RaYaNt3 wrote:

Hello everyone,
I'd like to "share" some pics about my last "encounters" with retro old bargain hardware...

Please resize those pictures.... Some 1958x2611 pixels are way too big for this forum.

appiah4 wrote:

I wish a producer would make a limited run of quality AT/ATX hybrid cases.

I have some across 2 specialist case suppliers who do all shapes of ATX including lunchbox portable styles, and I believe they still do some AT models. Expect to pay $150 or more a piece though.

Meanwhile, you might wanna see this..
https://youtu.be/8QXmxdiNWIs

P.S. Don't hate me, I was so short of ATX earlier this century, that I hacked holes in a couple of AT cases 😵

Cyrix200+ wrote:

Edit: As long as I have storage I will buy all AT cases in reasonable shape and with a reasonable price. I have too many now...

Ah, so you are the reason I am struggling to find enough AT cases for my retro collection! 😀

Cyrix200+ wrote:

Edit: As long as I have storage I will buy all AT cases in reasonable shape and with a reasonable price. I have too many now...

I've actually reached the point where I have extra AT cases. I was considering selling one that I don't like, but I know the moment it's gone I'll need it!

Recently I bought a few things on thee edge of retro.
Two XFX 4890's, two 4870/4890 water blocks.
A older 80mm scythe fan.
A few 3 pin fan splitters and molex splitters.

Retroish but for my main:

Bought a QX9650 because they were on sale for $59 on eBay. I'm hoping that unlocked multiplier lets me get it up to atleast 3.5GHZ. I need to get a new power supply though since a 780 Ti + a QX9650 on a 500w unit leaves me only about 50 watts spare to OC the CPU and I'd like to OC the GPU too.

BitWrangler wrote:

I have some across 2 specialist case suppliers who do all shapes of ATX including lunchbox portable styles, and I believe they s […]
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appiah4 wrote:

I wish a producer would make a limited run of quality AT/ATX hybrid cases.

I have some across 2 specialist case suppliers who do all shapes of ATX including lunchbox portable styles, and I believe they still do some AT models. Expect to pay $150 or more a piece though.

Meanwhile, you might wanna see this..
https://youtu.be/8QXmxdiNWIs

P.S. Don't hate me, I was so short of ATX earlier this century, that I hacked holes in a couple of AT cases 😵

I normally buy one of these:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/20-Pin-to-24-Pin-Con … w0AAOSwuq9ZYz5W

And one of these:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/20P-ATX-To-2-Port-6P … ngAAOSwr6RZnnN6

And make this:

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Retroish but for my main:

Bought a QX9650 because they were on sale for $59 on eBay. I'm hoping that unlocked multiplier lets me get it up to atleast 3.5GHZ. I need to get a new power supply though since a 780 Ti + a QX9650 on a 500w unit leaves me only about 50 watts spare to OC the CPU and I'd like to OC the GPU too.

The C0 stepping makes it a bugger to OC. But if you have a NVidia chipset or older Intel chipset (pre p35/x38) its a much better bet for OC'ing. It also helps in top end 775 system with 8gb of ram or ram running faster then 1333mhz.
Also keep In mind it pulls a lot of power and dumps a lot of heat. Back when the E0 q9650's came out folks were selling there qx9650 for them. The q9650 was for most a better overclocker, only time it is not if when your FSB limited or have very strong VRM's and water cooling even then the qx9650 took a good 775 overclocker to max it out.

That's all aside 3.5ghz will be a walk in the park with a good motherboard and cooling. I was not really even trying and hit 4.25ghz with my qx9650 on a lower end x38 board. And I hit 4.4ghz with a E0 q9650 on a mid range x38 board. 4.8ghz and even 5ghz is not unheard of with the q9650. But as for the qx9650 with the right setup pushing past 5ghz is not unheard of, but you really need to know what your doing and the long term stability will not be there as the VRM will be pushed hard even on some of the best boards.

for both the QX and q9650 4ghz to 4.5ghz tends to be the max you can get stable with a good setup and still keep the system running for a good long time. This is coming from someone that has worked on and owned countless 775 systems.

Gered wrote:

Certainly it's not the greatest quality case out there, I cannot deny that, haha. 😀 I have another case that I'm using with my 486 PC right now, so it's not the worst thing in the world that this broke. But I really wanted this style case because it's the same as the one my family had in the early 90's. /shrug

i bought like 4 cases very cheap that had that quality
some of them i dont like at all, some yellowed like cheddar cheese. plus the metal was in poor condition

the only one that i liked and i was able to recover in good condition is this one, that i kept for my retro 486 pc
it looks nice but its also a china plastic one that you need to be carefull

Cyrix200+ wrote:

That would be great. I guess they would be really expensive. You would need to sell thousands (?) to get to a reasonable price I think.

Edit: As long as I have storage I will buy all AT cases in reasonable shape and with a reasonable price. I have too many now...

whats important is not the full case
whats important is the front plastic of the AT case, thats all.

I used to keep the front plastic, the metal is almost the same in all models. i even took the metal from another model and used the front plastic of another pc to build one.

you can get a destroyed AT case everywhere, throw the broken or destroyed front, and wish some factory did the front plastic, way cheaper than buying a full case.

Plus you would end up having something of better quality plastic that doesnt turn yellow

Found a boxed BFG GeForce 7900 GTX OC. I happened to have another one of them lying around, so just had to SLI them!

Some 3DMark scores (note that 3DMark 2001SE doesn't scale with SLI). Test done on Asus M2N-SLI with a Phenom II X2 550.

3DMark 2003 @ 1920x1080
7900GTX, 11379
7900GTX SLI, 15549 (+36%)

3DMark 2005 @ 1920x1080
7900GTX, 8633
7900GTX SLI, 15038 (+74%)

3DMark 2006 @ 1920x1080
7900GTX, 5390
7900GTX SLI, 8878 (+64%)

Pabloz wrote:

whats important is not the full case whats important is the front plastic of the AT case, thats all. […]
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Cyrix200+ wrote:

That would be great. I guess they would be really expensive. You would need to sell thousands (?) to get to a reasonable price I think.

Edit: As long as I have storage I will buy all AT cases in reasonable shape and with a reasonable price. I have too many now...

whats important is not the full case
whats important is the front plastic of the AT case, thats all.

I used to keep the front plastic, the metal is almost the same in all models. i even took the metal from another model and used the front plastic of another pc to build one.

you can get a destroyed AT case everywhere, throw the broken or destroyed front, and wish some factory did the front plastic, way cheaper than buying a full case.

Plus you would end up having something of better quality plastic that doesnt turn yellow

It's funny you mention that, as that's what I was planning to do with the case I bought that arrived broken (take the AT case I was using already and swap the plastic front). 😀

These BFG's are beautiful!

I just bought myself a Voodoo 1 from Trend Helios (?) Black PCB w. 2 heatsinks. Honestly no Idea on what to do with it 🤣

Jade Falcon wrote:

The C0 stepping makes it a bugger to OC. But if you have a NVidia chipset or older Intel chipset (pre p35/x38) its a much better […]
Show full quote

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Retroish but for my main:

Bought a QX9650 because they were on sale for $59 on eBay. I'm hoping that unlocked multiplier lets me get it up to atleast 3.5GHZ. I need to get a new power supply though since a 780 Ti + a QX9650 on a 500w unit leaves me only about 50 watts spare to OC the CPU and I'd like to OC the GPU too.

The C0 stepping makes it a bugger to OC. But if you have a NVidia chipset or older Intel chipset (pre p35/x38) its a much better bet for OC'ing. It also helps in top end 775 system with 8gb of ram or ram running faster then 1333mhz.
Also keep In mind it pulls a lot of power and dumps a lot of heat. Back when the E0 q9650's came out folks were selling there qx9650 for them. The q9650 was for most a better overclocker, only time it is not if when your FSB limited or have very strong VRM's and water cooling even then the qx9650 took a good 775 overclocker to max it out.

That's all aside 3.5ghz will be a walk in the park with a good motherboard and cooling. I was not really even trying and hit 4.25ghz with my qx9650 on a lower end x38 board. And I hit 4.4ghz with a E0 q9650 on a mid range x38 board. 4.8ghz and even 5ghz is not unheard of with the q9650. But as for the qx9650 with the right setup pushing past 5ghz is not unheard of, but you really need to know what your doing and the long term stability will not be there as the VRM will be pushed hard even on some of the best boards.

for both the QX and q9650 4ghz to 4.5ghz tends to be the max you can get stable with a good setup and still keep the system running for a good long time. This is coming from someone that has worked on and owned countless 775 systems.

ASUS P5N-D with nForce 750i SLI.

Does that meet your definition of a good NVIDIA board?

As for cooling I have one of those Zalman Turbine Coolers on it. My 95w Q8300 OC'd to 2.9GHZ @ 1.4v was in the 40c region and my cut off is 80c (I know not great for the chip long term but i'm not planning on using this for the next decade. A year or two tops)

My planned formula for 3.5GHZ was upping the multi to 10.5 and adding voltage until stable with a cut off voltage of 1.42 volts which is what I'm told the max safe 24/7 voltage for these is.

Here's what I just received !

i430TX based mobo with 512k of cache. For some reasons during tests it didn't like pentiums other than MMX and I had to pull the battery off to get it to POST properly after each expansion card swap

A neat daewoo mobo with i430VX and 512k of cache

Quite an uncommon board : socket 5 with integrated video and having an SiS chipset. Has 256k of cache

A pcchips board (m520 IIRC) with it's regulator ! Neat ! I already had one but I didn't have this thing. No cache at all unless I install a COAST module.

Another SiS based mobo with integrated video as well as integrated audio ! Though I couldn't get it to work qo far

Ok, so... I spent €50 and got this....

In the same package as the one for socket 5/7 boards, here's the rest :

Weird AST mobo (there's 2 of them)

One of the 3 CPU expansion board for the ast mobos. There's a 386sx16 one, a 386sx20 one and a 486dx25 one. Unfortunately they use weird ram kind that I've never seen. I've put 30 pin and 72 modules for you to compare

And finally, a 286 mobo in rather good shape ! It's battery leaked, but that should be fixable, the damaged area isn't that big and that's just a 286 so there shouldn't be any inner traces. One thing that bothers me is that one of the rom chip had a missing sticker. I hope it wasn't erased over time as this would be a pain in the ass to reprogram for me.

I didn't show an mfm controller and a floppy controller with a rom chip. That might be useful for my 8088 if I manage to fix it somehow

That's it for today. I'm quite happy with all of these !

xeon3d wrote:

Ok, so... I spent €50 and got this.... […]
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Ok, so... I spent €50 and got this....

Lan/USB likely means it supports Ethernet over USB. I have the appropriate cable somewhere if you need it.

xeon3d wrote:

Ok, so... I spent €50 and got this.... […]
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Ok, so... I spent €50 and got this....

oh for fucks sake, I thought you paid 50 for just a crappy fan.

Finally found the link, and that is an nice score of scsi! color me jealous.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

ASUS P5N-D with nForce 750i SLI.

Does that meet your definition of a good NVIDIA board?

I would not call it good more lower mid range. But I'm just not a fan of Nvida boards of the time. But I want heat sinks on the mosfets.
I believe performance pcs sells them for cheap.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

As for cooling I have one of those Zalman Turbine Coolers on it. My 95w Q8300 OC'd to 2.9GHZ @ 1.4v was in the 40c region and my cut off is 80c (I know not great for the chip long term but i'm not planning on using this for the next decade. A year or two tops)

80c is fine as long as its not 24/7. Id shoot for 75c max my self. most higher end boards put the shut off temp at 85c.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

My planned formula for 3.5GHZ was upping the multi to 10.5 and adding voltage until stable with a cut off voltage of 1.42 volts which is what I'm told the max safe 24/7 voltage for these is.

for a qx9650 1.42v is rather low with good cooling if your boards VRM can take it. now 1.42v is a goo d bit for a q9650.

also there is not such thing as max safe volts for a cpu. its your temps that mater. Keep in mind you may need to up vtt volts and the NB volts to keep up with the higher cpu speeds, I don't know about nvidia boards but Intel board tend to need more volts to the NB and VTT around 3.6ghz.