VOGONS


Reply 20 of 28, by Marquzz

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I think 1366 and 1156 stuff are already collectors item as they seem to go for premium prices, especially Asus and Evga high end stuff. Early DDR3 2000-2200 DDR3 that clocked really high with low timings are also rare and go for high prices. As for graphics cards it will obvously be top cards of each generation, but cherry pickins will be special cards like MSI lightning, Asus Poseidon and EVGA Classified (amongst others). And as mentioned, CPU-wise it will be mainly AMD as they will probably be rarer, Intel cpu's will go for 1 cent a docen. Try to find a FX 9590 with boxed water cooler, that will be a treasure in the future 😉

Reply 22 of 28, by fillosaurus

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Hehe... Thinking to sell my 2xAcorn BBC, one Acorn BBC Master and an Amstrad CPC 464. Maybe I will be holding on to them until the prices go higher.

Y2K box: AMD Athlon K75 (second generation slot A)@700, ASUS K7M motherboard, 256 MB SDRAM, ATI Radeon 7500+2xVoodoo2 in SLI, SB Live! 5.1, VIA USB 2.0 PCI card, 40 GB Seagate HDD.
WIP: external midi module based on NEC wavetable (Yamaha clone)

Reply 23 of 28, by ynari

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idspispopd wrote:

Maybe Ageia PhysX PPU cards? Quite cheap at the moment when they show up on ebay, but not exactly common.

PhysX is a good one, although I decided not to buy one a while back when I looked at the number of games that needed an actual PhysX card and wouldn't be better with a separate Nvidia GPU. Like Glide, it was impressive at the time, but practically all of the games can now be run with newer hardware. The ones that can't generally aren't very good, with the possible exception of Shadowgrounds Survivors and Tom Clancy's GRAW.

Still, I suppose the question is whether it's collectible, not if it's actually worth it..

Reply 24 of 28, by GL1zdA

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It seems the Razer Hydra already goes for several times the price it originally sold for. What is painful, because I was looking for one to complement my Oculus Rift DK1.

getquake.gif | InfoWorld/PC Magazine Indices

Reply 25 of 28, by Rhuwyn

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Well, lets look at the reasons why thing that are really hard to get now are hard or expensive to get.

Voodoo2s are expensive because they allow for flexibility of having a 3dFX card while also having another hard which might be significantly better for non-Glide use cases. Voodoo5s are ridiculous because they are pretty much the fastest thing on earth that can run Glide natively.

For Windows 98 Gamers, the fastest hardware that still supports Windows 98 is in high demand. As you go earlier then that you run into situations where many games required specific hardware configurations to run optimally. For the fans wanting to run those specific games that hardware for those specific games will be in demand.

Outside of that, it's going to boil down to historically what things in the current generation were unique and cool for whatever reason. Physx was a good call, I bet the 25th Anniversary Pentium will eventually be collectable as well. Outside of that it's hard to say. I've said it before that I've thrown away 10s of thousands of hardware based on todays value of the retro hardware. As we go I will end up continuing to throw things away that will be of value in the future, purely because I can't comprehend now why it would be collectable or hard to find in the future.

Reply 26 of 28, by PARKE

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shamino wrote:

I mentioned late WinXP era graphics cards, but I'll add a couple more things:
Hard drives that support a logical block size of 512 bytes. Eventually this will fade away and the drives will only report and support a 4KB block size (other transitions may happen later). Lack of 512 byte logical sectors might break these drives on older operating systems. The "advanced format" drives still being made today will be useful.
Hard drives wear out with age, so maybe healthy ones would become hard to get in 20 years. However, maybe modern drives are so massively produced that this still won't be a serious problem. One thing I've always wondered about is how hard drives react to long periods of idle storage. If they don't like being stored, 20 years could wipe out most of the population.

I still have the hard drive from my first serious computer bought in 1993, a Quantum Pro 540.

http://www.4drives.com/DRIVESPECS/QUANTUM/3461.txt

It has worked on a home PC for about 5 years in the 1990's and sits in a plastic container ever since.
Just checked it: according to CHKDSK, Partition Magic and Partition Wizard there are no problems with it
(and it has blocks of 512 bytes).
While looking up the specs on the web I found this report on a contemporary disk with a decaying rubber problem:

http://www.dq-int.co.uk/blog/old-quantum-pro- … mb-50-pin-scsi/

I don't have the guts to open up the 540 to check out the condition of the interior.
For the historical background....I still have the receipt: paid the equivalent of US $862 for it here in Holland.

Reply 27 of 28, by shamino

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PARKE wrote:
I still have the hard drive from my first serious computer bought in 1993, a Quantum Pro 540. […]
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I still have the hard drive from my first serious computer bought in 1993, a Quantum Pro 540.

http://www.4drives.com/DRIVESPECS/QUANTUM/3461.txt

It has worked on a home PC for about 5 years in the 1990's and sits in a plastic container ever since.
Just checked it: according to CHKDSK, Partition Magic and Partition Wizard there are no problems with it
(and it has blocks of 512 bytes).
While looking up the specs on the web I found this report on a contemporary disk with a decaying rubber problem:

http://www.dq-int.co.uk/blog/old-quantum-pro- … mb-50-pin-scsi/

I don't have the guts to open up the 540 to check out the condition of the interior.
For the historical background....I still have the receipt: paid the equivalent of US $862 for it here in Holland.

Interesting link about that 250MB drive with the decaying rubber.
I've had mixed experience with firing up old drives. Your experience with that Quantum is encouraging though.
I had a Seagate 9.1GB SCSI drive which had always been reliable but I stopped using it. It sat for a few years, and when I tried to use it again, it had trouble spinning up. However, it did eventually start and then seemed reliable after that. I wonder if old drives should be spun up on some periodic schedule, but I have no idea if that would actually do any good.