@liqmat actually ECS was decent before they bought PCChips in the late 90's. Now you get why they went downhill afterwards ? ^^

Salient wrote on 2020-10-07, 19:15:

Bought this nice piece of hardware. It's in perfect condition and works like a charm still.

Those are nice units. Last time I used one was back in 2006 when I was in school for my CompTIA Net+ classes.

Salient wrote on 2020-10-07, 19:15:

Bought this nice piece of hardware. It's in perfect condition and works like a charm still.

jelly, I wanted to buy one of those once but got outbid 😁

@Hanamichi

M7MIA I don't know her. I use to search motherboards I remembering have been reviewed on Greek magazines back to the day.

Where did you find them boxed? I only search on eBay.

@liqmat it's always a pleasure to look at an old and shiny motherboard!!!
That's my thought, probably it was some pc hardware shop or a service center that kept only the motherboards.

I've always been on Gigabyte's side since my Athlon XP platform.

My Pentium MMx back on 1998 had the QDi Titanium IB+, but after some issues was replaced on guaranty with the Chaintech 5AGM2, which I still have the manual and the drivers CD (also for the QDi). When on summer of 1999 switched to K6-2 I used the Shuttle HOT 591P, which isn't functioning socket 7 system not posting

from 2001 to 2020 I owned...

GA-7DXR+ (burnt capacitor)
GA-7N400PRO2 (donated to a friend)
GA-MA790FX-UD5P (donated)
GA-890FXA-UD5 (still on basement)
GA-X570 Gaming X

Warlord wrote on 2020-10-07, 15:14:

Gigabyte is still considered good. These days they are known for top notch servers.

I've had a few too many of their boards die on me for no good reason (I'm assuming chipset BGA losing connections or similar) since the AM2/So775-era, so they're not my go-to brand these days. Back in SoA period they were legendary though for good reason. One classic incident was when my housemate and I bought nForce2 boards at the same time when they were the thing to have. I went for the GA-7N400L, he for the Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe. As far as memory went, they were identical boards with nForce2-Ultra 400 northbridge. We both bought 2x 512MB PC3200 RAM. I don't recall the exact brands, I generally go for chip vendor DIMMs, so Nanya or Infineon was likely. He went for some flashy DIMM vendor stuff (Corsair or similar). Oh, and my board was bought in a scrap pile of 'dead' motherboards, mostly misflashes as it turned out. His was flashy and new, paid for by dad. After hotflashing the BIOS on another board, mine worked flawlessly. He had trouble getting his to POST with two DIMMs and with a single one it would POST but crash on OS install and couldn't last 5 minutes in MEMTEST. Dead DIMMs? Nope. His worked fine in my board. He borrowed a second set from his brother. Same story. He was about to RMA the board when I suggested trying mine. They did finally work flawlessly, so we just swapped. Somehow Asus managed to mess up RAM compatibility horribly there where my bashed-up ex-scrap Gigabyte just swallowed them all with exactly same chipset. Oh, and I was OCing a CPU (Barton 2500+@200MHz FSB "3200+") where his (Barton 3200+) was running in-spec. Every system I built myself for the next 10 years or so had Gigabyte boards based on that experience.

1 dollar

I haven't tried it yet

that's a dollar well spent in any case :3

dionb wrote on 2020-10-07, 21:37:

Warlord wrote on 2020-10-07, 15:14:

Gigabyte is still considered good. These days they are known for top notch servers.

I've had a few too many of their boards die on me for no good reason

Only Gigabyte board I have used is the GA-A75-UD4H (socket FM1) that I'm typing this on. The onboard networking died after about 5 years. Had to buy a cheap gigabit nic, that turned out to only be a 100 Mb card. Wasn't worth replying by the time I realised how slow it is (ie after my ISP upgraded me to 200 Mb). It has been running 24/7 (apart from the odd reboot or upgrade) since new though 😀 Never was a good overclocker, but for a budget system it generally OK.

pan069 wrote on 2020-10-07, 04:52:

Last year or so I bought a whole stack of 2.5 inch 80GB hard disks for cheapo. The other day I got some 2.5 inch to 3.5 inch brackets and IDE adapters. I'm using one in my current nostalgia build (Pentium II 350Mhz, 512MB, AOpen AX6B, nVidia TNT AGP). For 486 and older I prefer to use CF/IDE but I think this a great option for anything Socket 7 and upwards. So far, works great!

PXL_20201005_013808560.jpg

I would prefer that style of 2.5 to 3.5 bracket to some of the ones I’m seeing on eBay listings. Could you PM me a link to where you got yours?

Aublak wrote on 2020-10-07, 23:38:

1 dollar

I haven't tried it yet

Wow, I'm green with envy over that price! They tend to be like +100$ these days on eBay ..

Saw a local ad, someone selling an intel 845 mobo and a P4 2.4 with ram and gpu. I saw a peculiar leadtek heatsink and after some googling found that it is a geforce 4 ti4200 which ive been chasing for a while. Its not stated in the ad what it is so my assumption is that the seller didnt know what it was. He mentions the fan bearings are bad but im ok to fix it. 35 aud for the mobo cpu ram and geforce 4.

Super excited to see if it works. Its a bargain in my eyes. I want to see how splinter cell looks with the special shadow buffer tech. Are there any other games with this xbox feature?

foil_fresh wrote on 2020-10-08, 05:18:

Super excited to see if it works. Its a bargain in my eyes. I want to see how splinter cell looks with the special shadow buffer tech.

It looks excellent. Performance is not so great though.

At 800x600 with all the settings maxed out, I'm getting slowdowns in certain locations, mostly the ones with a lot of detailed shadows. For example, the tutorial level plays fairly well until you reach the point where sunlight is breaking through the windows making the tree leaves cast those detailed shadows. The frame rate drops from 40-ish to sub-20 there for me.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2020-10-08, 05:40:

foil_fresh wrote on 2020-10-08, 05:18:

Super excited to see if it works. Its a bargain in my eyes. I want to see how splinter cell looks with the special shadow buffer tech.

It looks excellent. Performance is not so great though.

At 800x600 with all the settings maxed out, I'm getting slowdowns in certain locations, mostly the ones with a lot of detailed shadows. For example, the tutorial level plays fairly well until you reach the point where sunlight is breaking through the windows making the tree leaves cast those detailed shadows. The frame rate drops from 40-ish to sub-20 there for me.

damn thats heavy stuff! what kind of cpu are you using it with? i'm planning on swapping out my 9600xt for this geforce 4.

foil_fresh wrote on 2020-10-08, 05:56:

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2020-10-08, 05:40:

foil_fresh wrote on 2020-10-08, 05:18:

Super excited to see if it works. Its a bargain in my eyes. I want to see how splinter cell looks with the special shadow buffer tech.

It looks excellent. Performance is not so great though.

At 800x600 with all the settings maxed out, I'm getting slowdowns in certain locations, mostly the ones with a lot of detailed shadows. For example, the tutorial level plays fairly well until you reach the point where sunlight is breaking through the windows making the tree leaves cast those detailed shadows. The frame rate drops from 40-ish to sub-20 there for me.

damn thats heavy stuff! what kind of cpu are you using it with? i'm planning on swapping out my 9600xt (on an athlon xp 2200+ atm) for this geforce 4.

foil_fresh wrote on 2020-10-08, 06:00:

damn thats heavy stuff! what kind of cpu are you using it with? i'm planning on swapping out my 9600xt (on an athlon xp 2200+ atm) for this geforce 4.

I was using this rig with an extra 512MB RAM (for a total of 1GB) and running the game under Windows 2000 + SP4. I also swapped out the SBLive for an Audigy2 ZS since Splinter Cell supports EAX3. Driver version used was 45.23 paired with DirectX 9.0c. Game version was 1.2b.

Didn't do much yet, just ran some preliminary tests in the tutorial area, but the inconsistent performance kinda annoyed me. One minute I'm getting 40-50 FPS, then I turn a corner and the shadows kick in, and it goes down to 15-20. I wouldn't mind as much if it was a constant 30 FPS with no drops, but these randoms ups and downs are irritating.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2020-10-08, 06:18:

foil_fresh wrote on 2020-10-08, 06:00:

damn thats heavy stuff! what kind of cpu are you using it with? i'm planning on swapping out my 9600xt (on an athlon xp 2200+ atm) for this geforce 4.

I was using this rig with an extra 512MB RAM (for a total of 1GB) and running the game under Windows 2000 + SP4. I also swapped out the SBLive for an Audigy2 ZS since Splinter Cell supports EAX3. Driver version used was 45.23 paired with DirectX 9.0c. Game version was 1.2b.

Didn't do much yet, just ran some preliminary tests in the tutorial area, but the inconsistent performance kinda annoyed me. One minute I'm getting 40-50 FPS, then I turn a corner and the shadows kick in, and it goes down to 15-20. I wouldn't mind as much if it was a constant 30 FPS with no drops, but these randoms ups and downs are irritating.

ooof. that IS quite dippy. if the card works for me i'll let you know how it performs on my gear - i have an nforce2 board (2x 256 DDR in dual channel) so maybe things are a bit better. although if the shadows are causing the slowdown then i think it's gfx chip related. are there shadow complexity/resolution options? i am not at home to check. cheers.

foil_fresh wrote on 2020-10-08, 06:31:

are there shadow complexity/resolution options? i am not at home to check. cheers.

There are, and the performance does improve a bit when changing the shadow resolution from "High" to something lower. Not enough to offset the huge dips though.

BTW, if you haven't seen them already, check out Phil's videos on Splinter Cell. In part 1, he showcases the difference between various shadow modes. And in part 2, he does a detailed performance analysis.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2020-10-08, 07:10:

foil_fresh wrote on 2020-10-08, 06:31:

are there shadow complexity/resolution options? i am not at home to check. cheers.

There are, and the performance does improve a bit when changing the shadow resolution from "High" to something lower. Not enough to offset the huge dips though.

BTW, if you haven't seen them already, check out Phil's videos on Splinter Cell. In part 1, he showcases the difference between various shadow modes. And in part 2, he does a detailed performance analysis.

cheers.

i wonder what kind of settings the xbox version used then..? it had a P3-ish cpu ~700mhz and GF3-ish chip...

foil_fresh wrote on 2020-10-08, 07:20:

i wonder what kind of settings the xbox version used then..? it had a P3-ish cpu ~700mhz and GF3-ish chip...

We know it ran at 640x480 on the Xbox, but the other graphical settings are not well known.

At a guess, I would say somewhere between low and medium. Phil explains what each setting does in his videos. Basically, lower settings = rough looking shadows and blurry thermal vision.

Firstly, hello to everyone, I finally decided to stop lurking the forums and actually make an account and get some retro hardware to play with 😀

So after being inspired by Phil's 4 in 1 Retro Gaming PC video (and the fact that I had a box of RAM sticks, a 166MMX and a K6-2+ 475 CPU's lying around for ages), I decided to hunt down a S7 or Super S7 board and give it a go at creating some kind of DOS/Win98 gaming rig.

I mostly ignored ebay because shipping of larger stuff is usually more than double the price of parts, but after a few months I stumbled upon this locally :

Octek Rhino15+ EP40202r202 rev. 2.02 with a 200MMX and 32 MB of EDO and S3 Trio64V2/DX PCI on board, inside a half rusted case which included a Sky Hawk SH-200W PSU, 1.6GB HDD, 1.44 floppy and CD-ROM drive.

Status of system is untested (but according to seller was working recently when he powered it on) and that PSU seemed really scarry to me, so I will be testing the system without it, and will be replacing it with a 350W Fortron ATX-350PNF which seems to be around same power on 5v rail (that one I got from another seller). If all goes well I will be replacing the EDO sticks with 128MB SD stick which I allready got, and might try K6-2+ on this one, to see what I can make if it will work 😀

The set also included a nice little 15inch AOC LCD monitor, complete with a keyboard and a mouse.
Seller was also kind enough to include a P5I437P410/FMB MBO V1.0 with Pentium 100 and 16 MB of EDO on board, in case the first board doesn't work.

Also, I got a ISA Sound Blaster 16 from ebay which is on its way.

So when I sum all the costs, I got all this for around 70-75 USD, and if I can make a single working PC from all this it could be a nice non-3d gaming rig 😀