Pabloz wrote:

not today but some months ago […]
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not today but some months ago

will keep this till i die, when heavy gaming started for me with athlon xp. I can´t understand why some people say it is ugly

thermaltake Xaser III ...pure aluminum

No offense. But my take on that case is, that it is one ugly case. Not only ugly. It is extremely fragile and hard to builf with. I am only speaking out of personal experience. Imagine building like 12 machines a day, in that case. After some 3 months, you will hate every case like that.

I must have broken like 20 of those during my time of system building. I remember it's cusins. Pure low grade flimsy aluminium and thin plastic. Sold in thin boxes with thin styrofoam. Yup... Hate them to death.

Edit:
Just make shure you are carefull when building a machine in that case. Plastic are fragile and breaks like instantly. I am thinking of the front. It is from a time of chinese caps, motherboards that die within 6 months and sata controllers behaving strange. Like deleting the MBR or file allocation table.

All that said... If you like it, then I guess you like it. And that is what matters.

They look decent but are indeed pretty flimsy, one more thing is that some edges are extremely sharp. I've cut my hands countless times working on my TT Tsunami.

martin939 wrote:

They look decent but are indeed pretty flimsy, one more thing is that some edges are extremely sharp. I've cut my hands countless times working on my TT Tsunami.

Speaking of flimsy.... Try to build first gen. socket 775 at 3ghz with a box-cooler. You might just as well live next to a busy airport or right up at the freeway. The sound polution will be unbearable as the case has absolutely no noise damping features. At worst case scenario, the case will actually make the fan noise worse. There are so much resonanse in them. The absolute most horrible case I worked with in 2005. Was those blu, green and red coloured "alien" cases. No not the company. They had a front with two alen eyes and matching colored light inside. Had a window too. I think I killed like 50 percent of all case flaps, just by removing the case from the box. It's like the computer worlds answer to those japanese fast and furious movies. Really bad looking cars. Worst design language ever.

That's what young kids and unexperienced people want - as long as it blings and looks fast 😉

Got a VIA C3 "Ezra" 733MHz yesterday. 😀

martin939 wrote:

That's what young kids and unexperienced people want - as long as it blings and looks fast 😉

Yeah, good PCs are sometimes the ugliest. I bought an Alienware M14X in college with a 2540m, GT555M. Traded it for a dell precision M6600 2820qm, 6970m. Literally twice the power and roughly the same price on ebay when I sold/bought them. I really miss the cool keyboard lights though.

Got this the other day. It was in a pile of M64s and Vantas. There was some corrosion battery leakage on the agp connector and some crud on the card. It may have been wet before. Any advice on testing this safely without damaging it or a motherboard? I may try to strap a CPU heatsink to it.

xplus93 wrote:

Got this the other day. It was in a pile of M64s and Vantas. There was some corrosion battery leakage on the agp connector and some crud on the card. It may have been wet before. Any advice on testing this safely without damaging it or a motherboard? I may try to strap a CPU heatsink to it.

Testing it will be a gamble. I looks like a heatsink/fan was removed by a previous owner, I would not use it without at least a heatsink!

Cyrix200+ wrote:

xplus93 wrote:

Got this the other day. It was in a pile of M64s and Vantas. There was some corrosion battery leakage on the agp connector and some crud on the card. It may have been wet before. Any advice on testing this safely without damaging it or a motherboard? I may try to strap a CPU heatsink to it.

Testing it will be a gamble. I looks like a heatsink/fan was removed by a previous owner, I would not use it without at least a heatsink!

Well, it's dead. Text mode works fine, but I get vertical lines in graphics mode. It may be the agp connector, since i've seen similar issues with loose cards. There was heavy corrosion. Tried an eraser since i'm out of deoxit gold. No good.

Wouldn't it run in an AGPx8 board? Maybe you can find a cheap old OEM board as a lab rat 😀
I'd give the connectors a good clean with isopropyl alcohol.

@xplus93,
I've had one of thous obnoxious DTR game laptops with dual M290X (rebranded 7970/8970) and a 4700MQ and it was a headache, also made a crazy loss when selling it. Then I bought a HP 8770W with 3840QM and Quadro K4000M, technically a good bit slower on the GPU side but it worked absolutely FLAWLESS. It was reliable and dependable, not to mention the overall build quality was miles apart in favor of the HP.

brostenen wrote:

No offense. But my take on that case is, that it is one ugly case. Not only ugly. It is extremely fragile and hard to builf with […]
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Pabloz wrote:

not today but some months ago […]
Show full quote

not today but some months ago

will keep this till i die, when heavy gaming started for me with athlon xp. I can´t understand why some people say it is ugly

thermaltake Xaser III ...pure aluminum

No offense. But my take on that case is, that it is one ugly case. Not only ugly. It is extremely fragile and hard to builf with. I am only speaking out of personal experience. Imagine building like 12 machines a day, in that case. After some 3 months, you will hate every case like that.

I must have broken like 20 of those during my time of system building. I remember it's cusins. Pure low grade flimsy aluminium and thin plastic. Sold in thin boxes with thin styrofoam. Yup... Hate them to death.

Edit:
Just make shure you are carefull when building a machine in that case. Plastic are fragile and breaks like instantly. I am thinking of the front. It is from a time of chinese caps, motherboards that die within 6 months and sata controllers behaving strange. Like deleting the MBR or file allocation table.

All that said... If you like it, then I guess you like it. And that is what matters.

I've owned two of these Xaser cases and I feel that they are more sturdy than most modern cases, the only big gripe I got is mainly with the spaghetti thanks to the fan controller. I can ruin modern cases with just my hands (think watch maker hands like Trump) as the metal is so thin and the plastics are easy to destroy. The same goes for modern laptops as the only thing people buy these days are thin like macs.

xplus93 wrote:

martin939 wrote:

That's what young kids and unexperienced people want - as long as it blings and looks fast 😉

Yeah, good PCs are sometimes the ugliest. I bought an Alienware M14X in college with a 2540m, GT555M. Traded it for a dell precision M6600 2820qm, 6970m. Literally twice the power and roughly the same price on ebay when I sold/bought them. I really miss the cool keyboard lights though.

Sadly the Alienware laptops and Precisions from that period are the best that Dell has made in years, all the newer models are BGA hot plates. The M14x was very meh in my opinion but did have a M11x R1 and it was nice until I needed some grunt cpu wise, ended up selling it for what I paid for it so all was good in the end. The biggest problem with the M6600 is compatibility with Nvidia mxm cards and the M6700 like almost every single laptop of the Ivy Bridge generation has worse temps. M6800 is a nice deal when had at a good price and not a low spec unit.

Been wearing out Thinkpads and itching for something with good cooling and mxm.

nforce4max wrote:

I've owned two of these Xaser cases and I feel that they are more sturdy than most modern cases, the only big gripe I got is mainly with the spaghetti thanks to the fan controller. I can ruin modern cases with just my hands (think watch maker hands like Trump) as the metal is so thin and the plastics are easy to destroy. The same goes for modern laptops as the only thing people buy these days are thin like macs.

I've felt your pain. back in 2013 I built an AMD Athlon XP rig inside a new Diablotek ATX case and its build quality was meh to the point where I managed to put a big dent on the top panel as well as break the front panel's screw holes just by removing it. admittedly that case was only $20 BITD so it was a cheap POS but then again I managed to snag two used cases for $15 apiece at RE-PC and even those were better than the Diablotek case.

martin939 wrote:

They look decent but are indeed pretty flimsy, one more thing is that some edges are extremely sharp. I've cut my hands countless times working on my TT Tsunami.

Good thing I wear latex cooking gloves when working inside computers so I reduce the risk of getting cut. that Xaser case is both ugly and stylish at the same time IMO, the layout reminds me of the Cheiftec cases from the 2000s.

As for hardware I bought? TBH I haven't bought anything lately, saving up for PAX and depending on what I have left I'll see what I'm in the mood for getting afterwards.

By the way, here are some pics of my latest build in a TT case, the Tsunami is about 2-3 years younger than the Xaser (2003).
It's kinda funny that those cases were considered "high end" back in the day, the Xasers were around $200 new.
http://i.imgur.com/5uQwnPT.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/nUAvjRF.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/laW5aZz.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/07b6onc.jpg

They are quite big so I rather post them as links 😉

nforce4max wrote:

xplus93 wrote:

martin939 wrote:

That's what young kids and unexperienced people want - as long as it blings and looks fast 😉

Yeah, good PCs are sometimes the ugliest. I bought an Alienware M14X in college with a 2540m, GT555M. Traded it for a dell precision M6600 2820qm, 6970m. Literally twice the power and roughly the same price on ebay when I sold/bought them. I really miss the cool keyboard lights though.

Sadly the Alienware laptops and Precisions from that period are the best that Dell has made in years, all the newer models are BGA hot plates. The M14x was very meh in my opinion but did have a M11x R1 and it was nice until I needed some grunt cpu wise, ended up selling it for what I paid for it so all was good in the end. The biggest problem with the M6600 is compatibility with Nvidia mxm cards and the M6700 like almost every single laptop of the Ivy Bridge generation has worse temps. M6800 is a nice deal when had at a good price and not a low spec unit.

Been wearing out Thinkpads and itching for something with good cooling and mxm.

Retired gaming machines make great workhorses. Unfortunately there are certain brands that everyone thinks are worth hundreds even if there nearing a decade old like Sager, Clevo, and Alienware. It's batshit insane when people want $200 or more for a machine with a Core2Duo and a GTX 260-280. And usually they don't include the HDD, Charger, and sometimes even the battery are stripped.

Right now there's an ASUS W90 on eBay at 170 last I checked. Core2Quad and Crossfired 4870Ms. It's a 90 dollar machine at most. If those were DX11 video cards, even first gen DX11, it would be a different story.

I agree but a small few of those machines are worth the price but are generally pretty rare, the prices for older Alienware machines have jumped up recently and it must be the kiddies going to college. Sager/Clevo is kinda nice but junk at the same time and expensive when replacement parts are needed, had one that was missing the battery and it would have cost like $150 to get a new pack 🤣 like wtf. At least the Dells have a somewhat decent supply of parts when needed but I will never buy Asus ever again. Good well built laptops are getting uncommon to rare these days and very tired of how the market was ruined for casual users who want everything to be thin and light while at the same time cheap so everything is plastic shit. Apple really did ruin mobile computing by setting the current trends that limit options for actual users.

I always thought that the last PCI videocard from ASUS was the 3DP-V3000 based on Riva 128.
However you're never too old to learn - today by pure coincidence I acquired a nice job lot that included a seemingly oh-so-rare PCI-V3800/32M(TV) based on the Riva TNT2! Will be just great for a new project with the P2B-D2 motherboard (no AGP unfortunately) and the VR-100 upgrade kit 😀

i'm more interested in that pci tseng to be honest. 😀

Nah, I had already got two ET6100 before this one 😁
As soon as I put my hands on it (next year I guess) I'll make it available for sale or trade, stay tuned 😉

hard1k wrote:

Nah, I had already got two ET6100 before this one 😁
As soon as I put my hands on it (next year I guess) I'll make it available for sale or trade, stay tuned 😉

The legendary Tseng Labs ET-6000? On what system are you going to put the video card?