appiah4 wrote on 2022-12-08, 20:07:

DW12 wrote on 2022-12-08, 19:30:

That's very generic looking box, weird... According to Tweakstone's Banshee Asylum site the original box should look different: […]
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appiah4 wrote on 2022-12-08, 08:04:

Oh wow, I actually have one NIB (though the box is pretty beat up 😁) and never knew it was a fast specimen.. I would exchange my Elsa Banshee with this, but I really like the passive cooling setup 🙁

That's very generic looking box, weird... According to Tweakstone's Banshee Asylum site the original box should look different:
https://3dfx-banshee.de/banshee-cards-overvie … igabyte-ga-630/
Your box states x4/x2 AGP support which is wrong. Banshee doesn't benefit from AGP bus, it runs at x1 speed and treats AGP bus as a 66MHz PCI bus.

It's the box mine came in. I mean you could say it is in the wrong box, but the stickers on the box explicitly say Banshee so..

Remember, those years were a weird time. Banshee was the hotness one day and 6 months later nobody gave a fuck about it. I wouldn't be surprised if Gigabyte dumped some stock to a third party who packaged them in generic boxes and sold them to retail as bargain products, or some such.

Yeah, that does seem like really weird packaging for a high quality name brand card. I would say it was either dumped off at the end of production to a generic company like you said, or it possibly had a damaged\missing retail box and was sent through a refurbishing company where it received a generic box with a simple description printed on the bottom. No idea if that kind of thing was done back then, but it seems plausible, especially since Gigabyte likely wasn't going to replace the box or give any support whatsoever. Times haven't changed much. 🤣 If there were no other accessories or paperwork in the box either are possible.

DW12 wrote on 2022-12-08, 19:30:

I love blue PCB cards 😀. I also have a Gigabyte Rage 128 Pro card which has... red PCB. It's still really weird for me looking at this card as I am so used to Gigabyte having blue PCB cards 😁.

Ah, I had one of those red Gigabyte Rage 128 cards too! I think mine was totally dead, so I don't think I have it anymore... it's been a while since I've seen it. Or maybe it's in one of my totes of "stuff to fix". I have several of those at this point. 😮

DW12 wrote on 2022-12-08, 19:30:

I love blue PCB cards 😀. I also have a Gigabyte Rage 128 Pro card which has... red PCB. It's still really weird for me looking at this card as I am so used to Gigabyte having blue PCB cards 😁.

You know what's strange? I also have a Gigabyte Rage 128 Pro AGP card by Gigabyte and its Orange/Brown of all things:

Shponglefan wrote on 2022-12-09, 00:35:

Got this I-O Data PK-X486S50-3 upgrade for 286 systems.

While it unfortunately doesn't fit my Epson Equity III+ due to the Epson's annoying board layout, I'm going to try this in one of my Tandy TL's.

Meanwhile I've got another 286-to-386 upgrade on the way that I'm hoping might work in the Epson instead...

Excellent. And I know they do work in the TLs.

Earlier this week I found this All-In-Wonder Rage 128 Pro on a local trading site listed as a generic TV-tuner card. Today it arrived... in an envelope with no padding despite I asked the seller to sandwich it between two sheets of preferrably 5 layer corrugated cardboard. It wouldn't have costed any more to mail and even if so, I paid for shipping anyways. Seems undamaged, trace amount of rust on the shielding. Hope it works.

HanJammer wrote on 2022-12-09, 12:56:

Shponglefan wrote on 2022-12-09, 00:35:

Got this I-O Data PK-X486S50-3 upgrade for 286 systems.

While it unfortunately doesn't fit my Epson Equity III+ due to the Epson's annoying board layout, I'm going to try this in one of my Tandy TL's.

Meanwhile I've got another 286-to-386 upgrade on the way that I'm hoping might work in the Epson instead...

Excellent. And I know they do work in the TLs.

I just tried it with my TL/2, but unfortunately it won't fit due to the orientation of the socket and the board size. The 5.25" drive cage on the TL/2 blocks the location of the PCB. And since the drive cage is welded to the frame, I would have to likely cut it which I don't want to do.

I do have a Tandy TL which looks more promising although there appears to be an electrolytic capacitor partially in the way. But that should be more straight forward to deal with.

appiah4 wrote on 2022-12-08, 20:07:

It's the box mine came in. I mean you could say it is in the wrong box, but the stickers on the box explicitly say Banshee so..

Remember, those years were a weird time. Banshee was the hotness one day and 6 months later nobody gave a fuck about it. I wouldn't be surprised if Gigabyte dumped some stock to a third party who packaged them in generic boxes and sold them to retail as bargain products, or some such.

It's interesting to see how long this or this product was sold.
I have a few boxed cards (I don't specifically look for boxes).
Two of them looks super anachronistic.

- An ATI rage 128 box with 3 product descriptions on the back. Rage 128 pro, Radeon and Radeon 7500 (which came out along with the 8500). So a range of cards from 1999/DX6 era to 2001/DX8.1 era. Huge performance gap
- A Radeon 9600 pro box with a "Certified for Windows Vista" printed on the box. Well... a 2003 card for a Vista system in 2007... don't expect anything good with games. And it's not a generic box with an unknown brand (Power color)

acl wrote on 2022-12-09, 21:39:

- A Radeon 9600 pro box with a "Certified for Windows Vista" printed on the box. Well... a 2003 card for a Vista system in 2007... don't expect anything good with games. And it's not a generic box with an unknown brand (Power color)

It could have still been useful as a display accelerator for someone who's on like a 4800 or 5200 or 9250. R300 was the first generation compatible with DWM, so for all those XP boxes that were Vista-"ready", it might have been a decent low cost option to get Aero Glass and broadly better, if still low end, acceleration for other stuff. If they had a bunch of leftover dies and didn't need to keep wafers spinning to make the cards, they could probably mark them down to laughable prices.

Bought a Slot 1 CPU retention bracket.

For my Athlon.

It kinda feels like the kind of thing companies would be incentivized not to make specifically a Slot 1 or Slot A product because it would save them money to make it universal and there wouldn't really be any structural integrity issues as it would be held down by screws. I guess if you started making brackets in 1997 or 1998 you'd figure you were safe keying it like that...

I'm now deciding whether to sell it or cut out a key for the Slot A connector. My internal sense of keeping old stuff untouched is telling me to sell it and replace it, but I don't see a single specifically Slot A bracket on all of eBay that isn't attached to a motherboard.

lepidotós wrote on 2022-12-09, 22:01:

acl wrote on 2022-12-09, 21:39:

- A Radeon 9600 pro box with a "Certified for Windows Vista" printed on the box. Well... a 2003 card for a Vista system in 2007... don't expect anything good with games. And it's not a generic box with an unknown brand (Power color)

It could have still been useful as a display accelerator for someone who's on like a 4800 or 5200 or 9250. R300 was the first generation compatible with DWM, so for all those XP boxes that were Vista-"ready", it might have been a decent low cost option to get Aero Glass and broadly better, if still low end, acceleration for other stuff. If they had a bunch of leftover dies and didn't need to keep wafers spinning to make the cards, they could probably mark them down to laughable prices.

The Radeon 9550/9600 series was rebranded a lot of times. The X300, X550, X600, X1050 series are all mostly rebranded, slightly improved (PCI-e support) versions. Some X1050 got the RV410 GPU which is the X700 series.

Picked up this lovely Abit Geforce 3 Ti500, I have one already but it can be a bit funny when it gets hot so I grabbed this Abit one as a spare.

Also picked up a Zip250 with 25 disks and a Buffalo 650 MO drive with disks, both are USB which will make them far more useful to me than the parallel model I have, both drives have been tested and work fine. I have even hunted down some USB DOS drivers so hopefully I can even use them under DOS, not sure if the MO drive will work under DOS but itll be fun to find out.

Won this X58 Xeon W3670 (6/12 3.4Ghz) parts lot on the bay for a very low price, none of it is tested but I have had pretty good success when buying other parts from this seller, I don't have a X58 setup so grabbed this to tinker with, the board doesn't look that amazing but it should be ok for a top end XP setup, Got a Pair of GTX660s and 24gb of DDR3 to throw in it!

acl wrote on 2022-12-09, 21:39:

- An ATI rage 128 box with 3 product descriptions on the back. Rage 128 pro, Radeon and Radeon 7500 (which came out along with the 8500). So a range of cards from 1999/DX6 era to 2001/DX8.1 era. Huge performance gap
- A Radeon 9600 pro box with a "Certified for Windows Vista" printed on the box. Well... a 2003 card for a Vista system in 2007... don't expect anything good with games. And it's not a generic box with an unknown brand (Power color)

Powercolor is not a generic brand, it is actually one of AMD's current prenium AIB partners enduring all the way from ATI days..

PowerColor is TUL Corporation. They used to have another brand Vertex (~ATI 4870 era), but shut it down.
Palit is the main manufacturer of no brand/off brand generic cheap cards. They had over the years/have plenty of their own "noname" brands like Daytona (i740, S3 Savage, S3 Trio3Ds). Afaik they were always also a contract manufacturer, meaning anyone could order a batch with any name they liked. For example a lot (all?) PNY cards are rebranded Palit/Gainward despite PNY being a separate company.
There is also PC Partner with Zotac and InnoVision/Inno3D, they started in 1997 with 3dfx cards (voodoo/voodoo rush http://hw-museum.cz/vga/9/innovision-3dx5000tv http://hw-museum.cz/vga/14/innovision-3dxrush). PC Partner contract manufactured for Sapphire (https://hexus.net/tech/features/mainboard/104 … nes-pc-partner/).
Then you have motherboard manufacturers branching into cards like MSI (huge), ASUSTeK (also huge), Gigabyte etc.
Abit made some graphic cards before going bankrupt.
ECS and Pcchips only briefly branded some low end cards, I dont think they ever manufactured.

rasz_pl wrote on 2022-12-10, 15:07:

PowerColor is TUL Corporation. They used to have another brand Vertex (~ATI 4870 era), but shut it down. Palit is the main manuf […]
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PowerColor is TUL Corporation. They used to have another brand Vertex (~ATI 4870 era), but shut it down.
Palit is the main manufacturer of no brand/off brand generic cheap cards. They had over the years/have plenty of their own "noname" brands like Daytona (i740, S3 Savage, S3 Trio3Ds). Afaik they were always also a contract manufacturer, meaning anyone could order a batch with any name they liked. For example a lot (all?) PNY cards are rebranded Palit/Gainward despite PNY being a separate company.
There is also PC Partner with Zotac and InnoVision/Inno3D, they started in 1997 with 3dfx cards (voodoo/voodoo rush http://hw-museum.cz/vga/9/innovision-3dx5000tv http://hw-museum.cz/vga/14/innovision-3dxrush). PC Partner contract manufactured for Sapphire (https://hexus.net/tech/features/mainboard/104 … nes-pc-partner/).
Then you have motherboard manufacturers branching into cards like MSI (huge), ASUSTeK (also huge), Gigabyte etc.
Abit made some graphic cards before going bankrupt.
ECS and Pcchips only briefly branded some low end cards, I dont think they ever manufactured.

I'm always fascinated by stuff like this.

The other day I was researching some FCC IDs on some old parts and I believe I found a connection between "Pine" and XFX, which I found interesting because my perception of those brands is so vastly different.

Edit: Apparently this isn't a secret... 🤣
http://www.pinegroup.com/en/business_XFX.php

Thrift store find yesterday, a Dell Inspiron 8200 (model PP01X) laptop for $10. I have no idea the current state of the laptop as I cannot power it up since I do not have a power adapter for it, so I had to order one on eBay. Hopefully it works! Online specs say it's a Pentium 4 400 MHz FSB CPU on the Intel 845MP chipset with a GeForce 440 Go or AMD Radeon 9000 GPU. If it works, I think I'll install Windows 98 on it and use it as a mobile Win9x/DOS PC. The built-in floppy drive is a nice bonus.

Brawndo wrote on 2022-12-10, 22:24:

Thrift store find yesterday, a Dell Inspiron 8200 (model PP01X) laptop for $10. I have no idea the current state of the laptop a […]
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Thrift store find yesterday, a Dell Inspiron 8200 (model PP01X) laptop for $10. I have no idea the current state of the laptop as I cannot power it up since I do not have a power adapter for it, so I had to order one on eBay. Hopefully it works! Online specs say it's a Pentium 4 400 MHz FSB CPU on the Intel 845MP chipset with a GeForce 440 Go or AMD Radeon 9000 GPU. If it works, I think I'll install Windows 98 on it and use it as a mobile Win9x/DOS PC. The built-in floppy drive is a nice bonus.

I say "yes"!
Nice because it's the kind of model that has a lot of I/O ports, making it easy to copy data.
Hope it's your working xmas gift.

Brawndo wrote on 2022-12-10, 22:24:

Thrift store find yesterday, a Dell Inspiron 8200 (model PP01X) laptop for $10....

It won't be that simple: the same hw was sold as Inspiron and Latitude (which I have, see pic). The P4-M (mine at 1.8GHz) heats terribly, so I recommend replacing the original aluminium foil between the CPU and the radiator and replacing it with a decent thermal paste. The CPU is cooled short heatpipe with a few thin ribs and those 2 small fans are annoyingly noisy.

There were 2 types of power supplies with a compatible connectors: PA-6 and PA-9. The first one handles 70W (for use with P3 models like C810) and if you use it with the P4-M, it won't run at full frequency, but only in safe mode. For the P4-M, you need a PA-9 type with 90W power.

Dell does not provide a driver for the GF4MX440 Go graphics card for W98(SE) - it does not provide any support at all for this OS, the laptop was designed for WXP. The generic driver for GF4MX440 can't be installed, maybe it will if the INF file is edited and the Dell string ID is added - I haven't tried.

The modular FDDs can be replaced with a second battery or CD/DVD drive, they are identical to the lower C6xx series.

Dock station for use with PA-9 is model PRX.

RandomStranger wrote on 2022-12-09, 16:35:

Earlier this week I found this All-In-Wonder Rage 128 Pro on a local trading site listed as a generic TV-tuner card. Today it arrived... in an envelope with no padding despite I asked the seller to sandwich it between two sheets of preferrably 5 layer corrugated cardboard. It wouldn't have costed any more to mail and even if so, I paid for shipping anyways. Seems undamaged, trace amount of rust on the shielding. Hope it works.

IMG_20221209_172551.jpg

I'm crossing my fingers for you. Welcome to All-In-Wonder Anonymous... I didn't make a conscious effort to collect them, just a lot of ATI cards that turn up in front of me seem to be All-In-Wonders. I should take a "family photo" some time. Maybe when I've got them all gainfully employed, I'll have to use my old cable tv outlets with an android box streaming on RF channel 3 through a modulator or VCR so they can tune to something.

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-12-12, 15:58:

RandomStranger wrote on 2022-12-09, 16:35:

Earlier this week I found this All-In-Wonder Rage 128 Pro on a local trading site listed as a generic TV-tuner card. Today it arrived... in an envelope with no padding despite I asked the seller to sandwich it between two sheets of preferrably 5 layer corrugated cardboard. It wouldn't have costed any more to mail and even if so, I paid for shipping anyways. Seems undamaged, trace amount of rust on the shielding. Hope it works.

IMG_20221209_172551.jpg

I'll have to use my old cable tv outlets with an android box streaming on RF channel 3 through a modulator or VCR so they can tune to something.

Oh man... it just dawned on me that we've gotten to that point with cable now. I remember thinking about cobbling some kind of backward fake-ISP thing to tinker with dial-up modems 10 years ago (never did it). Now TV tuners are basically in the same boat. Some areas of tech sure move quickly. It makes sense that anything that relies on outside infrastructure is much more likely to become not just obsolete but completely unusable in a decade or two. Cell phones are the same way.

Ydee wrote on 2022-12-11, 09:39:

It won't be that simple: the same hw was sold as Inspiron and Latitude (which I have, see pic). The P4-M (mine at 1.8GHz) heats […]
Show full quote

Brawndo wrote on 2022-12-10, 22:24:

Thrift store find yesterday, a Dell Inspiron 8200 (model PP01X) laptop for $10....

It won't be that simple: the same hw was sold as Inspiron and Latitude (which I have, see pic). The P4-M (mine at 1.8GHz) heats terribly, so I recommend replacing the original aluminium foil between the CPU and the radiator and replacing it with a decent thermal paste. The CPU is cooled short heatpipe with a few thin ribs and those 2 small fans are annoyingly noisy.

There were 2 types of power supplies with a compatible connectors: PA-6 and PA-9. The first one handles 70W (for use with P3 models like C810) and if you use it with the P4-M, it won't run at full frequency, but only in safe mode. For the P4-M, you need a PA-9 type with 90W power.

Dell does not provide a driver for the GF4MX440 Go graphics card for W98(SE) - it does not provide any support at all for this OS, the laptop was designed for WXP. The generic driver for GF4MX440 can't be installed, maybe it will if the INF file is edited and the Dell string ID is added - I haven't tried.

The modular FDDs can be replaced with a second battery or CD/DVD drive, they are identical to the lower C6xx series.

Dock station for use with PA-9 is model PRX.

While it is true that this laptop was not built for win98 and dell offers no drivers for it, there are win9x drivers available for all hardware. I have the same exact laptop and successfully installed windows 98 on it using mostly generic win9x drivers. Chipset drivers directly from intel, graphics drivers can be found directly from nVidia, you don't need dell specific drivers - and if your laptop has an ATi card you can find win9x drivers for the mobility radeon 9000 and Radeon M3/M6 etc from IBM or Fujitsu Siemens as well as modded drivers on guru3d. Sound card drivers are available from dell, just not for the 8200 specifically, but for a different model, can't remember witch (possibly the 8100 or the C510 Latitude).

If I manage to find half a day of free time I'll archive the drivers I used to install Win98SE on my Inspiron 8200 and my Latitude C540.

Finally... I got my hands on a Toshiba Libretto 110ct. The wet dream of any IT technician in the late '90s.

Got it with some PCMCIA cards (all working), two batteries (one still has charge!), external battery charger and... a sadly damaged by shipping port replicator, which is not in the pictures here because the glue is still drying.
Yes I'm trying to recover it.

It's not in mint mint conditions (like the hooks of the upper cover are broken) but it doesn't have any other cracks.
Display is perfect, speakers too. Just the mouse\joystick a bit worned out.

It's the perfect dos\98 machine-to-go an I love it!