A brand new Samsung SyncMaster 797MB, for $10. Few of them were found in a warehouse in Moscow and sold via local downgraders forum.

^ awesome find!

That Samsung's looking great!

After two years I finally bought some "486 gear"... and I have to admit, I REALLY like it.
My eyes are nonetheless more focused on a Pentium60/66 but the combo I want costs around 250€ to 300€. Sucks that the prices for the classic Pentiums have unfortunately entered "Scrooge territory".

Yeah.... So wonderfull when recieving a package of retro hardware, packed in bubble wrap.
NO antistatic bag. NO cardboard box. The testprogram tell a tale of possible defect chips.
I have contacted the seller, and attached photos of my issue.
The board makes wierd lines and some games will not run at all. One or two makes GFX error.
Luckily. The games I want to play the most, are allmost all running. Just not all. 🙁

xplus93 wrote:

nforce4max wrote:

xplus93 wrote:

When you can easily put in a PII-450 or PIII-500 what's the point? Also, anything above a 10-15% overclock is most certainly not moderate.

10-15% is a drop in the bucket as a lot of us here at one point has done 50%+ without any long term issues. Cheap boards and power supplies with rot caps cause more problems than anything else.

Please define "long term" If you mean that you can use a system occasionally for a year or two without stability issues then that's not what I meant. It's like giving a horse stimulants. Yeah, it's going to win a few races. But after a while when you want to go for a ride out in the country he's going to die on you and leave you stranded without a horse. You see anybody putting nitrous in a ferrari GTO? IMO we should all take a look at the classic car world and learn something before we destroy the hobby we love.

Not trying to insult but what sort of person are you? You must have skipped the late 90s and early to mid 2000s computing altogether as overclocking was Extremely popular even all the way to Sandy Bridge i5/i7s. 15% much 🤣 even modern procs turbo more than that and issues are non existent. Those Celeron rigs ran for Years like that until time came around where people needed a pentium 4 or a athlon xp system to stay current.

bristlehog wrote:

A brand new Samsung SyncMaster 797MB, for $10. Few of them were found in a warehouse in Moscow and sold via local downgraders fo […]
Show full quote

A brand new Samsung SyncMaster 797MB, for $10. Few of them were found in a warehouse in Moscow and sold via local downgraders forum.

My understanding was the average Russian couldn't afford newer than a CRT?

Isn't the average wage there like $400 USD a month?

bristlehog wrote:

A brand new Samsung SyncMaster 797MB, for $10. Few of them were found in a warehouse in Moscow and sold via local downgraders fo […]
Show full quote

A brand new Samsung SyncMaster 797MB, for $10. Few of them were found in a warehouse in Moscow and sold via local downgraders forum.

How do you like those HP keyboards that came with Vectras at that time?

bristlehog wrote:

A brand new Samsung SyncMaster 797MB, for $10.

I used that exact monitor on the company I worked at between 2007-2009. If you ignore the "let's put a flat glass in front of a regular curved monitor and call it a flat screen" thing it's actually a pretty good monitor. Very crisp and easy to look at all day.

bristlehog wrote:

A brand new Samsung SyncMaster 797MB, for $10. Few of them were found in a warehouse in Moscow and sold via local downgraders

I wonder if that monitor will accept a 15khz horizontal sync , I remember a lot of older Samsung monitors could and people use them as RGB monitors for older game consoles and computers by simply creating a custom cable without the need for an expensive RGB converter, altough this may be more of an American ( or other NTSC regions) thing because most Europeans (or other regions that use PAL or SECAM) have had TV that could accept RGB via scart for years.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

My understanding was the average Russian couldn't afford newer than a CRT?

Isn't the average wage there like $400 USD a month?

That's insulting. I could afford a secondhand LCD (the hp 2035 I still use) while making about that much in 2007ish? Not exactly in Russia, but close enough.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

My understanding was the average Russian couldn't afford newer than a CRT?

Isn't the average wage there like $400 USD a month?

A good friend of mine I talk with almost daily is a russian, does computer programming for the russian government and makes about $80k/year USD. Has a nice house, couple cars, expensive desktop x99 desktop with big dual-xeon-LGA-2011 file server in his basement, 60TB storage on it, etc. They're not some backwards 3rd world country or anything.

Yesterday's arrival. Excellent conditions. No scratches on the lacquer whatsoever!

I just need to hunt LAPC-I and I guess I'm done. Not.

PS: no to Photobucket!

tikoellner wrote:

Yesterday's arrival. Excellent conditions. No scratches on the lacquer whatsoever! […]
Show full quote

Yesterday's arrival. Excellent conditions. No scratches on the lacquer whatsoever!

I just need to hunt LAPC-I and I guess I'm done. Not.

You've just been hit by the Photobucket plague 😁

Not trying to insult but what sort of person are you? You must have skipped the late 90s and early to mid 2000s computing altogether as overclocking was Extremely popular even all the way to Sandy Bridge i5/i7s. 15% much 🤣 even modern procs turbo more than that and issues are non existent. Those Celeron rigs ran for Years like that until time came around where people needed a pentium 4 or a athlon xp system to stay current.

Never saw the need for over clocking tbh....
My first pentium 2 was a 266 Mhz with a banshee worked for me till what 2002-2003 which I followed up with a 1800xp which also ran fine for years till I upgraded to a dual core and in 2011 for my previous 2600 sandy and now a 5930k (should've waited for the ryzen but meh). I never did any oc on my computers as there was no point in the slight increase over the potential issues that came with it. I rather just wait and get a better gpu , only now I oc my retro rigs but usually less then 20% and for benchmarks.
Oc to me means more wear and tear on my parts and alot of noise due the need of extra cooling. It's prestige and nothing else after the cpu started getting faster then 1 Ghz.

Stiletto wrote:

tikoellner wrote:

Yesterday's arrival. Excellent conditions. No scratches on the lacquer whatsoever! […]
Show full quote

Yesterday's arrival. Excellent conditions. No scratches on the lacquer whatsoever!

I just need to hunt LAPC-I and I guess I'm done. Not.

You've just been hit by the Photobucket plague 😁

Fixed I guess.

No pics atm (running backups and my main rig is old and slow 🤣), but I got the following stuff lately:
Boxed (but the box needs some tlc) external parallel ZIP 250MB drive, afaics its package is complete 😁
€3,50! 😁 😁
A never used NIB walkman (granted, it's not computer hardware, but this was the biggest surprise I had today).
Not hardware by definition, but also found a real package of Windows Vista Ultimate OEM 32-bit, the product key was included! Original M$ disk, quick start guide included, €1 🤣!!!!

Also got a small stack of games lately, including:
- Microsoft Board...seems to contain just board games, I mostly took it because I actually like board games and because it was M$ 😜 Seems to be made by "Bicycle games"??
- JSF. Made by Eidos. But if I want to fly any kind of plane, I'll usually just start up a game of BF2.
- SC3k World Edition (I've always been a fan of SC)
- Hidden & Dangerous. Don't actually know this game, but the title is a known one.
- Halo 1 😁
- DeusEx Invisiblewar (I heard of Deus Ex, but never of this Invisiblewar thingy..so I took it 😁)
- Rayman 2
- Midtown Madness. Never actually played this game, but it seems familiar (thanks Phil? 😜)
- Zoo Tycoon Complete Collection
- Spellforce
- TitanQuest (I had regretted NOT buying TitanQuest and Spellforce back when they were easy to find in the general game shops...now I got both games in a single swat 😁)
and another copy of Emperor: Battle for Dune. Now got enough copies for a LAN I suppose 😁

Also got a couple splitters for cheap, hoping one of these will fit one of the graphics cards I have that had some proprietary connector (it's a weird connector which splits into 2 standard VGA connectors) and some TV-Out cable (doesn't hurt to have a spare and it cost next to nothing anyway).

Got this Gainward FX 5950 and tested it; works great. However, realistically, I'm going to use the Quadro FX 3000 as a daily driver.

dexvx wrote:

Got this Gainward FX 5950 and tested it; works great. However, realistically, I'm going to use the Quadro FX 3000 as a daily dri […]
Show full quote

Got this Gainward FX 5950 and tested it; works great. However, realistically, I'm going to use the Quadro FX 3000 as a daily driver.

Neat looking card. I don't understand why everyone here except me buys a 5950 just to not use it regularly. Its like buying a Lamborghini just to fill a second garage.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

dexvx wrote:

Got this Gainward FX 5950 and tested it; works great. However, realistically, I'm going to use the Quadro FX 3000 as a daily dri […]
Show full quote

Got this Gainward FX 5950 and tested it; works great. However, realistically, I'm going to use the Quadro FX 3000 as a daily driver.

Neat looking card. I don't understand why everyone here except me buys a 5950 just to not use it regularly. Its like buying a Lamborghini just to fill a second garage.

Everyone does because everyone does 😜
Personally I just as much like to use any FX59xx, and I have in fact used my FX5950U (but I ended up replacing it with a 6800 Vanilla because the FX was much too slow for what I wanted at the time).

Btw, I do understand why most people would simply seek to buy the fastest of any generation. I'd probably seek out a Tualatin 1400 first and only go after a slower one of the 1400 is out of my reach. And keeping it in storage means one will have it available when needed, because when one will actually need it, it may not be obtainable anymore (or at least not for as cheap as back then).

dexvx wrote:

Got this Gainward FX 5950 and tested it; works great. However, realistically, I'm going to use the Quadro FX 3000 as a daily driver.

Same here! Got this baby last week:

It's MSI's FX5950 Ultra-VT256 - works like a charm. The huge cooler is (disappointingly) made out of aluminum, and copper plated. The card does 62C in full load but I still don't want to use it as a daily driver - I have a couple of Quadro FX 3000 cards for that. I use rivatuner to strap them to FX 5900 Ultra and they perform great.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Neat looking card. I don't understand why everyone here except me buys a 5950 just to not use it regularly. Its like buying a Lamborghini just to fill a second garage.

Thing is, I've been looking for a working 5950 Ultra for years - over 10 years actually. They are very rare here, and working examples are almost impossible to source - witch is why I'd rather keep it in a display case and use it occasionally.

I also got some other retro-modern stuff I've been hunting for a while:

Abit IC7 - socket 478 i875 - possibly the best socket 478 board ever made:

Abit IS7 - socket 478 i865. This came with a 2.4GHz CPU witch I found weird since it's an expensive motherboard, but when I turned it on, the CPU was running at 2998MHz so I guess the person who bought it new intended to overclock in the first place. This was actually a dumpster find... it came in a plain, dirty beige case, with no PSU, no cooler but had 1GB of ram left on it, a radeon 3650 AGP and an 80GB HDD.

The HD 3650 512MB AGP that came in the case with the IS7. Never used one of these before. Might be interesting.

A couple of socket A barton chips - one 3200 and a 3000+

Gigabyte GA-N400 PRO2 Nforce 2 Ultra motherboard - not so rare, but it's the first working example I've seen since back in the day. Won't be using it since I have two working AN7 boards, but I'll probably include it in a nforce 2 shootout one day.

I'm actually planning a high-end socket 478 build. I tried it before, but had problems with heat, PSUs and motherboards. The Gigabyte IP1000 was SLOW and a poor overclocker, and the Asus P4P800 boards all died (had 3 of them) with no apparent cause. This time I'm using an older beefy 650w PSU with strong 5v and 12v rails, a tuniq Tower 120 cooler and the IC7. Wish me luck 😀