TrashPanda wrote on 2022-08-18, 01:15:

Picked up these two Socket 7 CPUs, a low voltage P90 and a 225 Win Chip. […]
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Picked up these two Socket 7 CPUs, a low voltage P90 and a 225 Win Chip.

Winchip.jpg

Pentium 90.jpg

Going to throw them in the HX rig and see how they perform relative to my other CPUs in that speed range.

The P90 might be good for a pure DOS rig.

A P90 is a great choice for a pure DOS rig. It won't be doing high res Duke but it will handle all the modern DOS games at time period resolution. Also it can be slowed down pretty well by disabling the cache. I beefed mine up to 133 but that's because I'm also running a Banshee for excellent 2d performance and fun 3d dos/win for early titles. It runs GL quake great.

H3nrik V! wrote on 2022-08-16, 16:47:

SB0460 Fatal1ty with break out box. Haven't got ANY clue if it's of any interest, but "oh, something to fill a 5.25 bay" 🤣

I've thought about buying one of these for years, but I can't ever think of anything to plug into one.

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-08-18, 06:35:

H3nrik V! wrote on 2022-08-16, 16:47:

SB0460 Fatal1ty with break out box. Haven't got ANY clue if it's of any interest, but "oh, something to fill a 5.25 bay" 🤣

I've thought about buying one of these for years, but I can't ever think of anything to plug into one.

I think it's mostly about aesthetics, having all those knobs and stuff. Probably almost no one uses anything about those breakout boxes, people just like the looks.

RandomStranger wrote on 2022-08-18, 06:40:

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-08-18, 06:35:

H3nrik V! wrote on 2022-08-16, 16:47:

SB0460 Fatal1ty with break out box. Haven't got ANY clue if it's of any interest, but "oh, something to fill a 5.25 bay" 🤣

I've thought about buying one of these for years, but I can't ever think of anything to plug into one.

I think it's mostly about aesthetics, having all those knobs and stuff. Probably almost no one uses anything about those breakout boxes, people just like the looks.

Yeah, you're probably right about that 🤣

RandomStranger wrote on 2022-08-18, 06:40:

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-08-18, 06:35:

H3nrik V! wrote on 2022-08-16, 16:47:

SB0460 Fatal1ty with break out box. Haven't got ANY clue if it's of any interest, but "oh, something to fill a 5.25 bay" 🤣

I've thought about buying one of these for years, but I can't ever think of anything to plug into one.

I think it's mostly about aesthetics, having all those knobs and stuff. Probably almost no one uses anything about those breakout boxes, people just like the looks.

I had one of those sound cards back when they were new. If I recall correct, the headphone amp in the bay unit was pretty decent, so it was not just for show 😀 Other connectors I never even tried 😁

CrFr wrote on 2022-08-18, 11:03:

RandomStranger wrote on 2022-08-18, 06:40:

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-08-18, 06:35:

I've thought about buying one of these for years, but I can't ever think of anything to plug into one.

I think it's mostly about aesthetics, having all those knobs and stuff. Probably almost no one uses anything about those breakout boxes, people just like the looks.

I had one of those sound cards back when they were new. If I recall correct, the headphone amp in the bay unit was pretty decent, so it was not just for show 😀 Other connectors I never even tried 😁

Is there something better then more populated drive bays? The creative Drives are one of the more useful things to get.
I remember some pretty useless things you could buy like an ashtray 😁

Back when it was relevant, I would connect multiple disc drives as I got new ones but the old ones were still relevant. It wasn't uncommon to have more than one disk available at a time, maybe you wanted to leave a game's play disc in, keep one available for burning, and a third was your only DVD drive and you might want to play a movie later. This trend has had diminishing returns as multi-everything drives have become cheap and ubiquitous, and there is significantly less (if any) consumable media on disc for the PC anymore.

My retro machine has three 5.25" bays. One has a DVD-RW/CD-RW drive. The other has a 5.25" floppy drive that isn't connected but I might use in the future. I have no idea what to do with the third bay.

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-08-18, 13:36:

Back when it was relevant, I would connect multiple disc drives as I got new ones but the old ones were still relevant. It wasn't uncommon to have more than one disk available at a time, maybe you wanted to leave a game's play disc in, keep one available for burning, and a third was your only DVD drive and you might want to play a movie later. This trend has had diminishing returns as multi-everything drives have become cheap and ubiquitous, and there is significantly less (if any) consumable media on disc for the PC anymore.

My retro machine has three 5.25" bays. One has a DVD-RW/CD-RW drive. The other has a 5.25" floppy drive that isn't connected but I might use in the future. I have no idea what to do with the third bay.

Add more unused USB ports!

RandomStranger wrote on 2022-08-18, 06:40:

I think it's mostly about aesthetics, having all those knobs and stuff. Probably almost no one uses anything about those breakout boxes, people just like the looks.

The one i have is not even connected.

Meatball wrote on 2022-08-18, 13:39:

Add more unused USB ports!

I thought about USB, but there are usually front panel connectors for that. These old motherboards boards probably only support USB 1.1 or 2.0, even with add-on cards, so even if there are only a few front ports, a hub is usually fine and there isn't a pressing need to provide more dedicated ports in an expansion bay.

Another thing I used to use my 5.25" bays for was hot swappable 2.5" or 3.5" hard drives. But again, this isn't really something I would see myself doing in a retro rig.

Maybe you could add an IDE-to-CF bay or a SD/CF USB multi-reader, but these are also reasonable for the 3.5" bays. And if it's USB anyways, you don't need to dedicate a bay for it; this would only be useful if it's connect via IDE, and there are already 3.5" bays for that.

WJG6260 wrote on 2022-08-17, 19:07:

A bit late since this technically arrived a little ago, but nonetheless, I finally found a DDR Pentium III board! Featuring the […]
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A bit late since this technically arrived a little ago, but nonetheless, I finally found a DDR Pentium III board! Featuring the VIA Apollo Pro 266 chipset, and support for both DDR SDRAM and SDR SDRAM, this board is pretty feature complete. It's even got the semi-ubiquitous Promise IDE RAID controller onboard.

A couple of things I have noticed in testing this board include the following:

• For a VIA chipset, this is remarkably stable, more-so than the VIA 694X motherboards I've tested.
• This board is wicked fast, yielding memory reads in the ~750MB/s range and writes in the ~420MB/s range with a PIII-S 1.26.
• The quirks this board had when reviewed by THG (no AGP Fast Write support) seem to have been remedied by the latest BIOS and performance notably increases upon upgrade to v1.5.
• Between DDR and SDR, the performance delta is measurable, but not quite as large as you'd at first guess. This makes sense, given the bandwidth-limited FSB of the PIII, but still, the fact that there's any performance difference just shows how nice these mature DDR chipsets could be.

Overall, then, this board is pretty weird, but nice and capable all the same.

MS-6366-R.jpg

Nice board, it appears MSI are also proud of their creation, as it says MSI DDR on the heatsink lolol.

Is it ever a better option than a Pentium 3 with RDRAM? Because that's a thing too. It did also be a comparison between an Intel and VIA chipset.

Been picking up some more weird & wonderful retro hardware, my latest acquisition this very dirty and in need of some maintenance Philips CD-I 210:

Didn't cost me a lot, but does need a fair bit of work to get it working 100%, as well as cleaned up etc. As the pic shows, I've removed the lid and started some work to get basic functionality going, but I'm thinking this is going to be a project for coming weeks.

Not to mention I'll have to fix that damn soldered dead Dallas-like battery, to add a CR2032 holder at some point.

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-08-18, 01:15:

Picked up these two Socket 7 CPUs, a low voltage P90 and a 225 Win Chip. […]
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Picked up these two Socket 7 CPUs, a low voltage P90 and a 225 Win Chip.

Winchip.jpg

Pentium 90.jpg

Going to throw them in the HX rig and see how they perform relative to my other CPUs in that speed range.

The P90 might be good for a pure DOS rig.

I just discovered I have a Winchip to hunt for in the pile if some old scribblings are correct. It might be a Winchip 2 266, some sources say it must be a 2A if it's a 266... But anyway, catching some hints they have multi control with the settings progs, so pondering sticking it in an FX or HX single voltage board to be a "dial a speed" system. I'm setting a K6-2+ up like that anyway, but think this one will go half the bottom speed of that one on multis and thus might be more 286ey at the low end with cache off.

this must be one of the most remembered motherboards in history

paid 15 bucks for it with io shield, no box, no manual, no cd

PTherapist wrote on 2022-08-18, 18:50:

Been picking up some more weird & wonderful retro hardware, my latest acquisition this very dirty and in need of some maintenanc […]
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Been picking up some more weird & wonderful retro hardware, my latest acquisition this very dirty and in need of some maintenance Philips CD-I 210:

cdi210.jpg

Didn't cost me a lot, but does need a fair bit of work to get it working 100%, as well as cleaned up etc. As the pic shows, I've removed the lid and started some work to get basic functionality going, but I'm thinking this is going to be a project for coming weeks.

Not to mention I'll have to fix that damn soldered dead Dallas-like battery, to add a CR2032 holder at some point.

Good luck!

On my trawling for interesting, odd or just plain weird socket 7 cpus I ran across a seller from Taiwan selling these Rise MP6 266 CPUs, never heard of Rise before except here and have never seen one of these in the flesh before. No idea what the performance of these Rise chips are but I'm happy to have yet another oddity for my socket 7 test bench. (Assuming its not a fake...thats always a possibility with CPUs)

According to CPU world its FPU is somewhere around Pentium 200 MMX and its Integer is closer to AMD K6 233 so it should be a fun little CPU to add to benchmarks and GPU testing.

I got my hands on a Pentium III-S 1400 to replace the Celeron 1300. The FSB could easily be lifted to 122 MHz with the Celeron.

The Pentium however... Everything above 133 MHz is not being saved in the BIOS, it just boots right away with 133MHz FSB. The first option higher than 133, is 138 on this AOpen MX3S-T board.

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-08-19, 05:02:

On my trawling for interesting, odd or just plain weird socket 7 cpus I ran across a seller from Taiwan selling these Rise MP6 266 CPUs, never heard of Rise before except here and have never seen one of these in the flesh before. No idea what the performance of these Rise chips are but I'm happy to have yet another oddity for my socket 7 test bench. (Assuming its not a fake...thats always a possibility with CPUs)

According to CPU world its FPU is somewhere around Pentium 200 MMX and its Integer is closer to AMD K6 233 so it should be a fun little CPU to add to benchmarks and GPU testing.

See how it benchmarks with Quake compared to a Pentium 200. That's a good indicator of early FPU performing, since the Pentium already carries the prevailing game optimizations.

New user - long time lurker here. A couple of days ago i scored (for my location) a real interesting haul. It is an odd mix of both old and new stuff. I found the ad on marketplace where there was pictures of sad storage boxes and dusty computers. Well, it was actually two ads. One with a "Game retro package" and one with a "IBM retro package". The ads was posted by a friend of the owner because the owner didn't have facebook. The ad stated that they were cleaning up in the shed and that it was finally time to get rid of the collection. It was obvious that i could expect at least some water damage.

However... When you see an Amiga, a tower IBM Model 60/80, A 1084S and a spectravideo collection all in one its hard to pass it by. So i gave the guy an offer just for the "Game retro package", he replied and told me he would consider it. A day passed and he told me that there were more stuff (some laptops and what not) and that they were aiming to sell all at once. Well i told him i was interested in the whole lot but that i just didn't have room for it atm, i said that he would get the most money of a IBM-collector and that someone locally surely would contact him. It turned out that they had been bombarded by people wanting the IBM stuff but that they didnt want to ship it, but i was the only local and so i was first in line. Well a couple of hours later they had had enough and just wanted it gone. He told me they wanted 500 euros for everything. I gave him a counter offer and he accepted. Bare in mind this was untested, as is, and with small signs of water damage.

So i met the seller and he turned out to be a real nice guy. He collected computers "30 years ago" but had since lost interest. He had wanted to get back in the hobbie but never had the time to and he was happy to sell it to someone like-minded. So a 1 hour round trip and 4 boxes later and this i what i got. (im going to split this post up). Please feel free to comment if you see something interesting. I'm far from an expert in the older and IBM stuff. Also, i will note in the following posts the few items that i have powered on and the result of that...