Nexxen wrote on 2024-01-31, 00:00:

The Ultimate 686 Benchmark Comparison […]
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appiah4 wrote on 2024-01-30, 21:24:

Umm, no? […]
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H3nrik V! wrote on 2024-01-30, 17:00:

Again, ALU wise, FPU is hopeless ...

Umm, no?

https://thandor.net/benchmark/33

PR133 is about Pentium 90 levels of performance in Quake (which is more than twice as fast as an Intel 486DX4-100), quite possibly the most FPU intensive application you will ever run on it.. So no, it is not hopeless and CERTAINLY NOT a 486 CPU.

I have a K5 PR133 in my 586 build, and I can tell you first hand that its FPU is decent, if you would believe me. There is this weird belief in the retro community that anything non-Intel on the Socket 7 has a terrible FPU. Probably has to do with Cyrix having a particularly weak FPU. Regardless, the K5 has a pretty good FPU and the K6 FPU is nearly on par with Intel..

The Ultimate 686 Benchmark Comparison

Always worth a look.

Here:
download/file.php?id=11657

K5 133 is like 10-15% behind a P133 (ok, my math sucks but you get it).

Just reporting, no opinion given.

No, a 133 MHz K5 is 10-15% behind a P133; a K5-PR133 is more like 33% behind a P133 in FPU benchmart (40.1 vs. 61.4) making the P133 FPU in the ballpark of 50% faster. ALU vise, the difference is close to neglible (60.4 vs. 61.5); which is probably also why AMD used the PR-marking ... The 133 MHz K5 was the PR200 😀

I'm attaching a benchmark of 100 different CPUs (386 to 586-class) I did back in 2004-2006 (Yay, I'm old!).
It's in French and the website is long gone, but the graphs are readable by anyone. The K5-133 and Pentium 133 are in there.

H3nrik V! wrote on 2024-01-31, 06:37:

Nexxen wrote on 2024-01-31, 00:00:

The Ultimate 686 Benchmark Comparison […]
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appiah4 wrote on 2024-01-30, 21:24:

Umm, no? […]
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Umm, no?

https://thandor.net/benchmark/33

PR133 is about Pentium 90 levels of performance in Quake (which is more than twice as fast as an Intel 486DX4-100), quite possibly the most FPU intensive application you will ever run on it.. So no, it is not hopeless and CERTAINLY NOT a 486 CPU.

I have a K5 PR133 in my 586 build, and I can tell you first hand that its FPU is decent, if you would believe me. There is this weird belief in the retro community that anything non-Intel on the Socket 7 has a terrible FPU. Probably has to do with Cyrix having a particularly weak FPU. Regardless, the K5 has a pretty good FPU and the K6 FPU is nearly on par with Intel..

The Ultimate 686 Benchmark Comparison

Always worth a look.

Here:
download/file.php?id=11657

K5 133 is like 10-15% behind a P133 (ok, my math sucks but you get it).

Just reporting, no opinion given.

No, a 133 MHz K5 is 10-15% behind a P133; a K5-PR133 is more like 33% behind a P133 in FPU benchmart (40.1 vs. 61.4) making the P133 FPU in the ballpark of 50% faster. ALU vise, the difference is close to neglible (60.4 vs. 61.5); which is probably also why AMD used the PR-marking ... The 133 MHz K5 was the PR200 😀

It is well known that the Intel Pentium FPU was clearly apart of its competitors (Cyrix 6x86 & AMD K5). This is because it could work independend to the rest of the CPU.
So it is no wonder that the P-Ratings are to compare the Integer performance only - for marketing purposes of course.

Got this wireless PS/2 ball mouse from someone at work. Looking at the brand & configuration I expected the worst but it's not bad at all! The range is not more than 30" but more than enough on a standard office desk. It's surprisingly light and smooth for a ball mouse. Definitely a keeper.

Mandrew wrote on 2024-02-17, 10:45:

Got this wireless PS/2 ball mouse from someone at work. Looking at the brand & configuration I expected the worst but it's not bad at all! The range is not more than 30" but more than enough on a standard office desk. It's surprisingly light and smooth for a ball mouse. Definitely a keeper.

Is it a IR or RF mouse?

Mandrew wrote on 2024-02-17, 10:45:

Got this wireless PS/2 ball mouse from someone at work. Looking at the brand & configuration I expected the worst but it's not bad at all! The range is not more than 30" but more than enough on a standard office desk. It's surprisingly light and smooth for a ball mouse. Definitely a keeper.

Cool find. Not sure if it was that exact one, but I had one of those I used to death in the noughts. It was on my daily driver, so got heavy use, but wasn't among the most durable ever since I think it got glitchy and the wheel gummy within a year. Also I had got tired of it's battery consumption, these are more like one or two weeks, rather than the 6+ months you get from modern wireless mice.

Another thing soured me on the IR wireless, had another desktop set, think it was a Radio Shack or BestBuy own brand one, and I thought it killed a motherboard on me. What happened I think was that it was a bit close to the limit on power draw, and when the board was particularly heat soaked it blew fuses, which must have made the onboard monitoring drop power good or something... then it came back to life again when both me and the board had cooled off, with the dongle unplugged. Had those resettable thermal type fuses. This motherboard was a later one, so might not have had as robust a design for PS/2 as pre-2000s, since by then maybe designers were expecting 100mA per kb/mouse.

Anyway, just saying to maybe check the numbers, don't pair it with a thirsty keyboard in the other hole, should be fine for light retro use, take out the batteries every session, not sure they even have a low power standby.

Mandrew wrote on 2024-02-17, 10:45:

Got this wireless PS/2 ball mouse from someone at work. Looking at the brand & configuration I expected the worst but it's not bad at all! The range is not more than 30" but more than enough on a standard office desk. It's surprisingly light and smooth for a ball mouse. Definitely a keeper.

I am using this very similar looking Microsoft mouse. At first I thought it was clunky and that it didn't work well but then I realised that it should be used with a "mouse pad", something I haven't used for like nearly 2 decades... And when using mouse pad, this mouse is actually a really good mouse and I could use it as my daily driver. In fact, I recently ordered another one (new in box) because I want to have a back up for it.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2024-02-17, 13:12:

Is it a IR or RF mouse?

It's an IR mouse. It says the range is 7 ft but it's less than 3.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-02-17, 15:38:

Cool find. Not sure if it was that exact one, but I had one of those I used to death in the noughts. It was on my daily driver, so got heavy use, but wasn't among the most durable ever since I think it got glitchy and the wheel gummy within a year. Also I had got tired of it's battery consumption, these are more like one or two weeks, rather than the 6+ months you get from modern wireless mice.

I'm pretty sure the previous owner hated it because it looks brand new and it spent the past 15 years in storage. Some users just don't like wireless mice and can't get used to the extra battery weight. To be honest I didn't really like wireless stuff back then because of the batteries you mentioned earlier. Wired mice were much cheaper, you didn't have to deal with batteries and you didn't have to worry about range/interference. Today it's entirely different but I still use a wired mouse because it just feels... right.

pan069 wrote on 2024-02-17, 20:09:

I am using this very similar looking Microsoft mouse.

Looking good! To be honest I'm happy that we don't have to use mouse pads anymore because I hated them with a passion.

I feel like I got a straight flush of micro-atx madness.
They were all really close to working.

From left to right:

• 1997 - $2299 - Gateway G6-350 - Designed for Windows NT - 440BX - PII-350 - No memory - Power supply full of dust
• 1999 - $1299 - Emachines etower 433i - Designed for Windows 98 - 440LX - Celeron 433 - One bad DIMM, no hard drive or hard drive cage, plastic shipping box taped in the case to hold a drive
• 2005 - $699 - Emachines T6520 - Designed for Windows XP - ATI RS480 - Athlon64 3400 - Two bad DIMMs, no hard drive or hard drive cage
• 2009 - $380 - Emachines ET1161-07 - Designed for Windows Vista - GeForce 6150SE - Athlon 4050e - All 13 1800uf caps were popped

Well, replacing 13 capacitors took a minute, but all in all pretty close to working

Cool. I've got the brother of 3rd across, that one came with a s754 board and the neutered "Athlon XP-2600" version of an A64... I was bummed it wasn't socket A/Barton. Mine was kinda beat up, was acting dead, so it became a donor for a "stealth" build with an AM2+ mATX in, hasn't reached it's final form yet, I was testing GPU in it, and it's only got an AII X2 with an X4 sitting waiting, kinda didn't hit anything where I needed the oomph yet.

Edit: maybe I meant sleeper rather than stealth, you still know it's a computer 🤣

EditII: Scored a Phenom II x4 955BK for it last week, guess the Athlon X4 gets to go to an ECS or HP Nettle board.

That sounds like what I ended up doing to a free Compaq Evo D310V I got from a friend recently 🤣
Originally had a slim Maxtor 6E040L0, a Celeron @2GHz 478, a 250W PSU (Lite-On), 48x CD-ROM (also Lite-On), 640MB DDR266 RAM and a Radeon 9250.

Gutted it and snuck a Core 2 Duo E4600, 250GB WD Blue, Gigabyte 945GM-S2, Spire Jewel 420W PSU w/ 6pin PCI-E, Samsung DVDRW (SATA) and 4GB of RAM, as well as a 8500GT.
Not much of a sleeper but a definite upgrade!

douglar wrote on 2024-02-18, 18:57:

I feel like I got a straight flush of micro-atx madness. They were all really close to working. […]
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I feel like I got a straight flush of micro-atx madness.
They were all really close to working.

From left to right:

• 1997 - $2299 - Gateway G6-350 - Designed for Windows NT - 440BX - PII-350 - No memory - Power supply full of dust
• 1999 - $1299 - Emachines etower 433i - Designed for Windows 98 - 440LX - Celeron 433 - One bad DIMM, no hard drive or hard drive cage, plastic shipping box taped in the case to hold a drive
• 2005 - $699 - Emachines T6520 - Designed for Windows XP - ATI RS480 - Athlon64 3400 - Two bad DIMMs, no hard drive or hard drive cage
• 2009 - $380 - Emachines ET1161-07 - Designed for Windows Vista - GeForce 6150SE - Athlon 4050e - All 13 1800uf caps were popped

Photo Feb 18 2024, 1 26 48 PM.jpg

Well, replacing 13 capacitors took a minute, but all in all pretty close to working

very nice! including one of those "never obsolete" examples 😀, great range too. lots of bad caps on that last one! a bad batch on original machine maybe.

these will form nice platforms for vintage fun !

gerry wrote on 2024-02-19, 15:40:

very nice! including one of those "never obsolete" examples 😀, great range too. lots of bad caps on that last one! a bad batch on original machine maybe.

these will form nice platforms for vintage fun !

Nothing sexy there, but lots of fun.

Any idea why that line was called "Never Obsolete" ? Were they supposed to be upgradable or something? Or did they just have a good sense of irony =) ?

Definitely a bad batch of caps on the last one. Probably part of the reason why the emachines brand became obsolete.

One of these days I need to tinker up a 3d printed shell that holds a half length m.2 msata adapter & 40 pin pata bridge in a 3.5 inch form factor. I'd like to make a batch of "16GB retro drives" while the price on those components is low.

douglar wrote on 2024-02-19, 16:04:

Nothing sexy there, but lots of fun. […]
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gerry wrote on 2024-02-19, 15:40:

very nice! including one of those "never obsolete" examples 😀, great range too. lots of bad caps on that last one! a bad batch on original machine maybe.

these will form nice platforms for vintage fun !

Nothing sexy there, but lots of fun.

Any idea why that line was called "Never Obsolete" ? Were they supposed to be upgradable or something? Or did they just have a good sense of irony =) ?

Definitely a bad batch of caps on the last one. Probably part of the reason why the emachines brand became obsolete.

One of these days I need to tinker up a 3d printed shell that holds a half length m.2 msata adapter & 40 pin pata bridge in a 3.5 inch form factor. I'd like to make a batch of "16GB retro drives" while the price on those components is low.

i think emachines dealt with the mac clone lawsuit and the never obsolete i think they got sued for deceptive marketing. Still an old machine is never obsolete for some niche version of gnu linux like tiny or puppy or mx

douglar wrote on 2024-02-19, 16:04:

gerry wrote on 2024-02-19, 15:40:

very nice! including one of those "never obsolete" examples 😀, great range too. lots of bad caps on that last one! a bad batch on original machine maybe.

these will form nice platforms for vintage fun !

Any idea why that line was called "Never Obsolete" ? Were they supposed to be upgradable or something? Or did they just have a good sense of irony =) ?

It was a subscription deal, kinda similar to modern cellphone plans, where if you subscribed to the internet service they would give you a new computer every few years. I kinda wonder if that happened here since there is a succession of eMachines from same source. Don't know if they took the old one back or not.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-02-19, 17:25:

It was a subscription deal, kinda similar to modern cellphone plans, where if you subscribed to the internet service they would give you a new computer every few years. I kinda wonder if that happened here since there is a succession of eMachines from same source. Don't know if they took the old one back or not.

I think the gateway was from a different person because I got it a few days earlier. The gateway has a full sized ATX board jammed in there with a tiny power supply to make room for it.

But the other three? Judging by the lack of hard drives cages and the attempt at a cage replacement in the oldest, maybe emachines only required that the end user return the drive & cage?

It's also curious that 3 of the 4 DIMMs in the middle computers were bad.

Some dumpster diving resulted this nice memory card reader. Probably not the fastest reader ever, but it's a real swiss army knife when it comes to different formats supported. Unopened blister pack, never used.

scored 19 pcs of 800/256/100 cpu's w/o case and coolers 🙁
and one 1000/256/133 with cooler.

just one cpu not working, some smd missing.

Just got from my scrap yard.

Please identify this dual slot 1 mobo, did not find anything like it on retroweb.

labeling is HATTERAS Design by IBM 1997

* update
IBM 03N2499 motherboard, from an IBM Intellistation M Pro Type 6889