Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

[Topcat]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

those round ide cables cause crosstalk.

fascinating, considering I've used those for over 15 years and never once had a problem. The blue one is scsi. Hell, I have some nifty 50-pin round scsi cables as well, those came out of some IBM servers. Theres one in this system as well. Not really sure how or why crosstalk would be a factor with one of those versus a wadded up or folded or even a perfectly flat ribbon....and since I've never experienced it, I don't know what to say.

***EDIT***
I just burned an ISO to a CD with this system (DBAN). These burners don't have buffer underrun protection. No errors, I didn't make a coaster. No crosstalk would be a safe assumption, as anything that would have interrupted the data flow would have ended in an instacoaster.

[stj]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

on the ribbon cable,every other wire is usually ground to prevent crosstalk on long runs.
by rolling or squeezing them together you place the signal wires against each other.

it's mostly a problem on really long cables.

[kc8adu]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

damm too bad the zip isnt scsi

[stj]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

but can you till get functioning disks?

[Topcat]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

damm too bad the zip isnt scsi

I have a 100mb SCSI zip drive, but its had the "click of death", so it doesn't work... The Zip250 was never available in a scsi interface.

[Topcat]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

I downgraded Firefox to v15.xx, as 40 just sucked too much CPU. 15 performs awesome, it was a prior-to-the-big-facelift version. smooth as silk. With the voodoo3500, I also turned on all the XP eye candy, also smooth as silk....makes me kinda miss mainstream XP.



Ok, I probably wasted more time on this than I should have....but it was fun!

[Sparkey55]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

I downgraded Firefox to v15.xx, as 40 just sucked too much CPU. 15 performs awesome, it was a prior-to-the-big-facelift version. smooth as silk. With the voodoo3500, I also turned on all the XP eye candy, also smooth as silk....makes me kinda miss mainstream XP.



Ok, I probably wasted more time on this than I should have....but it was fun!

Hey, anything with windows XP is never a waste of time imho!

[ratdude747]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

on the ribbon cable,every other wire is usually ground to prevent crosstalk on long runs.
by rolling or squeezing them together you place the signal wires against each other.

it's mostly a problem on really long cables.

That's only true for 80pin IDE cables. 40pin cables only have a handful (at most) grounds. That's also why 80pin came into being, crosstalk issues.

That said, good round cables do work as they uses twists and other means of mitigate crosstalk. Some are shielded as well which adds noise protection.

And then you have old SCSI cables (68pin IIRC?) that had laminated ribbons with twisted pairs every 3 inches or so (guessing on the spacing)... talk about crosstalk mitigation...

[Topcat]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

That's only true for 80pin IDE cables. 40pin cables only have a handful (at most) grounds. That's also why 80pin came into being, crosstalk issues.

That said, good round cables do work as they uses twists and other means of mitigate crosstalk. Some are shielded as well which adds noise protection.

And then you have old SCSI cables (68pin IIRC?) that had laminated ribbons with twisted pairs every 3 inches or so (guessing on the spacing)... talk about crosstalk mitigation...

This. the 80-wire rounded cable is twisted pairs + shielded, as are all the scsi ones. I know crosstalk to be a factor on a longer cable, as STJ mentioned...but I've never seen or even heard of it being an issue with anything this short. the blue scsi one is a good 3ft long, and even that one never had any issues. I've had these cables for ages, not even sure if they can be bought anymore....probably not much demand for SCSI and PATA cables anymore.

[Uranium-235]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

I would of loved to have that in high school. Before I had the confidence to build my own my parents got me a tiger p3 667 256m 40gb voodoo3 cd drive for $1400 (1999)

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

PlayStation emulation would rock on that system with a Voodoo 3, likely will even with Gran Turismo 2.

And Nintendo 64 emulation with Super Mario 64 and Snowboard Kids possibly can run full speed. Definitely not with Goldeneye! Goldeneye is hard to emulate. Goldeneye needs a ton of CPU!

A Voodoo3x should rock with Super Mario 64 and Snowboard Kids. Possibly The Legend Of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time as well!

Nintendo 64 emulation requires at least 600 Mhz for anything to run full speed with recompiler.

OTOH, it don't even have to try for SNES games to work well, those don't need more than a Pentium 166.

For Halo 1x, it probably has a check to see if the PIII is at least 733 Mhz, because that's what the original XBox's PIII frequency was. Halo 1 requires an OC or a modded config file and the video upgraded to at least a GeForce 2.

[Uranium-235]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

At goodwill I managed to get them to "get rid of an old voodoo5 5500" untested for $10.

Still have it. It works

[Sparkey55]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

At goodwill I managed to get them to "get rid of an old voodoo5 5500" untested for $10.

Still have it. It works

They did not know what they had. Around here the SA "Thrift Stores" have employees check eBay for the consumer electronics prices, sometimes you get things cheap most times I walk out laughing shaking my head. But I got all of my Voodoo5 cards on eBay years ago before the prices went up.

[Topcat]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

At goodwill I managed to get them to "get rid of an old voodoo5 5500" untested for $10.

Still have it. It works

I got a Mint condition Dell u3011 30" 16:10 monitor from them in a similar manner. They thought it was a TV. Tag said "No remote, no sound, $50.00"

[ratdude747]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

They did not know what they had. Around here the SA "Thrift Stores" have employees check eBay for the consumer electronics prices, sometimes you get things cheap most times I walk out laughing shaking my head. But I got all of my Voodoo5 cards on eBay years ago before the prices went up.

Yeah around here you have to outsmart them as the usually overprice things thinking people will pay AS-IS ebay prices + markup out of the goodness of their hearts.

That said, I did nab a like-new 1.5 year old Acer 20" 16:9 LCD a month ago.

---

I also have a Voodoo3 2000 PCI brand new still sealed in box (with shrink-wrap intact). I got in a van-load of free computer parts many years ago and knew not to open in as it may have value down the road?

[Uranium-235]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

I got a linksys srw2048 for $5 because it was freezing. Took it home, 22 bloated 'stone' brand caps. Got new nichicons from tc and took an hour and a half replacing them. Used it in a shop for 3 years straight, not a single lockup

[Per Hansson]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

They did not know what they had. Around here the SA "Thrift Stores" have employees check eBay for the consumer electronics prices, sometimes you get things cheap most times I walk out laughing shaking my head. But I got all of my Voodoo5 cards on eBay years ago before the prices went up.

I got a Voodoo5 5500 PCI with DVI (the MAC version) flashed with a PC BIOS.
It worked great and I got it for a good price on eBay, but it's been lost for several years now.
I'm mad about that, miss my nice card!

[Topcat]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

The makings of another one....





I did rescue a GPU...and scored 4gb ECC PC133 off fleabay for 13 bucks shipped.

[Topcat]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

...and here we go... The icing on the retro system thread... The case, maybe not so retro, but its guts are, so close enough.

System Specs:
2x 1.4GHz P3 Tualatin-S's
4GB RAM
ATI HD4650 1GB AGP
Adaptec 2100S SCSI RAID Controller
Audigy2
2x 147gb Seagate 15k RPM U160 HDD's in a RAID1



It wouldn't be a good build unless there was a case mod involved.

The corner of the 5.25 cage was too close for the motherboard to clear, since it was a trifle too long for the case. Its not an eATX board, but its longer than the standard ATX, and it interfered with the cage.



Nothing the die grinder couldn't cure!!







Now we're cookin'!!







All put together.



Win7 on the way.



Up & running.



This is the oldest core hardware I've ever put win7 on, runs surprisingly well.

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

oh wow. that system is just so drool worthy. would want a system like that to put win95 and winnt 3.1, 3.5, 3.51 or 4 in a dual boot config. the p3 1.4ghz is the fastest pentium 3 they ever came out with right? would be nice benchmarking that rig side by side with a pentium 4 and seeing how much efficient the p3 is clock for clock against the p4.