS seems to be in good working order. I intially thought it'd be a good match for my P4P800 build to replace the FX5600, only to find it doesn't have Windows 98 drivers. Still, it's a good card.

You might be able to find or make modified drivers for your card I've seen others here do that for similar cards.