Won a classified for a MSI 694D Pro-AR and 2x 1GHz P3. My year couldn't have started any better.

acl wrote on 2024-01-14, 13:28:

I use an Athlon 1000 on this board.
I would love to have a slotA system but I never had the opportunity to get one.

I have one Mobo / CPU combination. Barely managed to find a cooler for the CPU, mine was naked for some reason, some person were selling them out of the box full of such naked CPUs, some vendor batch, idk. But it's not the 'real' one, the 'Classic'. It's Thunderbird that looks more like the ordinary socket CPU glued to the slot with builtin cache, neglecting the whole slot idea. Just like update kit or something. Probably, that's the reason they don't have cooling - it is supposed to be taken out from the old CPU to reduce upgrade costs.

Enthusiasts had them, thus disproportionate mention on overclocking and performance forums, but slot A was never very "mass market" as much as slot 1 was, so all stuff for them is harder to find. The slightly later approximation might be socket 940 for desktop/workstation and Opterons, or maybe socket 771 native implementations. Partially price based, AMD kept their prices high while they were trouncing PIIIs.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-01-15, 16:04:

but slot A was never very "mass market" as much as slot 1 was, so all stuff for them is harder to find

But then socket A was very good, performant and popular as for its price. Especially when intel went Rambus.

Surprisingly, I never had any intel based PC in my poseesion (except for two work laptops), so from the Am486DX4-100 till current Ryzen they were always AMD CPUs. So now my growing collections consist mostly of intel based solutions. And for P1-P3 era mostly intel chipsets.

rkurbatov wrote on 2024-01-15, 16:52:

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-01-15, 16:04:

but slot A was never very "mass market" as much as slot 1 was, so all stuff for them is harder to find

But then socket A was very good, performant and popular as for its price. Especially when intel went Rambus.

Surprisingly, I never had any intel based PC in my poseesion (except for two work laptops), so from the Am486DX4-100 till current Ryzen they were always AMD CPUs. So now my growing collections consist mostly of intel based solutions. And for P1-P3 era mostly intel chipsets.

I've only seen 2 or 3 for sale in France (generally expensive and/or "untested")
S423 P4 + RAMBUS are even more common (i had two, still have one)
Unfortunately the aforementioned Fury MAXX don't work on i850. It is explicitely tested and failed with the comment "Note1: Black screen after installed the driver. " (https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/850_Pro2/support#testReport)

weedeewee wrote on 2024-01-14, 12:55:

kaposzta wrote on 2024-01-14, 12:50:

Long time reader, first time poster here 😀
I've bought this interesting ISA video card recently. It has a weird COLOR/MONOCHROME switch on it and an odd video connector. Honestly, I don't know what this is, any has ever seen one before?

Reminds me of the monitor connector on an Ollivetti m24 or AT&T PC 6300, that also delivered power via the connector to the monitor.

That came to my mind as well when I saw that picture with the 25-pin video connector, but in the case of the M24/6300, the port on the side of the graphics board is female.

PcBytes wrote on 2024-01-14, 11:30:

Today's special picks from the car boot sale loot. ECS K7S5A, Radeon 9600Pro, as well as a strange Ethernet card. There were also some Maxtor Atlas drives but I need to repair their boards and then find a SCSI controller.

That strange Ethernet card is one of the early Gigabit PCI Ethernet cards.
Of course they had a heatsink, just very like to my D-Link DGE-500T.

digger wrote on 2024-01-15, 17:27:

weedeewee wrote on 2024-01-14, 12:55:

kaposzta wrote on 2024-01-14, 12:50:

Long time reader, first time poster here 😀
I've bought this interesting ISA video card recently. It has a weird COLOR/MONOCHROME switch on it and an odd video connector. Honestly, I don't know what this is, any has ever seen one before?

Reminds me of the monitor connector on an Ollivetti m24 or AT&T PC 6300, that also delivered power via the connector to the monitor.

That came to my mind as well when I saw that picture with the 25-pin video connector, but in the case of the M24/6300, the port on the side of the graphics board is female.

You are correct ! I had forgotten that.

Bought this video card for my winpro 486eon eBay.
Wasn't cheap.
Diamond stealth 64 vlb dram.

A lot of untested old hardware for 15 euro shipped. Some not so interesting PCIe cards, CPU coolers, PCI tuner and some good ones:
SB0060
CT4380
MGA-G100A-E
MX440se 64MB
Diamond Monster Fusion PCI 16MB

DundyTheCroc wrote on 2024-01-16, 08:31:

A lot of untested old hardware for 15 euro shipped. Some not so interesting PCIe cards, CPU coolers, PCI tuner and some good one […]
Show full quote

A lot of untested old hardware for 15 euro shipped. Some not so interesting PCIe cards, CPU coolers, PCI tuner and some good ones:
SB0060
CT4380
MGA-G100A-E
MX440se 64MB
Diamond Monster Fusion PCI 16MB
IMG_20240116_101715.jpg

Man, I assure you, leave these PCI-e cards for 20 more years and you will gladly play with them as with new retro. I just remember times when I had Voodoo card in early 2000s left by one of our clients (that I didn't have when it was REALLY NEEDED). I wanted to play with it a little but then just left as a scrap when moved. The same with Dual Socket A Tyan mobo. And now it all costs a fortune. I probably spent on my 486 build few times more than I got from selling my old 486 (and it was 2001, that money helped me with upgrade a lot).

HomeLate wrote on 2024-01-13, 09:41:

Another Compaq AP550 with dual 1Ghz PIII processors and an HP Kayak XAs.

How I wish for the decadent luxury of sounding almost bored with finding a system with i840 chipset in what looks like pristine condition 😉

Can't complain too much, I have the internals of one as well, including the foghorn. Just had to hack them into a regular case. Nice stuff regardless.

Disruptor wrote on 2024-01-15, 17:29:

PcBytes wrote on 2024-01-14, 11:30:

Today's special picks from the car boot sale loot. ECS K7S5A, Radeon 9600Pro, as well as a strange Ethernet card. There were also some Maxtor Atlas drives but I need to repair their boards and then find a SCSI controller.

That strange Ethernet card is one of the early Gigabit PCI Ethernet cards.
Of course they had a heatsink, just very like to my D-Link DGE-500T.

It came up as a SOHO-GA2500T. Dunno what's up with it but I can't get it to connect to the internet, despite the cable working on a RTL8169SC NIC.

weedeewee wrote on 2024-01-15, 17:33:

digger wrote on 2024-01-15, 17:27:

weedeewee wrote on 2024-01-14, 12:55:

Reminds me of the monitor connector on an Ollivetti m24 or AT&T PC 6300, that also delivered power via the connector to the monitor.

That came to my mind as well when I saw that picture with the 25-pin video connector, but in the case of the M24/6300, the port on the side of the graphics board is female.

You are correct ! I had forgotten that.

Thank you very much #weedeewee , #digger! 😀 I'll keep investigating 😀

wirerogue wrote on 2024-01-15, 23:41:

Bought this video card for my winpro 486eon eBay. Wasn't cheap. Diamond stealth 64 vlb dram. PXL_20240113_212510647.jpg […]
Show full quote

Bought this video card for my winpro 486eon eBay.
Wasn't cheap.
Diamond stealth 64 vlb dram.
PXL_20240113_212510647.jpg

very nice vga , I have a soft spot for Diamond branded cards... 😀

I dont know if this is considered retro, but I found this at the thrift store for 5 bucks. It will be nice for the core 2 duo build im doing, OR it might go into my Pentium 4 just for fun as it says it works with pentium 4s and windows xp....... Its a big step up from the fx quadro 5600 i have in there now.

That's a very nice $5 worth, yah be a nice top end XP card without hacks and workarounds.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-01-17, 00:05:

That's a very nice $5 worth, yah be a nice top end XP card without hacks and workarounds.

I have a pair of Windforce GTX580s that have a huge cooler and triple fans, they are super nice GPUs but run rather hot even with the extra cooling. These blower versions run even hotter so I hope they account for that and throw in some extra case fans or add some routing to direct airflow to the blower.

I would recommend throwing a new cooler on that card, unless they need a blower, to help it live longer as Fermi does run hot and the extra heat from the blower model may eventually kill it. (I would clean and repaste it at the minimum)

Today I managed to find somewhat of a grail for me and my more recent tastes.

Yes, a random no frills PCI-X/64-Bit SATA card with just two internal ports and two odd externals. What's so special about it? Well, it can natively boot a SATA drive in Mac OS 9. That's pretty damn handy with my recently upgraded G3 that just so happens to just run 9 and 10.4.

Great news. Same seller that I ordered the 694D from has prepped for sending an entire 486 kit - VLB GPU and I/O controller, 3com and UMC NICs, and a OPTI soundcard. I'll keep y'all posted soon enough.