You could combine both methods .... use freeze to break the heatsink off, then a little bit of brake cleaner over several hours on the remaining epoxy only just to break it down and remove it.

I also prefer the freezing method and always had good results with it. I leave the card overnight in a plastic bag before attacking the heatsink.

Radical Vision wrote on 2022-05-30, 11:27:

Look links both the Voodoo 3 and the 486 i did put them in the freezer, and look the end result... I did try also on GEforce 2 mx200 to remove the heatsink same crap happened the cooler may fall, but the nasty cement stays on the chip... ai did leave the parts to sit in the freezer for 1 hour...

Maybe i miss something then... But normally with brakes cleaner the glue just falls..

nVidia ... this here was the problem and why the freeze method didn't work well, for my nVidia GPUs I used plastic spudgers mostly to lever the cooler off once it was cold enough, the freeze method didn't work too well on the GF4 cards I have due to how it bonds with the GPU die. GF4 had a very flat and smooth die which helped the epoxy to have a very strong bond, much stronger than the 3DFX cards which had horrible epoxy that would breakdown on its own eventually.

nVidia honestly had good thermal epoxy cement, much better than 3DFX and certainly not as cheap, they also had better stock cooling and I dont usually remove nVidia stock coolers unless there is a need to.

Swapped a Thermaltake Silent Boost fan out in favor of a Noctua NF-R8 redux-1800. Cools just as well if not better and is much quieter. My XP box is now much more tolerable.

Today I built a retro PC that might be useful for job remote interviews conference sw and webapps but I didn't want to make it too modern (what'd be the point to just use the fastest) so I built a full atx Socket 775 board with a Pentium 4 HT 661 @ 3,6Ghz SSSE3, 1,5GB DDR2 (need to upgrade this), an HD4650 1GB DDR2, Asus Xonar DG (amplified) PCI, classic old grey case, IDE 40GB disk, linux with OpenGL 3.3 acceleration and video VAAPI decoding enabled and a VGA cheap camera (to reduce encoding/bandwidth task). 😀
Let's see if beside the very high power demand and fan noise it works better than the dual core Atom + GT610 PCI, I tried lately and failed to keep a functional conference for CPU usage limits. I don't know if this might be much faster than the Atom, I suppose it will be on the GPU side for the much more shaders units and PCI-E x16 bus. HyperThreading might help a bit too.

386sx, test the conference stuff before you put it to use!

It is prudent to have windows 10 computer, least issues and sometimes you cannot get compatible software you need to work on older OS even XP (not safe) and windows 7 is not supported anymore especially the security support. And older software might not work with their software they were using. Even older software might get removed by windows 10 even were not infected. Keep that in mind about these issues.

Buy a HP Z220 with i5 processor and 16GB, small SSD, around 200GB is sufficient and onboard video is pretty decent even drop in a low to mid end video card if you like. My main windows 10 is up to date and some software and only consumed just under 70GB and yes, mine is Z220.

Get a $25 Intel PT pro/1000 ethernet network card. Saves on processor's cycles and it does work on XP, 7 and 10. This what saved me another 1 year on my optiplex 780 running was XP then 7 and 10 with this card. This allowed me enough time to spend on parts to build Z220 which was about 5-6 years ago now.

Cheers,

pentiumspeed wrote on 2022-05-30, 17:00:

386sx, test the conference stuff before you put it to use! […]
Show full quote

386sx, test the conference stuff before you put it to use!

It is prudent to have windows 10 computer, least issues and sometimes you cannot get compatible software you need to work on older OS even XP (not safe) and windows 7 is not supported anymore especially the security support. And older software might not work with their software they were using. Even older software might get removed by windows 10 even were not infected. Keep that in mind about these issues.

Buy a HP Z220 with i5 processor and 16GB, small SSD, around 200GB is sufficient and onboard video is pretty decent even drop in a low to mid end video card if you like. My main windows 10 is up to date and some software and only consumed just under 70GB and yes, mine is Z220.

Get a $25 Intel PT pro/1000 ethernet network card. Saves on processor's cycles and it does work on XP, 7 and 10. This what saved me another 1 year on my optiplex 780 running was XP then 7 and 10 with this card. This allowed me enough time to spend on parts to build Z220 which was about 5-6 years ago now.

Cheers,

Do you think Win might work better anyway in conference apps and webapps? I was wondering that last interview I had cause the dual core Atom which I didn't have obviously great expectations from on such heavy tasks even with 8GB DDR3, GT610 OpenGL 4.4 drivers accelerated web browser and a vga camera, audio still suffered latency and probably cause the fixed 100% cpu usage I didn't expect with just a very simple conference.
I supposed that the GT610 can't help a lot in linux for any encoding task and it might have been all on the weak CPU. So I was wondering if the same config with DXVA acceleration might have been better where in linux the web browser video decoding isn't working not even H264 not to mention encoding.
This Pentium 4 HT 661 might be fast enough for the task even if same decoding/encoding problems of course (I don't know the official offline apps if they use more the hardware itself or the same WebGL whatever acceleration).

Or I might try even the dual Atom with the GT610 PCI in Win 8.1 x64 with full 8GB DDR3 ram and SSD maybe even the GMA/SGX545 iGPU but that sound too much. The web browser might have problems even if Pixel Shader 3.0 is enabled but not optimized for this gpu, maybe the offline apps can make more use of the good DXVA acceleration in Win.

Copied 22GB of game demos from my magazine bundle disks to my retro network shared drive. I still didn't find some like Crysis or Prince of Persia The Two Thrones. I can't find the latter one online either.

Must make good impressions with your job interviewers so you don't want to make excuse about poor hard ware issues or support, they will notice that. That is last thing you want.

Atom is vastly out of question at all, vast CPU starved on everything even slows down using PCI GPU due to driver overhead, had Atom of several computers based on this back then even much later was too starved. Go for even pentium based on socket 1155, i3 or i5 with 16GB and win 10, sandy bridge or ivy bridge is sufficient.

By the way, 8GB struggles too due to browser and software too hungry.

Cheapest to get complete computers to start with and windows 10 supported. These two includes COA key buried in the bios firmware means you can activate the windows 10 Pro for nothing just buying this either two:

Elitedesk 8300 tower or Z220.

Cheers,

Thanks, I tried many times to use this Atom which it's a SoC I really find interesting but seriously limited on modern o.s. (even linux). I suppose with some modern low profile PCI adapted gpu with video encoding in hardware might be better who knows, but seems like more a CPU problem anyway with the whole encoding done I suppose via software cpu anyway.

Rebuilt an Deer OEM'd Premier LC-8500BTX from almost scratch. I now have a safe 250-300W unit that can power an Athlon XP 2500+ and Radeon 9700 Pro while being slightly warm.

Does still need replacing some caps since I didn't have replacements to fully complete the 5v rail and the 3.3v rail, but so far the voltages seem rock solid and in spec. For working almost 3 hours without stopping on it, I guess it paid off.

Listened to some MIDI (via dreamblaster X2GS in GS mode on Aureal vortex 2) on my fresh new old stock Cambridge Soundworks beige "PC works" speakers. OMG, they're BEAUTIFUL and sound so good!!! Got for a bargain price too

I've always liked the idea and design of the Amiga CD32, cdtv, philips cdi, memorex vis, laserdisc, etc... And since the 90's I've dreamed of having a computer in the living room, connected to a huge Sony Trinitron CRT TV, to play games my favorite ms-dos and windows titles. I know this sounds like an eccentric fetish to some, but what can I do?

So after several years of coming up with ideas and designing, I'm finally creating my "product", a Pentium 2 100% compatible to run everything I like, and with the look of something for a typical 90's TV room. simply something that looks like a cd or dvd player, I wanted a device that just by looking at it, you could recognize it as a 90's HTPC computer. After a lot of research, I found a satellite receiver that had the look I wanted, and that I could reconcile computer design with it. For that, I got a Dell Inspiron 7000 notebook, whose CD and floppy drive are on the front of the notebook, and that all the ports (VGA, Serial, S-Video) are at the back, besides, it had the perfect size for the satellite receiver case, and all I had to do was make a cut in the front of the case to accommodate the cd and floppy. I will turn this led seguiment display into a watch.

Rikintosh wrote on 2022-05-30, 19:22:

I've always liked the idea and design of the Amiga CD32, cdtv, philips cdi, memorex vis, laserdisc, etc... And since the 90's I've dreamed of having a computer in the living room, connected to a huge Sony Trinitron CRT TV, to play games my favorite ms-dos and windows titles. I know this sounds like an eccentric fetish to some, but what can I do?

So after several years of coming up with ideas and designing, I'm finally creating my "product", a Pentium 2 100% compatible to run everything I like, and with the look of something for a typical 90's TV room. simply something that looks like a cd or dvd player, I wanted a device that just by looking at it, you could recognize it as a 90's HTPC computer. After a lot of research, I found a satellite receiver that had the look I wanted, and that I could reconcile computer design with it. For that, I got a Dell Inspiron 7000 notebook, whose CD and floppy drive are on the front of the notebook, and that all the ports (VGA, Serial, S-Video) are at the back, besides, it had the perfect size for the satellite receiver case, and all I had to do was make a cut in the front of the case to accommodate the cd and floppy. I will turn this led seguiment display into a watch.

Love this! Got any more pics of the build?

SteveC wrote on 2022-05-30, 19:45:

Rikintosh wrote on 2022-05-30, 19:22:

I've always liked the idea and design of the Amiga CD32, cdtv, philips cdi, memorex vis, laserdisc, etc... And since the 90's I've dreamed of having a computer in the living room, connected to a huge Sony Trinitron CRT TV, to play games my favorite ms-dos and windows titles. I know this sounds like an eccentric fetish to some, but what can I do?

So after several years of coming up with ideas and designing, I'm finally creating my "product", a Pentium 2 100% compatible to run everything I like, and with the look of something for a typical 90's TV room. simply something that looks like a cd or dvd player, I wanted a device that just by looking at it, you could recognize it as a 90's HTPC computer. After a lot of research, I found a satellite receiver that had the look I wanted, and that I could reconcile computer design with it. For that, I got a Dell Inspiron 7000 notebook, whose CD and floppy drive are on the front of the notebook, and that all the ports (VGA, Serial, S-Video) are at the back, besides, it had the perfect size for the satellite receiver case, and all I had to do was make a cut in the front of the case to accommodate the cd and floppy. I will turn this led seguiment display into a watch.

Love this! Got any more pics of the build?

I'm doing it little by little (for lack of time), but I'm filming everything, so I'll put the whole construction process on Youtube, so that other people can also do similar projects

Rikintosh wrote on 2022-05-30, 19:47:

SteveC wrote on 2022-05-30, 19:45:

Rikintosh wrote on 2022-05-30, 19:22:

I've always liked the idea and design of the Amiga CD32, cdtv, philips cdi, memorex vis, laserdisc, etc... And since the 90's I've dreamed of having a computer in the living room, connected to a huge Sony Trinitron CRT TV, to play games my favorite ms-dos and windows titles. I know this sounds like an eccentric fetish to some, but what can I do?

So after several years of coming up with ideas and designing, I'm finally creating my "product", a Pentium 2 100% compatible to run everything I like, and with the look of something for a typical 90's TV room. simply something that looks like a cd or dvd player, I wanted a device that just by looking at it, you could recognize it as a 90's HTPC computer. After a lot of research, I found a satellite receiver that had the look I wanted, and that I could reconcile computer design with it. For that, I got a Dell Inspiron 7000 notebook, whose CD and floppy drive are on the front of the notebook, and that all the ports (VGA, Serial, S-Video) are at the back, besides, it had the perfect size for the satellite receiver case, and all I had to do was make a cut in the front of the case to accommodate the cd and floppy. I will turn this led seguiment display into a watch.

Love this! Got any more pics of the build?

I'm doing it little by little (for lack of time), but I'm filming everything, so I'll put the whole construction process on Youtube, so that other people can also do similar projects

Subscribed 😀

Smart!!

Cheers,

Rikintosh wrote on 2022-05-30, 19:22:

I've always liked the idea and design of the Amiga CD32, cdtv, philips cdi, memorex vis, laserdisc, etc... And since the 90's I've dreamed of having a computer in the living room, connected to a huge Sony Trinitron CRT TV, to play games my favorite ms-dos and windows titles. I know this sounds like an eccentric fetish to some, but what can I do?

So after several years of coming up with ideas and designing, I'm finally creating my "product", a Pentium 2 100% compatible to run everything I like, and with the look of something for a typical 90's TV room. simply something that looks like a cd or dvd player, I wanted a device that just by looking at it, you could recognize it as a 90's HTPC computer. After a lot of research, I found a satellite receiver that had the look I wanted, and that I could reconcile computer design with it. For that, I got a Dell Inspiron 7000 notebook, whose CD and floppy drive are on the front of the notebook, and that all the ports (VGA, Serial, S-Video) are at the back, besides, it had the perfect size for the satellite receiver case, and all I had to do was make a cut in the front of the case to accommodate the cd and floppy. I will turn this led seguiment display into a watch.

This is awesome!! I can't wait to see your video of the build.

Created a label for Stunts "4D Sport Driving" Based on a picture I seen on ebay 😀

Original

My labels

I flipped the 1st disk... I'll have to do it again 😀

NyLan wrote on 2022-05-31, 21:39:

Created a label for Stunts "4D Sport Driving" Based on a picture I seen on ebay :) […]
Show full quote

Created a label for Stunts "4D Sport Driving" Based on a picture I seen on ebay 😀

Original
s-l1600 (2).jpg

My labels
2022-05-31 23.32.52.jpg

I flipped the 1st disk... I'll have to do it again 😀

🤣 this reminded me that I did the same thing with a Toshiba notebook. I reproduced the stickers from a photo I saw on ebay. Originally they had a different cut shape, but I preferred to make them rectangular, as I liked them better.

In the 90's, I remember that there was software just to create labels for floppy disks. I think it was software from a maker of adhesive labels for office use.