Nice loot!

But beware because it will consume you 😀

That physx card does physics calculations, used by some games but now built into nvidia GPUs - it just offloads some calculations from the CPU. More on wikipedia 😉.

But nice haul, hours of fun ahead 🤣.

An Ageia PhysX card to be exact, made, sold, and discontinued by the time PhysX was sold to nVidia.

Quite the mathematical monstrosity in its day.

That Gigabyte brand video card with the heatpipes and two fans on it, looks like the video card I'm using in my current gaming PC. It's probably a decent mid-to-high-end recent-ish video card.

I assume the physx card requires win xp and a pentium 3 or more? What video card would that physx card accompany? I think the guy mentioned that gigabyte video card had one of the fans not working..super glue was mentioned. Ill test it in the next few days.

A PhysX card would have a place in a Core2Duo , Phenom or some other multi-core era enthusiast setup. The actual use of the card would be in a few 'cosmetic physics heavy' games like Borderlands 2 and......... uhm.......... yeah, Borderlands 2.

PhysX is evil. Not many games use it because it's proprietary, there's no AMD equivelant for an API (OpenCL exists, but it's no physics API)

yikes! what a haul! And here I was pleased with myself for having *just* picked up a pristine AST 486 for 30 bucks US...!

Damn that is a nice haul. I wish I was that lucky with retro hardware 🤣.

The problem with PhysX both on that card and on the Nvidia boards is that you can't use it to do operations that effect gameplay. The time it takes to copy the data to the physics chip, send that back to the CPU, then have the CPU send that back to the GFX card means that its too slow. Physx in general is useful for large processing tasks where the time it takes to copy is less than the time it takes to calculate. Otherwise it's better to do it on the chip, all games that have gameplay effecting physics are done on the CPU.

The thing I'm hoping for with APUs from intel and AMD is that game devs start using those to do physics since they share a cache with the CPU you would save all that time of copying and you could actually use them to do things that effect gameplay. I expect the new consoles to start doing this at some point and hopefully when they get ported to the PC devs spend the time to make this work on modern APUs.

Nice vgas, i like the 6800 ultra and the radeons, also a nice s754 board.
Also the gf4 8x is great to have.
What is the ultra type vga card with the copper big fan cooled hs.
The cases on the right are at style?

Whats the dual heatpipe cooled vga?

And you got all that stuff for free? Or what did you pay?
I am jealous, i wish i were that lucky.

Btw it would be a good thing to hold onto that viagra just in case 🤣
And rambo ram with lifetime warranty, who makes this stuff up for a company to manufacture.

haha I noticed the lifetime warranty on the RAM and thought that was humerus.

I use local auction sites and sites where I can put ads advising Im looking for old hardware people want to get rid of.

Theres still plenty of people out there hoarding old hardware.

I had to drive 35km to pick it up and went through a few toll roads so It cost me maybe $20. But nothing for the items.

I've got some time off now so Ill go through and have a good look and let you know what some of those cards are.

good on ya!

Nice grab!
ViaGra chip 😀

I was unable to get the Viagra Board to boot.

Changing the CPU, Ram, Video Card didn't seem to work, Reseated the bios chip and any other chips I could find. Couldn't even get a beep out of it however there is power to the motherboard.

The other complete systems in the pic above are a working Pentium 166, working Aopen/Celeron 300, and an unknown Pentium 4 socket 423 that will not boot no matter what I do - again there is power to the motherboard - I don't have another socket 423 CPU to swap to test the CPU and the motherboard has no identifying features or labeling. Its a pretty interesting system in itself and I'm surprised how physically large the CPU is.

I haven't tested all the geforce and radeon cards yet but some don't work at all.

I have been able to strip some nice fans and heat sinks though.

I'd love to test the ECS Elitegroup board but dont have a correct socket CPU.

I would also like to try the PhysX card however if its proprietary there is very little use for it - also it looks like an AGP card which is another issue.

rgart wrote:

I would also like to try the PhysX card however if its proprietary there is very little use for it - also it looks like an AGP card which is another issue.

PCI, not AGP. Just look at the AGP video cards you got, the connector looks completely different. Besides that would mean you'd need a PCI video card.
This seems to be your model:
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/BFG/Ageia_PhysX_Card/

Proprietary - yes. But early 3D accelerators are also proprietary and still interesting to some.

Have a look at this list, there are some entries that say PPU only and some that say GPU or PPU: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_wi … d_PhysX_support

$20 on tolls? You would have to go over 90kph in Russia to get it!

seems that you wont leave your house for awhile..

idspispopd wrote:

PCI, not AGP. Just look at the AGP video cards you got, the connector looks completely different. Besides that would mean you'd […]
Show full quote

rgart wrote:

I would also like to try the PhysX card however if its proprietary there is very little use for it - also it looks like an AGP card which is another issue.

PCI, not AGP. Just look at the AGP video cards you got, the connector looks completely different. Besides that would mean you'd need a PCI video card.
This seems to be your model:
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/BFG/Ageia_PhysX_Card/

Proprietary - yes. But early 3D accelerators are also proprietary and still interesting to some.

Have a look at this list, there are some entries that say PPU only and some that say GPU or PPU: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_wi … d_PhysX_support

Thanks mate I had a look at that list.

I dont think I have a system to put the PhysX in and test at this time.
I'll be building a Pentium III 800 (or there abouts) at some stage but that's probably even too old for the card I'm guessing. Looking at the wiki link you posted the oldest game to support PPU is like 2005. So maybe I wont be using the card in the Pentium III.

RacoonRider wrote:

$20 on tolls? You would have to go over 90kph in Russia to get it!

Here in Brisbane there are so many tolls its ridiculous.

KRACKD wrote:

seems that you wont leave your house for awhile..

hehe, I have not got around to testing a lot of it. Only a few things I had thought looked interesting...

I static bagged most of it and stacked it away for now. A few other systems have my attention at the moment.

I didn't realise there were so many games that used it. I stopped paying close attention to hardware developments several years ago. I do recognise the first couple of games in the development list (bet on soldier, etc.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_wi … d_PhysX_support

Only the ones labeled "PPU" or "PPU or GPU" can use the physics card, and apparently new versions of the physx software won't recognise the card. What a great company.

hwh wrote:

I didn't realise there were so many games that used it. I stopped paying close attention to hardware developments several years ago. I do recognise the first couple of games in the development list (bet on soldier, etc.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_wi … d_PhysX_support

Only the ones labeled "PPU" or "PPU or GPU" can use the physics card, and apparently new versions of the physx software won't recognise the card. What a great company.

NVidia bought out the PhysX technology and integrated it into their own cards. They don't support the original PhysX processor anymore because it can no longer keep up with the speeds of newer video cards and they don't want Radeon users to be able to use PhysX (but there are hacked drivers out there that get around this).