philscomputerlab wrote:

Really liking the art work on that box. Today's boxes just don't look as cool 🤣

A little bit retro related. Sorted out my home networking / file server situation. Too many drives and USBs with stuff all over the place. Was looking for some redundancy, got a lot of drives, but really don't want to buy a NAS. Windows 8 has storage spaces built in, it's like a RAID manager for newbies. Created a Raid 1 array and will use that for my retro home network. The data on there is not super critical, but when you've organised it over some time, it's a major PITA if something dies.

Performance is pretty sweet. 140 MB/s local and 110 MB/s over the LAN. Just a shame Windows 98 networking is so slow 😵

It's how the RAID addiction starts. I used to be casual with storage. And now I have 4 computers in the house here with raid-5 storage of various sizes, and now with my dell servers I just got free, up to another 275GB raid-5 storage, and every computer is running on a full fledged hardware raid card on pci-express of some sort. And I have deep desires to move up to some very large enterprise raid setups of something around 8 x 2TB drives in the closet and move over to raid-6 and a newer hardware card.. (that would be 12.28 TB usable space, and protected against a two-drive failure) I'm hooked on it now, just the enjoyment of not losing anything because a drive decides to die is awesome.

Raid 6... Nice.

I considered going RAID 5, but, and correct me if I misunderstood this, I won't be able to access any files when I just pull out one of the drives and try to access it? It always needs to be in the RAID? Whereas with Raid 1, I can just pull the drive and access it in another machine (USB SATA dock for example).

philscomputerlab wrote:

Raid 6... Nice.

I considered going RAID 5, but, and correct me if I misunderstood this, I won't be able to access any files when I just pull out one of the drives and try to access it? It always needs to be in the RAID? Whereas with Raid 1, I can just pull the drive and access it in another machine (USB SATA dock for example).

In theory, yes, though I wouldn't recommend it. There's a good chance that the RAID has to be rebuilt after (since the drives are not synchronous anymore) - and that takes hours, at least.

What you really want is a NAS :p - seriously - cheap enough, easy to use and maintain, always available, low power consumption.

You could have a USB drive where you automatically make backups from the NAS, and use this on other computers if need be.

Browsing the web at 800x600... 😉

Dismanteled my K6-2 Box. Changed the psu from K6-2-500 to K6-3-400.
Mounted it all back together, and gave it a treat by using new unused black pata cables and a shiny new unused CPU cooler. Then benched it again in 3Dmark99. It bumped up from 3039 to 3245 on my G400.

oerk wrote:

In theory, yes, though I wouldn't recommend it. There's a good chance that the RAID has to be rebuilt after (since the drives ar […]
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philscomputerlab wrote:

Raid 6... Nice.

I considered going RAID 5, but, and correct me if I misunderstood this, I won't be able to access any files when I just pull out one of the drives and try to access it? It always needs to be in the RAID? Whereas with Raid 1, I can just pull the drive and access it in another machine (USB SATA dock for example).

In theory, yes, though I wouldn't recommend it. There's a good chance that the RAID has to be rebuilt after (since the drives are not synchronous anymore) - and that takes hours, at least.

What you really want is a NAS :p - seriously - cheap enough, easy to use and maintain, always available, low power consumption.

You could have a USB drive where you automatically make backups from the NAS, and use this on other computers if need be.

Just a nas won't do it. I had my nas crashing. Lucky for me the nas was my backup backup. Photo's are now stored on the computer and a external usb drive. When the import process has finished. The usb drive gets disconnected and a other usb drive gets connected to backup the data on a seperate usb drive that i store away.

Yeah, of course, a proper backup solution is a given.

Had three Synology boxes so far, and what they certainly didn't do was crash.

I just put together a Pentium II system. I need a system for getting some performance numbers to compare to the K6-3+ that I will bench later. My choice of CPU is an unlocked PII 300 Klamath that should let me bench at 4.5*66, 3x100, 3.5x100 and 4x100. Perhaps I will use a P2 450 to get 4.5x100 and 4.5x112 scores aswell.

I got a Gigabyte BX2000+ a week ago in a lot of untested Slot-1 boards (I posted a pic in the bought stuff thread) so I will use that board. There is very little information about the BX2000+ on the net but its a BX board with DIP-switches for multiplier and FSB (with no "SoftMeny"), 4 memory slots and a single ISA slot. It has dual BIOS, ATA66 controller and an overvoltage protection that wont let you change voltage or "tape mod" for a higher voltage as it knows what voltage Klamath, Deschutes and other cores are supposed to use. All in all a strange combination of features for a board that was released December 1999. I guess its because the board is an updated version of the older Gigabyte BX2000.

I think I will start a thread with my findings so other people who are looking for information about this board in the future find more useful stuff then I did.

The board has won many awards such as:

''Recommended'' Presented By: ?

''Quality Product Award 2000'' Presented By: ?

''The Eighth Award for Symbol of Taiwan Excellence" Presented By: Taiwan Award@Taiwan

http://www.gigabyte.se/products/product-page. … spx?pid=1413#na

So far I have noticed two related good things, the board works and unlike my BX2000 riddled with bad caps this BX2000+ board uses only Sanyo and Panasonic caps.

Browsing the web at 800x600... 😉

Specs?
It looks like a Pentium 1 maybe?

smeezekitty wrote:

Browsing the web at 800x600... 😉

Specs?
It looks like a Pentium 1 maybe?

You would be right 😀

Pentium 100MHz
40MB RAM
Cirrus Logic GD5434, 1MB VRAM (I think)
3.2GB HDD
Sound Blaster 16 CT1740
Windows 95

I just discovered, I made it to the Hackaday front page once without knowing it.

...uh, in their Fail of the Week section, that is.

Skyscraper wrote:

I got a Gigabyte BX2000+ a week ago in a lot of untested Slot-1 boards (I posted a pic in the bought stuff thread) so I will use that board. There is very little information about the BX2000+ on the net but its a BX board with DIP-switches for multiplier and FSB (with no "SoftMeny"), 4 memory slots and a single ISA slot. It has dual BIOS, ATA66 controller and an overvoltage protection that wont let you change voltage or "tape mod" for a higher voltage as it knows what voltage Klamath, Deschutes and other cores are supposed to use. All in all a strange combination of features for a board that was released December 1999. I guess its because the board is an updated version of the older Gigabyte BX2000.

It look's like a great board indeed. Would love to have one such board, in order to replace the Intel VC820 that I have.

jwt27 wrote:

I just discovered, I made it to the Hackaday front page once without knowing it.

...uh, in their Fail of the Week section, that is.

Woops! How'd you manage that?

brostenen wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

I got a Gigabyte BX2000+ a week ago in a lot of untested Slot-1 boards (I posted a pic in the bought stuff thread) so I will use that board. There is very little information about the BX2000+ on the net but its a BX board with DIP-switches for multiplier and FSB (with no "SoftMeny"), 4 memory slots and a single ISA slot. It has dual BIOS, ATA66 controller and an overvoltage protection that wont let you change voltage or "tape mod" for a higher voltage as it knows what voltage Klamath, Deschutes and other cores are supposed to use. All in all a strange combination of features for a board that was released December 1999. I guess its because the board is an updated version of the older Gigabyte BX2000.

It look's like a great board indeed. Would love to have one such board, in order to replace the Intel VC820 that I have.

It seems like a nice board indeed. I have found one odd thing though, the board dislikes CPU-Z. It can run it seeminly without issues, even 4 instances at the same time but after closing them and trying to run something else the board often just shuts down. If I do not run CPU-Z I can run everything in my benching suit over and over again without hiccups. I have tested the memory with HCI memtest and Prime95 blend also runs fine.

The CPU-Z bug is an issue I can live with but it makes screenshotting relevant information a bit harder.

Yesterday I plugged my modern Thrustmaster T.16000M into my current Windows 98 machine and was surprised that it went ahead and installed drivers. Tried some games, and the stick works perfectly. I had no idea!

Shame there is no way to use a modern USB stick for DOS games, that would be awesome.

I think I solved the Gigabyte BX2000+ CPUID shutdown bug by turning off the motherboards thermal shutdown feature. Im confident its a bug as the temp sensor in the BIOS never has shown a higher value than 36C and the heatsink the sensor is touching feels like... 36C or something like that.

jwt27 wrote:

I just discovered, I made it to the Hackaday front page once without knowing it.

...uh, in their Fail of the Week section, that is.

You can't say stuff like this and not show us! 😁

Well I had this little "incident"...
http://hackaday.com/2015/04/05/fail-of-the-we … -your-ram-dimm/

There's a post about it around here somewhere.

I installed my Powerleap PL-iP3/T in my ongoing SE440BX-2 build. It is using a Celeron Tualatin 1300. It took some doing to get it to work properly. Took me a while to learn that I needed to "downgrade" my BIOS from P15 to P13 before the board would post with a multiplier this high. Then I needed to give the Celeron a little extra voltage (1.6v instead of 1.5v) in order to get it to post. But it is working fine now, and I am running benchmarks for Phil's V5 thread, this time with a real Tualatin (albeit a 100FSB Celeron).

I will eventually grab a 1400MHz Celeron just so that I can say that I maxxed out the SE440BX-2.

I'm also going to have to do something about the fan. Very noisy, as promised. There's room for a taller heatsink, but I will need to install a proper retention mechanism so that the Powerleap doesn't accidentally fall on the V5.

philscomputerlab wrote:

Yesterday I plugged my modern Thrustmaster T.16000M into my current Windows 98 machine and was surprised that it went ahead and installed drivers. Tried some games, and the stick works perfectly. I had no idea!

Shame there is no way to use a modern USB stick for DOS games, that would be awesome.

I have seen USB drivers for MS-Dos somewhere in the wild.
I am just assuming that they don't work.