First post, by Skyscraper
For a long time I have thought of building a retro system for every year between 1995 and 2006. Now when Artex has started posting his yearly builds I felt that "mañana" wasnt good enough anymore.
Why start at year 1995? The reason is simple, I do not have enough of older hardware and to be honest I am starting to run out of storage space. One of this project's goals is to get some boxless stuff into cases for easy stacking.
Why end at year 2006? Because it was a revolutionary year when it comes to PC performance. The performance difference between a Netburst or K8 CPU compared to a Core 2 Duo Quad is ... noticeable. Anything slower then a 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo is today considered useless junk while C2D Quads still are sought-after CPUs. The G80 was almost as revolutionary on the GPU side, new cards with shrinked versions of the G80 design kept being released into the next decade.
Presentation of the system.
Overview.
Motherboard: (Nov 2006) Asus Striker Extreme, Nividia nForce 680i SLI. This particular board has the P5N32-E SLI trim level to increase the confusion when it comes to what the differences between the two boards really are. In practice this dosnt matter at all as the performance and relevant features of the two boards are identical, they can even use the same BIOS without any crossflashing hocus pocus.
CPU: (Nov 2006) Intel Core 2 Duo QX6700 - Quad Core 2.66 Ghz 8MB Cache. Open multiplier.
Cooling: (2006) Zalman CNPS 9000 CU. Also in the picture. Memory: (Year unknown) 2x 2GB Corsair XMS2-PC6400 .
Video Card #1: (Nov 2006) MSI Geforce 8800 GTX 768 MB
Video Card #2: (Nov 2006) Asus Geforce 8800 GTX 768 MB
I'm pretty excited to see what this 8 year old system can do so I better get started with the building of the system.
New PC: i9 12900K @5GHz all cores @1.2v. MSI PRO Z690-A. 32GB DDR4 3600 CL14. 3070Ti.
Old PC: Dual Xeon X5690@4.6GHz, EVGA SR-2, 48GB DDR3R@2000MHz, Intel X25-M. GTX 980ti.
Older PC: K6-3+ 400@600MHz, PC-Chips M577, 256MB SDRAM, AWE64, Voodoo Banshee.