Decided to treat my Medion GF3 Ti 200 with some heatsink love.

It looks like a lot of GF3 Ti 200-s from other vendors tend to have actually active cooling and memory heatsinks. I've heard that this Medion branded (MSI OEM) are from pre build PCs sold in Germany. I wonder what kind of case cooling those PC-s had?
Heatsinks I used are actually for Rasbperry Pi4. Dirt cheap im my local shops - probably because Pi-s are not produced these days.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2022-12-26, 03:02:

I had to oil a fan on a PNY Verto Ti 4200 64MB (a beast of a value card at the time!) and one of the screws had clearly been mangled by a previous owner at some point.

In cases these, I've found that a single drop off oil is often enough to free a stubborn screw like this.

gmaverick2k wrote on 2022-12-25, 21:21:

Upgrade z440 CPU to 2699 v3. Nice and fast. Gtx 970 needs 8 pin and 6 pin. Z440 700w PSU has 2x6 pin. Looking at getting rx 6600 on the cheap
picked up a 3060ti instead for £250. rx6600 seller was timewaster (wanted £160)

FIRE STRIKE
VALID RESULT
SCORE
22,793 with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti LHR(1x) and Intel Xeon Processor E5-2690 v3
Graphics Score: 28,970
Physics Score: 18,761
Combined Score: 10,012

Tested out this Cumulus Corporation 286-to-386 upgrade in an Epson Equity III+.

Currently only running at 12 MHz, but the processor is a 16 MHz chip, so I'm hoping I can figure out how to get it to run at the stated speed.

Also has a socket for a 387 coprocessor, so I may try acquiring one to see how that works.

Worked on adding a CD-ROM drive to the Epson Equity III+.

This system uses these plastic brackets to mount 5.25" drives properly. Fortunately, I had an extra one I was able to salvage from another system.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2022-12-26, 03:02:

MicroCenter "New Customer" discount when I traveled past one a few months ago. I was disappointed that there were really NO good deals on anything useful in the store (highly overrated place outside of the crazy deals that pop up from time to time), so I just used the coupon on something that I otherwise would never be able to get cheaply.

Any other brick and mortar retailer that has the kind of stock that Microcenter has? I live near a Microcenter and it's incredibly convenient to be able to drive there and get something within minutes vs. waiting a couple of days for an order to come in the mail. I don't think it's overrated at all.

The only two B&M's from the last decade that could go toe-to-toe with MicroCenter for PC parts and systems were Fry's Electronics and Tiger Direct's own retail stores. Before that, there was CompUSA, which was later folded into TigerDirect.

smtkr wrote on 2022-12-26, 20:32:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2022-12-26, 03:02:

MicroCenter "New Customer" discount when I traveled past one a few months ago. I was disappointed that there were really NO good deals on anything useful in the store (highly overrated place outside of the crazy deals that pop up from time to time), so I just used the coupon on something that I otherwise would never be able to get cheaply.

Any other brick and mortar retailer that has the kind of stock that Microcenter has? I live near a Microcenter and it's incredibly convenient to be able to drive there and get something within minutes vs. waiting a couple of days for an order to come in the mail. I don't think it's overrated at all.

I'm sure it's convenient if you have one nearby, but the closest one to me is like 4 hours one way. This one was about 7 hours drive from my home (just outside of a major city, as they all are) and we just happened to be passing by it when we were returning from a trip.

I very rarely buy new PC hardware, and when I do it generally has to be at a steep discount, so having a brick and mortar store that is selling everything at MSRP isn't really interesting to me. At the time the only thing I was somewhat interested in buying was a new CPU and everything they had was at or above the Amazon price (where I get 5% back and free fast shipping anyway). The prices on r\buildapcsales or slickdeals are what I look at when there is something I am interested in getting soon. Also, I expected to be able to demo some cool tech that I couldn't see in person anywhere else, because some day I may get a 240Hz IPS monitor... but everything they had was running on standard HDMI multiport switches so none of the monitors would display high refresh rates at all, let alone allow me to see\feel the reduction in input lag on a 240Hz display when moving the mouse. One of the employees I talked to was friendly and had a decent grasp of what was going on, but I also overheard some tech-advice that was definitely less informed than what I'd heard from the small-town computer hobbyist guys I worked with in the electronics department of a plain old department store back home.

I went looking for clearance stuff and was told they didn't really have anything, and there weren't any big sales the day I was there.

Again, if you're near one it's probably neat to be able to drop in and take advantage of the big sales or combo deals they have, but in general it just felt like a Staples or Bestbuy with an additional room full of computer hardware. If I built brand new PCs more regularly I'm sure it would be a different story, but if I find a buddy that needs a computer these days I can buy a second hand PC from a marketplace online for $200 that has $500 worth of parts in it. If someone just needs a really basic system, businesses are literally giving away piles of Optiplex systems that are more than powerful enough for the average user. It makes building brand new systems from scratch a pretty uncommon thing for me these days, so the immediacy of a brick and mortar store doesn't really change much.

... that said, I would rather that there be MORE of these stores, and I'd love one to be nearby, I just didn't have the spiritual-experience that people seem to describe when they go into one. 😁

Reformatted and reinstalled my Windows 95 partition. I couldn't find my driver CDs, redownload everything when I realize non of my PC at home has an optical writer, so probably going to get some external writers.

First post on Vogons... been skulking about for a few months now, but just created an account today. Today's activity was receiving an Asus P4P800SE motherboard from auction, and finding a 3.4GHz P4 Engineering Sample onboard, under a huge copper heatsink.... not bad for $37. Swapped out my Intel D865PERL that is having some wierd issues for my XP Retro build. Want to thank everyone here at Vogons for the in depth knowledge provided of old equipment and @Philscomputerlab for making great content to really getting me excited to get into retro hardware.

Antieon wrote on 2022-12-27, 04:52:

First post on Vogons... been skulking about for a few months now, but just created an account today. Today's activity was receiving an Asus P4P800SE motherboard from auction, and finding a 3.4GHz P4 Engineering Sample onboard, under a huge copper heatsink.... not bad for $37. Swapped out my Intel D865PERL that is having some wierd issues for my XP Retro build. Want to thank everyone here at Vogons for the in depth knowledge provided of old equipment and @Philscomputerlab for making great content to really getting me excited to get into retro hardware.

Welcome! this is a fun and knowledgeable community. Your project sounds fun be sure to start a thread about it.

Spent a couple hours trying to get XTIDE to work on this Epson. After a bunch of a troubleshooting turned out the problem was the video card (EGA/VGA combo card).

Swapped it out for an ATI VGA Charger video card and suddenly XTIDE worked!

Got DOS installed, along with the Mitsumi interface card and CD-ROM. Even managed to get EMM386 loaded thanks to the 386SX processor upgrade board.

I have noticed an issue with rebooting. For some reason soft reboots cause the system to lock up after the VGA BIOS appears on screen. Whereas a hard reset works fine though.

This will need further troubleshooting.

Antieon wrote on 2022-12-27, 04:52:

First post on Vogons... been skulking about for a few months now, but just created an account today. Today's activity was receiving an Asus P4P800SE motherboard from auction, and finding a 3.4GHz P4 Engineering Sample onboard, under a huge copper heatsink.... not bad for $37. Swapped out my Intel D865PERL that is having some wierd issues for my XP Retro build. Want to thank everyone here at Vogons for the in depth knowledge provided of old equipment and @Philscomputerlab for making great content to really getting me excited to get into retro hardware.

Welcome!

It's a fun and rewarding hobby, so we're happy to have you join us. 😁

Well resurrected my failing dual taualtin system, since the AOpen seems got something bad on it, and will refuse to load/ install or do any load at all, seems some element failed i suspect half-working mosfet ... So i did initial testing for the new config, so my system to be still 2x2 (dual CPU - dual GPU, now it have extra dual BIOS as well..). Te first choice was x2 Pentium III 1GHz both same stepping even, but for some reason one of the CPU is dead for no reason, as i was using that exact CPU in ABIT BE6-II system with slotket long time ago, and it did "just works", but guess is dead damn it, i will burn it with the heat gun, before send it to the scrap hell.... After that fail, i founded x2 similar P3 933MHz, the only difference between them one is 1.7v, the second one is 1.75v, but it seems they both work fine like that for now...

It looks fine to me (well the mobo is not as nice as the AOpen, with that shitty yellow, too bad GIGAbyte did not use blue PCB paint as they did on their single socket Tualatin boards..), and most importantly it works rock solid. Oyy and yes there is one thing, that annoy me much, these morons GIGAbyte did NOT even think to include fast post setup, so when adding even 1GB of SDram the post procedure is SLOW, and when i add the post is like 1 fucking minute long 🤣... I did look 3 times in the whole BIOS could not locate option for quick self on test, or something like that, there is not even "press esc to cancel mem test" jesus........... But aside from that fact, and that the mobo have garbage caps (still not blown up or leaking), and the bad color i dont have any complains...

Found these parts, just now, i did order them... 33 Euro for the DFI Expert + the CPU, 7 Euro for the 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee, but the guy is selling 320GB SeaGate ATA for 10 euro, so i could not resist to buy that too, as i like big ATA drives, specially these models of SeaGate as they are reliable from my exp..

3Dfx Voodoo Banshee AGP (a new day, a new voodoo)
SeaGate Barracuda 320GB Ultra ATA
DFI Lanparty SLI-DR Expert
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ на 2.20GHz

Also did test HD3850 AGP that i will sell to a client, since i have x3 of them..

As I have finally gotten my workshop/space in order to work on computer and other hardware projects again. I started working on some basics.

Got to removing this battery off a lot of computers I saved off a Craigslist posting. They were going to be trashed. Happening to be listening to Castlevania music at the time and yelled "Die Monster, You Don't Belong In This World!!! 😆

The last night I started working on this Sony 440LX Slot 1 board. With integrated OPL3 and OPL4 on board.

Trying to figure out which Sony system it came from. I presume a VIAO of some sort. More work to be done.

Gmlb256 wrote on 2022-12-23, 21:29:

True, this was noticeable with the Voodoo5 and the VSA-100 architecture. A product that wasn't competitive with simpler GeForce and Radeon cards in terms of performance, power consumption, features and price.

To be fair with 3DFX... You can't really compete with a company who acquired almost all the talent from SGI and Cray to work with them. Even ATi couldn't in long time, let alone S3 and Matrox.

People says nVidia destroyed SGI... But actually I would say nVidia IS SGI/Cray! minus the IBM-like corporate mindset and bureaucreacy which plagued almost every 80's corporations. And SGI was and now as Nvidia is... Well... They were and are the gods of matrix math processing ASICs. You really can't compete with them... Not at least in "clean" terms (directly targeting their engineering assets for example).

Vanessaira wrote on 2022-12-28, 00:55:

As I have finally gotten my workshop/space in order to work on computer and other hardware projects again. I started working on […]
Show full quote

As I have finally gotten my workshop/space in order to work on computer and other hardware projects again. I started working on some basics.

20221217_213510.jpg
Got to removing this battery off a lot of computers I saved off a Craigslist posting. They were going to be trashed. Happening to be listening to Castlevania music at the time and yelled "Die Monster, You Don't Belong In This World!!! 😆

The last night I started working on this Sony 440LX Slot 1 board. With integrated OPL3 and OPL4 on board.

20221223_234455.jpg

Trying to figure out which Sony system it came from. I presume a VIAO of some sort. More work to be done.

Do you have full photo of this yellow motherboard that have 286-20 processor? Is this one using CHIPS chipset?

Cheers,

hyoenmadan wrote on 2022-12-28, 01:25:

To be fair with 3DFX... You can't really compete with a company who acquired almost all the talent from SGI and Cray to work with them. Even ATi couldn't in long time, let alone S3 and Matrox.

Agreed, 3dfx singlehandedly killed nearly all of the old companies that used to make video chips. Only ATi managed to make it through the end thanks to OEM deals and even then, they were later acquired by AMD.

People says nVidia destroyed SGI... But actually I would say nVidia IS SGI/Cray! minus the IBM-like corporate mindset and bureaucreacy which plagued almost every 80's corporations. And SGI was and now as Nvidia is... Well... They were and are the gods of matrix math processing ASICs. You really can't compete with them... Not at least in "clean" terms (directly targeting their engineering assets for example).

Prior becoming the market leader they currently are, nVidia had a rough beginning with the NV1 chip. Said chip used quadratic texture mapping for 3D rendering which was slower and complicated to work with. Success for nVidia began when they launched the RIVA 128 which used polygonal texture mapping and led to the more competitive RIVA TNT.

Today I am expecting my Chaintech 6BTM0 mainboard to arrive with p2 350mhz and 512MB sdr memory with aparently all slots occupied.
Bought it for 40€ which seemed like an excellent price.

It is a nice replacement of my p233mmx because I really would like to run Mechwarrior 2 in 1024x768 smoothly in MS-DOS ofc. And test all the other mw2 versions I have at home.

Matrox Mystique, ATI Rage 3D, 3Dfx Monster and Orchid edition, the S3 Virge and pentium edition.

If someone has the PowerVR version, please let me know.

I just started a 1080p h264 to 1080p, 20mb/s WMV-HD transcode on a PIII Katmai 550, the slowest CPU I have with SSE. I have absolutely no good reason for doing such a thing; morbid curiosity is the best excuse I can come up with at the moment. I have no idea if this thing will actually complete the transcode, though I did ditch Win98 and install XP to give it at least a fighting chance.

It's currently encoding at a plodding .16 fps. Estimated time left for this roughly 2 hour movie is ~12 days! And to think, once/if it finishes encoding, this machine won't even be fast enough to play the file it created! But first, let's see how far this poor computer doesn't get.