I have just about everything I've wanted to get. It's been a decade in the works, occasionally buying hardware and also getting a lot of old computers for free from people. But eventually you'll have everything you've ever wanted (unless you're RG100 in which case it never ends!!!!)

I think it's safe to say that you're not alone here. 😉

I've settled for what I need only and a few things that have a sentimental value to me. I used to want everything, but I just wasn't ever satisfied. I've now settled for only one retro PC on which I do my experiments and play tons of games 😁

swaaye wrote:

I have just about everything I've wanted to get. It's been a decade in the works, occasionally buying hardware and also getting a lot of old computers for free from people. But eventually you'll have everything you've ever wanted (unless you're RG100 in which case it never ends!!!!)

I think I'm actually getting to this stage now. At this time theres little that I want and don't have yet. Ever since the beginning I decided to only concentrate on 486 and up (though a little bit of 386 did manage to slip in 😜), but that was in a time where Pentium 1's were still worth more then scrap value and 486's were considered to be not worth any trouble. ATX was always expensive, times sure have changed!

I started collecting in mid 2002 I think, but only when I discovered Ebay, a couple local second hand computer sites and sites like cpu-world.com did I actually get all the stuff I ever wanted 😀
Apart from some really rare items like the original Cyrix s370 CPU, POD133 s4 and Nextgen, I've finally had "that moment" of "Hmm...I kinda got all I ever wanted and dreamed of, what more could I possibly want?" about a month or so ago.
I'm not ready yet to sell off bits of my collection yet, but the thought has crossed my mind on more then 1 occasion.
But the funny thing is, I still buy bits and pieces of hardware here and there, but no longer the vast quantities of hardware that I used to (ok, nevermind the 7+6 ATX cases + parts I've received in the last 2 weeks, L O L!).

There seems to always be stuff left to buy, or stuff you can never have enough from (I'll still take any K6-III non-plus I come across, as I got just one available).
And it also depends how expensive it will be. If I find someone selling a Super 7 on a fleamarket for under €10, I'll probably not skip it!

Also a couple more LS-120 drives are nice to have, but most of the stuff I have plenty of.
It's kinda an accomplishment 🤣!
What retro hardware collector wouldn't want to say "Hey, I got it all"!
Right now I'll first finish my attic (I call this project "Attic 2.0, 😁") and then continue exploring...well...anything I want, basically 😁

And I did what I set out to do when I moved roughly 2 1/2 years ago;Having the computer parts separated from the rest of my house, and my life. 95% of it is in my attic, and if I don't feel like being retro, I can simply close the attic hatch and it's out of sight and can still be in my "man cave 😁" whenever I want to and immerse myself in my very own private retro geek heaven when I want to 😁 😁 😁

I don't know exactly how much I have, but it's eh...more then enough to build more then 10 rigs with plenty hardware to spare, and that's a really strange thought considering I started with virtually NOTHING back in 2002! I had just 1 old P2 and NO MONEY, and now I created my own private little hardware heaven...goes to show what one can accomplish if you set your mind to it I guess.
And without going nuts 😜

One extra benefit is, now I know my way around hardware and can help people online with hardware related problems like here on Vogons 😉

Edit:Still waiting for RG100 to reply hehe! 😁

I've been doing PC repair/upgrades/consultation since 1995 or so (small one-man show). Heh, I've stockpiled so much crapola that I wouldn't even know where to begin 🤣!

A lot of it I had to toss when I moved from Miami to out here in the woods in Crystal River <grin>, but I still moved quite a bit of it with me 😀

I mostly wanted to relive a specific era of my gowing up time. 386 period with games such as Wing Commander 1 and 2 and Monkey Island 1 and 2. Getting all this Roland Midi gear was something I could never afford as a kid so that was a very special moment.

The whole W98 era was a bit of blur. Wing Commander Prophecy and Tomb Raider 2 are the last games I remember playing. There was also Foresaken and heaps of other games I played on a Voodoo 2. I had a CD burner and at that time so many games that I actually didn't get to play much. It was more about collecting and trading games with others. There was blade runner, G Pokice and heaps of other games.

Then I went overseas and didn't touch a computer for many years.

I got back into with a P4 northwood, but the things is this was with XP and all these games workd just fine on modern hardware (apart from some expections such as Splinter Cell which uses weird features of specific video cards and drivers 🤣). Remember reading tomshardware at that time and following up on all the changes. Read about the race to 1GHz the dimise of 3DFX and how Nvidia and ATI took over.

Built a Northwood 2.6 GHz, 2GB Ram (heaps at that time), Radeon 9800 and a 21" CRT. Loved that machine and one of the best gamng memories was playing Farcry which i have replayed many times, now with HDR and 100+ fps 🤣

Big time. 1991-2002 is when all my 'old hardware' is from. Not a new 'old' addition since, I just regurgitate the systems in different configurations I've never tried in 'what could have been' scenarios. and random game testing.

I have a pretty nice collection of old junk. Most of it's from the mid and late 90s.

I don`t have that mess at my home. I am only buying the parts that iam really need.. When i was young i never had an old computer for my own.
I started when my dad has bought an vendex Headstart Explorer computer.(XT without an harddrive, an harddrive was very expensive that day so my dad never bought one) That was the first computer my dad ever owned. When that headstart explorer getting to old, my dad bought an Highscreen 386 DX 33mhz.. so my bother and i could play on this headstart computer. For that day it was a good computer. But the lack of the harddrive gived me a lot of headegg. You needed always to reboot from that stuppid floppy disk.. Little later my dad bought also an highscreen 486 computer. We never had to playing games on the new systems. Only when my dad sitting near us. So when he was working we getting to play.. Before he get back we turning the computer off..

My real computer begin when i had an 486 DX-2 66mhz..
Then i was buying my old computer in the pentium II time.. I had not that much money.(because of my age so had no job in this time.. So first i had bought een seagate medalist 4,3GB at the store. And an ATX case.
Then i had no money left.. So i never could finisned this computer because i urned not that much money.. So i quit my project..
Then 1 year later, the pentium 1 stuff in the computer store was getting a lot of cheaper (it needed to get out stock)
So i could buy for cheap an Baby-AT board and an Pentium 233 MMX when other people already had an pentium III computer..
Later i urned more money (because of getting an job) Then i bought an Pentium III processor (but this one had some problems, it was always getting to hot , also with good cooling. I had to RMA it but the shop wont taking it back.. So i thought maybe buy an new cooler for it. But the problem still exists. So i trowed it away.. I decided never to buy an intel again, so i did go to AMD..
Then i had an Athlon thunderbird (slot A) Then Athlon 64 3200+, then an core duo E6600, then core duo2 8500, Core i7 920. Now after having some cheap AMD replacements an AMD Phenom II X4 955BE iam still working with.. I had more motherboard used then processors bought.

If my mom knew DOSbox was the reason the hallway closet is now vacant, she would be posting here herself!

I'm glad I hung onto all my game manuals. You can't take no pdf to the restroom.

JPV511 wrote:

If my mom knew DOSbox was the reason the hallway closet is now vacant, she would be posting here herself!

I'm glad I hung onto all my game manuals. You can't take no pdf to the restroom.

^^^^
Post of the CENTURY 🤣! Excellent! 👍 😀

I'm thinking I have more hardware then RG100. Yeah, scary. 🤣 Most everything is from the mid to late 90's.

I keep a database for my video cards. Current tally is 135, but that's not including 2 GTX 460's in my current rig. 😁

Hehe. Nice database you have there. 😀 It's very likely you have more video cards than me. Probably double, but I've got lots of spares. I test everything, including all the spares. I really enjoy it. I even test trivial things like cables, etc. I'm concentrating on 386, 486, socket 7, SS7, slot 1, socket 462, and a bit later on when prices drop a mobo for very fast Win98 such as nForce2.

I'm not sure how many graphics cards I have, but last count was somewhere around 135 or so. Most of them are of the older types. I got under 5 PCI-E cards, many AGP and a lot of PCI cards.
Maybe time to do another count 🤣, this afternoon I was slamming together metal frames for added storage, slipped and had to pay a little visit to the emergency room of the local hospital, L O L

CPU count is over 300 I think and motherboards was 85, but that was a year ago.
I did count the number of AT cases I have, current number (which most likely won't be increasing a lot, if at all) is 19. Many of the AT cases have some sort of problem though, be it yellowing, poor quality, one is missing it's front door thingy (but otoh it has teh LED display 😁), another one is missing it's harddrive cage, and so on.
A couple look in very good condition though, so it's not all worn down quality.

I might go do a couple counts, now that my thumb is kinda unusable atm, the curiosity is sparked 🤣!

I...really...have...a LOT of hardware 😁
I've never counted how many sticks of memory I have, but it's sure to be a lot.

I've done a quick (lol?) count of the graphics cards I have stored in my attic. Total count so far:158!
This should be the bulk of my cards, though I know theres 1 box of cards missing (the box with all my best PCI cards...it better not be stolen, L O L!) and excludes the couple cards I have laying around everywhere and the cards currently installed in a system.

Notable mentions:
23 3dfx cards, mostly V1, V2 and V3.
10+ ISA cards (mostly the crappy kinds) and a handful of VLB cards (I started really late collecting VLB stuff so I missed out on the big toss-out early this century).
12 Trio64 and 9 Virges
a #9 Vision 968
A ProMotion 6410 (whatever that is)
mil2a/4bi/20 AGP + memory upgrade module
Somekind of strange PCI card with two 3S Virge chips on it, but without a standard VGA port
5x Rendition 2100, made by Diamond
Radeon 9800XL 128MB
Radeon 9600 256MB made in 2007(???)
An X800
SiS 6326DVD, written on the heatsink (does it really need one? 😜)
Blade 3D 8mb PCI (YEAH!!1)
Diamond Stealth III S540 (Savage4 I think)
Couple i740's
Couple Rage cards of all kinds of different types.

Tetrium wrote:

I've done a quick (lol?) count of the graphics cards I have stored in my attic. Total count so far:158!

Great, now now I'm going to have to go and count all my other crap cards and duplicates so I am not out done.

bushwack wrote:

Tetrium wrote:

I've done a quick (lol?) count of the graphics cards I have stored in my attic. Total count so far:158!

Great, now now I'm going to have to go and count all my other crap cards and duplicates so I am not out done.

LMAO!!

And defective cards don't count, al right? ;D

Tetrium wrote:

bushwack wrote:

Tetrium wrote:

I've done a quick (lol?) count of the graphics cards I have stored in my attic. Total count so far:158!

Great, now now I'm going to have to go and count all my other crap cards and duplicates so I am not out done.

LMAO!!

And defective cards don't count, al right? ;D

All my cards work, not much sense keeping a dead or defective one. I've only had to toss a handful away.

Tetrium wrote:

bushwack wrote:

Tetrium wrote:

I've done a quick (lol?) count of the graphics cards I have stored in my attic. Total count so far:158!

Great, now now I'm going to have to go and count all my other crap cards and duplicates so I am not out done.

LMAO!!

And defective cards don't count, al right? ;D

Do Savage 2000 cards count as defective?

sliderider wrote:

Tetrium wrote:

bushwack wrote:

Great, now now I'm going to have to go and count all my other crap cards and duplicates so I am not out done.

LMAO!!

And defective cards don't count, al right? ;D

Do Savage 2000 cards count as defective?

As long as they provide a screen, you can use them as test cards ;D

I found the box of PCI cards, final (estimated) count is 171+another 20 or so that are lost in systems, so should be somewhere under 200 in total.

Some noticeable cards:
Another Voodoo 1
Somekind of dual head PCI card (made in 1995) with a daughterboard on it which has an S3 Vision 868 graphics chip (part number is LAHC20TW-PCI-1)
3x TNT2 M64 PCI 16MB (a 4th should be in my Celeron 400 rig)
1x TNT2 M64 PCI 32MB
SiS 6326 PCI (funny thing is, the chip itself reads SiS6326AGP 🤣)
GF2 MX400 64MB PCI (which is also the best PCI graphics card I have laying around here)

My test cards include another Virge (on a PCB that looks more like a Trio64), another Trio64, another SiS6326 AGP and a TNT2 M64 AGP with a nice looking northbrigde heatsink (It's a test card as I accidentally slipped the screwdriver while removing the original tiny heatsink with dead fan and popped off one of those tiny resistor thingies. Still seems to work though).
And a PCI-E Radeon X550

And I should have a GT8600 DDR2 PCI-E laying around. It posts, but even with it's stock HSF it becomes pretty hot. Planned for a HSF mod before I put it to use).

Theres also a GF2 I was gifted once a couple years back. Put one of those blue Zalman heatpipe heatsinks on it, put it in a box for a couple years and now it suddenly has 2 bulging caps?
Oh well, at least the heatsink looks cool on it 😁

Edit:My best cards are build in a couple rigs (of course 😁) and include an AGP 6800GT(could be a normal 6800 though, I kinda abused it's cooling and am gonna try running an 8cm case fan on the thing), 2x GF7600GS DDR2 256MB (yup, the crappy ones 😜), HD4670 1GB DDR3 AGP, HD5670 1GB GDDR5 (in my main rig), one more Radeon 9600, one Radeon 9600XT with the Zalman copper horseshoe/flower-like cooler, one more Voodoo3 3000 (in my Celeron 800 rig), one more Voodoo2 which has mild artifacting (in my Super 7 rig), another Rendition 2100 (of all places...in my 486 😁) and "lots 'nd lots" of GF2MX cards 😜

Edit2:

bushwack wrote:

All my cards work, not much sense keeping a dead or defective one. I've only had to toss a handful away.

Indeed. I only counted cards that are not dead, but not cards with extreme artifacting.
Theres 1 exception:I did count a second Voodoo3 3500 which will post (single beep) but will not display yet. I (finally!!!11....-_-) got the required adapters (all the way from Australia) but theres something else wrong with the PnD connector. Probably only requires a broken trace/wire fixed on the connector itself.
The second Voodoo 3 3500 works fine though, I posted about it in a thread where I was looking for suitable adapters for them.

Edit3:
The vast majority of the cards I got are the "kinda fell into my lap" ones, especially the older cards I got for a long while now. Theres only a certain number of older graphics card I actively spend time finding and buying (like the Voodoo 3's and the post-GF-FX generation of cards).

I didn't get 4 of those SiS6326 graphics cards because I really 'wanted' them 🤣, they kinda fell into my lap 😜
The only thing I regret is not having gotten more VLB cards when they were being tossed en masse but oh well...it's not like I had a huuuge shortage of cards anyway.

And I kinda like having a couple back-up cards also...preferably 1 card to use and 4 backup cards 😁

Edit4: But eh...having close to 200 graphics cards doesn't make you somekind of sick hoarder......riiiiight? 🙄