GuyTechie wrote:

I found out there is a FreeGeek in Chicago (http://freegeekchicago.org/) - when I get some time to drive down there (has to be a weekend), I'd like to see if they have any gems. Hopefully much cheaper than ebay.

I went to the FreeGeek in Portland once (on vacation) and it was super lame. The only vintage stuff they had was a couple bins of old AT keyboard adapters. All of the other stuff was modern, and there wasn't very much of it either. I asked the guy and he said they just don't get that kind of thing. Kind of funny for a thrift store.

I hope the one in Chicago is better!

Hey guys - been a while since I've posted! Hung out with a really cool game developer last weekend and long story short, came back with a TON of goodies 😀

Gravis UltraSound MAX (box only this time..)

GUS PnP w/8MB (Boxed)

GUS PnP Pro w/8MB

Gravis UltraSound Classic 2.4

Gravis E3 Schwag! 😎

Creative Sound Blaster CT-1350 (Sound Blaster 2.0) - Boxed CMS Ready! Picked up on boxed, one bare - both have CT1336 chips

ATI Rage Fury MAXX

ATI R300 Engineering Sample

Diamond Stealth 64 Video VRAM (Boxed)

3DFX E3 Schwag 😎

NVIDIA FX 5900 Ultra Engineering Sample

NVIDIA FX 5600 Ultra Engineering Sample (Broken fan blade)

Diamond FireGL Pro 1000 PCI (Boxed)

Sweet ATI T-Shirt 😀

Also picked up this one as I'm trying round out my 3DFX collection:

And this 4 foot by 3' vinyl banner which I'm planning to hang somewhere (if my wife lets me... (cough))

^^^ Sweet! Love the GUS'.

Finally, cracked open this Everex system and took a peek at the hardware.

Truevision Targa+
CT3600
Diamond Speedster 24
An AHA-2940 to run all the SCSI HDD's, CD-ROM and SyDOS44i

Haven't actually identified this motherboard, yet.

Thanks Artex! A great way to start the weekend 😎

Awesome, Artex. I am jealous!

So I had quite the haul yesterday. I thought I would try to find sound cards in the wild, but somehow found someone selling everything but sound cards.

I am interested in any thoughts you guys have on specifics of this haul - I haven't really considered video card collecting to be a thing, but goodness are there quite a few in my possession now! I am still googling details on models, etc.

ATX Power supplies (4)
2x (Generic) Models: HP-7700 and LP-6100B - 3.3V 10A, 5V 20A, 12V 9A, -5V 0.5A
iCute 400W P4 - 5V 40A also with -5V
LTC Model: LC-A300 - 5V 30A also with -5V

CD-ROMs (3)
2x BenQ 656A
HP GCR-8486B

Motherboards(3) with processors. Couple have RAM
Asus K8V-X SE
Asus A7V8X-X
Asus A8V-MX

Gravis 15-pin black and red joystick

Misc PCI
Parallel port card
Firewire card

Deep breath...

Video cards

PCI

3d Rage II 109-38500-00
3d Rage II 109-37900-00
Trident KY2-JAX-TVGA57PCI
Matrox MGA-MIL/2N 576-04 (Millennium? Different/earlier from my 590-05)
STB PG64V 1X0-0360-009
ATI 102-A676(B) Radeon X1300 (PCI-e)
ATI Mach64 113-32103-103
Cirrus Logic CL-GD5446BV-HC-A VGA-PV46
ATI Rage II+ 109-40100-00

AGP

STB 3dfx (Voodoo3?) 210-0364-003
ATI Radeon R6 SD64 109-70700-01 (R6 Rage Theater?)
2x Geforce FX5200 D128M
e-Geforce FX5200 (blown caps)
Geforce "4" MX400-BX D64M - Pretty sure the (sellers) label I saw on this is incorrect and this is a GeForce 2 MX400
ATI Rage Mobility-L 8M
ATI Rage 128 1026650100
ATI Rage 128 102-5190-601 ("Rage Fury" hand-written on a label on the back)

I guess I will try to build a test bench using one of those motherboards and one of the power supplies, and start cycling the video cards through to see if they work/look up firmware (yay). I would like to benchmark them all for fun somehow...but ugh the driver glut is too real!

Artex wrote:

Hey guys - been a while since I've posted! Hung out with a really cool game developer last weekend and long story short, came b […]
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Hey guys - been a while since I've posted! Hung out with a really cool game developer last weekend and long story short, came back with a TON of goodies 😀
Sweet ATI T-Shirt 😀

I have this shirt in storage, but mine has been worn many many times.

I really would like to get my hands on an old Sound Blaster in box. I'm thinking of downgrading my SB16 to an older model.

Picked up a partial spindle of Sony "Supremas" CDRs that were probably made about 10 years ago. They looked identical to some discs I bought back then, and I later confirmed they have the same ID code. They're very good discs, compatible with picky drives. They're old but that hasn't been an issue with mine yet, and they were a bargain compared to comparable new discs.

Also bought a box of 45 3.5" floppy disks. Yeah, exciting, but they're IBM branded and that makes them awesome. Although 5 disks are missing, the remaining 45 still haven't had the labels applied so they might be unused. I haven't actually checked them.

A CompUSA branded storage box for 3.5" floppies. I suppose it came from the store out here that closed about 15 years ago.
I didn't notice the dividers can't actually be moved. They're removable but they only snap in to fixed locations. How lame. Babbage's unit was better.
Saw another case for 5.25" floppies that had a lock on it. Don't let your little brother mess up your Ultima 3 save.

12V 2A power supply so I can finally test an old CCD scanner I bought a few weeks ago. I'm hoping it will be able to scan PCBs.

I don't remember why I bought this, probably because it was cheap? An Abit ZM6 with a Mendocino Celeron 400MHz S370.

Some bulging caps, I'll see if it will post tonight.

Also, when at a local goodwill, I bought two systems on a whim. They were only a few euro each.

The Fujitsu is a Slot 1 Pentium III 450MHz on a M6VBE Biostar motherboard, Via Apollo Pro (not the 133) AGP ATi Rage video

The Dell is a Socket 370 Coppermine Celeron 533MHz on an i810 motherboard with onboard video (no AGP slot). Other than that, I kind of like the Dell. Really compact case, and what looks like an Intel manufactured motherboard. The Windows licence sticker on the case is for NT Workstation 4, but is running XP now (horribly slow). It's just that the i810 really sucks 🙁

TNT2 :

TNT :

Here's the interesting part :
That TNT2 uses 6ns SGRAM chips (32MB of it), and it works fine on TNT2 Ultra settings (with Fan forcing air on "GPU").
I didn't tested TNT yet.

Q : Is this the most overbuild [excluding cooling] regular TNT2, you can get ?

PS. 3DMark 01 SE score for TNT2 @ Ultra :

Cyrix200+ wrote:

when at a local goodwill, I bought two systems on a whim

I went to my local Goodwill yesterday and all they had in the "electronics" section was a couple DVD players 🙁 So disappointing.

agent_x007 wrote:

TNT2 : […]
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TNT2 :

TNT2.jpg

TNT :

TNT.jpg

Here's the interesting part :
That TNT2 uses 6ns SGRAM chips (32MB of it), and it works fine on TNT2 Ultra settings (with Fan forcing air on "GPU").
I didn't tested TNT yet.

Q : Is this the most overbuild [excluding cooling] regular TNT2, you can get ?

PS. 3DMark 01 SE score for TNT2 @ Ultra :

3DMark 01 SE Riva TNT2 @ Ultra.PNG

TNT2's are great cards. I really love them, as they are the cards I tend to use the most.
Actually I use them just a much as I use Voodoo cards.

Uhhh.... That reminds me to search for more V3's in the near future. (My TNT2 stash are good enough as is)

Cyrix200+ wrote:

Also, when at a local goodwill, I bought two systems on a whim. They were only a few euro each. […]
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Also, when at a local goodwill, I bought two systems on a whim. They were only a few euro each.

The Fujitsu is a Slot 1 Pentium III 450MHz on a M6VBE Biostar motherboard, Via Apollo Pro (not the 133) AGP ATi Rage video

The Dell is a Socket 370 Coppermine Celeron 533MHz on an i810 motherboard with onboard video (no AGP slot). Other than that, I kind of like the Dell. Really compact case, and what looks like an Intel manufactured motherboard. The Windows licence sticker on the case is for NT Workstation 4, but is running XP now (horribly slow). It's just that the i810 really sucks 🙁

Just a heads up the dell uses a proprietary psu 😀

As I'm currently living in a new city, I visited its sunday flea market. Two new graphics cards for my collection (1€ each! 🤣 ):

Matrox MGA IS-STORM 590-03

I found that it has 4MB of WRAM, but still don't know what the second connector apart from VGA is for (D-SUB style, 26pin).

Joytech 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee 16MB SGRAM

Another 3Dfx card! When 6 months ago I hadn't a single of these cards. Now I have a V2, this Banshee and 2 V3-3000. Still quite easy to find here!

mmx_91 wrote:

As I'm currently living in a new city, I visited its sunday flea market. Two new graphics cards for my collection (1€ each! :lo […]
Show full quote

As I'm currently living in a new city, I visited its sunday flea market. Two new graphics cards for my collection (1€ each! 🤣 ):

Matrox MGA IS-STORM 590-03

I found that it has 4MB of WRAM, but still don't know what the second connector apart from VGA is for (D-SUB style, 26pin).

Joytech 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee 16MB SGRAM

Another 3Dfx card! When 6 months ago I hadn't a single of these cards. Now I have a V2, this Banshee and 2 V3-3000. Still quite easy to find here!

Nice cards 😀 the Matrox is a 4MB Millenium, the unknown connector is used for a breakout cable used with an MediaXL MPEG add-on card E.G. http://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/HwoAAOSwXeJXexmY/s-l500.jpg Kind of tricky to find the MPEG card & cable, I've been looking for a while myself ...

mmx_91 wrote:

As I'm currently living in a new city, I visited its sunday flea market. Two new graphics cards for my collection (1€ each! :lo […]
Show full quote

As I'm currently living in a new city, I visited its sunday flea market. Two new graphics cards for my collection (1€ each! 🤣 ):

Matrox MGA IS-STORM 590-03

I found that it has 4MB of WRAM, but still don't know what the second connector apart from VGA is for (D-SUB style, 26pin).

Actually, I just happened to find this free daugtherboard for a similar Millenium card:

There is a huge input adapter that connects to the 26-pin port you've mentioned. It has s-video, composite, audio in and audio out.

The daugtherboard itself has a Philips SAA 7110A chip. Both the daughterboard and the adapter have a MGA MIL/MODMC model name.

It's an MPEG decoder card, I guess? Some sources say that the daugtherboard also adds RAM, but I'm not sure if that's the case. There are two empty placements for RAM chips on the back of the daughterboard, though — very similar to the RAM chips on the card itself.

I also wonder what's the connector on the top of the daughtercard for and what is the unused connector on Millenium itself, for that matter.

Edit: Oops, sorry. The forum keeps kicking me out, so I didn't notice another reply.

Finally found a SB16 with DSP 4.05. Now the fun begins.

The mixer chip may be decent as well. Let us know how it is for noise!

Bought this for $10 today. The FX 5950 Ultra is not easy to find on eBay for a good price, so even though I don't really need it, I couldn't pass it up when it was available locally.

It will go in my "fast" 98SE build: Socket A Athlon XP 2400+ (KT133A).

In before bad fans.