kanecvr wrote:

Same here! Got this baby last week: […]
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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 thought you got one in a scrap lot a couple of months ago along with like 50 other cards?

We should all bench our FX5950Us. Mine is the ASUS model with an Arctic NV silencer.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

I thought you got one in a scrap lot a couple of months ago along with like 50 other cards?

That's her. I didn't get it until last week, and only had a chance to test it yesterday. This friend of mine lives 300km away, and shipping all the cards (there were a lot) would have cost an arm and a leg, so I had to wait until he had buisness in Bucharest to come into possession of the cards. Luckily, the 5950 works great. Unfortunately the 6800GT AGP in the lot was dead.

I was really really lucky last week. An old Tulip PC showed up on the 'Dutch craigslist' Marktplaats. Usually bidding wars will commence and the machine will be sold quickly. I put down a small bid of 25 euro and decided to forget about it to avoid dissapointment.

So, I was quite surprised to be contacted by the seller. He was happy with my offer. Not wasting any time, I asked my brother in law to pick it up (it was in his town) and I got it this weekend. The seller did mention that it came with a lot of original accessoires, but this was just ridiculous. I did not have time yet to take any pictures or to even unpack everything, so consider this a sneak peak. I will open a topic once I dare to power it up after a lot of checking.

The machine is a Tulip pc compact 2, a machine with a NEC V20 CPU, 2 floppy drives (5.25" and 3.5"), 20MB harddisk and EGA graphics. It is in pristine condition. No dust!!!! It looks like it was hardly used. It came with the EGA monitor, original keyboard and manuals. Everything still packed in the original boxes! There were 4 AA batteries inside, badlyh corroded but nowhere near electronics. I've taken those out and will find out what they are for and replace them. Here are some pictures:

These two CPUs came in today.

The Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 (Left) is going into my mom's Toshiba Satellite A105 laptop once the replacement keyboard arrives, and the Intel Pentium III Mobile 1 GHz (Right) is now in my Dell Inspiron 8000 and I plan on doing benchmarks to see how this matches up to the 1 GHz Tualatin Intel Pentium III-M inside my 8100.

On the way is a 10-pack of multicolored Memorex 1.44MB floppies (seller's picture used).

Not sure if this was mentioned but I bought a black Apple Pro Mouse at Goodwill a few weeks ago, blends in nicely with my friend's iMac G3 and its graphite USB keyboard.

Cyrix200+ wrote:

I was really really lucky last week. An old Tulip PC showed up on the 'Dutch craigslist' Marktplaats. Usually bidding wars will […]
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I was really really lucky last week. An old Tulip PC showed up on the 'Dutch craigslist' Marktplaats. Usually bidding wars will commence and the machine will be sold quickly. I put down a small bid of 25 euro and decided to forget about it to avoid dissapointment.

So, I was quite surprised to be contacted by the seller. He was happy with my offer. Not wasting any time, I asked my brother in law to pick it up (it was in his town) and I got it this weekend. The seller did mention that it came with a lot of original accessoires, but this was just ridiculous. I did not have time yet to take any pictures or to even unpack everything, so consider this a sneak peak. I will open a topic once I dare to power it up after a lot of checking.

The machine is a Tulip pc compact 2, a machine with a NEC V20 CPU, 2 floppy drives (5.25" and 3.5"), 20MB harddisk and EGA graphics. It is in pristine condition. No dust!!!! It looks like it was hardly used. It came with the EGA monitor, original keyboard and manuals. Everything still packed in the original boxes! There were 4 AA batteries inside, badlyh corroded but nowhere near electronics. I've taken those out and will find out what they are for and replace them. Here are some pictures:

😲
That's a fantastic find! 😁
Hardly used, little dust, no corrosion! Nice!

Found these two single board computers today. Each was 2 USD equiv.

One is Olivetti 386sx 16 with cyrix math coprocessor (FCC ID DYKUB386SX).

The second is Fujitsu 486dx2 (W26361-D674-Z1-07-36). It seems to be some automation controller.

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 […]
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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.

I owned this card for a couple of years back in the day. It was my go to Doom 3 card. I believe that is the Golden Sample model and the fans should light up red. That is a tank of a card. I gamed on it non-stop for two years, almost, and it never flinched so that will probably last you for years to come. Nice find and I always liked the looks of it. Gainward pulled from the U.S. market years ago and it's too bad because I really liked their designs.

Cyrix200+ wrote:

http://i.imgur.com/sODaQ1hm.jpg […]
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Beautiful! Tulip is one of those brands that just stand out to me, along with Olivetti, Unisys, Zenith and others.

More pics! 😀

Great find... Please post pics of the ega monitor too!

liqmat 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.

I owned this card for a couple of years back in the day. It was my go to Doom 3 card. I believe that is the Golden Sample model and the fans should light up red. That is a tank of a card. I gamed on it non-stop for two years, almost, and it never flinched so that will probably last you for years to come. Nice find and I always liked the looks of it. Gainward pulled from the U.S. market years ago and it's too bad because I really liked their designs.

Aren't most FX5950s of reasonable quality?

I've had my ASUS model for about 9 months now. It never gives me any issues. Definitely limited to 2004 and older games. I imagine that must have been quite a bottleneck once 2005 rolled around.

I'd say no. Most cards from known manufacturers I came across are dead or artifact. Issues include bad BGA joints (confirmed by re-flowing an ASUS card witch worked for two days before developing problems again), bad capacitors or mosfets witch ruined the GPU or VRAM and overclocking. Plus most FX 5950 cards get HOT.

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.

The Quadro FX 3000 is either clocked at 400/400 or 400/425, compared to 475/475 for a FX 5950U. That's about ~90% of the performance. The 5950U had stiff competition from the R9800 series, so IMO, they're clocked higher than intended (they are quite hot). So other than taking it out for some benchmarks, I see no real reason to use it as a daily driver over an FX 3000.

Also if the fans break on the Gainward, it's going to be a PITA to find replacement parts.

liqmat wrote:

I owned this card for a couple of years back in the day. It was my go to Doom 3 card. I believe that is the Golden Sample model and the fans should light up red. That is a tank of a card. I gamed on it non-stop for two years, almost, and it never flinched so that will probably last you for years to come. Nice find and I always liked the looks of it. Gainward pulled from the U.S. market years ago and it's too bad because I really liked their designs.

Haven't really paid much attention to the fans, tbh. I'll look next time.

kanecvr wrote:

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

Really? The P4C800 goes for waaaay more money than the IC7's. I find it strange most Abit boards (Past the p3 generation) go for almost peanuts.

I have a CT-479, so that's literally the only reason I'm looking for a P4P800 SE/P4C800-E.

Got my hands on one of these locally recently:

The Box is in pretty bad shape, and I don't think the disks are all there, but the card itself looks good.

c0keb0ttle wrote:

Got my hands on one of these locally recently: […]
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Got my hands on one of these locally recently:

IMG_2124.JPG

IMG_2125.JPG

The Box is in pretty bad shape, and I don't think the disks are all there, but the card itself looks good.

Interesting card. Looks like the RAM sockets are used for wavetable samples, depending on how much RAM is installed, if I'm correct.

Cyrix200+ wrote:

http://i.imgur.com/sODaQ1hm.jpg […]
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I see you have the same "LEGA" ega card, if you need jumper settings tell me

@ MMaximus
I owe you some EGA pics too, what do you want to see?

c0keb0ttle wrote:

Got my hands on one of these locally recently: […]
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Got my hands on one of these locally recently:

IMG_2124.JPG

IMG_2125.JPG

The Box is in pretty bad shape, and I don't think the disks are all there, but the card itself looks good.

WOW! Great find! I'm very impressed!

Picked this up some time ago, besides POST, I didn't mess around with it. Finally got around to doing some stuff today. Has stickers that says it was made by MS Engineering from Cupertino, CA (looks defunct now) with build date 4/24/94. Looks like it came with:

1. Intel 486 DX33 (with no heatsink... just a sticker that says warranty void if removed)
2. Asus ISA-486SV2B (coin battery yay!) with 128K cache, 12MB of ?? RAM, no HDD (sticker said it shipped with a Conner 210)
3. Diamond MM Stealth 32 (ET4000 based) 2MB VLB
4. Creative CT 1770 SCSI
5. 1x ISA IDE card, 1x ISA other IO card.
6. 1x 3.5" floppy and some SCSI (I assume 50 pin) CD-ROM.

General questions:
1) Should I open up the PSU to check caps? Looks like PSU is model FS230-42N
2) CT1770 worth keeping? Seems to have hanging note bug (DSP 4.12) Maybe get an ISA SCSI controller?
3) Anyone have a manual for this? I can get one for the ISA-486SV2, but haven't found one for this ISA-486SV2B.
4) What do most people use their 486 era systems for (DOS version)?

Album link for some pics:
http://imgur.com/a/jBGyr

Nice system... I don't see many Stealth32 cards around...

dexvx wrote:

Really? The P4C800 goes for waaaay more money than the IC7's. I find it strange most Abit boards (Past the p3 generation) go for almost peanuts.

I have a CT-479, so that's literally the only reason I'm looking for a P4P800 SE/P4C800-E.

Well, the IC7 was able to drive a 3GHz Perscott to 4GHz 266x15 @ 1.42v while my P4C800 is.. well.. dead. As well as both my P4P800-X, my two P4P800-Deluxe and the new in box P4C800 I bought a year ago. There's even a thread here on vogons about these boards dying mysteriously. One day they ran fine, the other they're dead. Tried everything - re-flashed bios, replaced all mosfets, complete recap, even went as far as to re-ball the northbridge - nothing works.

I also have a couple of AS8 boards (LGA775 i865) and they are incredible overclockers, not to mention very very stable. Got 3 of them for 10 euro, while the same seller was asking 12 euro a piece for some crap budget Asus i915 LGA775 board - witch further reinforces your statement.

As for performance, the P4C800 is OK. It did manage to get the same 3GHz prescott to 3660MHz @ 1.45v (244x15) and it has some nice features, but they are pretty unreliable.

Price-wise, old Asus boards command a premium because they are still around today and they make expensive motherboards. Abit is gone, and youngsters don't know the brand.

Picked up a MAXOR PCI ULTRA ATA 133 card, really like it as I don't need to load any drivers, even in dos!

I also got a NOS AT case on eBay as my local places have dried up a ways back, made an offer and the seller took it. I'll being putting a really cool system in it, and I'll mod the case to take dual PSU's.