Trashbytes wrote on 2025-03-13, 10:19:

Got this old girl on a GPU hunt, looks in good nick but you can never be sure till you test it, One lovely AGP BFG 6800 Ultra OC […]
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Got this old girl on a GPU hunt, looks in good nick but you can never be sure till you test it, One lovely AGP BFG 6800 Ultra OC.

Going to do that tomorrow, tonight its getting a teardown with some TLC and new paste.

The attachment 6800 Ultra OC Front.jpg is no longer available

The attachment 6800 Ultra OC back.jpg is no longer available

Sorry about photo quality, Vogons has some esoteric compression thing going on where super sharp pictures get made to look like 1980 pics, the card looks great in person.

Been on the search for a nice 6800 GT or Ultra for a while now but just not prepared to pay silly money. I had a Gainward 6800 GT Golden Sample back in the day. Twin fan, cooper sink, red anodised aluminium shroud. Was a lovely card.... wish I'd kept it.

Thermalright had been on my eBay saved search for a few years now while I try and find some of their old coolers.

Today was a good day. NOS SL-128. Finally a nice 939 compatible cooler that isn't a tower.

Still jonesing for that old full copper socket A cooler.

Went on a little hunt today looking for something a bit different, went hunting for a AM2 board with AGP support, wont be used for 98 but rather XP/2000 with the 6800 Ultra. I also have a very nice 478 3.4 P4 setup that I will also test it in, im not sure if the P4 will have enough grunt to drive the 6800 Ultra as good as it should be driven.

Managed to snag a Biostar K8M800 with a 2.4Ghz LE1620 for a reasonable price.. IIRC this is a 1mb single core so it should have some head room to go even faster if the board allows it(I have plenty of other AM2 options here I can throw at it)

No idea how good this Biostar board will be but I dont have any other AGP AM2 boards so itll have to do!

Edit - Just nabbed a LE1640 2.7Ghz for it for 5 bucks.

Arrived today. Works great although I have to take care of that fan as even after oiling it runs kinda slow for me.

Tested using ABIT BH6 v1.02, Celeron 300A @ 450MHz, 640MB RAM, Turtle Beach AU8830 A2 soundcard.

PcBytes wrote on 2025-03-14, 13:00:

Arrived today. Works great although I have to take care of that fan as even after oiling it runs kinda slow for me.

Luckily, it looks like you can fix a replacement fan onto that heatsink, if needed.

$30 old laptop lot off Swedish eBay, all sold as defective.

Too many pics, continuing in next post

#1. Compaq Armada 7730MT

P166, 64MB, 1.4GB. Purchased the lot for this.
GFX issues in ad, hopefully caps. Worked well during testing.

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#2. Compaq Contura 430CX

Not sure about CPU (can't get into BIOS), but has 8MB RAM, and a relatively huge 700MB HDD with catchy noises.
Obliterates the Acernote's performance in the pinball demo that came on both.
Can't find anything wrong except dead CMOS battery, and previous owner's notice it won't cooperate with SD cards.

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#3. Acer AcerNote 730

486SX-25, 12MB RAM, 270MB HDD
Weird screen defects, never seen anything like it. It's like dead areas of pixels (orange ones, second image below).
Weak brightness and gets "burn in" effects from previous elements. Perhaps normal operation of early lcd/tft's?
Otherwise works and has an interesting physical "on the fly" BIOS access button!

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#4 And finally a 1991 ungooglable 486.
Loose hinges and plenty of bottom screws missing, but appears to have potential.
No AC adapter shipped. AcerNote's fits physically, but delivers only half the voltage.

I bought a few 2.5 HDDs for old laptops. For MS-DOS the speed issue is non existent.

I actually picked this Compaq Deskpro 466 XE wednesday, but only had time to fiddle with it this evening. I'm fond of these old Compaqs, this is now third Compaq 486 I have and this is a nice addition to my Prolinea 4/50 and Presario 425. There are few thing with this system which made me really want this although practically as a computer this doesn't offer anything special over what I already have.

Here is the box, it is in terrific condition. Only some slight dirt stains, but very few scratches and nothing major. It only has the on board 4MB RAM, but it has the largest HDD option these systems were sold with, 525MB. The guy I bought this from bought it from his work when they phased these out in the late 90s, so the history is well known with this one:

One nice aspect with this is that it has DX4-100 ODPR CPU in it, something which I didn't already have, but nice as they properly fit with these 5V only motherboards. I do have one Kingston Turbochip with 133MHz AMD CPU rolling around in my parts bin, but still can't complain about this one. This CPU was upgraded to the system already when it was used as a business machine, something which I find a bit odd. After all, this system had 486DX2-66 originally and this CPU certainly won't drastically change things for the better especially when it lacks L2 (this has the proprietary COAST module, something that is almost impossible to find). They guy I bought this from said that they had some good year around 94-95 and the company spent quite a bunch of money to upgrading or purchasing new ICT stuff.

Most peculiar thing that came with the system is this extremely cool early VGA graphics card, Video7 VEGA VGA. Not only it is a 8-bit ISA VGA, something that I also didn't have previously, but this one is true "dual" graphics card. Besides having regular VGA analog 15-pin DSUB output, it also has digital 9-pin DSUB for EGA, CGA, MDA and Hercules displays. I asked why this card is in this system as the onboard Compaq Qvision 1024 VLB absolutely destroys this ISA card as far as the performance goes, the previous owner told me that this system had a CGA monitor connected to it:

And now the most interesting feature of this system. This machine has Compaq Business Audio on-board sound system. It has 3.5mm line out, head phones out, mic and line in jacks on the back. On the motherboard it has Analog Devices AD1848 Soundport chip. But not only that, it has OPL3 next to it! To me, this looks like this is full blown WSS sound card on the motherboard, which would make it actually pretty damn good for DOS games! According to retroweb this is the only 486 desktop motherboard which has this combo. Compaq did have few others which had AD1848, but they lacked the OPL3 so you don't get the FM synth out of them:

As this system hasn't been circling around or dumped to recycling, it also came with computer and ODPR manuals. Nice little icing on the cake!

That's a great looking computer! I didn't even know there was a 66MHz version of the Deskpro XE.

devius wrote on 2025-03-14, 21:04:

That's a great looking computer! I didn't even know there was a 66MHz version of the Deskpro XE.

Yes it is and especially the audio system makes it quite interesting and unique! According to the manual, there were 450, 466, 433S and 4100 models as well as 560. First two are pretty obvious, 433S had SX33MHz, 4100 had DX4100 and although the manual doesn't quite clearly state it, as far as I've browsed it so far, I bet the Pentium model, that is 560, had the original 60MHz Pentium following the logic of model numbers of this series.

Ahrle wrote on 2025-03-14, 18:08:

#1. Compaq Armada 7730MT […]
Show full quote

#1. Compaq Armada 7730MT

P166, 64MB, 1.4GB. Purchased the lot for this.
GFX issues in ad, hopefully caps. Worked well during testing.

The attachment 20250314_150622[1].jpg is no longer available

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#2. Compaq Contura 430CX

Not sure about CPU (can't get into BIOS), but has 8MB RAM, and a relatively huge 700MB HDD with catchy noises.
Obliterates the Acernote's performance in the pinball demo that came on both.
Can't find anything wrong except dead CMOS battery, and previous owner's notice it won't cooperate with SD cards.

The attachment 20250314_144952[1].jpg is no longer available

----------------------------------------------

#3. Acer AcerNote 730

486SX-25, 12MB RAM, 270MB HDD
Weird screen defects, never seen anything like it. It's like dead areas of pixels (orange ones, second image below).
Weak brightness and gets "burn in" effects from previous elements. Perhaps normal operation of early lcd/tft's?
Otherwise works and has an interesting physical "on the fly" BIOS access button!

The attachment 20250314_161236[1].jpg is no longer available

The attachment 20250314_155424[2].jpg is no longer available

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#4 And finally a 1991 ungooglable 486.
Loose hinges and plenty of bottom screws missing, but appears to have potential.
No AC adapter shipped. AcerNote's fits physically, but delivers only half the voltage.

The attachment 20250314_161232[1].jpg is no longer available

Got a vague recollection of seeing the dot pattern of the Weston machine on generic rebrand laptops of the type used by "regional" system builders. So maybe one of those brands that sold into those markets, Sagem or something.

Trashbytes wrote on 2025-03-13, 10:19:

Got this old girl on a GPU hunt, looks in good nick but you can never be sure till you test it, One lovely AGP BFG 6800 Ultra OC […]
Show full quote

Got this old girl on a GPU hunt, looks in good nick but you can never be sure till you test it, One lovely AGP BFG 6800 Ultra OC.

Going to do that tomorrow, tonight its getting a teardown with some TLC and new paste.

The attachment 6800 Ultra OC Front.jpg is no longer available

The attachment 6800 Ultra OC back.jpg is no longer available

Sorry about photo quality, Vogons has some esoteric compression thing going on where super sharp pictures get made to look like 1980 pics, the card looks great in person.

Ooh that's a beauty! Hope it works!

Lucky finds in a job lot...

nfraser01 wrote on 2025-03-15, 19:24:

Lucky finds in a job lot...

Yes, indeed.

I ended up with this card: "Quadrant Cinemaster C 1.2 DVD Decoder Card ", maybe this time I will finally use that video overlay port...

It's been a while, but now I got my vehicle issues under control by just spending a fortune on another one, I can get back to retro crap...

So, grabbed a load of retro crap, well half of it is, Epson ActionNote 4slc33, socket 775 mobo 945 chipset, D845GTP or PLM might be PLM version if the audio header is what it goes by, then there's a 3com pci 100mbit NIC, a 2 internal/2 external SATA card for PCIe 1x, 2+4GB DDR3, 512 DDR, 64MB SDRAM, and two 256MB SDRAM that seem likely to be BX compatible, big modules, samsung chips both sides marked 133 capable also. Also got two printer cables thrown in which I will have to mark as unspecial so I can use them for custom parallel cables.

Actionnote I wanted to replace Zenith machines that have gone super fragile, so basically unusable, so thankfully it feels solid with tight hinges. Wondering though if it's more of a fixer upper than intended. Was sold as "needs HDD" come to fire it up, there's one in there, not detecting, but CMOS is picking up random HDD types, wondering if the interface is pooched, needs CMOS batt fixing too. I am hoping it's really just the HDD pooched and interface is okay and not subject to battery rot or something.

Motherboard I didn't have real plans for, was just added to deal, as was the other stuff really, was hoping to figure out how to get Conroe on it at least. But could PentiumD it. Only cap with slight swell is the one near the CR2032. Anyway seems unspecial enough that it probably gets donkey work, though might pick up tweener duties now the AM3 system I was using is playing dead.

A NIC is a NIC, says 3com on it which makes it 2% nicer I guess, though I have never particularly fanboyed them, prefer DEC when I can find them. SATA board might find a purpose in those boards around 2005ish that weren't sure whether SATA was gonna take off or not and gave you only one or two. RAM, can use all DDR3, the SDRAM 256Mb are always good to get, not sure I can max all my PC-100 up slots yet. I mean 2x128 is prolly fine for most stuff that takes it really.

Edit: Oh passed up an Nvidia GPU elsewhere, only ID on it was P672, no wifi around and my data was acting up, so saw only that it could be a 210 or a 460, and the cheapth of the cooler was leaning me to the 210 side. Not sure if the 460 was all that great either, better than a 440 in theory, but didn't look like it would have much clock since it was crappy cooler and no extra power socket.

BitWrangler wrote on 2025-03-15, 20:57:

Edit: Oh passed up an Nvidia GPU elsewhere, only ID on it was P672, no wifi around and my data was acting up, so saw only that it could be a 210 or a 460, and the cheapth of the cooler was leaning me to the 210 side. Not sure if the 460 was all that great either, better than a 440 in theory, but didn't look like it would have much clock since it was crappy cooler and no extra power socket.

The 460 would be a fun heater in the winter, but horrible in the summer as that series is known for overheating.

Most I've seen with the P672 point to either 210 or 8400 even. I doubt 460s were made in that format.

I am seeing all the other GTX460s need 2x PCIe 6 pin and a double slot cooler, so I guess the card I saw must have been more on the 210/8400 side. The 210/8400 is hard to distinguish often also, seems like the GPU chip must either be pin compatible or 210s are just basically a BIOS softmod of 8400 or something.

P672 = Its a GT210 or GT215

The GTX 460 also used this number but this PCB doesn't fit any 460 design, not even the super cheap 460s used this design and all had at least one power connector.