Out with the old, in with the new. Hopefully this will make my Descent III life a little less choppy...
Descent III will run much better on a faster CPU as well. I noticed a pretty huge difference going from a Pentium II to a Pentium III 850, even with a Voodoo 3.
Out with the old, in with the new. Hopefully this will make my Descent III life a little less choppy...
Descent III will run much better on a faster CPU as well. I noticed a pretty huge difference going from a Pentium II to a Pentium III 850, even with a Voodoo 3.
Yep some games are heavily CPU bound, vampire bloodlines doesn't run well unless you are using an athlon64 4000+ or equivalent for example, no matter what GPU you use.
Out with the old, in with the new. Hopefully this will make my Descent III life a little less choppy...
Descent III will run much better on a faster CPU as well. I noticed a pretty huge difference going from a Pentium II to a Pentium III 850, even with a Voodoo 3.
I didn't even think about it being CPU bound since I was 150Mhz over the recommended specs...
Unfortunately the board only has dip switches up to 500Mhz 🙁 so I can only go up 50Mhz more... unless I try to just jam a 700Mhz PIII in there and see what happens.. hmm..
Who decides what truth is, and what is their objective? Today’s falseness can reappear as tomorrow’s truth.
There are also two grades of Pentium 3, one with on-die cache and one where it's external, on the Slot 1 PCB. There was a significant improvement in performance for the Pentium 3 when the cache was moved back onto the die.
Haven't bought anything lately but i was wondering .. how far would people here go (bidding) on a PCI-E X850XT-PE (not boxed. seemingly good condition and working)? I mean how much is too much? Up until now if i didn't get something cheap i didn't bother, but i used to own this exact card back in the day (same brand) and have been looking for a long time now. I have not yet bought anything from anyone who actually knew what the hardware was worth. In fact that card is kind of the piece that always stuck with me in my mind and kinda sparked the idea to build my old pc's again.
Haven't bought anything lately but i was wondering .. how far would people here go (bidding) on a PCI-E X850XT-PE (not boxed. seemingly good condition and working)? I mean how much is too much? Up until now if i didn't get something cheap i didn't bother, but i used to own this exact card back in the day (same brand) and have been looking for a long time now. I have not yet bought anything from anyone who actually knew what the hardware was worth. In fact that card is kind of the piece that always stuck with me in my mind and kinda sparked the idea to build my old pc's again.
I wouldn't go over 70\90 and take into account that you can unlock some x850 gto to X850XT-PE levels.
Haven't bought anything lately but i was wondering .. how far would people here go (bidding) on a PCI-E X850XT-PE (not boxed. seemingly good condition and working)? I mean how much is too much? Up until now if i didn't get something cheap i didn't bother, but i used to own this exact card back in the day (same brand) and have been looking for a long time now. I have not yet bought anything from anyone who actually knew what the hardware was worth. In fact that card is kind of the piece that always stuck with me in my mind and kinda sparked the idea to build my old pc's again.
I purchased mine for $170 USD and consider that a good price. It’s in mint condition and it’s not the OEM version. If you go for a standard x850 to upgrade to a x850XT PE then you need to make sure it has the right memory chips to allow that.
If that card is bringing back a lot of nostalgic feelings for you, then in my view it’s worth spending some more dollars than what you would usually spend. Keep in mind retro hardware will only go up in price. What you think is expensive now will be considered cheap in a couple of years.
Haven't bought anything lately but i was wondering .. how far would people here go (bidding) on a PCI-E X850XT-PE (not boxed. seemingly good condition and working)? I mean how much is too much? Up until now if i didn't get something cheap i didn't bother, but i used to own this exact card back in the day (same brand) and have been looking for a long time now. I have not yet bought anything from anyone who actually knew what the hardware was worth. In fact that card is kind of the piece that always stuck with me in my mind and kinda sparked the idea to build my old pc's again.
I personally wouldn't pay more than 79 ish Dollars for a PCI-E Version of the X850XT-PE, they are not exactly rare vs the AGP version. You can find them in Dell Dimension XPS Gen 4's if memory serves me correct. If you are patient you shouldn't have a problem finding one for under 99$ or buy up an entire XPS Gen 4 Machine and pull it out or use the whole computer 😁
But if you are looking for a personal replica of a specific brand / design ect. Then the Limit is your own pocket book and happiness 😀
Who decides what truth is, and what is their objective? Today’s falseness can reappear as tomorrow’s truth.
I purchased mine for $170 USD and consider that a good price. It’s in mint condition and it’s not the OEM version. If you go for a standard x850 to upgrade to a x850XT PE then you need to make sure it has the right memory chips to allow that.
If that card is bringing back a lot of nostalgic feelings for you, then in my view it’s worth spending some more dollars than what you would usually spend. Keep in mind retro hardware will only go up in price. What you think is expensive now will be considered cheap in a couple of years.
I personally wouldn't pay more than 79 ish Dollars for a PCI-E Version of the X850XT-PE, they are not exactly rare vs the AGP version. You can find them in Dell Dimension XPS Gen 4's if memory serves me correct. If you are patient you shouldn't have a problem finding one for under 99$ or buy up an entire XPS Gen 4 Machine and pull it out or use the whole computer 😁
But if you are looking for a personal replica of a specific brand / design ect. Then the Limit is your own pocket book and happiness 😀
Thanks for the suggestions guy's. Appreciate it. I'm currently (already) slightly over $110 so i'm calling it quits on the bidding (currently high bid) we will see were it ends up. Add shipping and that's all i'm comfortable with really.
Also thanks for the tip on the XPS machines. I didn't know these also had x850xt-pe cards. I've only seen later ones with 7800GTX cards.
Out with the old, in with the new. Hopefully this will make my Descent III life a little less choppy...
Descent III will run much better on a faster CPU as well. I noticed a pretty huge difference going from a Pentium II to a Pentium III 850, even with a Voodoo 3.
I didn't even think about it being CPU bound since I was 150Mhz over the recommended specs...
Unfortunately the board only has dip switches up to 500Mhz 🙁 so I can only go up 50Mhz more... unless I try to just jam a 700Mhz PIII in there and see what happens.. hmm..
Recommended specs back in those days meant "The game will run at 25fps most of the time."
Graphics settings also have a pretty huge impact on that game, and some scenes are significantly heavier than others.
Also, if you put a PIII with a higher multiplier in there, if it works at all it will run at that multiplier because these CPUs were mostly multiplier locked. So, if the board is set to 500Mhz (5x100), and you drop a 933 (7x133) in there you'll still get a 700Mhz PIII (7x100). If you own a slotket of some kind to use Socket 370 CPUs that would be a big help.
The 19" LG LCD for $1 seems to work OK. Well, I only did a quick power up today, as that's all I had time for, and I didn't see any lines or any cracks on the screen. The "No Signal" message came through fine and backlight didn't do any funky stuff.
I'll still probably open it and check it for bad caps, of course. If nothing else, I have to check the cooling on the PSU / inverter board. A lot of LCDs from that era had terrible hot-box designs for the PSU, as if they wanted to roast the crap caps in there on purpose. A few extra holes in the right place can make some of these monitors run 10-15C cooler inside, which is substantial difference.
Yeah, I can see why mecha pencils are a blessing. One straightens pins, one unlocks Athlons and Durons 🤣
Also good for annotating my hand-drawn schematics. I usually use a regular pencil (and ruler) do draw them, but then prefer to annotate with a mech. pencil, because it's finer and makes text easier to read/cram into small space.
Got this nice clean ASRock 939Dual Sata2 for a good price, seems like the perfect board for the 4800+ or an Opteron 180, they are essentially the same CPU just depends on which one I can dig out of the CPU box first.
...
Comes with everything except the manual, also doesnt appear to have any bad caps but will get a good testing once its here.
Very nice!
I've never seen the box for these before (and I suppose I didn't care to look it up), so it's neat to see it here.
I have two of these boards. One is semi-dieing at this point, so I use it for testing all kinds of GPUs that I think might end up damaging my other boards. And having PCI+AGP+PCI-E fits the bill to allow me to test all kinds of video cards.
I think the Northbridge and Southbridge is kinda vulnerable on these boards, mostly due to running too hot. And I believe this is what is making my 1st one act up so badly. Essentially, its audio is dead, the LAN port will crash the system if used heavily, as will the USB sometimes, the SATA II port is semi-unstable, along with the SATA I ports (though the latter not as much), and the PCI slots often corrupt data when an add-on card is used. The AGP slot is sometimes buggy too. The common denominator is that all of these are handled through the Southbridge. I've already recapped the board and checked every cap - it's not a cap issue nor a PSU / power delivery issue. RAM is known good. CPU and CPU socket pins are fine. I tried all kinds of over and under-clocking on various components, and none seem to make the board less stable. So I'm pretty sure these boards' chipsets just run too hot for their own good. For this reason, I have a fan pointed at mine and so far that seems to have stabilized its operation. Been using it for a GPU test system for ~9 years now. The PCI-E slot is so worn out now that it will regularly refuse to recognize cards. But I came up with a work-around for this: use a 1x miner riser card/slot. The downside is that my test cards only work in 1x mode. But on the upside, I don't have to worry about messing up my PCI-E slot anymore.
Very nice!! I have always wanted to get my hands on that board, but it has always been pretty spendy.
I got my first one around 2009-2010-ish, IIRC, in a PC I found by the side of the road on trash day.
The 2nd one I bought for under $15 with the shipping to my door included. Moreover, the lot contained an Athlon 64 4000+ (939), 2 or 3 GB of DDR RAM, Athlon 64 X2 AM2 of some sort (IIRC), 8 GB of DDR2 RAM, and best of all: the AM2 upgrade board. Been meaning to build a quirky retro PC with this one for a long time. But glad I waited. I've acquired a few fitting cases only in the last 2 years or so.
I sold dozens of those back in the day, quite literally every single one I sold or used in my shop had capacitors that failed after a few years of usage.
That's surprising.
These boards don't have anywhere near the worst caps.
Mostly OST RLS series (or was it RLP?) for the small 6.3V 1000 uF caps scattered everywhere on the board, while the rest of the board they varied a bit more.
My 1st one came with Chemicon KZE on the VRM high side (which are known good reliable caps) and OST RLX on the VRM low-side. From what I've seen, the OST RLX on the low side rarely give problems, even though RLX are not the most stable series. I think ASUS/AsRock just designed a fairly easy-going CPU VRM that doesn't stress the caps much, so probably that's why.
My 2nd board came with the same arrangement, except the VRM low-side uses Rubycon MBZ series... which pretty much means nothing to worry about, as those are pretty stable and reliable too. On the 2nd board, though, I had several of the OST RLS (RLP?) caps bulged - namely two or three around the Northbridge heatsink (one is below the RAM slots next to the RAM MOSFET linear voltage regulator, which also runs extremely hot.)
- ASUS P5GC-MX
- KME CX-6058 case
- Rexpower PSU (also KME OEM)
- Geforce 8500GT 512MB that was artefacting
- 250GB IDE WD Caviar SE
- 1GB DDR2
- Samsung SH-S203 DVDRW (SATA)
Pic from when I was cleaning it up.
That's exactly the case I wanted to buy but missed, as mentioned in my more previous post here. Guy wanted $5 for it, and only reason I didn't buy it was because I didn't want to carry it with me all day (this was at the start at the flea market in the morning.) How silly of me, though. Even worse, when I came back to ask for it, I noticed the two side panels were still there, but the PC was gone. I asked the seller, and he said someone bought it but didn't want the sides. Probably a scrapper, which makes me sad.
Speaking of which... is yours missing the side panels or is that just how you took the picture?
deas for a build inside it? I'm thinking of the following:
- 865 based 775 build
- ASRock P4Dual-915GL w/ Radeon X1950 XTX and Prescott P4
- mobile Barton build with either SL-75FRN2-RL or NF7-S v2.0
- (reserved space for special Socket 462 build)
I think socket 462 or 478 -era hardware would be more appropriate for this build... i.e. 2003-2005.
So perhaps the mobile Barton or special s462 build??
I see the case has space for a 92mm (or 120mm) fan at the back, which should be adequate enough for a s462 build.
Thats wild i just picked up the exact same case, from the same estate sale I got the Compaq from. Except it has a crazy surge protector strip built in. I'll have to grab a pic of it. The lan party handle is the best thing!
I think it was a pretty popular case back in the day, at least in Eastern Euroland.
The LAN Part handle is indeed what I think is really cool about it.
With a bit more luck, maybe I'll see another one at the flea market again. I saw one like that but in all white (and blue on the side) a few months prior. The one I missed more recently was nicer though - had a matching color and era-appropriate Gigabyte mobo and GPU, and the mobo was full of bad/bulging Sanyo (likely WF) caps, which is normally exactly the type of hardware I like to get: broken / with issues, but nothing too complicated to fix.
Agp motherboards in general seem to be randomly picky about the graphics cards you put in them. I have come to find you need to test all video cards in at LEAST two motherboards with different chipsets before declaring an agp gpu is dead.
Seems my experience varies from this again.
I've had very few AGP boards not work with whatever AGP cards I threw in them (save for AGP 1.o cards into mobos with 3.o slots and vice-versa, which we all know is a NO-GO... but then, these are keyed to prevent this from happening anyways.)
With PCI, I did have a few OEM mobos reject my PCI cards (i.e. not even see it's there or refuse to use it as the boot VGA.)
And with PCI-E, I've probably had the most incompatibilities, namely with PCI-E 16x v1 mobos and GPUs using PCI-E v2 or 3. Though I also suspect some of the "incompatibilities" were just faulty GPUs.
Sometimes if a PCI-E GPU has dead/dying PCI-E lanes, it may not detect at all on the bus.
If you compare the contacts on an AGP card vs ISA, PCI and PCI-Express, you'll see that the shape of the pins is very different on AGP and they are staggered. I don't know if this is why some combinations of cards + boards can be so picky, but it could be why we don't see connectors like this on consumer gear these days (there may be some, but I can't think of any). It seems like that would have been a pretty huge oversight in the design, but they may have had other good reasons to make the connector this way. Maybe they did this to manage the force required to insert or remove cards? If half the pins are at different depths then it would require half the force spread out over two rows of pins.
But then, this also makes the card come loose more easily too.
I think the staggered pins in AGP (and slot 1 / A) were indeed to lower insertion/removal forces, thus causing less force to be exerted on the board and less likely to flex it / cause a solder joint issue.
That being said, this is why these slots (or at least Slot 1 and A CPUs) always came with some kind of locking mechanism.
It seems that later on with "universal" AGP slots, many motherboard manufacturers just started to slack and not include a lock.
Powered it on and had a laugh with going through the P/O's win98 .. then second time i went to power it on ... BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ (standard bigfoot noises) TICK*TICK*TICK*TICK*TICK ( not so standard bigfoot noises ) 😒
I still wonder how it was able to power on and work flawless one last time (first time since me buying it) and then Clunk .. dead.
Ah those BigFoot HDDs, what miserable drives they were - slow, unreliable, and BIG (physically).
I have a 3.2 GB that came out of a Compaq PC I found on the side of the road (I think this was my 1st trash-picked PC.) Used said hard drive to transfer files to/from an offline PC at my grandmother's house. This was in the early 2000's when flash drives were still not big enough and too expensive. And while I did have a CD burner, I preferred to only use it for long-term storage of files.
The BigFood was far from an ideal solution for this, but it worked OK enough at the time. Though, I should note I did get a few files corrupted back then, so it looked like it was failing even then.
Fast forward 15 years... I pulled it out of storage, powered it on, the BigFoot made its usual "BZZZZZZZ.... RAT-TA-TA-TA-TA-TRRRRRRRR" successful head-calibration sound and all was well. Then, a day later, I wanted to do a sound recording of the boot-up sounds it made and... no-workie, just like yours. Essentially the head calibration only went through partially followed by "DONK" sound with the head returning to park zone. After 3 failed attempts, though, the HDD finally calibrated and booted up.
So perhaps gives yours a try a few times to boot/calibrate.
I may look at throwing a small fan on the northbridge of the board, i have a number of small fans from northbridge coolers from other boards that kicked the bucket, im sure one will fit and I can rig it to one of the fan headers or molex adaptors.
I really do want to keep the board working for as long as it can so may repaste the heatsinks too.
@Demetrio considering that you are in Italy, one would think that you'd be more partial towards Olivetti computers. 😉
Nice buy, though. There's just something very nice about the IBM PS/2 machines, at least those in the pizza box form factor. It's just a pleasant and robust looking design. The power button alone. 😄
But maybe that's just personal nostalgia, since we had those machines in the computer lab in high school.
That's exactly the case I wanted to buy but missed, as mentioned in my more previous post here. Guy wanted $5 for it, and only reason I didn't buy it was because I didn't want to carry it with me all day (this was at the start at the flea market in the morning.) How silly of me, though. Even worse, when I came back to ask for it, I noticed the two side panels were still there, but the PC was gone. I asked the seller, and he said someone bought it but didn't want the sides. Probably a scrapper, which makes me sad.
Speaking of which... is yours missing the side panels or is that just how you took the picture?
That's just how I took the picture during cleaning. The case is 99% intact - save for missing feet, for which I'll have to hit up some "home-depot" style stores to buy some feet, the type that screws in.
I think socket 462 or 478 -era hardware would be more appropriate for this build... i.e. 2003-2005.
So perhaps the mobile Barton or special s462 build??
I see the case has space for a 92mm (or 120mm) fan at the back, which should be adequate enough for a s462 build.
I'll let you in on a single hint about the special 462 build - Thunderbird und DDR.
"Enter at your own peril, past the bolted door..."
Main PC: i5 3470, GB B75M-D3H, 16GB RAM, 2x1TB
98SE : P3 650, Soyo SY-6BA+IV, 384MB RAM, 80GB
@Demetrio considering that you are in Italy, one would think that you'd be more partial towards Olivetti computers. 😉
Nice buy, though. There's just something very nice about the IBM PS/2 machines, at least those in the pizza box form factor. It's just a pleasant and robust looking design. The power button alone. 😄
But maybe that's just personal nostalgia, since we had those machines in the computer lab in high school.
I am also in Italy and have IBM collections, you should know that Olivetti already at the time of the 386/486 was no longer the very advanced company it was at the time of the 8086. Not to mention that the availability of computers/parts and documentation is enormously greater in IBM compared to Olivetti.
A strange thing about Demetrio's computer however is that that PS/2 model was built with both the 8086 and the 286 and the 8086 version had a red power selector unlike the 286 which was white like yours....
I have wondered if there are any hardware filters that can sit between a VGA card and a monitor that are able to do some minor processing on the image to clean that up. It shouldn't be difficult to figure out the approximate color of a pixel and sharpen that up. The problem with this idea is always latency. Is it possible to apply any kind of filter like this in real-time without noticable input lag?
I have wondered if there are any hardware filters that can sit between a VGA card and a monitor that are able to do some minor processing on the image to clean that up. It shouldn't be difficult to figure out the approximate color of a pixel and sharpen that up. The problem with this idea is always latency. Is it possible to apply any kind of filter like this in real-time without noticable input lag?
I have a Diamond ARK2000 based card and it has a lot more filtering caps than this one does, I also suspect the Vbios on this card is perhaps not the best. IIRC some S3 Virge cards could be cleaned up a lot by flashing a better Vbios on to them and replacing the filtering caps with better quality ones.
Still Im sure there would be a way to clean this card up too since it wouldn't be the ARK processor causing the image quality issues here.
