From my point of view TNT2 M64 was released in 1999 and all cards using it are pretty much the same, so I would consider any card with TNT2 M64 as period correct for 1999 no matter when the card itself was manufactured.

I have become more and more aggressive on time-accuracy as the build nears completion

That "authentic year" trend is getting more and more ridiculous.

athlon-power wrote:

3) The card itself was manufactured and released in 2001, being made off of the same design as the old 1999 versions, just purpose-sold as a budget video card. This would likely be the worst of scenarios, but I also find it very unlikely.

Various components (such as the video memory) on the PCB will likely carry date codes of their individual manufacture, but the format (or the presence of such codes at all) tends to vary from manufacturer to manufacturer. If you like, you can post a photo of the front of your V3800M with the part numbers on at least the video memory chips visible so that we can try and identify various date codes for you.

SW-SSG wrote:

Various components (such as the video memory) on the PCB will likely carry date codes of their individual manufacture, but the format (or the presence of such codes at all) tends to vary from manufacturer to manufacturer. If you like, you can post a photo of the front of your V3800M with the part numbers on at least the video memory chips visible so that we can try and identify various date codes for you.

Thanks! I've attached a few pictures that should be useful. I took pictures of the various stickers on the board, and on the back of the board, as well as some of the RAM chips and the chip with a yellow sticker on it, which seems to be the video BIOS ROM.

The Serpent Rider wrote:

That "authentic year" trend is getting more and more ridiculous.

I'm not sure as to why it's a problem. I would just like to have a machine that I could've built and used back in '99. I do understand the point of view that newer hardware can do the job just as good, if not better than older hardware, especially in the video card, sound card, and storage departments. I do also understand that many people have come up with modern alternatives to alleviate the inbuilt issues of older hardware- for example, in storage devices, there's solutions like CompactFlash to IDE adapters, which can hail the small HDD sizes of many eras of PCs without the instability, noise, and slow speed that often come with using time-accurate HDDs. Even in late '90s PC builds, a newer IDE HDD is always an option: again, they are quieter, faster, more reliable, and in this case, often carry many times the storage than a time-accurate HDD would.

I just find the aspect of hunting down time-accurate parts to be a challenge, and I genuinely enjoy using a machine that could've been used nearly two decades ago, in its current configuration. I do have my limits; I absolutely refuse to use any PSUs from that era. I'm even cautious around PSUs that are older than say, 2008. I feel like there is no harm in using an HDD from that time period- if it fails, it fails. You can get another one, eventually. I know HDDs like that won't exist forever, but I'd like to use them now, while they still work. As long as the part isn't putting any other parts in serious danger, I find time-accurate builds to be fascinating. But using an old PSU is risking many parts in the system, as those have far less protection in them than they do today, and they're almost two decades old now, if not more.

If I just wanted to run Windows 98 games, I could probably take out my Socket 754 motherboard with a mobile Athlon XP 2800+ installed in it, throw in a PCI sound card that can do MIDI, or even skip that step and just use DOSBOX for DOS games, and I'd have a system that was fully capable of running almost every late '90s game imaginable, especially if I were to put my GeForce FX 5200 in it. It's a complete garbage card for most games newer than 2003 or so, but it runs '90s games quite nicely. My point is, I like working directly with the older hardware, working around its limitations, changing things, and trying to get closer to a fully time-accurate build. It gives me something to do, something to work on over long periods of time. This will also be the first time I have ever made a build like this, and this is also the closest I've ever gotten to running a time-accurate system with this much detail.

I suspect that his point is that if the part is current as of that time, the date code of that specific card is not as important. A card released in 1999 but manufactured in 2001 is still era appropriate for 1999 since the performance will likely be effectively identical to that which was available in 1999.

Now, that being said, it's your build; you can do whatever you want with it. I consider the overall balance of the build to be more important. Usually, that means that most things will be from roughly the same period. I tend to think of a system as the CPU and Motherboard; everything else stems from that.

As far as that v3800m, the date code on the memory is 0121, which means the 21st week of 2001.

OK, so:

• The manufacture date shared by those Hyundai/Hynix SDRAM chips with readable print is, indeed, 2001 week 21, or between May the 21st and 27th of 2001. Naturally the card as a whole would have been manufactured from weeks to months later.
• I think that's a version number on the BIOS ROM's yellow label (3.05.00.10). If Sandra shows a version number for the card's BIOS and it matches, this 2001-dated BIOS is the original one that shipped with the card.

The Serpent Rider wrote:

That "authentic year" trend is getting more and more ridiculous.

I don't see this applied much to software yet. Like rejecting drivers or patches that're past a certain date.

You'd assume it's a fairly natural evolution, still.

This is just a fledgling idea, and if it doesn't make sense, I don't intend to use the system this way. But, it did occur to me, what if this could be a 2001 build with a very low budget? I feel like it would be at least a socket 370 board, not an old slot 1 board like this one. Theoretically, it would take very little modification from its current configuration. I might even be able to keep that processor, as 800MHz PIII's (the maximum this motherboard will support) obviously existed in 2001, but I'd say that they were still quite expensive. Also of note, this system isn't going to be alone forever- as time passes, I will be making more and more of these builds- most of them being from the late '90s and very early 2000's. One day, I'll have an insane number of systems (like six) hooked up together in a LAN. This system will likely be seeing a 2001 Socket A Athlon XP build or something like that on the network, maybe an early Pentium 4 build just for kicks, to give the systems some variation. Point is, in 1999, the stuff that came out in 2001, and especially in 2002, was space-age technology, so that system would never see anything like that in 1999. And it's really no fun just to have a room full of mid-1999 or prior builds, so variation between machines, especially time, will most likely end up being vast, with a maximum of 2003 or so.

So I'm thinking, maybe a 1999 build that somebody upgraded? The 500MHz processor feels a bit underwhelming here, but for price reasons, somebody could've just kept it. Both the graphics and sound cards are from around 2001, so it wouldn't be that much of a stretch. I'd have to figure out how much an 800MHz Coppermine or similar processor was in 2000 or 2001, to see if that could be an upgrade that I could do, but I will most likely keep the Katmai 500 in there.

The very high price of computers at that time period is helping me quite a bit, because price could be a legitimate reason to not upgrade too much- and in 2001, that TNT2 card couldn't have been far above $100, nor do I think the sound card would have been (relatively) expensive.

If I decide to keep the year at 1999, I only have to disable the motherboard diagnostic screen at boot, so all that you can see is just a fancy "Intel Motherboard" boot screen. The BIOS date, RAM amount, IDE configuration, all of it, is hidden. The video card BIOS/release date doesn't matter all that much, either. Looking at PCBs from older cards, there seems to be very little variation, other than the fact that the others are generally slower or have 16MB of VRAM instead of 32. The sound card really doesn't matter if it's not brought up directly, and again, there's probably versions of it that existed pre-2000, and it probably has very little variation between it and the older models.

So, either way, it really doesn't matter all that much. I've worked on this thing for too long now, and I feel like it's time for a fresh build. In the meantime, I have some plans that I'll post in another thread, involving a different system and the leftover parts from prior renditions of the main Pentium III project.

It seems to me that you are ripe for 'Ship of Theseus' considerations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus