Dothan Burger wrote on 2026-08-11, 23:27:

I'm swooping up all the NOS built by ATi Radeons I can get my hands on. Saw this NOS All-In-Blunder 8500 for $69 (instant buy)

Well done you, Radeon 8500 is one of my all time favorite GPUs. I remember getting it and firing up Morrowind, and just looking at the screen awestruck for minutes..

appiah4 wrote on 2026-08-12, 06:33:

Dothan Burger wrote on 2026-08-11, 23:27:

I'm swooping up all the NOS built by ATi Radeons I can get my hands on. Saw this NOS All-In-Blunder 8500 for $69 (instant buy)

Well done you, Radeon 8500 is one of my all time favorite GPUs. I remember getting it and firing up Morrowind, and just looking at the screen awestruck for minutes..

It was certainly one of "THE" GPUs to have at the time, I remember seeing the water shaders in Morrowind the first time .. then realising just how punishing it was on my GPU. (Had to get a mod to fix the poor performance of Morrowind, Gamebyro was an utter dog of an engine)

Found some cool stuff from the 486 era. They were cheap and the flesh weak, so could resist.

A winbond powered multi oi card, always nice to have.

A VLB 86C805 vga card, not the best and not the worst.

A Acer J3 motherboard. Eisa and VLB with a strange CPU implementation. It has a slot for a card that may upgrade the MB to a dual Pentium architecture.

Luckily it came with the 486DX2 card. Everything works fine. Word of caution if you find an Acer J3, they are sensitive to ram type and bank order. My combo refused to boot unless parity FPM were present.

At last but not the least, 2 486 motherboards with VLB, PCI and ISA.

Have to find some MCA edge connectors to populate in the FIC Motherboard.

Today I got a rather boring piece of hardware at the flea market.

A Targa Databox II 250.

Essentially just a external HDD enclosure. However it's very well built—aluminium casing with active cooling. What was interesting is that it was never opened actually as it had some kind of weird screws that even took me a while to figure out how to remove. Having 250 on the casing I figured it's a boring SATA 250 GB drive. However to my surprise it was a PATA drive, WD Caviar, and in great condition. Seems like a good deal for 3$.

SlowA wrote on 2026-08-12, 06:06:

Cute MSI, pretty rare combination of nForce4 & Socket 754 (in my country): https://i.postimg.cc/9FZ79WH2/MSI-K8N-Neo3.jpg […]
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Cute MSI, pretty rare combination of nForce4 & Socket 754 (in my country):

Neat! Am i mistaken or does that board have PCI-E together with AGP? The brown/black slot looks like AGP but not quite sure ... I never knew NF4 was used on S754 either. I remember the K8N neo 2 Platinum (S939) had the NF4 with that same noisy fan it ... mine bit the dust quite early (as did most if not all of those tiny north/southbridge fans.)

It does...sort of. It has AGR which is basically PCI emulating the AGP. But it works. 😀

Another mystery machine, AOpen HX45 case, happy with the insides. There's an Athlon 900 in the GA-7ZX cpu socket. The graphics card is a GF2 MX 32MB and there is a total of 512 MB of RAM.

SlowA wrote on 2026-08-12, 16:30:

It does...sort of. It has AGR which is basically PCI emulating the AGP. But it works. 😀

It's not emulating anything. The original AGP specification includes detail on how AGP cards are supposed to be able to run in PCI mode. In fact, I am not sure 3dfx implemented AGP features on their AGP cards. Furthermore, users sometimes disabled as many AGP features as they could in the BIOS to improve stability or performance.

The real economic effect of AGP is that it encouraged a habit of replacing exactly one graphics card instead of supplementing one card with additional cards 😉

PD2JK wrote on Yesterday, 06:06:

Another mystery machine, AOpen HX45 case, happy with the insides. There's an Athlon 900 in the GA-7ZX cpu socket. The graphics card is a GF2 MX 32MB and there is a total of 512 MB of RAM.

The attachment 20260813_080029625.JPG is no longer available

Man, that's a nice find! Throw a Vortex2 or something else from the time period in there and you've got a nice system for late Win9x games. It even has an ISA slot if you want to experiment with DOS sound cards. Could also swap the CPU for something beefier for a bit more CPU headroom.

Amazingly, the caps also don't look to have swollen up or exploded.

PD2JK wrote on Yesterday, 06:06:

Another mystery machine, AOpen HX45 case, happy with the insides. There's an Athlon 900 in the GA-7ZX cpu socket. The graphics card is a GF2 MX 32MB and there is a total of 512 MB of RAM.

The attachment 20260813_080029625.JPG is no longer available

The blue reminds of the Abit KT7E. I had a KT7E in my stash waiting to be recapped when the fire happened. Heavy sigh.

Repo Man11 wrote on Yesterday, 16:44:

I had a KT7E in my stash waiting to be recapped when the fire happened. Heavy sigh.

That sucks. Does anyone insure PC collections?

MattRocks wrote on Yesterday, 17:00:

Repo Man11 wrote on Yesterday, 16:44:

I had a KT7E in my stash waiting to be recapped when the fire happened. Heavy sigh.

That sucks. Does anyone insure PC collections?

I'd imagine that you could make a claim if you had homeowners/renters insurance, but I didn't have anything of the sort. I remind myself that I actually was pretty lucky since that fire claimed 85 lives, so losing everything was no big deal by comparison.

Ozzuneoj wrote on Yesterday, 16:33:

PD2JK wrote on Yesterday, 06:06:

Another mystery machine, AOpen HX45 case, happy with the insides. There's an Athlon 900 in the GA-7ZX cpu socket. The graphics card is a GF2 MX 32MB and there is a total of 512 MB of RAM.

The attachment 20260813_080029625.JPG is no longer available

Man, that's a nice find! Throw a Vortex2 or something else from the time period in there and you've got a nice system for late Win9x games. It even has an ISA slot if you want to experiment with DOS sound cards. Could also swap the CPU for something beefier for a bit more CPU headroom.

Amazingly, the caps also don't look to have swollen up or exploded.

Thanks! Good suggestions, I have an SQ2500 and an Athlon 1400 somewhere. Could an Athlon XP (Palomino) work in this? Edit: I guess not, I need Rev 5.1 - this board is Rev 5.0 haha

There is indeed almost no dust and the caps look good, the CPU fan however is noisy when cold booting the system, maybe dried up bearing(s), don't know yet. :p

A borderline brace of boards, they're as old as 486 was at the inception of Vogons, but maybe that didn't get much enthusiasm until 5 years from then. A suspiciously cheap thrift pickup, due to untested, but thrifts don't keep a bunch of random spares around to test random spares so not that unusual. Can't see visible problems apart from a dinged cap on the ASUS P8H61-M LE.

Anyway, I figure that MSI is kinda "collectible" appealing, and might be a wallhanger if it won't boot. First thoughts were an XP screamer with a Pentium Anniversary edition clocked to an inch of it's life, buuuut, still being in the RAM crisis, I could put 32GB in those DDR3 slots for not too much money, and give it 4ghz or so. The other is kinda yawny, but less so than the Intel H61 I got the other week.

CPUs "around" are a 4570, 4690T, 3570, 3570k, unsure if I will hunt for anything else for them right now.

Not me but looks like 5 lucky people picked up a 5950 Ultra’s in mint condition for $38 AUD. The deal of the century. Seller didn’t know what they were selling.

https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/336736420482

Great deal, for sure.
I just bought a 7950 GX2 for $100 USD; it seems like a fair deal....

zuldan wrote on Today, 11:51:

Not me but looks like 5 lucky people picked up a 5950 Ultra’s in mint condition for $38 AUD. The deal of the century. Seller didn’t know what they were selling.

https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/336736420482

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wow! that's lucky

zuldan wrote on Today, 11:51:

Not me but looks like 5 lucky people picked up a 5950 Ultra’s in mint condition for $38 AUD. The deal of the century. Seller didn’t know what they were selling.

https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/336736420482

The attachment IMG_0411.jpeg is no longer available

From this I remember what my ex-wife used to say.
"If you die in whatever, I will sell your collection 10$ a piece."

This could be a similar situation with the wife selling (hope the owner is not dead though...). 😀

Dothan Burger wrote on 2026-08-11, 23:27:

I'm swooping up all the NOS built by ATi Radeons I can get my hands on. Saw this NOS All-In-Blunder 8500 for $69 (instant buy)

Wow, 128MB 8500! (and not the DV). Very rare.
Does it work?

I have one sealed / plastic wraped.
I don't have the hearth in opening it and I have just returned this week another one:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/147427170354

It looked brand new, it "smelled" brand new and... it was not working.
I needed the card not the box and accessories.