Soldering iron and retro hardware

[vlad01]

Yeah mine's retro. 2003, had PCI and AGP.

Anything pre PCIe in my eyes is retro. Your stuff is more vintage I reckon.

[Ken]

Yeah mine's retro. 2003, had PCI and AGP.

Anything pre PCIe in my eyes is retro. Your stuff is more vintage I reckon.

Yeah you're probably right, I keep forgetting the car I own is now also considered vintage.

[antus]

Cyrix were pretty good until the pentium came along. I upgraded my AMD 486dx4/100 to a cyrix 586 back in the day, then overclocked it up to 120mhz. It wasnt stable but it started becoming more stable so I kept using it and after a week or two it was fine. I assume the cpu must have had some spare hardware in it, and maybe the bits that couldnt handle 120mhz were disabled... I dont know for sure, but it was pretty quick vs a 386 or 486. Then when the pentiums came out, software that needed floating point started gaining popularity and the 586 just could no longer keep up. I remember playing around with mp3s when they first came out. Clean up 50% of my 120mb hard drive, rip a single track to wav, then encode at 128kbit which took a day, with this crappy integer maths only software encoder. People with pentiums were smashing out way higher quality mp3s due to the floating point maths and they were doing it way faster!

Speaking of, I kept that 486 cpu and have it on my desk at work right now. I love how it says heatsink and fan required. Such a new concept!

[ejukated]

Ahh the old AM486-DX4-100 !

I lost track of how many of those BIOS backup Batteries next to the AT connector I've replaced due to leaking or blowing up.

[Ken]

You could buy the 486 120mhz AMDs, from there they became DX5's then 5x86-133 and 160mhz.
I ran the chip third from the left for a few years on a mini AT 486 board, Abit PB4, the only 486 I'd seen that gave option to boot from a CD, though only from the F2 bios update.
I beta tested early Windows builds on it, I'd run the cpu at the 4x33 bus to install, then set the bus to 40 to run it at 160 mhz, never had a single issue with it.
Just couldn't install windows overclocked, would lock up at random stages of install, which it often never recovered from.

AM_5x86_133.JPG

Ahh the old AM486-DX4-100 !

I lost track of how many of those BIOS backup Batteries next to the AT connector I've replaced due to leaking or blowing up.

Nearly every 386/486 board I've scrapped over the years has been for that reason, all the motherboard circuit tracks would turn green with corrosion, so bad in some cases that keyboards or other functions stopped working altogether.

[vlad01]

I always liked the AMD , Cyrix, ST and Texas Instruments variants as they were so much more interesting than the bog standard intel variants at the time.

Only intel of the period I find interesting and like is the pentium pro as it is the farther of modern CPUs with it's out of order execution, branch perdition and writeback cache, modern pipelines etc. The very stuff the modern intel and AMD CPUs use today.

To this day the Althon 64 was my fav architecture. And the good old Athlon XP.... mmmm Athlon

[Gareth]

Should probably rename this tread 'retro PC porn'

Hey Ant, what's the busted axle from?..

[vlad01]

My collection of unused parts.

5 AMD Opterons, 2 Althon XP 3200+ (modded) and a mediocre flagship 1st gen Phenom, my first bad CPU.

And one dead BFG nvidia 6800 Ultra OC AGP board. BFG a legendary company that no longer exists, killed off by nvidia's own dirty practices

I got more but they are in stuff atm. Phenom II x945 and 2 more dual core Opterons. I had some de-lidded broken intel xeons but chucked them out as they were netburst architecture, no one wants netburst

IMG_0650.JPG

[antus]

I liked the Athlon64x2. I had one of them for many many years and by the end of it speed was still good but limiting factor was that the motherboard chipset supported only 2G ram max.

@biggvl - its the other end of this viewtopic.php?f=16&t=651&start=10#p59299

[ejukated]

Should probably rename this tread 'retro PC porn'

Can we split it and rename the split? This brings back memories, would be good to be able to.easily find it in the future