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Bought these (retro) hardware today

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Reply 7320 of 52338, by luckybob

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HighTreason wrote:

The dog was included?

- or -

3.4GHz Emergency Edition. Which makes you wonder if dog man was overclocking it with that rather flimsy looking cooler installed, thank heavens those processors had thermal throttling.

ACTUALLY, that heatsink is a beast. If you can keep the air intake cool, it will keep even the newest 150W cpus cool. It depends a lot on the case you put it in. That said, the Alpha one I bought should be better.

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

Reply 7321 of 52338, by HighTreason

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It looked like a heatpipe cooler with a small footprint to me, so I was just assuming it was garbage, those things never work as promised in my experience and that's assuming they go on straight - I've seen some simply horrible mounting systems. Heatpipes should only be used in low power implementations or to augment a solid heatsink. The nice solid mass of the one you bought looks a lot better indeed.

Either way, that should shape up to be a pretty kickass P4 rig.

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Reply 7322 of 52338, by smeezekitty

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HighTreason wrote:

It looked like a heatpipe cooler with a small footprint to me, so I was just assuming it was garbage, those things never work as promised in my experience and that's assuming they go on straight - I've seen some simply horrible mounting systems. Heatpipes should only be used in low power implementations or to augment a solid heatsink. The nice solid mass of the one you bought looks a lot better indeed.

Either way, that should shape up to be a pretty kickass P4 rig.

There is nothing wrong with heatpipes IF they have a decent heatsink to dump the heat to. They heat has to go somewhere.

Reply 7323 of 52338, by HighTreason

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Usually it just goes into the heatpipe and dissipates poorly due to the heatsink hanging off by a line of tiny brazed points that are less than 1mm².

As yet I've never seen one that was well designed, even the one with the huge 120MM heatsink in the old Sony Vaio was terrible. By the time you find one that is meant to be good (and they generally aren't anywhere close to what the box promises anyway) they cost so much that you may as well have bought a decent solid copper one or installed water cooling in the first place.

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Reply 7324 of 52338, by luckybob

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I actually still have all my watercooling parts from 2002, back when i had a 2.8 prescott and I wanted to get it as high as I could. I could go that way again. I'd probably need to service the pump, i bet the seals have dried and cracked by now.

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

Reply 7325 of 52338, by HighTreason

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I don't know if this was only a local thing or not, but I remember that around that time was when most people first discovered liquid cooling. Every LAN party I went to seemingly had increasingly ridiculous setups, most of which lacked any reservoir, some of which lacked radiators (and failed miserably). This was fine on it's own despite the lack of any specialized parts (many contained pieces from the B&Q Garden Centers and burned out Ford Fiestas) making them a little unpredictable.

The problems started when people caught on that putting tap water into your computer was potentially a bad idea and they began trying to substitute it with other fluids. There were two camps; those who were worried about leaks and wanted less electrical conductivity and those who were confident theirs would not leak and were more concerned with thermal conductivity. I saw petrol, vegetable oil, soap, pure anti-freeze, mineral oil, purified water, some kind of dye, vodka and this one guy got thrown out for attempting to use mercury(!) in his loop - he was in the second group obviously.

I remember one guy had an ingenious system where he sucked the air out of the cooling loop through a valve and used a pressure switch of some kind to switch the power off if the loop leaked.

Open T-Points at the top of the case was the in-thing to do, I always remember this one guy getting mad because he lost at Q3A and bashing his monitor which fell off the back of the desk and smashed, his elbow caught the PC case and tipped it over onto it's side. Needless to say, the monitor was the least of his worries at this point and he kicked the desk and left never to be seen again.

The worst one I saw was a friend of mine who used tap water, would have been fine, but he was an early adopter and never replaced the water, only topped it up. That K6 machine was crap anyway, but the open cooling loop made horrible smells when the system got warm.

There was also an influx of these horrible cheap kits which had tubing made of nylon, it was only around one millimeter thick. Those never lasted long and always ended the same way.

Hehe, good memories. Incidentally, I have liquid cooling on my 775 box, but it's pretty standard fare with two radiators, regular non-conductive fluid, two heat blocks (CPU+GPU) and a decent reservoir. It leaks a bit after six years though, so if you dig yours out you should definitely test it first.

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Reply 7326 of 52338, by smeezekitty

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Every LAN party I went to seemingly had increasingly ridiculous setups, most of which lacked any reservoir, some of which lacked radiators (and failed miserably). This was fine on it's own despite the lack of any specialized parts (many contained pieces from the B&Q Garden Centers and burned out Ford Fiestas) making them a little unpredictable.

The problems started when people caught on that putting tap water into your computer was potentially a bad idea and they began trying to substitute it with other fluids. There were two camps; those who were worried about leaks and wanted less electrical conductivity and those who were confident theirs would not leak and were more concerned with thermal conductivity. I saw petrol, vegetable oil, soap, pure anti-freeze, mineral oil, purified water, some kind of dye, vodka and this one guy got thrown out for attempting to use mercury(!) in his loop - he was in the second group obviously.

😲 😲

I don't claim to be a water cooling expert but it is amazing these people were so clueless.

Reply 7329 of 52338, by Dant

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jwt27 wrote:

Acquired a potentially interesting board today, an Asrock 775i65G. It's a socket 775 board with AGP 8x.

That board is more than potentially interesting. Its chipset is old enough that is supports DDMA and PC/PCI. Drop a compatible PCI sound card in there, and you'll have soundblaster compatibility along with your Core2 CPU.

Reply 7330 of 52338, by Stiletto

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HighTreason wrote:
I don't know if this was only a local thing or not, but I remember that around that time was when most people first discovered l […]
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I don't know if this was only a local thing or not, but I remember that around that time was when most people first discovered liquid cooling. Every LAN party I went to seemingly had increasingly ridiculous setups, most of which lacked any reservoir, some of which lacked radiators (and failed miserably). This was fine on it's own despite the lack of any specialized parts (many contained pieces from the B&Q Garden Centers and burned out Ford Fiestas) making them a little unpredictable.

The problems started when people caught on that putting tap water into your computer was potentially a bad idea and they began trying to substitute it with other fluids. There were two camps; those who were worried about leaks and wanted less electrical conductivity and those who were confident theirs would not leak and were more concerned with thermal conductivity. I saw petrol, vegetable oil, soap, pure anti-freeze, mineral oil, purified water, some kind of dye, vodka and this one guy got thrown out for attempting to use mercury(!) in his loop - he was in the second group obviously.

I remember one guy had an ingenious system where he sucked the air out of the cooling loop through a valve and used a pressure switch of some kind to switch the power off if the loop leaked.

Open T-Points at the top of the case was the in-thing to do, I always remember this one guy getting mad because he lost at Q3A and bashing his monitor which fell off the back of the desk and smashed, his elbow caught the PC case and tipped it over onto it's side. Needless to say, the monitor was the least of his worries at this point and he kicked the desk and left never to be seen again.

The worst one I saw was a friend of mine who used tap water, would have been fine, but he was an early adopter and never replaced the water, only topped it up. That K6 machine was crap anyway, but the open cooling loop made horrible smells when the system got warm.

There was also an influx of these horrible cheap kits which had tubing made of nylon, it was only around one millimeter thick. Those never lasted long and always ended the same way.

Hehe, good memories. Incidentally, I have liquid cooling on my 775 box, but it's pretty standard fare with two radiators, regular non-conductive fluid, two heat blocks (CPU+GPU) and a decent reservoir. It leaks a bit after six years though, so if you dig yours out you should definitely test it first.

Way before my knowledge of watercooling, somehow I missed the early days and didn't learn more about it until like 2004 or later.

Several years ago I acquired a book which talked all about these early days, it was pretty eye-opening. 😀
http://www.amazon.com/PC-Overclocking-Optimiz … ds=overclocking

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Reply 7331 of 52338, by oerk

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RacoonRider wrote:

Speaking of water cooling... I once saw a video featuring a P4 put into an aquarium filled with some dielectric liquid. That was fun 😀

Friend of mine has his PC running in an aquarium filled with transformer oil. I think it ran for four or five years on an Athlon X2 setup, has a Haswell Pentium in it now.

He's not a computer geek, just a tinkerer who wanted a silent computer in his living room.

Same guy has a Tualatin Celeron system running as a car PC. That thing has outlived two Mercedes 190D and is now in a 250D.

Reply 7332 of 52338, by jwt27

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rick6 wrote:
jwt27 wrote:

Acquired a potentially interesting board today, an Asrock 775i65G. It's a socket 775 board with AGP 8x.

I have a ASRock 775V88 VIA PT880. Not a great performer to be honest and it had a bit of coil whine, solved by disabling cpu throttling on the bios.
It works ok nonetheless with a Pentium 560 3.6Ghz, although cpu-z shows that the cpu is only working at 3.5Ghz 😀

Can imagine where the coil whine comes from. Super cheap caps, and half of them are shot on this board. It won't boot either, presumably for this reason.
I believe I have a quad core 775 Xeon here somewhere with some ridiculous amount of cache, combined with an XFX 7800GS might make a nice buid. Not that it wouldd run anything that my current machine won't handle though...

Dant wrote:

That board is more than potentially interesting. Its chipset is old enough that is supports DDMA and PC/PCI. Drop a compatible PCI sound card in there, and you'll have soundblaster compatibility along with your Core2 CPU.

Whoa... very interesting indeed. But how practical would that be though? The only reason I can think of to use such a fast machine in DOS is for Fractint and Autocad... both of which don't require any sound. And yeah, Build engine games could use the extra power in high resolutions. But Duke3D isn't all that fun without an SCC-1, and PCI soundcards tend to have pretty bad DOS support anyway.

Reply 7333 of 52338, by HighTreason

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Get a PCI-ISA bridge or buy one of those SuperMicro P4 boards that had ISA anyway...

Nah, it's pointless, most DOS games actually perform better on the P3 anyway due to later CPUs not being optimized for such applications.

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Reply 7334 of 52338, by obobskivich

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I finally found another Creative Voodoo2 12MB to complete SLI (and I think it took about as long as Duke Nukem Forever's development); shipping estimate says it should arrive next week. Haven't the foggiest what machine they're going in though. I've been toying with the idea of trying them out alongside X850 CrossFire with an Athlon64, but I think the behind-the-case wiring would be a total mess.

Reply 7335 of 52338, by kithylin

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jwt27 wrote:
Dant wrote:

That board is more than potentially interesting. Its chipset is old enough that is supports DDMA and PC/PCI. Drop a compatible PCI sound card in there, and you'll have soundblaster compatibility along with your Core2 CPU.

Whoa... very interesting indeed. But how practical would that be though? The only reason I can think of to use such a fast machine in DOS is for Fractint and Autocad... both of which don't require any sound. And yeah, Build engine games could use the extra power in high resolutions. But Duke3D isn't all that fun without an SCC-1, and PCI soundcards tend to have pretty bad DOS support anyway.

DOS SVGA games. SVGA modes need all the CPU power you can throw at em. Even my super-powered one I've set up specifically for this task with a 1.8 ghz AthlonXP Barton still can't do above 1024x768 in certain games (Quake, BLOOD).

Reply 7336 of 52338, by jwt27

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kithylin wrote:
jwt27 wrote:
Dant wrote:

That board is more than potentially interesting. Its chipset is old enough that is supports DDMA and PC/PCI. Drop a compatible PCI sound card in there, and you'll have soundblaster compatibility along with your Core2 CPU.

Whoa... very interesting indeed. But how practical would that be though? The only reason I can think of to use such a fast machine in DOS is for Fractint and Autocad... both of which don't require any sound. And yeah, Build engine games could use the extra power in high resolutions. But Duke3D isn't all that fun without an SCC-1, and PCI soundcards tend to have pretty bad DOS support anyway.

DOS SVGA games. SVGA modes need all the CPU power you can throw at em. Even my super-powered one I've set up specifically for this task with a 1.8 ghz AthlonXP Barton still can't do above 1024x768 in certain games (Quake, BLOOD).

How much of a difference would a 775 cpu make? I don't know if there's any difference in optimization as HighTreason says, I'd be more concerned about the graphics card on this point. I do know that at least 75% of a quad-core's processsing power would be utterly wasted under DOS.

Not that I'd really need it either.. Can't even tell the difference between 640x480 and 800x600 on my DOS monitor. But I'm all for benchmarks. For science! 😀

Reply 7337 of 52338, by vetz

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Quite a haul the last days, so here we go (Artex kind of style!):

AUYA CAM/50-UO motherboard. I've been looking for some while to acquire the ASUS ISA-486 motherboard to build a true 486 DX50 ISA build, highend 1991/1992 style, but this board came up instead in my searching. I havent seen anyone else do a 486 DX50 ISA build, and I love the weird builds, so this is just in my alley! Badmofo, I hope you concur! Battery has been removed, and there is no damage. 256kb cache installed (maximum), but for some reason someone had switched the TAGram around and it didnt boot correctly. Luckily Google helped me solve it. The board itself was originally installed with a DX50 in 1992 (both BIOS and build dates are from 92) which is still there (see sticker). I put in 8MB of RAM, which should be more than enough. Just need to get an external battery and its all ready. I've already VGA benched it with my ATI Mach32 2MB ISA card (only 486DX50 submission to Phil's VGA benchmark as of this writing!!). It performs like a DX66 with ISA basically, so it's not entirely slow (too slow for Doom though). What is also very nice is that switching the turbo off drops the performance right down in the 386 33/40mhz sweet spot. So this should cover loads of games!

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ASUS P/I-XP55T2P4 Rev 3.0 I've benched both this and my rev 1.3 version up against each other. No difference in terms of performance, but the ATX version is a tad slower than the AT brother seen below.
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ASUS P/I-P55T2P4 Rev 3.0 Also been benched. Legendary board.
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Abit AB-PG5 Interesting socket 7 board with PCI, EISA and ISA. Cannot get it to boot 🙁
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Promise DC4030CL-2 VLB IDE cache controller - Brand new in box 😀
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Tekram DC-690B IDE cache RAID controller This has to be the earliest PCI IDE controller I've seen. It's from 1993/94! Supports up to 16MB cache and RAID 1 setup. New in box!
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Canopus Spectra 7400 DDR In box Geforce 256 DDR card from Canopus 😀
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Reply 7338 of 52338, by kithylin

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jwt27 wrote:

How much of a difference would a 775 cpu make? I don't know if there's any difference in optimization as HighTreason says, I'd be more concerned about the graphics card on this point. I do know that at least 75% of a quad-core's processsing power would be utterly wasted under DOS.

Not that I'd really need it either.. Can't even tell the difference between 640x480 and 800x600 on my DOS monitor. But I'm all for benchmarks. For science! 😀

You don't get much of a difference until you get to the upper resolutions where it packs the pixels tighter. I can notice a serious difference between 320x240 and 1280x1024 in Descent2 and 1024x768 in Descent I.

And Also I've noticed some of that too. What was not obvious to me for a long time is different graphics cards have faster 2D cores than others.. which leads to higher SVGA performance.

The absolutely fastest SVGA performance I've ever seen on a system was core2duo 45nm wolfdale chip I had clocked at 4.6 ghz and a stock speeded HD4890, the 4000 series of AMD cards seems to be the last ones with fast 2D core, and I found.. I forget the name, I think TopBench, which is a ms-dos benchmark that gauges 16-bit performance. I have a lot of CPU's here and the core2duo series is the last cpu with a native 16-bit core in it, at least the highest in that test. The core2quads dropped 16-bit performance. But I couldn't ever get such a system to run sound along with it's SVGA performance, so I gave up on it.

vetz wrote:

Quite a haul the last days, so here we go (Artex kind of style!):

AUYA CAM/50-UO motherboard. I've been looking for some while to acquire the ASUS ISA-486 motherboard to build a true 486 DX50 ISA build, highend 1991/1992 style, but this board came up instead in my searching. I havent seen anyone else do a 486 DX50 ISA build, and I love the weird builds, so this is just in my alley! Badmofo, I hope you concur! Battery has been removed, and there is no damage. 256kb cache installed (maximum), but for some reason someone had switched the TAGram around and it didnt boot correctly. Luckily Google helped me solve it. The board itself was originally installed with a DX50 in 1992 (both BIOS and build dates are from 92) which is still there (see sticker). I put in 8MB of RAM, which should be more than enough. Just need to get an external battery and its all ready. I've already VGA benched it with my ATI Mach32 2MB ISA card (only 486DX50 submission to Phil's VGA benchmark as of this writing!!). It performs like a DX66 with ISA basically, so it's not entirely slow (too slow for Doom though). What is also very nice is that switching the turbo off drops the performance right down in the 386 33/40mhz sweet spot. So this should cover loads of games!

<snip pictures>

FYI for you, those 4030-plus VLB cards, you can connect newer 40GB and 80GB IDE Drives to them, and while they will only support up to 8.1 or 8.4 GB out of the total drive's space, the drives will work natively with those cards, using the 8 GB out of it, and you get much much newer drive performance on 486's. Also you can load them up to 32 MB of ram using 4 x 8 MB sticks. It's not documented in the manual but I'm doing it on mine and it works fantastically. I've been wanting to try some of those 16MB chips and try 64MB in it, but I've just never gotten around to it.

Reply 7339 of 52338, by Artex

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vetz wrote:

Quite a haul the last days, so here we go (Artex kind of style!)

No doubt! Nice work man!

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