Got a Core Duo T2600 (Yonah) processor for benchmarking and overclocking on my AOpen i975xa-YDG board. I think it'll be kinda interesting to see how it stacks up against Core 2 and K8-X2 clock-for-clock.

I consider Core Duo the last and greatest P6 processor. It's basically a dual core Pentium M with SSE3 tacked on. I know many people consider Core 2 to be part of the P6 family, but there are so many differences between it and PM/P6 that I've always thought of Core 2 as a completely new architecture.

Sorting some hard drives out. The last one would play ball with any thing but IMS REAL/32, which is a multi user Dos:

I just bought something I do not really need and to make matters worse I payed an unreasonable amount of money.

2x Pentium III XEON Slot2 900/100/2M S2 2.8V.

Searching the net I found that they can be bought cheaper in the US but with Swedish VAT, shipping and customs fees they would end up just as expensive as the $125 + $25 shipping I payed for two from Hungary and the ones from Hungary have more compact heatsinks.

Im glad I did not have to pay Intels list price at launch though, $3692 each... probably ~ $4500 each if you consider inflation. At least 3 Swedish computer stores still sell these as upgrades for old servers... the price is ~$1400 for one. 😀

My Supermicro S2DG2 has no offical support for the 900 MHz Xeons (this seems to be the general rule for all boards) but I hope it will run them anyhow. Getting two 700MHz 1M CPUs would have been ~$50 shipped but the second best is the first loser...

The sellers picture

Got a GTX 8800 and 260 today.

Both cards had to be cleaned out since they were full of dust, the 8800 more than the 260. I cant test these right now as my Dell Precision 430 I use to test PCI-E cards on only has one power connector and these both need two. I imagine the 260 works, but not the 8800, helped by the fact that the heatsink was totally blocked, some of the area around the RAM chips seemed to be blued like metal, the PCB behind the heatsink was bent, and there was a cap that fell off (that i stuck back on using electrical tape for now since unless i know it works i don't plan on wasting time soldering the cap back on) I was mainly after the 260 anyway so not bad for $20 US.

theamtrakvirus wrote:

Got a GTX 8800 and 260 today. […]
Show full quote

Got a GTX 8800 and 260 today.

Both cards had to be cleaned out since they were full of dust, the 8800 more than the 260. I cant test these right now as my Dell Precision 430 I use to test PCI-E cards on only has one power connector and these both need two. I imagine the 260 works, but not the 8800, helped by the fact that the heatsink was totally blocked, some of the area around the RAM chips seemed to be blued like metal, the PCB behind the heatsink was bent, and there was a cap that fell off (that i stuck back on using electrical tape for now since unless i know it works i don't plan on wasting time soldering the cap back on) I was mainly after the 260 anyway so not bad for $20 US.

You might want to consider re-doing thermal paste on those two. I bought a pair of GTX 260's last year and while they did work, they ran very hot, like in the 85c - 90c range. I carefully dismantled their heatsinks and pulled em off only to find out excessive dust deep inside the things beneath the heatsink near the core, and the core it's self did not have any "functional" thermal paste any more. It was long dried up and just came off as a crusty powder. I put in new arctic silver 5 and now they run like 60c - 65c under load. Really big difference.

Hmm... I do wonder if my 8600GTS still works. Will have to try it some day!

Rocking with OS/2 on a 2 gig Big Foot:

kithylin wrote:

theamtrakvirus wrote:

Got a GTX 8800 and 260 today. […]
Show full quote

Got a GTX 8800 and 260 today.

Both cards had to be cleaned out since they were full of dust, the 8800 more than the 260. I cant test these right now as my Dell Precision 430 I use to test PCI-E cards on only has one power connector and these both need two. I imagine the 260 works, but not the 8800, helped by the fact that the heatsink was totally blocked, some of the area around the RAM chips seemed to be blued like metal, the PCB behind the heatsink was bent, and there was a cap that fell off (that i stuck back on using electrical tape for now since unless i know it works i don't plan on wasting time soldering the cap back on) I was mainly after the 260 anyway so not bad for $20 US.

You might want to consider re-doing thermal paste on those two. I bought a pair of GTX 260's last year and while they did work, they ran very hot, like in the 85c - 90c range. I carefully dismantled their heatsinks and pulled em off only to find out excessive dust deep inside the things beneath the heatsink near the core, and the core it's self did not have any "functional" thermal paste any more. It was long dried up and just came off as a crusty powder. I put in new arctic silver 5 and now they run like 60c - 65c under load. Really big difference.

Oh yeah, i already did on both. The paste on the 8800 was rock hard and the 260 wasn't far off. I also put on AS5 too.

I used to have that model of GTX 260 but with a slightly different print. It was a really good card until it shorted out on the bottom of my drive cage, there's actually a part of one of my drives casings which has a blue-ish hole burned into it from that, it sure caused one hell of a big orange DC arc. That was not a good day and I still kinda miss the card, but the 460 I replaced it with has done great and I like that just as much.

For the record, I hate the 8000 series and never used one that worked properly, I suspect the problems were driver related and it may have improved, or the ones around in the short time I was using them were just a crappy batch or some such, but I had more luck and better performance with my 7000 and 9000 series cards. Still, everyone else seemed to like them, so they probably weren't as bad as I thought.

HighTreason wrote:

I used to have that model of GTX 260 but with a slightly different print. It was a really good card until it shorted out on the bottom of my drive cage, there's actually a part of one of my drives casings which has a blue-ish hole burned into it from that, it sure caused one hell of a big orange DC arc. That was not a good day and I still kinda miss the card, but the 460 I replaced it with has done great and I like that just as much.

For the record, I hate the 8000 series and never used one that worked properly, I suspect the problems were driver related and it may have improved, or the ones around in the short time I was using them were just a crappy batch or some such, but I had more luck and better performance with my 7000 and 9000 series cards. Still, everyone else seemed to like them, so they probably weren't as bad as I thought.

Judging by the fact that i have a 8800 GT single slot already and it idles at 80C after new thermal compound and latest drivers, I don't think its just drivers. I also have a 8600 which has around 8 or so dead caps.

I find these newer cards a bit of a pain to clean properly. I prefer non reference designs which have traditional flower type coolers, they are much easier to work with 😀

But on the 8800 GTX I don't think there is much choice. The 200 series does have nice non reference models however.

Caluser2000 wrote:

Rocking with OS/2 on a 2 gig Big Foot:

IMAG0268.JPG

Nice mouse mat you got there. And using a Microsoft mouse for OS/2? 😉

A fan sent me retro care package 😀

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

A fan sent me retro care package :) […]
Show full quote

A fan sent me retro care package 😀

Nice catch.
I have only had one, maby two of them Asrock "Uni" boards between my hands in my entire life.
They feel solid and ok boards. Stable and lots of possibilities in them. They are like two era's in one.

HighTreason wrote:

For the record, I hate the 8000 series and never used one that worked properly, I suspect the problems were driver related and it may have improved, or the ones around in the short time I was using them were just a crappy batch or some such, but I had more luck and better performance with my 7000 and 9000 series cards. Still, everyone else seemed to like them, so they probably weren't as bad as I thought.

Early on, I had a huge number of driver issues with both my 8300GS and 8600GTS - the drivers would just hang up at random and for no obvious reason. After a year or two though, they'd settled down and my 8600GTS was bulletproof until I replaced it in 2012. It was never the greatest performer, but I had little money then (and my lack of knowledge meant that I didn't go for a better AMD/ATI card of the same price point... oops)

Im bought two motherboards I have been eyeing for months.

First this new old stock boxed QDI P6I440FX Commander. I got this board for the manual voltage control up to 3.5V, I should be able to run a Pentium Pro at 4x66 on this board. The price was 75 euro.

The sellers picture.

And also this Intel VS440FX which can do 70 MHz FSB. It would have been nice if this board also had manual voltage control but no. The Price ended up £45.

The sellers picture.

Swaaye gave an Intel VS440FX motherboard with CPU away for free back in 2010 (grats Tetrium) but the supply of socket 8 boards seems to have diminished considerably. The seller of the boxed QDI board (or some other French seller) had many of them last year, I think they were 45 euro each or something like that. The lessen is buy the stuff you think you might want in the future now because it dosnt get any cheaper with time.

I picked up a few miscellaneous peripherals.

Picked up a couple of these, they're new in the box and perfect condition. I haven't seen many affordable new serial mice around. At only $8 I figured why not stock up.

The joystick is particularly interesting, it has an AT keyboard connector that lets you map standard keyboard keys/macros to the eight keys on the base. Only $3.99. Haven't been able to thoroughly test this out though, no idea how well it works for DOS.

I have one of those Genius mice. It is quite heavy and smooth rolling for an old serial mouse, never got the wheel working so I probably need drivers to do that. I don't really care to track down and install them though.

It's been a good mouse so far and I think I've been using it as my second go-to serial mouse for over a decade, so it must be doing something right.

I will also have to stock up on serial mice at some point as I think I only have two left working and my schizophrenic PS/2 mice have all stopped working on serial ports for some reason.

brostenen wrote:

Nice catch. I have only had one, maby two of them Asrock "Uni" boards between my hands in my entire life. They feel solid and ok […]
Show full quote

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

A fan sent me retro care package :) […]
Show full quote

A fan sent me retro care package 😀

Nice catch.
I have only had one, maby two of them Asrock "Uni" boards between my hands in my entire life.
They feel solid and ok boards. Stable and lots of possibilities in them. They are like two era's in one.

They are pretty cool. I have an LGA775 version (4CoreDual-VSTA).

I don't know about the Socket 939 version, but on my version, the chipset has a RAM limit of 3.3GB. You can put 4GB on the board and it sees 4GB in the BIOS, but when you're booting up during the RAM test is tells you "3380MB available". Doesn't matter if you use a 64-bit OS. Very flexible board. The AGP slot is a better choice since the PCI-e slot is limited to x4. And I noticed ~1% performance improvement going DDR2 over DDR. Very minor. Some overclocking options in the BIOS, but not a lot. I could for example run an 800Mhz FSB cpu at 1066 FSB but cannot manipulate the multiplier.

clueless1 wrote:

I don't know about the Socket 939 version, but on my version, the chipset has a RAM limit of 3.3GB. You can put 4GB on the board and it sees 4GB in the BIOS, but when you're booting up during the RAM test is tells you "3380MB available". Doesn't matter if you use a 64-bit OS. Very flexible board. The AGP slot is a better choice since the PCI-e slot is limited to x4. And I noticed ~1% performance improvement going DDR2 over DDR. Very minor. Some overclocking options in the BIOS, but not a lot. I could for example run an 800Mhz FSB cpu at 1066 FSB but cannot manipulate the multiplier.

The 939Dual-SATA2 uses a different chipset, a combo of ULi M1695 and ULi M1567 with full PCIe and AGP bandwith.