I stopped by the local computer shop today to see if they had any interesting old parts. Last time I was there I spotted a beige IDE DVDROM, but sadly it was gone. I did buy a black IDE DVDRW drive, then I spotted this. They have stuff loose in boxes on shelves, including one with video cards. When I had looked before there was nothing of any real interest - the few AGP cards I saw before were Nvidia 6200s and similar. But this one caught my eye. A closer look and rather than the 9800 Pro I hoped for, it was a 9800 SE. I decided to roll the dice, and I got the card and the drive for $10.00. I tested the card out today, and it worked with no problems. It's a 128 bit card ( just as the 9800 SE I already have is), but it unlocked to eight pipelines with Omega drivers with no issues, and completed 3D 2001. I then removed it, cleaned it and oiled the fan bearing and replaced the thermal paste. I had been planning on removing the 9800 SE that's in my low dollar PCChips P4 system to compare its performance in my Soyo K7V Dragon Plus, but now I have two of them so I don't have to! I tested it in that system, but it only had a 700 MHz Duron, so it only scored a little over 5,000 points, where the Quadro4 700 XGL was scoring just under 5,000. But the Palomino XP2000+ I purchased arrived today, and now the Quadro scores just over 10,000 points so I'm looking forward to seeing how it does with the 9800 SE.
I asked the worker who helped me if they ever get old motherboards that have bad capacitors, and he took my phone number and told me that he would give me a call if they get any old stuff like that. If that works out, it would be great.
After watching many YouTube videos about older computer hardware, YouTube began recommending videos about trains - are they trying to tell me something?
