What retro things have you done today?

@hohum I can certainly replace the surface mount capacitor and reflow the GPU and RAM as well as take a look at the rest of the board under the microscope.

@LewisRaz I'll happily take a look at the motherboard, if I get it fixed you can have it back.

Here's how my V3 looks now:

v3-heatsink4.jpg


And I've made up (and braided) a 4-way fan to molex adapter, 2x 12v fan leads (the grey braided) and 2x 5v fan leads (white braided). CPU fan is still fast enough on 5v! Voodoo3 is connected to a 12v lead.

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That's great, thanks! Will trust you in a bit. Cooler replacement looks decent, can't tell from the pics but did you use the existing mounting holes or thermal epoxy?
 
hohum said:
That's great, thanks! Will trust you in a bit. Cooler replacement looks decent, can't tell from the pics but did you use the existing mounting holes or thermal epoxy?
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Thermal epoxy (but only in the corners), normal Thermal Grizzly hydronaut in the middle (so it’ll not be impossible to remove if I want to fit the original cooler).

I had to remove the mounts from that cooler so there was a slot in the cooler to allow for the crystal. I also had to shave the bottom edge of the cooler so it missed the AGP slot! The GPU is really low/close to the edge connector on the V3.
 
LewisRaz said:
Ah man that looks really neat!

I have just ordered some blank io shields so I can cut them for the 2 PS2 ports and have a nice, neat rear... :)
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I’ve done the same for this k6-iii machine. I only need the one hole for the 6-pin DIN, but it’s not in the same place as the AT to ATX backplates you can buy, so I’ll be DIY’ing it with a hole saw once the blank arrives.
 
Thought it might be interesting to see where people work on their retro stuff before it's finished. This is my "retrobench" in the garage. You can see my bench power supply, a battery charger capable of charging rechargeable lithium and NiMH cells, my hot air station, my soldering iron, my desk lamp and most importantly my CRT and P233-MMX machine (where I try parts). Out of shot is a test AT and ATX PSU for powering stuff up on the bench.

Most of the tray drawers have screws, bolts, retro parts (like RAM, BIOS chips, CPUs, etc) as well as useful bits like heatshrink, dupont connectors, molex connectors, offcuts of PSU cable, etc.

retro-garage.jpg
 
Yeah I'd say that's a pretty comprehensive work area, haha. I'd love to have an area I could dedicate to working on stuff with everything at hand, but I just don't have the space for it unfortunately. Quite a few of my projects have been built on the dining room table actually!
 
Thats a really nice work area! Quite jealous!

I am confined to the area under the stairs... This is in our lounge however so my wife is very understanding! This can look much worse when things are going on.



usually the 4:3 monitor would be on top of the dryer and there would only be 1 retro pc under the desk but I am between about 3 projects right now!
 
My retro activity this weekend was to put my new SFX PSU in that old tiny case, and see what sort of system I wanted to build from there. Unfortunately it only takes the "narrow" kind of M-ATX board so only my 775 socket would fit, and not really "feeling" that kind of build right now.

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I also tested out my 800MHz Slot 1 CPU, which works fine. I transplanted my "good" cooler from my 650 chip onto it but doctors were unfortunately unable to save the brittle intel stock cooler. I've now got a 650MHz CPU with no cooler; I think I'll try to find a scrap P3 somewhere.

Ibuilt a Windows XP PC in the 'old faithful' case so I can play No One Lives Forever 2 and BF1942 and wrarp up that First Person Shooter project I started a year or more ago. It's my 2GHz Athlon 64 and 2GB of RAM with my Audigy 2 ZS and overkill but quiet and internally powered GTX645. Hopefully fast enough for a little spotify, youtube and eBay whilst at work this week.

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I am in a very lucky position that bought our first house last year but don't have any kids so I basically have bedroom 2 for all my crap. My work area is just my desk as I don't really do anything intense. I've got a garage that coincidentally we spent all Saturday emptying into a skip so I can actually do some drilling (need a dremel really) and I could finally use my soldering iron if I needed to.

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Also coincedentally I had some shelves arrive from IKEA (no box, they just dumped a load of wood outside the drive, but it was all there so who cares) so now I have enough storage space for all my retro (and modern, and consoles) junk... with space to expand the collection :p Yes it is leaning, I think it is slightly un-straight and the floor is also not quite level and they've combined to be very not straight...

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Today I'll try to find a "narrow" MATX motherboard for that Tiny case. I'm thinking Socket 7 to Socket 478... or AM4 maybe!
 
cee-S-dee said:
I've been messing about with this Asus P5PE-VM over the past day. My intentions are to run a Dual Boot Win98/XP setup with it. It has a Xeon X3220 installed (Microcode added to Bios), 2 GiG Corsair 3500LL Ram and I'm running a Radeon 850XT PE card.

Installed Win98 SE along with the RLOWE (RIP) Memory patch to allow 2 gig. He also has a interesting AHCI patch for Win 98 i'm going to try out.
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Nice. I wasn't thinking retro particularly when I grabbed a Gigabyte GA-G41M-ES2L mainly for Amithlon (an Amiga-emulation kinda) but I found out I can put Win2000 (one of my favourite OS) on it and I had a 2008 vintage HD 4670 which some clever person has modded drivers for to support Win2K, so by accident I now have a W2K retro system. Couldn't resist OC the CPU (E5700 dual core) to 3.8GHz (so far) and will be OC the GPU also. Should see some crazy FPS from retro games.

Need to sort a case though.. any retro ideas anyone?
 
Been playing with the K6-III machine today, overclocking, tweaking and testing performance (3DMark 99 MAX).

CPU (as to be expected from a non + K6-2/III) didn’t clock hard. Will boot stably at 500MHz with a 0.1v increase on vcore (up to 2.5v), and will POST at 550MHz at 2.5v, but no amount of vcore (only tested up to the known safe maximum of 2.7v) will make it boot to Windows. It will boot at 523MHz (95x5.5), but I get instabilities likely caused by the out of spec PCI/AGP bus speeds.

My RAM is however happy at CAS 2 (the only memory timings I can change on this board).

I do however appear to be getting **** poor performance with the Voodoo 3. Even clocked to 175MHz I’m getting far worse performance than I can find on Vogons to compare to (for reference, I’m getting around 55-60% of the performance of a PII-450 machine running a stock V3 3000), my fillrates in particular are shocking on 3DMark99 MAX.

I’ve tried both the latest official drivers and the AmigaWizard drivers without any real difference, though I’m certain it must be driver issues.

Any Voodoo users got any tips? I’ve not used this Voodoo 3 since around 2005 so most of my knowledge is long gone.
 
Today I did "baby's first case mod" and mounted my AT switch into an ATX case (genuinely the first time I've done anything to a case other than point it). I wanted to put it on the front but couldn't find a way to route it through the metal and onto the plastic easily, so it's on top. I'll sand down the holes a little and call it a day.

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For your Voodoo I would use early drivers not late drivers - Vogons will surely have pretty much every version on their Drive Database. Are you using W98 Unofficial Service Pack 3? Apparently that can give issues too. Can you tell if it is a GPU or CPU/"anything but the GPU" bottleneck? Have a look at Anandtech's review to see how you compare to the review performance (or their review of something like the TNT2 or even GeForce SDR to see how it 'matured' with later drivers).

https://www.anandtech.com/show/272/13

You could also compare your performance straight against this Anantech post where they did a K3-450 with a V3 3000...

https://www.anandtech.com/show/647/11
 
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Thanks @almoststew1990, I’m pretty certain it’s a GPU bottleneck as the CPU score in 3DMark99 MAX is suitably higher than the P2-450 I’m comparing against, yet my fillrate scores are around half if not less.

It’s a vanilla 98SE install, no unofficial (or official at this point) updates, nor any tweaks/hacks as I’m sticking under the RAM limit for this build.

I’ve tried the Voodoo 3 drivers from my Voodoo 3 CD, yes I’ve got the driver disk, as well as the latest official and the latest unofficial from AmigaMerlin. Not sure I’m running the best version of via 4-in-1 at v4.43, but it’s compatible with the MVP3 chipset and 98SE.

I’m lacking an age appropriate AGP card to test with other than this Voodoo 3, my next oldest card is a GF4 ti4200. I do have a Geforce 2 PRO en-route though, so can hopefully test with that by the end of the week to rule out the system being problematic as a whole.

Always nice to break your casemod cherry, you’ll be dremelling away like a trooper in no time!
 
I am finding the performance of my k6-3 lacklustre too but put it down to the jankiness of the setup.
Dungeon keeper was really choppy when a lot was going on. I originally played this on a DX4 so on this it should be butter!
My sonic and knuckles collection is really inconsistent too when in fullscreen. Sims 1 is unplayable even tho I exceed minimum and recommended specs.

I think I read today on vogons that the 3dnow in the amd cpus boosted the 3dmark scores when in reality they arent as good as the scores suggest.
 
Methanoid said:
Nice. I wasn't thinking retro particularly when I grabbed a Gigabyte GA-G41M-ES2L mainly for Amithlon (an Amiga-emulation kinda) but I found out I can put Win2000 (one of my favourite OS) on it and I had a 2008 vintage HD 4670 which some clever person has modded drivers for to support Win2K, so by accident I now have a W2K retro system. Couldn't resist OC the CPU (E5700 dual core) to 3.8GHz (so far) and will be OC the GPU also. Should see some crazy FPS from retro games.

Need to sort a case though.. any retro ideas anyone?
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if you look on ebay there is a retro m-atx case by a Company called Acme. Its pretty reasonably priced too.

Benchmarked my Radeon 850XT on the Xeon machine today. Fair to say it has no problems with 3D Mark 2000/2001SE :D:D:D

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paradigm said:
Tried with 256MB (1x256MB) and 512MB (2x256MB). I guess I could trawl through the loft to find a 128MB stick.
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Ive got some on my desk if you want one chucked in before your parcel is collected tomorrow.

I got 5472 CPU 3dmarks at 401mhz.
The nearest thing I have on my chart is a 600mhz P3 that got 9200.
 
LewisRaz said:
Ive got some on my desk if you want one chucked in before your parcel is collected tomorrow.

I got 5472 CPU 3dmarks at 401mhz.
The nearest thing I have on my chart is a 600mhz P3 that got 9200.
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Nah, I’m ok for RAM, I’ve got a bucketload in the loft, I just have to find it.

You are getting more CPU marks at 401MHz than I’m getting at 500! What RAM are you running, and what GPU?

I could swap in my K6-2 350 I guess.
 
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