Kahenraz wrote on 2021-12-27, 04:40:

Would you explain what's so special about this processor, for those of us who don't collect Socket 7?

It's the low voltage variant which runs at 1.6V instead of the usual 2.0V.
They usually clock at 550-600MHz when you run them at 2.0V and only cost a fraction of what the 550MHz one demands.

There currently is a 550MHz (NOS) on Ebay. Auction ends on Sunday and is already at 95€. Seller has a bunch of them and auctions off one of them every few months. Last one sold for 402€. The one before that got auctioned for 332€. His first even sold for 912€!

That's a bit ridiculous...

(secretly wishing I had a stash of K6-III+ that I could use to guarantee a steady stream of income)

https://www.ebay.com/itm/274825467551

Well you can grab K6-2E+ 3 Pieces for 69,45$ 😉

A Good Pricing around 23$ for each Piece.

matze79 wrote on 2021-12-27, 11:15:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/274825467551

Well you can grab K6-2E+ 3 Pieces for 69,45$ 😉

A Good Pricing around 23$ for each Piece.

... and they work @630 mhz, I grabbed a couple last year...

matze79 wrote on 2021-12-27, 11:15:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/274825467551

Well you can grab K6-2E+ 3 Pieces for 69,45$ 😉

A Good Pricing around 23$ for each Piece.

It's extremely hard to tell that you get three processors from that listing. It's not clear in the photos or the title.

I think Super Socket 7 processors are really cool but I don't have any of these motherboards to go with them. And I already have WAY to many motherboards to start collecting another socket.

But for an investment in the low four figure range, you could have 5 more boxes of crap you need to pay storage for. 🤣

All I see are 570s, but has anyone seen a true 500? My K6-2+ actually reads 500 on the chip.

matze79 wrote on 2021-12-27, 11:15:

Well you can grab K6-2E+ 3 Pieces for 69,45$ 😉

A Good Pricing around 23$ for each Piece.

"It is known."
But those only have half the L2 cache. Still a good choice.
Seller also accepts offers of $60 for 3 pieces.

Kahenraz wrote on 2021-12-27, 14:40:

I think Super Socket 7 processors are really cool but I don't have any of these motherboards to go with them. And I already have WAY to many motherboards to start collecting another socket.

Well, I'm not really a collector. I only keep hardware which I'm gonna use.
I will use that CPU for a Super Socket 7 time machine. Got the same board and CPU that Phil uses. Hehe.

Got the board a few months ago, but didn't have access to it for a while. Finally got it back 2 days ago:

Poly modded by my buddy Hirsch. One of the USB ports was broken. Hirsch also took care of that.
Some people here might consider it an abomination because of the caps, but I don't want to open a museum. I just want a few machines for myself, which will be used regulary.

Asus P5A and Gigabyte GA-5AX support higher FSB, but they only have 1 or 2 ISA slots. I did choose the DFI because it's the only board (which I'm aware of) which has UDMA66 and 3 ISA slots.
In contrast to Phil, I will not use a Voodoo3, but a combination of GeForce2 MX and Voodoo2 SLI. Best of both worlds. I currently only have one Voodoo2 and can't find a sister for a reasonable price. So I will probably end up selling it and get two Diamonds insteads. I will also add a Voodoo1 for those few games which won't run on V2's. It's already on the way, but I don't know if it works yet. Fingers crossed.
Probably gonna have to sell a kidney to afford the sound cards. 🤣

debs3759 wrote on 2021-12-24, 03:03:

Just bought an ASUS A7V600-X for £21 shipped. I asked the seller if it's working, and he said he thinks so, but will refund me h […]
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Just bought an ASUS A7V600-X for £21 shipped. I asked the seller if it's working, and he said he thinks so, but will refund me happily if it isn't. VIA KT600 / VIA VT8237 chipset, so should be good for Athlon XP. Don't think it supports anything earlier than Morgan (Duron) or Thunderbird (Athlon) but should be good for testing all my later skt A chips. Might be good for testing the abundance of PATA drives I have as well.

Never understood why a board that supports DDR RAM would have 3 slots though, but that seems normal for the time. Guess I'll max it out with 2 GB for best performance.

Seller's pic. Looks like it needs a good clean when it arrives.

ASUS A7V600-X (Seller Pic).jpg

I have that motherboard too. I use it with a AMD Athlon XP 2600+ CPU (Barton core). Also, it does not support Spitfire cores (because someone from ASUS claims that you should not use AMD processors with core speed lower than 1 GHz). It can work with Duron Morgan, Athlon Thunderbird, Athlon XP Palomino/Thoroughbred/Barton, and with a BIOS update at least to version 1005 or 1006 AMD Sempron Thoroughbred/Thorton and some Athlon XP Thorton. It was stable with Windows 98SE, 2000, ME, XP, even installed a Mandrake Linux 10 on it. It works flawlessly. 6 PCI slots and the better SoundMAX DIGITAL Audio codec with BassBoost.

I won an auction for an Intel 486 DX2 66 on a OPTi 82C895 chipset motherboard!
Didn't expect to win it, now I'm waiting for the mailman to stop by tomorrow.
Quite excited, although I'm actually not sure where to begin building a decent retro rig out of it... I guess a case and a video card would be the next stop..

Bought this as an upgrade over my MX4000: https://www.ebay.com/itm/334261306195

Still waiting for my socket a cooler to arrive.

retrogamerguy1997 wrote on 2021-12-27, 19:46:

Bought this as an upgrade over my MX4000: https://www.ebay.com/itm/334261306195

Still waiting for my socket a cooler to arrive.

IIRC the MX4000 was the replacement for the MX440, the 4000 being the newer of the two.

They are similar in spec but the 440 does have faster Vram and a wider bus ... but the trade off is that it has less Vram overall.

Looking at them both I would have just grabbed a Ti4200 and gotten pixel shading but I cant fault the price of 20 bucks for a MX440, thats a nice deal no matter the reason for using one.

TrashPanda wrote on 2021-12-27, 21:22:

IIRC the MX4000 was the replacement for the MX440, the 4000 being the newer of the two. […]
Show full quote

retrogamerguy1997 wrote on 2021-12-27, 19:46:

Bought this as an upgrade over my MX4000: https://www.ebay.com/itm/334261306195

Still waiting for my socket a cooler to arrive.

IIRC the MX4000 was the replacement for the MX440, the 4000 being the newer of the two.

They are similar in spec but the 440 does have faster Vram and a wider bus ... but the trade off is that it has less Vram overall.

Looking at them both I would have just grabbed a Ti4200 and gotten pixel shading but I cant fault the price of 20 bucks for a MX440, thats a nice deal no matter the reason for using one.

damn, I got it based off of other people's advice here. Then again I'm sure I would still see a benefit since my mx4000 is pci and 64mb

retrogamerguy1997 wrote on 2021-12-27, 22:14:

damn, I got it based off of other people's advice here.

Well there's your problem!

People, in EVERY hobby, have a tendency (myself included) to have very strong opinions about what hardware is "THE BEST". My unsolicited advice? Get whatever you want, its not like you are limited to buying ONE card and can never change it out. Find a deal on something cheap, and if it gets the job done to your satisfaction, then its all good. Leave the aggressive spreadsheet metrics to the people who get off on things like that. (not kink shaming)

retrogamerguy1997 wrote on 2021-12-27, 22:14:

TrashPanda wrote on 2021-12-27, 21:22:

IIRC the MX4000 was the replacement for the MX440, the 4000 being the newer of the two. […]
Show full quote

retrogamerguy1997 wrote on 2021-12-27, 19:46:

Bought this as an upgrade over my MX4000: https://www.ebay.com/itm/334261306195

Still waiting for my socket a cooler to arrive.

IIRC the MX4000 was the replacement for the MX440, the 4000 being the newer of the two.

They are similar in spec but the 440 does have faster Vram and a wider bus ... but the trade off is that it has less Vram overall.

Looking at them both I would have just grabbed a Ti4200 and gotten pixel shading but I cant fault the price of 20 bucks for a MX440, thats a nice deal no matter the reason for using one.

damn, I got it based off of other people's advice here. Then again I'm sure I would still see a benefit since my mx4000 is pci and 64mb

Honestly they are both based off the same Geforce4 core and the MX440 being AGP with the faster Vram and bigger bus should in theory provide a performance increase here, just dont expect a huge one 🤣, the MX4000 PCI bus aside has more Vram but its slower and has a 64bit bus I guess if you needed the extra Vram for some purpose then it would help there, it being PCI does mean itll be slower than its AGP brother.

I didn't realise that you had the PCI MX4000 so yes the AGP MX440 should be a bit quicker for gaming but as Luckybob pointed out . .get what makes you happy ! ...I bought a pair of 8800 Ultras for just that reason, it made me happy to finally own a pair of these legendary GPUs. Im too afraid to fire them up since there is a very real possibility of killing them due to the shit solder nVidia used on that series. They make for lovely wall GPUs however, such massive cards and they have a place at the top of my wall.

So just buy what you want and enjoy it for what it is, none of this older hardware will win any speed crowns.

Also I might need some advice for using retrobrite on a badly yellowed PC case and Keyboard I just bought, can I just use cling wrap instead of a bag and since I have an abundance of sunlight here would that work as well as say a UV light would ? I may make a post about the case later as its an entire Pentium 133 system, turns out it has a Asus p55tp4n in it. (Seems like a nice board)

If you want retrobright hassle free, you can just leave the plastic parts in the sun all by themselves. No hydrogen peroxide needed, although it does speed up the process a lot, so if you do want to use H2O2 then full immersion bath gives the best uniformity.

devius wrote on 2021-12-27, 23:09:

If you want retrobright hassle free, you can just leave the plastic parts in the sun all by themselves. No hydrogen peroxide needed, although it does speed up the process a lot, so if you do want to use H2O2 then full immersion bath gives the best uniformity.

I was thinking of buying the Retrobrite Gel tubs off Amazon since getting a decent quantity of peroxide might be a bit hard here in Rural SA.

Received the Q500 Digital Optical Serial Mouse and it works in DOS. WFW 3.11 is a work in progress (need to change the driver or find the correct ones to play it safe).

Gotta say, it's a cool mouse and the pad is groovy as well. Have to get used to this mouse and it's certainly better than the trackball mouse on my Austin TFT laptop (has issues, which is why I got this mouse and pad in the first place.

retrogamerguy1997 wrote on 2021-12-27, 22:14:

TrashPanda wrote on 2021-12-27, 21:22:

IIRC the MX4000 was the replacement for the MX440, the 4000 being the newer of the two. […]
Show full quote

retrogamerguy1997 wrote on 2021-12-27, 19:46:

Bought this as an upgrade over my MX4000: https://www.ebay.com/itm/334261306195

Still waiting for my socket a cooler to arrive.

IIRC the MX4000 was the replacement for the MX440, the 4000 being the newer of the two.

They are similar in spec but the 440 does have faster Vram and a wider bus ... but the trade off is that it has less Vram overall.

Looking at them both I would have just grabbed a Ti4200 and gotten pixel shading but I cant fault the price of 20 bucks for a MX440, thats a nice deal no matter the reason for using one.

damn, I got it based off of other people's advice here. Then again I'm sure I would still see a benefit since my mx4000 is pci and 64mb

Some people's advice here is also... not wrong but incomplete. Depending on what hardware and OS you're using, a GeForce 4 could be unstable. For example, NVIDIA cards with pixel shaders require at least a Pentium 3 Coppermine, have problems in Windows 98 with some configurations, and other issues with chipsets prior to 440BX. Everything non-pixel shader such as the card you bought should work great. Maybe. Unless it requires +3.3V on PCI and your board doesn't have that.

There is no right answer, unfortunately. 😀

Well I guess there's only one way to find out, but seeing as I'm on Socket A I should be fine.