Bought this one for cheap money the other day, yet did not have time to test it out.
That's what I did tonight. And it works great. Nothing wrong at all with the card.

I mounted it in my trusty FIC PA-2013 machine, connected it to the stereo-system, and fired up under some games.
It works like a charm in all the games you would expect it to. Duke3D, Doom2 and so on.
The card previous in this machine was an AWE64-Value, and boy did I notice a big difference.
Now even Adlib emulation sounds allmost as good, as the real deal. 😜

There are soo much non computer related things I should be doing so I thought I should limit this weekends tinkering to something easy that wouldnt take much time.

I need to get some systems benchmarked in Doom 3 a second time as I used the slow 1.3 version the first time around and havlis much better score makes my nice Athlon 64 systems look slow 😜.

I have one single Geforce 6800 GT/Ultra PCI-E and its place is in a box under the desk I use when benching systems that dont have cases. The damn card wasnt there, I looked twice then I spent two hours turning the whole apartment upside down hunting for the card. In the end I found it, in the box under the table I use when benching sys...

Its that kind of day I guess 😀

I assembled my 386 today. Still a lot of stuff I need to do on it, but it runs! Won't post pics here because I don't know how to link previews of attachments already uploaded to vogons, but you can find pictures of the build process here: Re: 386 - 25MHz build (lots of pics)

How I love this DFI Nforce 4 Vanilla board.

The DFI boards use to be a pain to set up, my other DFI Nforce 4 boards are very picky about everything, if voltages and memory timings isnt tweaked to perfection you can forget about stability with any overclock. With this particular board getting to 3 GHz is as easy as putting a decent San Diego 4000+ in the socket, power on the system, load optimized defaults, change the reference clock to 250, save and reboot.

Its a shame its just a Nforce 4 Vanilla board and not a SLI or Ultra, perhaps I will have to do the mod...

Skyscraper wrote:

How I love this DFI Nforce 4 Vanilla board.

The DFI boards use to be a pain to set up, my other DFI Nforce 4 boards are very picky about everything, if voltages and memory timings isnt tweaked to perfection you can forget about stability with any overclock. With this particular board getting to 3 GHz is as easy as putting a decent San Diego 4000+ in the socket, power on the system, load optimized defaults, change the reference clock to 250, save and reboot.

Its a shame its just a Nforce 4 Vanilla board and not a SLI or Ultra, perhaps I will have to do the mod...

Nforce 2/3 and early nforce 4 boards are very picky about ram. Found that out the hard way.

kanecvr wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

How I love this DFI Nforce 4 Vanilla board.

The DFI boards use to be a pain to set up, my other DFI Nforce 4 boards are very picky about everything, if voltages and memory timings isnt tweaked to perfection you can forget about stability with any overclock. With this particular board getting to 3 GHz is as easy as putting a decent San Diego 4000+ in the socket, power on the system, load optimized defaults, change the reference clock to 250, save and reboot.

Its a shame its just a Nforce 4 Vanilla board and not a SLI or Ultra, perhaps I will have to do the mod...

Nforce 2/3 and early nforce 4 boards are very picky about ram. Found that out the hard way.

This board seems to like this OCZ 2x1GB kit, they run at their rated speed 500 MHz CL 3,3,2,7 1T without issues.
I think its this kit but Im not totally sure as my memory dosnt have any stickers http://www.anandtech.com/show/1817/7

A keyboard for my orphaned XT finally arrived. As much as I hate the old Miniscribes this one actually booted.
MS-DOS 4, Lotus 123, Microsoft Works, Word Perfect, Dbase, some disk utilities from Norton and a program manager. That's it. Guy must of kept all his files on floppies as the disk was pretty much full of office applications and nothing else. Quite clean. Regardless I'll probably give the drive a needed LLF, reload with DOS 3.3, then load it down with drivers for the various cards I added and then hold out for a 5153. IT was also suprising that the floppy drive was working fine even though I had yet to clean and lube it. This machine in in very good condition.

Are baking an chocolate cake from scratch, retro enough?

Well...
I did clean some dust off some of my hardware.
Played some lemmings and some raptor.

I received a box with an Epox EP-D3VA (with Dual P3 1000 and 1.5GB RAM), and a very tobacco-smelly ABIT VH6T 1.1 and some cards:

Geforce 2 MX 200 AGP 32MB SDRAM 6ns (the memery could fit on a Voodoo 4 4500 AGP 😁 )
3COM Etherlink XL PCI

Now to some testing 😁

Does anyone know the Abit VHT6?
Does it support Tualatins (with adapters)?
I havent decided yet which graphics card to use with the Dual Pentium 3 Board.
Maybe a Voodoo 5 5500 setup on Win2K? (quake 3 arena: r_smp 1 ? 😁 )

brostenen wrote:

Are baking an chocolate cake from scratch, retro enough? […]
Show full quote

Are baking an chocolate cake from scratch, retro enough?

Well...
I did clean some dust off some of my hardware.
Played some lemmings and some raptor.

Damn it. Now I a hungrier than ever!

Making progress with my new setup. Having the shelves in my other bedroom, I'm now able to fit a third desk in my computerlab. Sort of in a U-shape. The plan is to have the capture machine in the centre, one side for 386/486/Super Socket 7 and mostly DOS stuff and the other side for more modern Slot 1, Windows 98 SE, Voodoo, early Windows XP stuff.

The little monitor is a 18.5" Philips with a 4:3 aspect ratio mode button. It's terrific for retro gaming. Does 1024 x 768 1:1 pixel mapped, really nice. Wanted to buy another one, but the shop I got it from doesn't stock it anymore 😢

On the more modern side I will be using my 24" 1920 x 1200 screen for some nice 1600 x 1200 4:3 high resolution bliss.

All the cables are now on the desk. Around the MIDI gear it's still a bit of a mess, but it's much easier to work now. I'm also going to have at least 3 builds setup permanently, because my Super Socket 7 machine always got a bit neglected. A side project is adding all the GOG DOS games onto that machine.

It's now got a 120 GB notebook drive, basically the limit Windows 98 can handle, so heaps of space for games 😀

The SS7 machine is based around a late DFI SS7 board, a Pentium 200 chip, but clocked at 100 MHz. 64 MB Ram, 120 GB Notebook drive connected through a SATA to IDE adapter. A newish DVD drive with analogue CD output at the back. Floppy emulator at the front and a HDD bay which lets me pull out the drive and put it a USB HDD dock on the capture PC.

It's got a FX5200, D-Link PCI Ethernet card, Roland MPU401 and a Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold. Got Windows 98SE installed + MS-DOS mode with my easy-to-use boot menu 😀

The drive on the SS7 machines is shared on the network, and on the capture PC I've also got one share going. This works very well. There is also a dedicated audio cable going from the back of the DVD drive, through an open rear slot into the mixer. This allows me to mix CD audio tracks if needed. Or mute it.

The four midi modules go through an audio selector box into the mixer. The AWE64 Gold also goes into the mixer. Currently I do need to manually connect the MIDI cable from the MPU401 to whatever MIDI module I'm using. I've labelled the cables, so it's not very difficult. I do have a 4 port MIDI hub / switch, but it gives me hanging notes. There is also a good old MS Sidewinder stick.

Are those Shure SRH-1440s I spy there, phil? Neat setup overall - I used to have a U-Shape desk years ago, and it was very nice with multiple systems.

Anyways, for myself: I got my dual Xeon Windows XP box finished, finally! Hoping to spend some time gaming on it in the coming week(s). While I had it apart, I decided 2x40GB hard-drives wasn't big enough, and upgraded it to a 500GB SATA disk - so now I should be able to install any/every game I could possibly want, and it seems to boot faster as well. 😎

I also want chocolate cake now...

obobskivich wrote:

Are those Shure SRH-1440s I spy there, phil? Neat setup overall - I used to have a U-Shape desk years ago, and it was very nice with multiple systems.

Yes. Nice headphones, very comfortable.

Added a test bench to the left for 386 and 486 gear. Just tested this ATX to AT adapter with the -5V regulator. Works fine. Listening to some Fate of Atlantis music through a Sound Blaster 2.0 😀

philscomputerlab wrote:

Yes. Nice headphones, very comfortable.

I keep hearing good things about them, but Shure is one of the few headphone makers I've yet to try. 😊

For today: tried out Hitman: Codename 47 on my Voodoo2 SLI setup. It works surprisingly well even at 1024x768 - the game's built-in FPS counter was showing mostly 60 FPS, with a few drops to 30-40 FPS. There were a few very quick snaps where I would've sworn it was lower than that, but it wasn't unplayable by any means. 😎

Just finished installing my Dual P3 Build:

Dual Pentium 3 1000EB
1536MB SD-RAM PC133 (512-512-256-256 - CL3)
Epox EP-D3VA
Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 Kyro 2 (64MB AGP / TVout)
2x WD400 IDE (40GB) (soon to be "RAID")
Terratec DMX 6Fire 24/96 PCI with Drivebay
Coba 400W ATX

Works really well at browsing, UT99, CS1.5, Quake 3 Arena etc.
I will make a separate Thread when I'm done.

Arctic wrote:

Just finished installing my Dual P3 Build: […]
Show full quote

Just finished installing my Dual P3 Build:

Dual Pentium 3 1000EB
1536MB SD-RAM PC133 (512-512-256-256 - CL3)
Epox EP-D3VA
Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 Kyro 2 (64MB AGP / TVout)
2x WD400 IDE (40GB) (soon to be "RAID")
Terratec DMX 6Fire 24/96 PCI with Drivebay
Coba 400W ATX

Works really well at browsing, UT99, CS1.5, Quake 3 Arena etc.
I will make a separate Thread when I'm done.

😜

brostenen wrote:

Arctic wrote:

Just finished installing my Dual P3 Build:
[...]

😜

Why the tongue smiley?

Took a Socket 7 AT board I recently acquired (Shuttle HOT-569A) and gave it a possibly-permanent home in a spare ATX case I had on hand. They actually went together quite well...the case has mounting holes specifically for AT, and the motherboard has both AT and ATX power connectors. Really the only problems are the lack of a proper I/O shield and the USB header on the motherboard isn't compatible with the front panel wiring, but those aren't a big deal. The board came with a K6 233 and a single 64MB DIMM, so it's a good base for a vintage system I could work on while waiting for parts on my 486 rebuild to arrive.

I finally got around to finishing my XP box after it's Gigabyte 81PE775 motherboard died... shame, since it was my only ATX LGA775+AGP motherboard... Current configuration is:

- Pentium D 945 cooled by a Tuniq Tower 120 (this thing cools great and is one of the few tower coolers to also fit socket 478 P4 motherboards - you can still get it new)
- 2x512MB Kingston DDR400
- some shitty Foxconn mATX MB with i865 chipset (needs replacing since it's mATX and frankly kind of boring... runs well tought 😁 )
- Saphire Radeon X1950 AGP ( ever wonder what a vacuum cleaner would sound like inside a computer case? )
- Creative X-Fi Xtreme Audio
- 650W Mushkin 650-XP PSU
- Maxtor 250GB SATA HDD
- old beat-up and incomplete Antec P182SE Silver witch a friend donated

Can anyone recommend a GOOD LGA775 + AGP motherboard? I seem to have no luck sourcing a decent one - preferably one that can do a little OC as well. I'm only looking to run 2000-2004 and a some newer games on it - Doom 3, Quake 4, Black and White 2 (witch for some reason keeps crashing on 64 bit OSes) etc.

kanecvr wrote:

Can anyone recommend a GOOD LGA775 + AGP motherboard? I seem to have no luck sourcing a decent one - preferably one that can do a little OC as well. I'm only looking to run 2000-2004 and a some newer games on it - Doom 3, Quake 4, Black and White 2 (witch for some reason keeps crashing on 64 bit OSes) etc.

Funny you mention this. I was just looking for a "good featured" board for this exact thing last night and have one stashed in my ebay wish list.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/151670792416 775 board with AGP 8x, and dual channel ddr-400. Some overclocking supported in bios. Allows multiple ram dividers, and 1-step base clock and cpu voltage adjustments, as well as ram voltage. The only thing it lacks is ram timing settings, so it's likely going to some how pick those automatically in that regard. And expensive, $95.

BUT! It's the best featured one I could find. Highest CPU supported is the Pentium D 940 @ 3.4 Ghz.