Old hardware appreciation thread

[Flamin Joe]

Originally Posted by xlot

Here's the slot-A - in my office behind me. First generation of K7 core cpus.. kept AMD going very nicely and paid for the intro of the Athlon64 in 2003. I had two more K7 cpu's.. Thunderbird 1333 and a 2600+.

Starting to sort the slot-A out for retro purposes - will remove the old ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder TV/Video card - replacing with an AGP Geforce2 GTS for some 3d performance in Win95, and will use my old Orchid Voodoo2 via pass-thru where possible

image

I need to find a quiet replacement for the fans on the slot heatsink.. one of them is noisy-as - but it booted ok on the weekend.

Damn I loved the old Athlon Slot A's! AMD were getting such great yields with those processors that they were selling higher clocked CPU's at lower specs. It wasn't unreasonable at one stage to carefully open up a Athlon 500 and find anywhere up to a 650 core inside. You then had the choice of either safely bumping it up to it's rated CPU speed for a free upgrade or pushing it even further. Awesome CPU's.

I had a ASUS K7M Motherboard with the AMD 751 Irongate Chipset. Rock solid motherboard.

Sadly I don't have any retro gear to share anymore as I sold it all.

[|anykey|]

I'll have to gather a few photos of some of my stuff. I've taken a break from the old stuff for a bit - too much going on.

I have a 486 P75-5x86 133ADW on a quirky motherboard that barely works with this cpu - 64MB EDO, SB16 ISA, adaptec 154x ISA SCSI, 2x SCSI HDD's, CF>IDE Adapter with 2GB Ultra II Sandisk CF Card (Various reasons) -

It runs Xtreegold. I have brown bag power menu on it, but I prefer Xtg. I recently formatted the main drive to try and install Linux as a challenge but it just didn't work (Quirky motherboard issues)

Apart from that I've got various super socket 7, really odd boards that only accept a celeron 566 (How stupid) - and other stuff (pentium II era, Pentium III) I still use a few P4 class machines today.

I'll post photos when I get a chance.

[Segression]

Cool thread, wish i had kept my shit over the years, but i tend to sell my old stuff and upgrade.

I had an old xt when i was a kid then went without a pc for ages till the mighty 486 dx2 66 came out. - p150@180 - cyrix 300mmx - amd k62 450 - athlon 800 maybe? - athlon 1800 - its a bit hazy around here i was playing everquest for ages so i could have been playing on a toaster as lOng as it ran eq lol, then amd 3000+ - c2d 6750 - i5 750. To current i7 2600k.

I miss the old hardware, i should build an old pentium box lol

[mike-s]

Reminds me of the old stuff i used to have.
I started with a PS/2 55sx with it's 16MHz of 386sx bottlenecked grunt.
Then started my beigewhite-box era:
First a 486 DX2/66, i remember feeling so chuffed with myself when i upped that baby to 24meg of memory.
Next came a Pentium 75 with 32 meg of EDO, I kept this baby for a while and relegated it to being a router when i got permanent dial-up (in the pre-adsl era)
Then a Cyrix P120+, man with the shitty coolers you got, you could cook an egg on those things.
Then a P166MMX
Then a Celeron 300A, over clocked to 450MHz for about 9 months until the motherboard decided it couldn't handle 100MHz and had to be clocked down again .
Then i made a mistake and got a lemon with a VIA socket 7, that wasn't just slow, this particular one was as buggy as hell and i turfed it after a couple of months
* Then a Duron 1200, which i still have in a box of motherboards & other stuff, i used this baby for years and years as it was rock solid.
* Then a big jump to LGA 775 and the thermal horror that was Pentium D
* Then a smattering of 775/dual core's and here i am with a Duo 5200 running stable at 2.6Ghz .

In the meantime i picked up some other hardware that some has come, gone and some is still here.
SPARCstation 2, kept for a while, sold on ebay once i got a Sparcstation 10
* SPARCstation 10, This bit of hardware is currently powered off & used to keep my desktop & NAS box from sitting directly on the floor inhaling dust.
Socket 7 motherboard with dual Pentium 75's, sold on eBay a long time ago
* A Pentium 3/733, sitting in a pile of crap that really should be either given away or just scrapped.
* Sun Ultra 5 pimped out with 256meg of ram. Currently humming away next to my feet right now, not really being used for anything, i guess i should pull the finger out and use it though.
* An IBM Pentium Pro dual-CPU, A IBM special as it has SDRAM, however the form-factor for the memory is unusual, it it styled in the way of SIMM memory instead of the standard DIMM's we use now (click in at 45' then flick vertical as opposed to the current push down one corner and then the other) and has proven to be a bastard to get extra ram for.
* Dec Alpha 500/500, pimped out to the maximum of 1Gb of memory, I have bought a legit copy of Tru64, i just need to pull a finger out and install it over the top of the current VMS.
* Via C7 nano, bought less than 2 weeks before the atom line of hardware was announced by Intel

I think i need to clear my shelves out, i still have a copy of Solaris 2.5.1 there as well as a genuine NT4 & Windows 95a (The floppy disk edition). How the hell my missus puts up with this eclectic collection i do not know, and do not want to question.

Oh and i forgot, i still have two IBM 101 clacky keyboards that are as good as the day they were made, i think one of them might be missing the cover off one or two keys and the return spring on the * on the keypad is slightly wonky, but the other has everything working perfectly well.

(*= i still have this hardware

[Draxx]

Originally Posted by elvis

LOL @ Athlons being "old". I still use two Althon XP based systems every day! I've got a customer who's using a dual Athlon XP pencil-modded to MP in a production thin client server as you read this!

LOL, sounds like something Luke212 would use at "work"

[mike-s]

Man, totally forgot about laptops *facepalm*
Oldest to Newest:
Toshiba Libretto 50CT, this is a Pentium 75, and unfortunately has the LBA quirk where it can only go up to about a 8.4gb drive or so, currently running a microdrive pulled from a defunct Ipod in a compact flash -> ide adaptor to increase battery life and also reduce the quantity of heat generated as the battery used to be a massive hotspot on it previously. It runs alright, currently has Win98 on it. I would like to get my hands on a memory upgrade to get it to a whopping 32meg of ram, but as this is from the era where custom memory form-factors were common, this can be a pain in the arse to get hold of. I'll get one eventually though.

Next up, a Dell CPi, all Pentium 1, 233MHz of grunt.totally forgot i had it and found it while hunting for the power supply for the 50CT tonight.

IBM R30, Pentium 3, 1GHz. This is from the time when they really hadn't acknowledged the whole "thermal dissipation" concept in laptops and the only air going through the laptop was through the heatsink, thusly this was less a laptop and more a lap-localised-cooker.

Toshiba Satellite A65. A 3GHz Pentium 4 HT cpu packed into a laptop chassis. This thing had a massive pro, and a massive con. The former was the fact it is by far the clearest and largest screen i have ever had the pleasure of using on a laptop. Con: Power usage & thermal limitations. Having 2 fans running full time wasn't really quite enough to keep this thing from having a meltdown without a fan-pad underneath. Using a watt-meter i measured this thing at 65w idle and a giant 115w at full load. Hasn't been turned on in anger in about 18 months.

Here's a pic of the 50CT i took tonight, note the 20cent piece on the battery/wristrest for size comparison.

[sanjay]

ahh i remember lusting after those librettos in PC world magazine from the late 90s. the first 'netbooks', which costed nearly twice as much as an ordinary laptop at the time. still an amazing feat considering it really was a full-powered PC in there, up to the standards of your average desktop computer of the era.

[RSDXzec]

decent thread, pretty sure the oldest system I have lying around is a 486 that I got for free. It turns on but its not fully functional atm, last time I tried running it mustve been a few years ago. Man how tech has changed.

[broccoli]

I've finally fished out my old stuff and here are the pictures. Sorry they aren't very good, the camera autofocus didn't work properly and then I resized them and lost half of the picture.
portable Canon bubblejet printer with sheetfeeder attached

Click to view full size!
The sheet feeder attaches with hooks into the back of the printer where the hole is

Click to view full size!
Thinkpad 340 screen and keyboard

Click to view full size!

Click to view full size!

[stano]

although I think I have posted this pic before here is a voodoo 5 5500 pci card

[andyroo54]

We've come a long way baby..



Or have we? I mean there is almost a decade between them, they both still weigh a ton, they both only last an hour or two on batteries, the newer compaq can only really do stuff as impressive as a smartphone can, and they have batteries that last longer anyway. Laptops I'm not impressed.


It's an Armada 1700 P2, It's got an internal ac adapter, and it boots but you need some floppy disc to boot it, or maybe its got an early pxe boot I haven't really had time to look at it yet.

[Asteroid]

Compaq machines usually used a bios that lacked an inbuilt configuration utility like we're used to. Instead it had to be loaded from a floppy disc or sat in a hidden partition on the HDD. The F10 screen on these things would be software, not firmware.

I think this is what you need (also a floppy, ugh).

[bYrd]

Originally Posted by mike-s

Toshiba Libretto 50CT, this is a Pentium 75, and unfortunately has the LBA quirk where it can only go up to about a 8.4gb drive or so, currently running a microdrive pulled from a defunct Ipod in a compact flash -> ide adaptor to increase battery life and also reduce the quantity of heat generated as the battery used to be a massive hotspot on it previously. It runs alright, currently has Win98 on it. I would like to get my hands on a memory upgrade to get it to a whopping 32meg of ram, but as this is from the era where custom memory form-factors were common, this can be a pain in the arse to get hold of. I'll get one eventually though.

I've a 70CT, which is overclocked to 166Mhz MMX, and you can get around the 8GB limit by formatting 8GB, leaving ~ 100MB free space, then format the rest. The hiberation file sits at the end of the first 8GB partition, so if you format over that data corruption will occur. I've a 30GB drive in mine, but like you plan on putting a solid state/small microdrive in there.

The RAM is hard to find - a year or so ago there was a seller on eBay with the requisite 16MB module; I held out for the last one and got it cheap, and sold my existing 8MB module for twice as much With this amount of RAM, it runs Win98SE nicely, and any DOS game you can throw at it.

JB

[FuzzyKaos]

Originally Posted by bYrd

I've a 70CT, which is overclocked to 166Mhz MMX, and you can get around the 8GB limit by formatting 8GB, leaving ~ 100MB free space, then format the rest. The hiberation file sits at the end of the first 8GB partition, so if you format over that data corruption will occur. I've a 30GB drive in mine, but like you plan on putting a solid state/small microdrive in there.

The RAM is hard to find - a year or so ago there was a seller on eBay with the requisite 16MB module; I held out for the last one and got it cheap, and sold my existing 8MB module for twice as much With this amount of RAM, it runs Win98SE nicely, and any DOS game you can throw at it.

JB

hehe ive got stacks of that ram :P EDO if im not mistaken.

Scroll up to look at the picture I posted, 128gb o ram, mine ALL MINE, MUHAHAHA!

[WooKiE_MaN]

I remember i used to own a Dual P3 System. It had Dual P3 1GB Slot loading. 4GB of PC 133 RAM. FOr shits and giggles i remember i put a PCI RAID card in running 4x 80G RAID0. Video card running was a 6800GS or something, but it was a good card..

I installed Windows XP and run steam

Believe it or not it run quite well. it run 1280x1024 resultion playing some CSS and Day of Defeat source.

About a 2 week laters i ended up selling it