brassicGamer wrote:

Next question: how many of you have had therapy for the issues that manifest in the above?

Bit personal, so I'm kidding, but you get my point 😉

🤣! Well, someone had to say it 😁 - frankly I'm pretty happy with myself - yeah I go a bit overboard with my hoarding - my two room apartment and my parent's attic are both filled with PC parts (been steadily moving stuff to my parents house tough) - worse yet, I've spent so much money getting my '89 BMW E30 back on the road - I have a garage full of parts for it and even got a spare (almost identical) car I picked up for 400 euro.

BUT I always take the most important things first - both time and financial -wise - like my job, my house and my family - etc. My hoarding hasn't been a problem yet, and It's not compulsive. If I can afford something, I get it. If not, I focus on other stuff.

kanecvr wrote:

worse yet, I've spent so much money getting my '89 BMW E30 back on the road - I have a garage full of parts for it and even got a spare (almost identical) car I picked up for 400 euro.

Some cars aren't worth getting back in the road. That one is. I don't know whether I'm going to bother spending money on my E36 Compact if it fails its MOT. I would have to sell some of my gear...

You should see the underside of my car 😁 every area where sheet metal was folded (rear skirt and side skirts) has superficial rust. The rear skirt is starting to rust, and it doesn't look superficial. The brake lines and fuel lines are not copper and have started to rust as well 🙁 and I just installed a stroked M50B25 S1 in it... but nothing is unfixable if you have enough patience end time.

It needs a new brake pump with four brake lines - probably go for a VW golf 3 non-abs ATE pump - (the stock e30 pump it has a common brake line for the rear wheels witch worked fine with the stock drums, but it's not strong enough for the disks I pun in four years ago), new brake and fuel lines and a new rear - left caliper (I snapped off the vent bolt when trying to bleed the brakes after I replaced the stock brake booster with a smaller one so the new engine would fit) - and of course I need to adapt the M50's 50mm exhaust headers to the E30's 45mm exhaust system.

My collection isn't that big, so I don't have that many spares. Got 3x Voodoo3 3500 (compaq), a couple of Pentium 166 MMX and Athlon XP 2500+, two CUSL2 (one of them kills my wifi), a few intel NICs (forgot the model), and a bunch of FSP power supplies found in OEM builds and cases.

The rest is your typical matching RAM sets and matching Vooodoo2s.

I have more, but these are the ones I can think of right now.

I sometimes buy multiple of the same item to save on shipping and for spares. Paying 10 USD for shipping on a 5 USD item doesn't make much sense to me. Might as well get 3 or 4 of the same item.

I have 20 or so Microsoft basic PS/2 ball mice, all shrink wrapped.

I have a ridiculous number of lower end Slot-1 CPUs, many of them duplicates. I should sell a bunch of them off.

I have many many motherboards which are not technically identical, but they have a lot of overlap between them. I don't like selling motherboards, they're too complicated and too prone to a buyer having some unpredictable issue with them. It's a headache. I also tell myself that they'll just be harder to get and more valuable in the future, so I end up with no strong compulsion to get rid of them.

I have in the past bought bulk lots of identical RAM and ended up with more than I can use. At least RAM doesn't take much space.

==

I don't know anything about BMWs, but in general I think older cars are worth keeping running. Once you get them up to reliable driver status, they're a lot simpler to maintain than a modern car. They are easier to understand and diagnose, there's a fraction as many parts, and each of the parts is usually cheaper than a modern vehicle. They enable more self reliance than today's ridiculous cars.
But again, I just mean old cars in general, I have no idea what a 1989 BMW is like in terms of complexity.

I have some stuff, multiple times.

3 x Seagate 120gb PATA HDD
2 x Maxtor 40gb PATA HDD
2 x IBM 9.4 GB SCSI HDD
3 x IBM 4.6 GB SCSI HDD
2 x K6-II-500 CPU's
3 x AWE64-Gold
2 x SB PCI Live
2 x Voodoo2 8mb PCI
2 x Voodoo3-3500-Compaq AGP (one dead, one working)
2 x CL-5446-PCI 2mb
2 x SB16-ISA
2 x TNT2-M64-16mb AGP

Finally a crapload (in the range of 30 to 40 sticks) of different PC-66 to PC-133 modules, ranging from 32mb to 512mb a' stick.
A crapload of 512mb DDR1 Modules from Kingston and Elixir.
Plus a crapload of cables, and other random stuff you would normally have multible times.

brostenen wrote:

I have some stuff, multiple times.

2 x SB16-ISA
2 x TNT2-M64-16mb AGP

I have a ludicrous amount of RIVA TNT2 M64 cards - all different brands. Only using one in a pentium 2 build...

shamino wrote:

I don't know anything about BMWs, but in general I think older cars are worth keeping running. Once you get them up to reliable driver status, they're a lot simpler to maintain than a modern car. They are easier to understand and diagnose, there's a fraction as many parts, and each of the parts is usually cheaper than a modern vehicle. They enable more self reliance than today's ridiculous cars.
But again, I just mean old cars in general, I have no idea what a 1989 BMW is like in terms of complexity.

It's pretty simple and easy to work on actually - once you understand how everything is supposed to go together. As for reliability - suspension and bushings are more reliable, chassis is sturdier, but the car's original engine was not. M20 and M40 engines are a pain in the ass to get running correctly. Newer engines from BMW cars 1993 - 2003 are a lot easy to get running reliably, and less sensitive to vacuum leaks and such. Also parts are cheaper and easier to find for the newer engines...

Yeah. I know they are probably one of the easiest card to come by.
I just have two of them. I use none of them, other than for Mobo testing.

It is like those cards, were some of the most sold versions of the TNT2.
Or pretty darn close. I do not know if the Vanta was sold more or less.

brostenen wrote:

Yeah. I know they are probably one of the easiest card to come by. I just have two of them. I use none of them, other than for M […]
Show full quote

Yeah. I know they are probably one of the easiest card to come by.
I just have two of them. I use none of them, other than for Mobo testing.

It is like those cards, were some of the most sold versions of the TNT2.
Or pretty darn close. I do not know if the Vanta was sold more or less.

As common as they are, I'm not sure if I have a TNT2 M64 that actually works. I seem not to run into them as much as some people do. I know I had at least one that was severely artifacting, and I was disappointed about that at the time. Only after I learned more did I come to realize that the M64 isn't a "proper" TNT2 so I shouldn't be bothered about it.
I've still never held in my hands a proper good performing version of the TNT2, just the M64.

I think I have 3 of the Vantas that came in a bulk lot. Honestly, I never heard of "Vanta" cards until just a few years ago when I ended up owning those 3. I've never done anything with them, but I think they work (only POST tested and then I moved on to more interesting stuff). I don't know of any reason to care about having them though. But just because of my mindset, I would still want to keep 1 working one in my "collection".

At some point I crossed a threshold and started wanting to keep an "example" of just about every type of motherboard and video card. I'm not sure if that counts as redundancy, since the parts are mostly different, but taken in summation I have way more of the stuff than I can use.

2x QDI Rendition V2200 8MB
some Virges, but none I would consider identical (1x DX, 1x GX, 1x GX/2, 1x MX).

shamino wrote:

I've still never held in my hands a proper good performing version of the TNT2, just the M64.

Both the Pro and the Ultra editions are fine. I have an Asus TNT2-Pro and an Compaq TNT2-Ultra, and they are just performing nice.
And they are some of the good cards to put into a SS7 systems.

5x Zotac GTX 560 video cards
3x 8600GT video cards
3x Pentium D 820
3x Celeron D 335
3x PIII Katmai-550
2x Radeon HD 5770
2x 8800GTS-640MB cards, currently working together in SLI mode
2x Core i7 920s (and not one motherboard to use with them. 1366 mobo pricing on eBay was insane the last time I looked 😢
2x PIII-S 1400
2x X-Fi Titanium PCIe
2x SB Live!
2x Turtle Beach Santa Cruz
So many Pentium 4s, AM2 Athlon X2s and Core 2 Duos that there's gotta be a few duplicates.

I'm sure I'm missing something.

My hardware collection is not really big, but i have many duplicates.

My top duplicates are:
Over 20 Realtek 8139x network cards
10x Pentium 4 3.0E GHz
8x Soundblaster PCI 128 CT5880
6x Pentium 4 1.5 GHz (Socket 478)
5x Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz
5x QDI Platinix 2 motherboards, one is used in one of my P4 builds
4x Pentium III 1 ghz
3x Pentium III-S 1.4 ghz

I don't really have many duplicates, though the amount of junk I've accumulated is beginning to be staggering. Off the top of my head:

3 SB X-Fi PCI (because of a project I was working on that involved comparing the hardware variations between different models)
2 Nvidia TNT2 PCI (because they came together as a lot from ebay)
I also have a few identical PCI network cards (3c905C), a few Yamaha YM718 and YM744 sound cards (but they are not identical), and a various amount of hard drives, microdrives, CF cards etc which I never bothered cataloguing.

Carlos S. M. wrote:

5x QDI Platinix 2 motherboards, one is used in one of my P4 builds

Oi! Which QDI Platinix 2? I think there were at least 3 or 4 versions. FWIW I'm putting parts together right now for a socket423 build based on a QDI Platinix 4X. I've become very interested in QDI motherboards lately.

I have 31 FX 5200 128mb 64bit cards. Don't ask 🤣 and a pair of PNY 7900GTX's and a pair of Dell 7800GTX's

candle_86 wrote:

I have 31 FX 5200 128mb 64bit cards. Don't ask 🤣 and a pair of PNY 7900GTX's and a pair of Dell 7800GTX's

I don't know why, but could you be persuaded to post a pic of your FX 5200 128MB 64-bit collection for all of us to see? 😁

You're all amateurs. I have 50 kettle-type black power cables.

I have:

2x Pentium 133
2x Celeron 433
2x Athlon 2000+
2x Radeon 9550
and 2x GeForce 4MX440

I dont really have duplicates, lots of parts I dont use but off of the top of my head:

2x ATi 6850s (was used for crossfire, different brands)
Some 486 CPUS (2x 66mhz)
Lots of pairs of ram, those are duplicates too right , 🤣