konc wrote on 2024-11-28, 07:05:

ODwilly wrote on 2024-11-26, 23:07:

Does ivy bridge count as "retro" yet? I just picked up a Pentium G 2020 based IBM Thinkcentre for $20. 2gb of ram, 500gb HDD of some flavor and in wonderful condition! Not sure what I'm going to do with it yet, but my 1st thought is to find 8gb of ram and a low power i7 for it + a 500gb SSD I have kicking around. It has a TPM 1.2 module, so I'm also considering fooling around with putting windows 11 on it.

My main computer is based on ivy bridge, ok not with a G2020 but an i7 like your plan. I can tell you that it's still passable for generic use. For me what really shows its age and insufficiency nowadays is not the CPU but the lack of SATA3 and good USB3 implementation on most motherboards.
(Note to self, it looks like it's time to get a new computer)

Unfortunately this machine is H61 based. Does have a Display Port! My relative is still running a Dell XPS desktop with a i5-2310? Iirc. That's had a PSU die, ram die, and the factory HD6450 die at separate occasions. Currently running off of IGP and 12gb of ddr3 1333mhz off a 1tb Crucial Mx500. For everyday usage it's been great. Have a new Ryzen 5 5600gt build ready to go. Absolutely overkill for him, but should last a long time.

That's kind of impressive, never heard of anyone killing an HD6450 before... mind you a PSU going bad might have had a hand.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-11-29, 00:03:

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-11-28, 17:58:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-11-28, 17:32:

Yeah, I totally agree about NVMe and SATA being indistinguishible for most tasks.

Even a fast CF card is overkill for older motherboards with a slower CPU. I ran some tests with a fast enterprise CF card on a 533 Mhz Mendocino a few weeks ago and the performance was extremely disappointing. The speed was capped well below 33 MB/s using the onboard ATA33 controller as well as any PCI ATA100/133 controller I tried. Performance was slightly better with a SATA controller, but nowhere near what the drive was capable of.

There is definitely a CPU bottleneck with these older systems that make "fast" storage redundant. The only real advantage of an SSD is the access time.

Yes, that makes me think of the parallel CF card reader I use on my IBM PC 5150. I made a post about it here several years ago.

An 8bit ISA EGA + Parallel card from the mid to late 80s attached to a CF card reader from ~1996, with a 16MB CF card (that came with a Canon camera from ~2004) topped out at less than 43KB\sec transfer rate (yes KBytes), and yet it still managed to beat the internal MFM hard drive's 29.5KB\sec by almost 50%. The seek times were obviously even further in the CF card's favor. Like, most of us can game online with pings better than the seek time of a hard drive from the 80s, and we can download at thousands of times their transfer speed... What a time to be alive. 😮

That's pretty bad even for the klunkiest of klunky MFM drives. Probably needs a LLF and the interleave redoing to match the system.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-11-28, 17:32:

Yeah, I totally agree about NVMe and SATA being indistinguishible for most tasks. I went a little overkill on storage speed mai […]
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Trashbytes wrote on 2024-11-28, 15:11:

Modern SATA SSDs dont normally support SATA1 or SATA2 and will likely not to work on the older standards, you can still buy the […]
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Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-11-28, 13:52:

My old MSI P67A-G43 had decent enough USB 3.0 (two ports) via an NEC chip, which is what most mid\high end boards used before the 7-series chipsets. It only had two SATA 3 6gbps ports as well, but for the time period that was still more than enough for the average enthusiast. Hard drives likely still don't benefit much from 6gbps vs 3gbps SATA today, and SSDs were still so expensive back in 2011 that most systems only had one or two anyway... and even then, lots of great drives that people had from previous generations were only SATA2.

The random read\write performance is still the main benefit of SSDs, and that will still be fast enough for most uses even on a slower interface... I would be interested to see what even a modern system "feels" like with a decent SSD on SATA2 or even SATA1. Though games that benefit from NVMe storage will probably take the most noticeable hit. 😁

Modern SATA SSDs dont normally support SATA1 or SATA2 and will likely not to work on the older standards, you can still buy the older SSDs that do support SATA1/2 but I doubt that will satisfy the curiosity as their interface speeds are naturally limited.

But yeah the convo was about using that old hardware for modern stuff which it can do but at a large penalty due to its age and lack of modern features, I have both SATA based SSDs and NVME drives and you can tell the difference if you do a lot of larger file operations like editing but for day to day stuff .. you wouldn't notice a difference between SATA and NVME as they are both overkill for that task. Now if you asked if I can tell the difference between fast spinning rust and a SSD .. yes 100% once you get to 10k or 15k rusty rockets then you may have to really pay attention to notice for day to day stuff. (You would notice the noise first, 15k drives sound like cats fighting)

I just recently got one of them new PCIe 5.0 NVME drives .. with a staggering 14.5 gig a second reads and 12.7 gig a second writes and yeah that thing is fast to the point its silly, made it my boot drive and booting the PC happens faster than you can blink, but I cant recommend it. It runs very HOT to the point it throttles hard after ~10 seconds of use to gen 4 speeds and then throttles again ~30 seconds later to gen 3 speeds. The heat issue is going to have to be fixed soon by something other than heat sinks and I can see PCIe 4/5 drives needing active cooling in the near future. (Mine has a huge heatsink on it but its just not enough to dump 90c heat as fast as the drive needs)

Computing is fun ! dumping heat is not and I think we will need to find better cooling solutions very soon to handle modern 600watt GPUs and super fast NVME drives, even CPUs are hitting 300watt+ under load.

Yeah, I totally agree about NVMe and SATA being indistinguishible for most tasks. I went a little overkill on storage speed mainly just because the prices came down a couple years back and there were concerns that they would skyrocket... plus there were some very affordable high performing drives that don't run hot. I am running a Solidigm P44 Pro 2TB for OS\apps\games + a Samsung 970 EVO Plus 2TB for storage. Other than my dual SATA dock, I have no SATA cables in the computer, which is pretty cool! I think the NVMe heat thing will eventually work itself out as people continue to find near-zero benefit to top tier drives that put out excessive heat... people will stop thinking about NVMe speed all together, they will stop spending a ton on drives that reviewers find no reason to recommend, and SSD manufacturers will focus on something else for consumer-grade drives (efficiency, less heat, etc.).

Also, regarding newer SATA drives not working on older SATA1/2 systems, I have never heard of that before and I have never experienced that personally. Every SATA drive I've ever used has always worked in every SATA system I've put it in. I guess I can test it pretty easily since I have an NF7-S 2.0 on my workbench right now. That is one of the first SATA-equipped motherboards ever released, so it is obviously only SATA1. I'll post back here with my findings when I get a chance. 😀

EDIT: Yeah, just hooked up a WD Blue 250GB SSD (3D NAND, 6gb SATA 3) made in 2019 to the NF7-S from ~2003, and the drive was detected automatically by the SATA controller and was readable in Windows XP. This is a very recent model as far as SATA SSDs go. Are there specific drives you know of that aren't backward compatible for some reason?

I ones I can personally say are the two OCZ SSDs I have that were made well after Toshiba IIRC bought them out both are ~2016 SATA3 drives, they always fall back to IDE mode on SATA 1, perhaps its a firmware issue but I also have a couple of SanDisk drives that will also use IDE mode on SATA 1 and SATA 2 boards.

I'm willing to accept this is likely a direct firmware issue.

I personally like avoid throwing SATA 3 drives on SATA1/2 boards, early SATA implementations were like early AGP implementations or PCIe 1.0 and its one less compatibility issue if I just use a SATA 1 or 2 drive to begin with. (Intel made so many of them and they are dirt cheap to grab, the 60Gb and 80Gb ones are perfect and you can usually find deals for 10 of them for less than the cost of a 128Gb SATA3 SSD)

Got this VLB card the other day. Nothing special. Was advertised as NOS but is clearly used as it is covered with a fine dust. It works and it wasn't too expensive so I am happy to have it in my collection.

pan069 wrote on 2024-11-29, 04:47:

Got this VLB card the other day. Nothing special. Was advertised as NOS but is clearly used as it is covered with a fine dust. It works and it wasn't too expensive so I am happy to have it in my collection.

The attachment PXL_20241129_020432769.jpg is no longer available

I have that exact same card, but it has the 1MB memory chips installed above the Cirrus Logic chip, and I added another 1MB in the DIP sockets.
I think I've seen that card on ebay for quite some time, unless it's just a coincidence.
Performance wise I got 28.9 fps in the doom benchmark with an Intel dx2-66 which is quite good.

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-11-28, 16:00:

Just of note, these connectors are not gold plated and might not visually match what is being replaced.

Beggars, choosers, etc 😀

Imperious wrote on 2024-11-29, 05:31:

I have that exact same card, but it has the 1MB memory chips installed above the Cirrus Logic chip, and I added another 1MB in t […]
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pan069 wrote on 2024-11-29, 04:47:

Got this VLB card the other day. Nothing special. Was advertised as NOS but is clearly used as it is covered with a fine dust. It works and it wasn't too expensive so I am happy to have it in my collection.

The attachment PXL_20241129_020432769.jpg is no longer available

I have that exact same card, but it has the 1MB memory chips installed above the Cirrus Logic chip, and I added another 1MB in the DIP sockets.
I think I've seen that card on ebay for quite some time, unless it's just a coincidence.
Performance wise I got 28.9 fps in the doom benchmark with an Intel dx2-66 which is quite good.

Cool. It's weird to see this many memory layout options on just one card. I have another Cirrus Logic VLB card (GL5429) which was reaching 27.18 fps in Doom on a DX2-66. Somehow I have a weak spot for VLB graphics cards. Too bad they're all interlaced, so adding more than 1MB is typically useless unless you have a CRT that supports it (which I don't).

Does a full-hardware back-compat PS3 imported from US to the PAL plains of Romania count? 😁

pan069 wrote on 2024-11-29, 04:47:

Got this VLB card the other day. Nothing special. Was advertised as NOS but is clearly used as it is covered with a fine dust. It works and it wasn't too expensive so I am happy to have it in my collection.

The attachment PXL_20241129_020432769.jpg is no longer available

Nice one! These are getting a bit scarce... hard to source locally.

After a LONG time I bought a stylish grey tower and an ASUS SP97-V(80€ for both items) which I had back in '99. Everything runs fastest but the "RAS Assertion" option had to be upped from 5 to 6.
PS/2 mouse connector bracket was missing so I had to make my own... not good to look at.

Managed to snipe a big lot of cards and motherboards for cheap.

First a nice assortment of expansion cads. Mainly sound cards:

A nice 486 Contaq Cache with a 486DX-50. Had a leaked Mi-Cd cell. Cleanup work and restore almost done.

Compaq DESKPRO EP (44BX), refashed and cleaned. Had a PII 400. Interesting bios recovery mode, similar to Intel.

PCPartner MB520NH and a Soltek SL-54U5. CPU wise, they had a P -166(no mmx) and AMD K6II-500.

Continuing on .......

ASRock K7S41GX, and Biostar MB-8500TTD...

Chaintech 4SPI + Cyrix/IBM DX2, and Gigabyte GA-5486AL. both Late 486 with PCI. The chaintech had a short on a tantalum near the isa slots. The Gigabyte had a small Ni-Cd cell with a minimal leak.

Intel Premiere/PCI II BABY-AT. Had to remove the flash and program it with a "theretroweb" dump.

Abit NF-M2SV, and ASRock P4VT8+. Both need some TLC, but otherwise work.

ECS Elitegroup SI54P AIO and PCChips/Hsin Tech M507. The PCChisp has fake cache and a COAST module. Both motherboards have damage to the pcb that will be a challenge to repair ..... 2 holes where none should be 😒

Xicor wrote on 2024-11-29, 16:32:

Continuing on .......

The attachment MB_06.jpg is no longer available

Intel Premiere/PCI II BABY-AT. Had to remove the flash and program it with a "theretroweb" dump.

Wow, great haul, love it. I’ve got good memories stepping up from a DX2 to the Plato back in the day. Of course made the mistake to switch to the Triton without cache…

I'm out of kidneys again. Last year was 'meh' on the local craigslist. Then this month, all great things pop up at the same time. Like people need money for Christmas or some Dutch holiday involving red dressed pope.

Chicony CH-1451A socket 4 mainboard
Pentium OverDrive 133
2x 4MB fast page

Imperious wrote on 2024-11-29, 05:31:

I have that exact same card, but it has the 1MB memory chips installed above the Cirrus Logic chip, and I added another 1MB in t […]
Show full quote

pan069 wrote on 2024-11-29, 04:47:

Got this VLB card the other day. Nothing special. Was advertised as NOS but is clearly used as it is covered with a fine dust. It works and it wasn't too expensive so I am happy to have it in my collection.

The attachment PXL_20241129_020432769.jpg is no longer available

I have that exact same card, but it has the 1MB memory chips installed above the Cirrus Logic chip, and I added another 1MB in the DIP sockets.
I think I've seen that card on ebay for quite some time, unless it's just a coincidence.
Performance wise I got 28.9 fps in the doom benchmark with an Intel dx2-66 which is quite good.

I think I've got one with them in that position too.

Was looking for a Geforce GTX 280 for my Core2Quad system, bought a Quadro FX 5800 instead. Same chip, four times the memory, half the price on the bay.

Got the ASRock Alive Dual ESATA2 recapped yesterday, works like a charm. AGP with a X4 945 and 1066MHz DDR2 is pretty tasty.

Also posting a few graphics cards I received and I got repaired the last few days.

I was wondering what that realtek rtm866-895 chip is, but it's impossible to find any info on it. It's a clock gen, but that's all I can say. No datasheets or anything.

Seems like realtek deleted their history.

I'll replace my ECS US3486 board with this one. The main reason for doing so is having two 72 pins RAM slots.

Looks like it'll fit 4 if you remove 2x30s