Skyscraper wrote:

I found that a Geforce 6800 Ultra AGP is faster than an overclocked Geforce 7600 GT (DDR3) AGP in World of Warcraft vanilla. The difference is not huge but it seems World of Warcraft benefits from the Geforce 6800s higher video memory bandwidth when running at 1280*1024 with maxed out settings.

http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=179&card2=435

Neither one is a clear winner either direction. One card's faster than the other in some things but they're pretty close. Maybe vanilla WoW favors gpu ram speed and fill rate more than anything else. Interesting though.

kithylin wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

I found that a Geforce 6800 Ultra AGP is faster than an overclocked Geforce 7600 GT (DDR3) AGP in World of Warcraft vanilla. The difference is not huge but it seems World of Warcraft benefits from the Geforce 6800s higher video memory bandwidth when running at 1280*1024 with maxed out settings.

http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=179&card2=435

Neither one is a clear winner either direction. One card's faster than the other in some things but they're pretty close. Maybe vanilla WoW favors gpu ram speed and fill rate more than anything else. Interesting though.

Yea they are pretty evenly matched.

A good thing with the Geforce 7600 GT (DDR3) AGP is the lower power consumtion, it's a good card for OEM systems.

Decided to take one of my more exotic systems for a spin only to have the antec ea-500 psu kick the bucket which scared me a little given how rare and expensive the board is. Click click and the whole thing powered off! At least everything else survived thank God. Wouldn't surprise me if it was capacitor rot /grumpy face

Setup a Dell DImension 8200 with Windows Me... I tried 98SE first and messed around with VCACHE but kept running into all sorts of errors. Me seems oddly enough much more stable. I disabled things like System Restore and installed unofficial Me service pack so it runs nicely now.

Pictures http://imgur.com/a/ALsYz

I once again got reminded how much I hate Socket 423/603/604 CPU mounting clips, especially the ones belonging to Intel Xeon "fan tunnel" heat sinks.

In theory they are easy to remove, you just push on one end of the clip and it unhooks it self... In reality you often have to use a screwdriver and it's very easy to slip and modify the appearance of nearby capacitors (or worse).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuZ24VBrbO4

Skyscraper wrote:

I once again got reminded how much I hate Socket 423/603/604 CPU mounting clips, especially the ones belonging to Intel Xeon "fan tunnel" heat sinks.

In theory they are easy to remove, you just push on one end of the clip and it unhooks it self... In reality you often have to use a screwdriver and it's very easy to slip and modify the appearance of nearby capacitors (or worse).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuZ24VBrbO4

I had the plastic clips on the socket itself break off 2 motherboards: my old AM2+ motherboard had that issue and the temporary "fix" was to have the tower in the horizontal position, so I purchased a new clip assembly and installed it, and 2 years ago, the same thing happened on my Socket 370 motherboard from a Compaq Presario 6300US desktop, so I purchased a new heatsink fan assembly, and I got it installed (2 weeks later due to riots in Maryland) without issues.

I decided to download my Ms-DOS animated background (GIF) onto my K6-2 300 desktop to see if it'll work as a background image, and it works without issues!

I'm typing this on my desktop right now.

Here are the images:

I also downgraded the RAM to 64MB, and it's holding up, as long as I don't run more than 1 program at once, and I will install the 256MB stick in my desktop tonight since FireFox takes almost half the system's resources.

The reason why the images have pixels (or interlaced) is because the Microsoft Paint program in Windows 98SE only supports BMP, GIF, or JP(E)G file formats to be saved, and this site doesn't allow BMP files due to the fact that BMP files take a hell of a lot of space (about 2MB for a 1024x768 resolution picture), which I understand that this site doesn't allow that, so that's no major issue.

Tried to get an Audigy 2 ZS Laptop PCMCIA card working in Windows 98.

It only officially supports Windows 2000 or higher... and I couldn't get it to work.

Tried both WDM and VXD drivers from the Audigy 2 as well as the drivers from an Audigy.

Guess that answers that question... 😒

cyclone3d wrote:

Tried to get an Audigy 2 ZS Laptop PCMCIA card working in Windows 98. […]
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Tried to get an Audigy 2 ZS Laptop PCMCIA card working in Windows 98.

It only officially supports Windows 2000 or higher... and I couldn't get it to work.

Tried both WDM and VXD drivers from the Audigy 2 as well as the drivers from an Audigy.

Guess that answers that question... 😒

Try getting the drivers from here: http://soundcard-drivers.com/companies/258.ht … thx=9&bng=7&o=3 and scroll down until you see Audigy 2 ZS. I'm planning on upgrading the sound card to that as well since the FM Synthesizer emulation for DOS games is too quiet.

I found a good deal ($30) on an atx socket 7 motherboard with an AMD K6-2 350 cpu and 384MB SRAM not sure if I should get it as I already have a Socket 7 MMx system and a Slot 1 450Mhz system.. Gotta fight that hoarding mentality!

Had to swap the video card in my K6-2 300 machine... AGAIN due to the GeForce4 MX 4000 having issues going to 640x480 with the images being chopped off at the left and right side of the screen with my STB Velocity 3D (S3 Virge/VX) PCI card and it works without issues, and my machine would BSOD when I try to reinstall the nVidia card (VSB16) since the card conflicts with my Sound Blaster 16 WavEffects CT4170. Thankfully, I have an STB BlackMagic VooDoo2 12MB 3D accelerator card to prevent strain on both my CPU and primary card.

Partially rebuilt 1 of my Socket 478 systems. I had a spare case (that previously housed a now-dead Dual Slot 1 board) so I decided to go with the fastest spare parts I had laying about.

The motherboard I got years ago cheaply on eBay, it's from a DELL Dimension 3000.
CPU: Intel Celeron D 335 @ 2.8GHz
512MB PC2700 DDR RAM

And so far this is where I've stopped, as the CPU needs a cooler. As it's a DELL custom board, the CPU currently has just a heatsink and was cooled by the case fans. I used to have this set up with a back case fan blowing onto the heatsink, but it wasn't very stable or quiet for that matter. I remember trying a Pentium 4 3.0GHz in there at 1 time, which did have it's own cooler - however the motherboard would still switch off due to "overheating", so it possibly may also have a faulty heat sensor which makes me a bit reluctant to spend too much money on this.

If I ultimately decide not to bother, I have 4 other motherboards that could possibly find a new home in this case - 3x Socket A & 1x Slot 1.

xplus93 wrote:

Tested my new graphics cards and got a bit disappointed. I was pretty excited to get my first 3dfx card until it wouldn't post. Looks like it got attacked by the full force of the swiss army.

There are people who can resurrect dead 3dfx cards.
Maybe you can find someone who wants to fix it 😀

Arctic wrote:

xplus93 wrote:

Tested my new graphics cards and got a bit disappointed. I was pretty excited to get my first 3dfx card until it wouldn't post. Looks like it got attacked by the full force of the swiss army.

There are people who can resurrect dead 3dfx cards.
Maybe you can find someone who wants to fix it 😀

It appears to be just cut traces. So, in theory an hour or two with a soldering iron could fix it. I might just list it on ebay since i'm starting to realize my soldering skills are not good enough.

Retro activity for the past few days: it was very sunny and totally cloudless for the past days which proved to be a very succesful attempt on whitening yellowed plastic. I used regular 12% Peroxide "hair-stuff" and sprayed it on cleaned plastic. I haven't figured out an exact water-to-hair-stuff ratio but about 25% water ought to do the job using a plant-spray (well, actually cold water spray with a fan but same idea).

Without further ado some pics:

Tried the casing first before touching the drives. Difference is clearly visible.

My first own computer; couldn't be more yellow!

Which cleaned up nice. I did the floppy drive a day later for a better overall result.

And while I was at it.. why not more stuff? 😀. The small Compaq bezel was very yellow and turned white again. It does have very little staining though. The white cover with the damaged logo (due to water) on the bottom turned out very good. It's cheap plastic and not as solid was the Compaq part- but sometimes cheaper parts turn out better 😉.

All in all I'm very happy with the results. Most logo's and colors survived. I noticed that an AOpen 48x12x50 CDRW can't handle brake cleaner (I love brake cleaner for cleaning things) very well because the letters started to disappear. Logo's on the Compaq including the powerbutton print survived the whole process just fine. Also the Hyundai logo made it through 100% 😀.

Tested out a couple of ISA graphics cards in a spare Socket 7 board.

Tseng Labs ET4000AX 1MB. This card is faulty, displays a scrambled screen full of unreadable gibberish text, but with correct VGA colours. The card has been exposed to moisture with rusting around the metal bracket, but the card itself looks fine.

Trident TVGA8900 1MB. Working fine. I originally got this card with a 386 PC back in 1997 and then later used it temporarily in a Pentium 100MHz PC (being limited to 256 colours meant it was replaced very quickly). It also had a brief stint in an 8088 system, before finally being placed in a now-defunct 486 PC.

Spent four hours dealing with paypal on a claim about my XPS Gen 2. FYI, they don't care one bit about people wanting to get things repaired no matter how rare it is. Just go straight to the bank and do a chargeback.

Trying to install NHL 96 on my K6-2 300 desktop, and it goes south by throwing me this error:

1cdromdirectoryentry - error 2 reading directory /data\game.ksf

The CD has light scratches, and when I run:

1dir \data\game.ksf

It shows the file and I might try to copy the CD onto my hard drive to see if it'll work.

got this and set it up nicely http://imgur.com/a/5VID5

oeuvre wrote:

got this and set it up nicely http://imgur.com/a/5VID5

Nice rig you got there.