dionb wrote on 2024-07-23, 07:57:

weedeewee wrote on 2024-07-22, 23:15:

dionb wrote on 2024-07-22, 21:31:

- It's an 8-port Gb switch, so you can use it to connect up to 7 devices to one network cable

You do realize that another switch or router is also a device ? 😀

Hence 7: 1 to connect to the cable from router/other switch/whatever, 7 to connect to other things. An 8-port switch increases the number of available connections by 8-1=7

Well that's closer to the truth than your previous statement. Still I stand by mine, 8 port switch, 8 devices. 8 network cables .

It was less confusing when they didn't have auto configuring ports, so thus a 4 port hub had 4 ports AND an uplink port.... but then you'd get some geniuses plugging uplink to uplink with a straight through.

Trying to check out some laptops with 9.5" LCD screens lately because my T2450CT needed one - this Compaq LTE Elite 4/75CX was up for sale as untested and pretty cheap at something like £30. Don't worry, this one gets to keep its screen.

From the listing I expected the worst but this thing has surprised me! It came in a fancy 90s laptop case, the rubber feet had dissolved into goo and powering it from DC it worked 100% straight away. It's a functional equivalent of the Toshiba T2130CT but probably a bit older, sadly no sound card but it's got a full ISA dock port so maybe one day I'll find the dock.

The RTC battery was a NiCad and it's only started to turn green so the motherboard is immaculate, the hard drive was included in the tough to find caddy and the floppy drive is a Citizen W1D from 1994.
The early W1D floppy drives have mostly not worked in my experience with various faults from getting stuck halfway through reading a disk because of stepper motor faults to straight up not working I think because the RPM isn't holding steady. But this W1D is working nicely from the get go with some basic servicing, just lubrication and a fresh 3d-printed TPU belt. Which is great! An easy fix is much appreciated lately.
The mouse was pretty terrible and unable to go up/down properly which is better after I took the whole trackball assembly out from the screen and cleaned the two rubber rollers. It's still pretty bad but serviceable as a built-in mouse.

I've never seen a Compaq LTE Elite up close before but I really like it now since the PSU is built in and it's pretty small and the FDD is working nicely. It seems the Compaq LTE Elite models are more likely to work in the current day than this laptop's predecessor the Compaq LTE Lite, which I've had terrible luck with, most of them now having broken motherboards from battery corrosion.
One thing I really like about this LTE Elite is that you can power it through either DC or mains without having to open it up, just flip a cover to un-hide the DC power jack and now I can test with the bench PSU - being able to see power consumption is a great help for troubleshooting.

Got hold of an Opteron 175. I wanted to get the fastest possible S939 cpu but can't get much closer than this (at reasonable price).

Also with it i aquired a S939 4000+ for which i would very much like to find a MSI k8N neo2 platinum (i had this board when new but sold it back in the day in favor of a PCI-E version of that board. This was with a 3500+ back then)

The Opteron in it's new home (S939 connoisseurs might know the board already. Again i used to own one but sold it for upgrade to S775. Then all these years later i had to search a looong time to get one)

G-X wrote on 2024-07-26, 20:02:

Got hold of an Opteron 175. I wanted to get the fastest possible S939 cpu but can't get much closer than this (at reasonable pri […]
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Got hold of an Opteron 175. I wanted to get the fastest possible S939 cpu but can't get much closer than this (at reasonable price).

Also with it i aquired a S939 4000+ for which i would very much like to find a MSI k8N neo2 platinum (i had this board when new but sold it back in the day in favor of a PCI-E version of that board. This was with a 3500+ back then)

The Opteron in it's new home (S939 connoisseurs might know the board already. Again i used to own one but sold it for upgrade to S775. Then all these years later i had to search a looong time to get one)

I have a soft spot for the 939. That Opteron 175 is a great CPU! Will perform nicely in a gaming PC. What graphics card are you planning to match it with?

A couple of weeks ago I managed to recover my 4800+ (ADA4800DAA6CD) I purchased new all those years ago. I powered on the original motherboard and it smoked even though there were no shorts on 12v and 5v. Short must have been low side VRM. To my surprise the 4800+ survived. I think it’s the fastest standard “desktop” 939? Can’t believe I paid $1000 for it back in the day. It’s not a FX-60 but comes close.

zuldan wrote on 2024-07-26, 21:04:

Yeah me too. S939 was my first homebuilt setup bought with my first paychecks! Though it was quite a run of the mill 3500+ compa […]
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G-X wrote on 2024-07-26, 20:02:

I have a soft spot for the 939. That Opteron 175 is a great CPU! Will perform nicely in a gaming PC. What graphics card are you planning to match it with?

A couple of weeks ago I managed to recover my 4800+ (ADA4800DAA6CD) I purchased new all those years ago. I powered on the original motherboard and it smoked even though there were no shorts on 12v and 5v. Short must have been low side VRM. To my surprise the 4800+ survived. I think it’s the fastest standard “desktop” 939? Can’t believe I paid $1000 for it back in the day. It’s not a FX-60 but comes close.

Yeah me too. S939 was my first homebuilt setup bought with my first paychecks! Though it was quite a run of the mill 3500+ compared to your X2 4800. Nonetheless it set me back €400 back in the day ... when you compare that with today you can actually get better value for the same price. (graphics cards however are the other way around)

i'm trying to find the GPU i used to run in that board which was a (by then getting older) Sapphire X850XT-PE. I managed to find non PE one (affordable) but it's an AGP version. I have several PCI-E cards but not exactly the correct one to go with the setup. I presume a X1900XT would be too recent?

Yes as far as i'm aware the X2 4800+ is indeed the fastest (non-FX) desktop CPU. As these are quite rare and expensive i had to go for the Opteron variant. Though there is still the 180 and 185 but the former is expensive and the latter extremely rare.

It's amazing your cpu survived letting the magic smoke out. The board is toast i presume?

The 2 S939 setups i want to (re)create are
MSI k8n neo 2 platinum AGP with 4000+ 2x512mb corsair XMS pro with X850XT
DFI lanparty SLI-D(R) with Opteron 175 (mem and GPU not yet sure)

Nice, I still have my Opteron 175 which I delidded soon after I got it and dropped the load temps by 20c.

Picked up this rough beauty as a dead /bad caps ebay buy for 35$ on a gamble.
Surprisingly it worked!! It does need three caps replaced. I did finish a full round of 3DMark2001 and the caps actually tested slightly over rated capacity crazy enough...

Ceramic heaven. 1500 UAH (~$36)

Saved from the scrap.

AGP4LIfe? wrote on 2024-07-27, 03:12:

Picked up this rough beauty as a dead /bad caps ebay buy for 35$ on a gamble. Surprisingly it worked!! It does need three caps […]
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Picked up this rough beauty as a dead /bad caps ebay buy for 35$ on a gamble.
Surprisingly it worked!! It does need three caps replaced. I did finish a full round of 3DMark2001 and the caps actually tested slightly over rated capacity crazy enough...

That was a steal! I was planning to bid on that but just flat out forgot. Most of the time cards like that will have tiny components scraped off the back, which is really the only reason I wasn't watching it like a hawk... I'm really glad to hear that it is working for you though!

Replacing those caps should be simple so I highly recommend doing that. Leaky caps are bad, regardless of the measured capacitance rating. I'm sure other things (ESR, etc.) are massively out of spec, and with a fairly rare and valuable card like that I wouldn't chance running it with bad caps.

How are the fans? The heatsink design is really interesting, especially with the fans having screws on the outside. It seems like those screw holes could allow some interesting alternative cooling setups if the stock fans ever die. The nvidia OEM style heatsink for the Ti 4400\4600 really offers no options other than zip tying a huge fan across the whole card, so this is nice to see.

Got another Geforce 2 Ti yesterday. A Powercolor. I have 3 Geforce 2 Tis now. Lol! Pretty basic. Stock cooler lost, replaced by an horrible aftermarket one. Anyways.
Unlike the Chaintech this one has 250/200 so I wanted to try overclock to match the other one I have, but Riva Tuner refuses to detect the core frequency correctly. It detects 100 and the max you can set is 150, which is 100mhz less than the stock speed. Before I open Riva Tuner, the card has the correct Ti frequencies in GPUZ. What should I do? Thankso!

I would try powerstrip instead, then if no joy there, look up the "cool bits" registry hack to see if those values were right, but if nothing solved there, don't know after that.

Wes1262 wrote on 2024-07-27, 08:26:

Got another Geforce 2 Ti yesterday. A Powercolor. I have 3 Geforce 2 Tis now. Lol! Pretty basic. Stock cooler lost, replaced by an horrible aftermarket one. Anyways.
Unlike the Chaintech this one has 250/200 so I wanted to try overclock to match the other one I have, but Riva Tuner refuses to detect the core frequency correctly. It detects 100 and the max you can set is 150, which is 100mhz less than the stock speed. Before I open Riva Tuner, the card has the correct Ti frequencies in GPUZ. What should I do? Thankso!

I have noticed that Rivatuner 2.24C seems to have issues with older video cards. For example, it reported incorrect clocks for a TNT2 Ultra and wouldn't allow me to set the clocks manually (TNTClk detected it perfectly). I haven't located an older version to try, but it isn't surprising that the version from 2009 doesn't work well with 8+ year old cards.

I don't think TNTClk will work for a Geforce 2, but I bet if you locate a very old version of Rivatuner it would work. I just looked and I can't find anything older than 2.0x, which is probably still too new. It seems like they've been scrubbed from the internet or something.

As Bit Wrangler said, Powerstrip or the Coolbits registry tweak may be a good alternative.

I bought one of these on the cheap-- 16GB Optane NVME.

I don't know what I'd ever do with it, but it was so cheap and I always wanted optane storage.

Would be kind of cool if it were possible to mount it as persistent ram in a retro PC, but that's pretty unrealistic right now.

cyclone3d wrote on 2024-07-26, 22:34:

Nice, I still have my Opteron 175 which I delidded soon after I got it and dropped the load temps by 20c.

I have yet to fully test the CPU (apart from booting) i have a zalman 9500 on it now (as did absolutely everyone back in the days of S939) temps seem ok idle but curious about load temps.

Anyone know if the thermal transfer between the die and the IHS degrades over time?

I'm really tempted so slap a modern cooler it as apparently AM2 to am4 coolers fit on S939 aswell ... but i don't know if the clamping force is different. i mean what are the chances the top of the IHS is at the exact same height on S939 as it is on AM4 for example. I've seen people do it but i'm still on the fence about it. I don't have a cheap disposable S939 board to do some testing with.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-07-27, 15:14:

I have noticed that Rivatuner 2.24C seems to have issues with older video cards. For example, it reported incorrect clocks for a […]
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Wes1262 wrote on 2024-07-27, 08:26:

Got another Geforce 2 Ti yesterday. A Powercolor. I have 3 Geforce 2 Tis now. Lol! Pretty basic. Stock cooler lost, replaced by an horrible aftermarket one. Anyways.
Unlike the Chaintech this one has 250/200 so I wanted to try overclock to match the other one I have, but Riva Tuner refuses to detect the core frequency correctly. It detects 100 and the max you can set is 150, which is 100mhz less than the stock speed. Before I open Riva Tuner, the card has the correct Ti frequencies in GPUZ. What should I do? Thankso!

I have noticed that Rivatuner 2.24C seems to have issues with older video cards. For example, it reported incorrect clocks for a TNT2 Ultra and wouldn't allow me to set the clocks manually (TNTClk detected it perfectly). I haven't located an older version to try, but it isn't surprising that the version from 2009 doesn't work well with 8+ year old cards.

I don't think TNTClk will work for a Geforce 2, but I bet if you locate a very old version of Rivatuner it would work. I just looked and I can't find anything older than 2.0x, which is probably still too new. It seems like they've been scrubbed from the internet or something.

As Bit Wrangler said, Powerstrip or the Coolbits registry tweak may be a good alternative.

looks like 2.0 was released around geforce 3. I'll give that a try

douglar wrote on 2024-07-27, 16:44:

I bought one of these on the cheap-- 16GB Optane NVME. […]
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I bought one of these on the cheap-- 16GB Optane NVME.

I don't know what I'd ever do with it, but it was so cheap and I always wanted optane storage.

Would be kind of cool if it were possible to mount it as persistent ram in a retro PC, but that's pretty unrealistic right now.

Sounds like you can hammer on it harder than flash so I'd guess swapfile might be the ideal use for it in older stuff. It should work with NVME PCIe adapter right? I think that would be way to do it to use in s754/s939/s775 rigs.

I got something similar in the Satellite A200, 2GB of that intel turbo memory buffer. But that is flash based I believe, but works similar to what intel intended for optane I think. Thing is I guess, it never does better than faster storage or more RAM, so it's either a competing SSD tech or a solution looking for a problem... which I guess intel somewhat created with artificial memory restrictions on chipsets. Anyway, in the particular contrived situation of the A200 not having much RAM and slow storage, it makes it feel like a machine with more RAM and faster storage. Otherwise you wouldn't feel it I guess in a well specced system until you overwhelmed it.

So here's the more retro half of today's haul I posted in modern... I had seen the seller list the 8800GT separately but didn't want to push it too far for my lowish offer, but they threw that and the HD 7350 in anyway, yay! I was back and forth when I saw it on whether I wanted the 8800GT because it was a bit of an icon for cheap speed back in the day, not much slower than the line topping GTX for a lot less money. Then also we have an FX 8350 and stock cooler. Things need a bit of a clean, but that does tend to confirm they were working pulls and unmessed with.

So since the 8800GT was a bit of a surprise, I don't really have firm plans about what sort of machine it might go in yet, or whether it will just be a shelf queen for a while. The HD 7350, the existence of which had not managed to impinge on my consciousness in a meaningful manner before today, is obviously for when a machine cannot handle the thrumming power of all 160 cores in a 7450 and you need to scale back to 80 for everyone's safety.... yeah okay it's a KVM interface at best. Not that I won't never be able to use such a thing, it may find it's way to something servery or utilitarian that only needs enough to have drivers for more recent OS and hook up to a KVM. So bit borderline as retro that maybe, though it's a reskinned 5450 I guess. "That" ITX rig tho with only 1x for GFX, if I test the GT440 in there, and it's wayyy down on performance, maybe this will "take one for the team" and do as best as 1x can do.

The FX 8350 is very borderline also, as I think it will get "modern" duties for the present, until I regress it back to release era stuff. It had a bit of a renaissance when code that suits it finally turned up 5 years later I guess.

I bought the FX 8120 at launch (later upgrading to an 8370) and used it for years. It's a solid processor and a great platform for Windows 7 an early Windows 10. The GeForce 8800 GT is also a fantastic card. The two of those will pair nicely, if that is your goal.

I'd think an 8800GT matches an X2 6400, or first gen Phenom AMD more in time frame. Though what I was thinking now was a 2007 build, the 8800GT, a Q6600 and Vista64. Get some physx going on, maybe dual boot to XP for EAX stuff.