# perC's retro computer hardware corner



## The red spirit

This is a place for posting old news, benchmarks, articles, videos, personal stories, comparisons and etc. It's all about computer hardware, which can be considered retro. Currently the most modern "retro" hardware is something like Core 2 Quad or AMD Phenom II. Anything newer than that is too modern.

Anyway, just *have fun*.roud:


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## The red spirit

Old THG (Tom's Hardware Germany) videos:


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## The red spirit

Old THG (Tom's hardware Germany) videos:


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## The red spirit

AMD Athlon 64 reviews:
https://www.tomshardware.co.uk/amd,review-770.html
https://techreport.com/review/5683/amd-athlon-64-processor
https://www.anandtech.com/show/1164
https://www.pcworld.com/article/112603/article.html

Athlon 64 wikis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athlon_64
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Athlon_64_microprocessors


Overclocking guides:
[M] AMD Athlon 64 General Overclocking Guide
https://www.techpowerup.com/articles/overclocking/AMD/138
https://www.hardwaresecrets.com/athlon-64-overclocking/

Box + contents:

























Example of AMD Athlon 64:









AMD Athlon 64's stock cooler:


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## The red spirit

Retro computer builds:


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## The red spirit

Computer port and connector guides:
Beginners Guides: PC Ports, Connectors and Sockets - PCSTATS.com
https://www.ramelectronics.net/connecters.aspx


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## The red spirit

Old Creative Audigy 2 ZS review:
Creative Audigy2 ZS Sound Card Review

Photo:


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## The red spirit

Not exactly hardware stuff, but explanation of how hardware works, so it belongs here too:





Modtracker music example:





Some more history of sound hardware:
http://www.computernostalgia.net/articles/HistoryofSoundCards.htm
https://tedium.co/2018/05/10/sound-blaster-history/

Some further explanation of audio hardware specifications (still applicable today):
https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/...ding-audio-specifications-and-hardware.64921/

Very technical videos of digital sound:


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## Euclid




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## Euclid

Also fun channel on youtube involving old school video games, emulators, compilers, ASM and C/C++ programming, modules etc, nostalgia if you grew up in the 80s/90s
https://www.youtube.com/user/Bisqwit/videos


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## The red spirit

Bit of history about Pentium 2 CPUs:


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## Mick Travis

People who are able to work with old computers are my heroes. The planet has a ton of discarded hardware to be utilized.

View attachment 812507


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## The red spirit

Mick Travis said:


> People who are able to work with old computers are my heroes. The planet has a ton of discarded hardware to be utilized.
> 
> View attachment 812507


https://www.personalitycafe.com/science-technology/1160874-athlonium-64-a.html :wink:


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## Mick Travis

The red spirit said:


> https://www.personalitycafe.com/science-technology/1160874-athlonium-64-a.html :wink:


Thank you. I knew of the thread. This one appeals to me more.


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## The red spirit

Ever wondered what name GeForce meant? Maximum PC did investigation in 2002 and at first used dictionary to look up meanings of words Ge and Force, which turned out to mean Extinct South American tribe that is powerful. Of course it didn't make sense, so they asked their readers and they all wrote jokes about money spent and great performance of those cards. Finally they decided to contact staff of nVidia and the official meaning was actually Geometry Force shortened into Ge + Force, in the end just being GeForce. And the story doesn't end here just yet. Turns out such name was given to their first card that could do hardware Transform and Lighting which truly helped a lot in rendering geometry faster than ever before.

In 2000 Maximum PC explained how 3D Graphics are rendered on PC. First of all CPU generates instructions for scene, giving "list" of things GPU must do and then we have infamous Transformation process (quoting straight from Maximum PC magazine):
"The next challenge is to transform the multiple 3D models referenced in these instructions (scene generation stage), so that they all exist in the same screen space. The GeForce 2 does this by using a dedicated transformation engine to process millions of matrix calculations per second. Those calculations mathematically spin, scale, twist, and rotate a 3D object to proper screen orientation. The output from the transformation process is a stream of screen-space verticles (points located in 3D space) that makes up a scene. This is where out 3D model gets shrunk down to fill a few inches of screen space, and planted firmly onto a surface."

Quote form Maximum PC magazine about next step in rendering, Lighting: 
"Next, the GeForce 2 turns the lights on. Each model that the CPU delivers to the GeForce 2 can be lit by up to eights hardware accelerated lights, through most games (including Quake III) still do a lot of their advanced lighting by using "software" techniques such as light-maps. Even in carrying out just these basic light calculations, the GeForce 2's lighting engine helps unload an overworked CPU. The lighting engine uses the color, type (ambient, directional, point, or spotlight), and location of each enabled light to calculate the amount and color of the illumination reaching each vertex. These calculated values are stamped onto the verticles as they flow by. Once the work of the lighting engine is complete, our fully lit box is handed off to setup engine."

In the past nVidia was known for giving names to their cards. The famous one was TNT. It meant Twin Texel. Magazines were talking about explosive performance of those cards (they were fast) and nVidia made Detonator drivers for cards. Later we had TNT 2 video cards and after TNT era driver name Detonator" was changed into "Forceware".

After Geforce there hasn't been any major renaming of nVidia's consumer graphics cards. With time they got rid of names like Ultra, GTS, GT, FX and etc. Only leaving addition to Geforce, the "GTX" to live. Ironically latest nVidia cards lost their GTX addition in favour for RTX, which is all about shadows (rays). This is how nVidia turned from 'bright' company into 'dark' one.

If we get back to GeForce name itself and hardware T&L, we can see that just after GeForce 1, 2 and maybe 3 T&L already started to lose popularity as term as many cards could do it. Pretty much after 3DMark 2001 SE, average gamer barely had any chances of ever again meeting T&L term ever again, yet the GeForce name lived long after that.


Some demos of what GeForce 256 could do:













BTW GeForce 256 was world's first GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) as well as nVidia's first GeForce card. SO it's possible to interpret name of GeForce as nVidia's line of consumer focused GPUs.


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## Mick Travis

I cut my teeth on Crystal...






All my recorded work was stolen by a roommate on his way out. I'm guessing he thought he could use it to get a job. He may have just been upset with my persistent heterosexuality. He was a diva.

I had left the field due to the cocaine use and business like atmosphere.


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## The red spirit

Mick Travis said:


> I cut my teeth on Crystal...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> All my recorded work was stolen by a roommate on his way out. I'm guessing he thought he could use it to get a job. He may have just been upset with my persistent heterosexuality. He was a diva.
> 
> I had left the field due to the cocaine use and business like atmosphere.


I still think that company BitBoys had one of the most underrated graphics hardware prototypes.

Their demo looked like this:









In 1999. They had actual hardware (Glaze 3D graphics cards) running for their demo.

Sadly it was one time hit and we never heard of them ever before. Maybe ATI bought their tech, but still no graphics hardware manufacturer wasn't close to this level of realism for several years.


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## Mick Travis

I recorded animation overnight to a U-matic. The controller was designed by the owner. The commercial units were built in his garage.

I just looked up that company...

http://www.bcdusa.com/


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## Antiloop

As I read the title of the thread I was wondering how recent'd count as retro today. Not too surprised to see Athlon 64 mentioned. The first processor I ever bought. Still have the cooler that came with it around and actually used it last year for a project not related to computers. A bit surprised to see Phenom II mentioned though. I'm still using it in my computer.



Another Tom's Hardware video:


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## The red spirit

Antiloop said:


> As I read the title of the thread I was wondering how recent'd count as retro today. Not too surprised to see Athlon 64 mentioned. The first processor I ever bought. Still have the cooler that came with it around and actually used it last year for a project not related to computers. A bit surprised to see Phenom II mentioned though. I'm still using it in my computer.


I just didn't knew how to define eras of topic, so I decided to not be very picky. Mentally I see 3 categories of hardware, current, aged and vintage. I try to remove word obsolete, because it can be used very widely. Some would say that first gen i7 is obsolete, yet I can say that Athlon 64 is still not obsolete. Whatever. 

In the end I just used some logic, if hardware is new and talked about, also popular it's not retro. If hardware isn't forgotten, being talked about and is still widely used it's not retro yet. Then we have hardware that is forgotten, no one talks about and is now rarely used. It can still be useful and quite powerful, but quite often such hardware has aged. 

Phenom II has a vibe of older days, now no new hardware uses name Phenom, nor Sempron. The history of it was a bit unclear at times and AMD had tendency to support sockets for several generations of processors. Phenom II is mostly forgotten, not being talked about and it wasn't very popular in its whole lifetime. Meanwhile Core 2 Quad is much more popular, despite being mostly worse in terms of speed and core count. Even then both CPUs haven't been made for a long time and finally Core 2 Quad started to show its age in gaming loads. Phenom II X6 aged better due to more cores. Still they are both quite old now and some people actually grew up with these things, soon they will start building retro computers based on them. 

As I said I didn't want to be nazi of what is retro and what isn't, so I included some things that aren't very retro yet, but soon will be so. Core 2 series is sure vintage, knowing how many generations of CPUs came after it. AMD was slower and had less generation, but Phenom II is quite old now.

Those were great CPUs and likely still are, but probably now almost no one would build a computer using it. 

Feelings aside, but this XP PC is in retro computer channel:





Clint did some other videos with it and pretty much talks like it's some sort of retrospective.

While our computational power needs have slowed down a lot, fastest hardware is way beyond Core 2 stuff and Phenom II.

I pretty much grew up in era of Athlons X2s, Phenom X4s and etc. It feels somewhat nostalgic to me. They were and still are often sights in schools and other institutions. I guess time flies fast and it's sometimes hard to realize how old some things are. I think original retro people just wanted to relive their own memories of specific computer eras. I would like to relive Phenom II and Core 2 era, it has that sort of appeal. Many people probably replaced computers of such vintage already so they starting to become rarer. Meanwhile things like Pentium II or AMD K6 they feel ancient to me. And 8086 and AM8086 feel prehistoric. Yet they all are welcome here in this thread. Perhaps for someone to relive good old times, enjoy them a bit more. 

Fun fact:
My main computer's and HTPC's desktop background is Phenom II purple arrow without any logos. It looks really good on IPS screens. 

I remember in car forums someone discussing if BMW E36 can ever be considered as vintage car like E30. Many people didn't knew that as they were old, but really well known and still often used by masses. Yet in 70s, 50s car would definitely would be considered as vintage. I guess the same effect is here.



Antiloop said:


> Another Tom's Hardware video:


I thought it was a part of longer video, I guess I was wrong then. Thanks for addition. I love old Tom's Hardware videos.


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## contradictionary

Holy crap, istp, you made me want to keep my phenom ii x4 machine forever. 

Good ol time, eh. I remember wasting hours and days to tweak my fsb, multiplier, voltage, timing, even finetuning my fans to better follow the thermal dynamics.

Hmmm... but that ryzen 2700x does look juicy. That or threadripper 2920... add the upcoming radeon 590... or the excellent valuedl radeon 56.

But for ol time sake, i still don't have time to game anymore :sigh:

_Sent sans PC_


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## Mick Travis

contradictionary said:


> i still don't have time to game anymore :sigh:


Computers can do much more than game.


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## contradictionary

Mick Travis said:


> Computers can do much more than game.


Sure, mike. That's why i still use my 9 years old phenom ii x4 machine. It's still work perfectly and plenty fast for all my current computing needs. And it already upgraded to win10 latest build. All is well.

I don't do render or encoding but if i need to do it, i just left the machine running on script overnight. All is well.

I very much agree to OP, he tried to persuade people not to be impulsive on technological purchase.

_Sent sans PC_


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## Mick Travis

contradictionary said:


> 9 years old phenom ii x4


There are some worthwhile games to run on it.


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## ae1905

*What Does It Take To Keep a Classic IBM 1401 Mainframe Alive?*


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## The red spirit

contradictionary said:


> Holy crap, istp, you made me want to keep my phenom ii x4 machine forever.
> 
> Good ol time, eh. I remember wasting hours and days to tweak my fsb, multiplier, voltage, timing, even finetuning my fans to better follow the thermal dynamics.
> 
> Hmmm... but that ryzen 2700x does look juicy. That or threadripper 2920... add the upcoming radeon 590... or the excellent valuedl radeon 56.
> 
> But for ol time sake, i still don't have time to game anymore :sigh:
> 
> _Sent sans PC_


In my country Ryzen 1700 is 200 euros and i7 8600K is 479 euros. LMAO

RX 570 8GB is 191 euros, RX 580 8GB is 228 euros, GTX 6GB is 250 euros, GTX 1050 Ti 4GB is 173 euros. nVidia's and Intels competition only meant AMD's payday here.

In the end I don't really think you will miss anything if you skip this era. I tried Far Cry 5 and it's just nothing special. FC 4 or FC 3 were better.

BTW that Phenom X4 is still fine, if you have beefier graphcis card liek RX 580 you could try to ramp up resolution and settings and I think Phenom wouldn't be much of bottleneck.

I just want to ask, why did you call me ISTP?


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## Mick Travis

jammed...


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## The red spirit

Mick Travis said:


> jammed...


The better:





The best:


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## contradictionary

The red spirit said:


> In my country Ryzen 1700 is 200 euros and i7 8600K is 479 euros. LMAO
> 
> RX 570 8GB is 191 euros, RX 580 8GB is 228 euros, GTX 6GB is 250 euros, GTX 1050 Ti 4GB is 173 euros. nVidia's and Intels competition only meant AMD's payday here.
> 
> In the end I don't really think you will miss anything if you skip this era. I tried Far Cry 5 and it's just nothing special. FC 4 or FC 3 were better.
> 
> BTW that Phenom X4 is still fine, if you have beefier graphcis card liek RX 580 you could try to ramp up resolution and settings and I think Phenom wouldn't be much of bottleneck.
> 
> I just want to ask, why did you call me ISTP?


It's a compliment. You know what you are doing, dedicatedly, in detail. I admire that quality.

That and the fact that we are in the same team. Hail red team!

Edit: show us your rig, please!

_Sent sans PC_


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## The red spirit

contradictionary said:


> That and the fact that we are in the same team. Hail red team!


Sorry to say that, but after reading more about CPU architectures and stuff, I start to think that FX architecture wasn't well thought out. It seems like so many resources are underfed by data and the crucial stuff is just not up to task. And FX CPUs had AMD's long time problem, slow cache with long delays.

Well, at least I tuned it, so it doesn't eat much power and performs quite better. Maybe overclocking does helps to solve some bottlenecks.



contradictionary said:


> Edit: show us your rig, please!


Not sure which one as all 4 computers I have have AMD stuff inside. I guess you meant the main one. You will not be impressed by what you see:








^inside








^It's just been maybe half year at best and the fan is like the, horror. Some 10 year old AMD heatsinks look better without cleaning.








^Scythe Mugen 4 PCGH with 2 Noiseblocker fans. That thing is a beast.








^All my cards. There are at least 4 cards: GPU, sound card, USB 3.0 card, WiFi card.








^Just look at those cables! Brings back bad memories to me. When I did cable managements for the first time. I overdid that to the point that this PC became a thing I wouldn't want to work on. I used more than 100 zip ties to clean up the mess. Sadly there wasn't big mess in the first place and I just overdid whatever I was doing. After this time I decided to never ever care about cable management so much, just using case features like holes to route cables will be fine next time. If you think this isn't so bad, then I can tell you I had to be way too rough with SATA cables and the other side of computer is even more 'organized'. I'm not sure, maybe it looks good to someone to look at manged cables, but for me it's a disaster in terms of usability.








^More cable horror.








^Obviously weird choice to do such thing.








^Shitty picture, but you can see that the case is something straight up from 2012s and if you look better, you can see dust patterns that built up over time. On top of the case is one 80mm fan, I cut out hole for it. Another thing on case is X360 controller dongle, I used to use it, but mostly don't use it anymore. The only games I tried with it was Dirt 4 and some games on Mild Velocity build. Tried Asseto Corsa once, but I didn't like how it behaved.

BTW this rig isn't retro, so it shouldn't be in this thread at least. I guess this time is an exception for off-topic.


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## The red spirit

Best 3DFX mod I have ever seen:


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## The red spirit

Nostalgia post of Bitchin' Fast! 3D 2000


















But can you trust this man with his jokes?









The answer is no:






















It's 2018 and this old card still gets more BungholioMarks than RTX 2080 Ti. You could buy one of these Bitching Fast! cards without any heatsinks, because heatsinks are ugly!


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## The red spirit

If someone was wondering how often branch prediction of CPU cache is correct, then it's about 90% for each level of cache.

The fun discovery I had is that we practically don't need fast memory if cache is working fine. As even at the worst case scenario of all caches mispredicting we would be at 1% probability, when CPU will waste quite a bit cycles in will have to work at abysmal frequency of 16MHz (speed depends on your specific system). So more and faster cache can have bigger benefits than faster RAM. Mind blown!


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## contradictionary

The red spirit said:


> Sorry to say that, but after reading more about CPU architectures and stuff, I start to think that FX architecture wasn't well thought out. It seems like so many resources are underfed by data and the crucial stuff is just not up to task. And FX CPUs had AMD's long time problem, slow cache with long delays.
> 
> Well, at least I tuned it, so it doesn't eat much power and performs quite better. Maybe overclocking does helps to solve some bottlenecks.
> 
> 
> Not sure which one as all 4 computers I have have AMD stuff inside. I guess you meant the main one. You will not be impressed by what you see:


Ahh, thanks. Is that a coolermaster haf case, if yes, you are such a value hunter. Because i use the slightly smaller one, in red h: It came with bundled ps which are so reliable and more than enough juice to rock.

That beast scythe mugen is awesome indeed, kind of remind me of the megahalem.

Soo all your rigs are amd, haha, now i remember one of the reason why i haven't upgrade for so long was precisely because of what you said, bulldozers sucks big time.

I think i need to upgrade now to ryzen 2, simply for the reason of supporting amd. 



The red spirit said:


> If someone was wondering how often branch prediction of CPU cache is correct, the nit's about 90% for each level of cache.
> 
> The fun discovery I had is that we practically don't need fast memory if cache is working fine. As even at the worst case scenario of all caches mispredicting we would be at 1% probability, when CPU will waste quite a bit cycles in will have to work at abysmal frequency of 16MHz (speed depends on your specific system). So more and faster cache can have bigger benefits than faster RAM. Mind blown!


But intel's implementation on unprivileged branch prediction had come with expensive security costs with the meltdown, spectre and their newest derivatives emerging like bot spawn.

_Sent sans PC_


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## The red spirit

contradictionary said:


> Ahh, thanks. Is that a coolermaster haf case, if yes, you are such a value hunter. Because i use the slightly smaller one, in red h: It came with bundled ps which are so reliable and more than enough juice to rock.


Well, no, but close enough tbh. It's Cooler Master K (knight) 280. I think it was more budget oriented version of HAFs. My original plan was to upgrade this prebuilt (yes it once was a prebuilt) and initially I wanted Fractal Design Define R4, but it was quite costly. I kept looking at Cooler Master N400 mostly, as it offered a lot at very low price. It was better deal than any HAF could ever be. But soon I noticed Cooler Master's K series. K280 was the cheapest case with everything I needed. So I saved a lot of cash and got good enough product. I could have bought even Cosmos II, but I just don't like spending too much money on stuff I almost don't need. Cooler Master K280 was a huge upgrade from noname Codegen Qori case I had at first (it even had 500watt noname PSU in there, I upgraded it to FSP 700 watt unit). It's probably laughable now, but a big thing to me was that K280 was the first case, in where I didn't have to worry about overtightening motherboard standoffs. In that Codegen I overtightened a few. Still in K280 I managed to overtighten a few screws, but it was much better.



contradictionary said:


> That beast scythe mugen is awesome indeed, kind of remind me of the megahalem.


It is a beast even with bundled fans. But those two Noiseblocker fans are a nice touch for that huge cooler. They spin 400 rpm faster and give me around 30% airflow increase. That is quite a bit. I don't know if you know, but Noiseblocker fans are decent. They are from small German company, so that's why they are mostly unknown. Still they are very quiet and have good airflow. Signature feature is purple blades or dark brown blades. Der8auer sometimes uses their products too.



contradictionary said:


> Soo all your rigs are amd, haha, now i remember one of the reason why i haven't upgrade for so long was precisely because of what you said, bulldozers sucks big time.


It just happened to be so that all my stuff is AMD, sometimes with some stuff from nVidia. AMD just offers much better deals than Intel, so I naturally my choice is AMD. And all PCs I got from other people are AMD, so yeah.

Bulldozers sucked, but later versions of them sucked less. Even then AMD FX 8150 somehow managed to be fastest CPU for a short time. At least Tom's Hardware says so. With some tweaking and their aggressive pricing, they sold quite well. I remember it was like i3 4130 vs FX 6300 and i5 4440 vs FX 8320 and at high end i7 4770K vs FX 9590. The fun thing is that AMD CPUs were always a bit cheaper in those fights. If I had to choose now the winners of each fight, then they would look like that: FX 6300, FX 8320 and i7 4770K. Even in 2014 it was hard to choose Intel due to lack of cores and IPC at least to me wasn't very convincing. In the end FX 6300 and FX 8320 aged much better than i5 4440 and i3 4130. I would kinda like to see what FX 9590 could do, but it definitely was AMD's madness of CPU. i7 just didn't required super expensive motherboard and insane cooling to do the same or more.




contradictionary said:


> I think i need to upgrade now to ryzen 2, simply for the reason of supporting amd.


That would be a bit unreasonable. If you do work and want improvement, then it would be a big upgrade from Phenom X4, but just for supporting AMD? Nah. I personally don't think that Ryzen are well designed CPUs as they truly have to rely quite a lot on RAM. Good CPU wouldn't need to be like that. Their infinity fabric or whatever isn't well made to work cooperatively with cache and due to such deficiency you better have faster RAM. And in the end result is same as always for AMD. More slower cores than Intel, in such thinking they didn't improve much. Just that this time they have much lower TDP, but you can't overclock them much. If Intels weren't so overpriced, then the best CPU would be 6 core unlocked i5.

If you truly intend to upgrade, then I would advise to wait for next gen Ryzen. After all they are gonna be 7nm and AMD said they will have around 25-30 percent increased IPC, on top of that increased clock speeds. That sounds really good and after a long time AMD would be ahead of Intel. But I'm skeptical and I would just wait until release and some benches. Of course their pricing too.




contradictionary said:


> But intel's implementation on unprivileged branch prediction had come with expensive security costs with the meltdown, spectre and their newest derivatives emerging like bot spawn.


But even after all that stuff and lots of patching Intels are still stronger in single threaded performance. Exactly where they are most competent in.


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## The red spirit

Forgotten Intel technology from the past:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/834/5

They speculated that it would be suitable for 20GHz CPU cooling. Sadly it never was used, but imo i9 9900K could have used it.


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## The red spirit

The most insane air cooler, the Thermalright TRUE copper:









Due to full copper construction it weights a lot:









The whopping 1890 grams. Manufacturer doesn't even recommend mounting it horizontally as it can damage motherboard. Monstrosity.

Here's a review of it (it was the best thing around back then):
https://www.hardocp.com/article/2008/11/19/thermalright_ultra_extreme_copper_cpu_cooler_review/1

Worth mentioning that there was short lived trend of copper coolers back then, but due to obvious drawbacks like weights and cost they disappeared. I think that also they weren't that good compared to dual tower coolers, so copper coolers just died at that point.


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## The red spirit

De Dust:
https://www.tomshardware.com/picturestory/565-dusty-pc-clogged-fan-dirty-power-supply.html


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## The red spirit

AMD Phenom II X4s reviewed:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/2702/20
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/phenom-x4-965,2389.html
https://www.trustedreviews.com/reviews/amd-phenom-ii-x4-965-black-edition
https://www.techradar.com/reviews/p...cessors/amd-phenom-ii-x4-965-be-623177/review
https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/phenom-ii-x4-965-be-revision-c3-review,1.html

Hall of Fame:
"A true return to competition" - Anandtech
"Phenom II is what the original Phenom should have been" - Anandtech
"The Phenom II X4 965 BE is a capable performer" - Tom's Hardware
"Delivers exceptional value in almost any discipline" - Tom's Hardware
"A great opportunity to pick up a processor" - Tom's Hardware
"The AMD Phenom II X4 965 BE is AMD’s fastest ever CPU, in every sense of the word" -Trusted Reviews
"At 3.4GHz, the 965 is clocked pretty aggressively, too. All of which makes it very competitive with Intel's cheaper quad-core chips. Add AMD's cheaper platform pricing into the equation and the deal only looks sweeter" - Tech Radar
"A solid quad-core processor" - Tech Radar
"This SKU is as good as its predecessor, and here's the kicker... when it comes to overclocking the C3 revision really is even better." - Guru 3D
"we feel the Phenom II X4 965BE is a really tasty quad-core processor for budget minded overclockers and PC afficionados, you'll absolutely like what it brings to the table. It's a product that makes a lot of sense and as such comes very much recommended - now with an even better energy efficiency and power envelope." - Guru 3D

Picture of Phenom II X4's die layout:









Pictures of CPU, stock cooler and CPU box:


























@contradictionary I guess now you will feel even stronger feeling of this "you made me want to keep my phenom ii x4 machine forever". AMD you know, was:








A smarter choice.

Fun fact:
I had to do Ecology presentation yesterday and machine in that classroom had AMD Phenom inside. My high school had lots of Phenom II X4 machines in drafting class. Phenoms were awesome.


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## The red spirit

It's time to write about AMD history. Naturally question arises, why and the answer is quite complicated. In short this company is very dramatic. It has been alive for a long time, sometimes it was big, sometimes small. At first copied, tried to be competitive, grew and beat the giant, but never actually thrived and this post is dedicated just for explanation why.

Let's start with reading:
https://arstechnica.com/information...all-of-amd-how-an-underdog-stuck-it-to-intel/
https://arstechnica.com/information...e-top-of-the-mountain-to-the-deepest-valleys/

Another source of same story:
https://www.techspot.com/article/599-amd-rise-and-fall/

And just a little bit more:
http://fortune.com/2013/05/02/an-insiders-view-of-amds-war-with-intel/

Imperfect, problematic and complicated past of AMD has lasted for a long time. AMD was usually below Intel and we knew that. Yet in thread like this we still like to remember those times and all problems AMD faced. They fought and tried hard to stay relevant and survive and that's an admirable quality of AMD.

After-reading stage video footage:
[video]https://www.ted.com/talks/hector_ruiz_on_connecting_the_world#t-621032[/video]

AMD had very interesting CEOs:
Jerry Sanders was charismatic dude, who was enjoying his life and often leaving company to do whatever it wanted. He was a party man.
Then Hector Ruiz was a simple man, with good morality. He wanted to make AMD a quality brand and also offer affordable solutions to poor people. He wanted world to be connected.
Rory Read brought nothing new, but at least he pushed production of AMD a bit and didn't want AMD people's efforts to go to complete waste. He wanted the best.
Now Lisa Su is a a strong leader and she does the impossible, she is curing the underdog status as much as she could with strong goals, with lots of business opportunities and by clever organization.

So many attitudes, so many 'colors' in a single volatile company. It has changed a lot. Even if their products weren't always the most interesting ones, their inside stories definitely were. Their efforts, their passion, their fight for existence, relevance in form of thinking, planning and creativity. And the result of that is the AMD we have today. Full fledged company with many things to offer and nice stories about their inside work to tell. Well done, AMD.

Note: "Slingshot" book is available at Google Play store. It's not expensive (less than 10 euros), but also there's a free sample of like 1 fourth of it for free. The book has 208 pages in total and that's with intro, contents and etc, so it's not very long. If someone wants to read it, it's quite accessible. I bet that it's possible to find it for free on internet too.


----------



## The red spirit

https://www.theverge.com/2015/9/9/9274915/graphics-card-boxes-weird-art

They may not know how to build a PC, but this article is great.


----------



## Mick Travis




----------



## Mick Travis




----------



## The red spirit

Sega does what Nintendon't


----------



## ae1905

*UK Just Banned the National Health Service From Buying Any More Fax Machines*


----------



## The red spirit

ae1905 said:


> *UK Just Banned the National Health Service From Buying Any More Fax Machines*


Dude, you are posting off-topic. Stop that.

Pagers and fax machines aren't computer hardware.


----------



## ae1905

some retro software


*The Last Independent Mobile OS*


----------



## The red spirit

ae1905 said:


> some retro software
> 
> 
> *The Last Independent Mobile OS*


I have some problems:
1)This is not retro
2)This is not computer related
3)This is not hardware

Just create a thread for retro software if you want, but don't shit on existing threads.


----------



## The red spirit

Amiga ads:

















































































I would like to dedicate this post to Amiga computers. It was a marvel, definitely like no other computer out there. It had amazing color capabilities (4096 colors), multitasking ready OS, amazing sound production abilities. It was a true revolution in multimedia. Not only that, but it imo started major steps in lots of medias. At least Amigas were truly inspirational. If anything it became a legend in music tracker software, which is a predecessor to modern music making.

The thing about Amiga, was that it offered a lot of features in a single package. Even if it was home computer, to me it was more like workstation. It was a wonderful machine, the one that deserves to be called being one of the greatest computers of whole time.

Amiga wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga

Amiga logos:









Amiga OS (pretty much any v1 version looked similar):









Inside Amiga 600:









Inside Amiga 1000:









Amiga mouse:









The whole Amiga 500 package:









The whole Amiga 600 package:









Amiga hard drive add on:









Amiga video connector:









Amiga 500 IO:


----------



## The red spirit

Now this is pure Youtube nostalgia.

The amazing thing is that he still does what he does. It's been a whole decade since he started.


----------



## The red spirit

The 90s, graphically represented:


----------



## The red spirit

And this is the first time Sebastian Linus appeared on Youtube.


----------



## The red spirit

well...


----------



## The red spirit

Accidentally found this video in Youtube recommendations:





It was pure trip down the memory lane.


----------



## The red spirit

ATi Rage 128 Pro tech demo






It's running on the card that looks like this:









This was ATi's attempt at making the fastest 3D accelerator in late 90s. It had lots of variations of hardware configurations used, but they all had 128 bit GPU inside. It supported DirectX 6 and OpenGL 1.2. Rage 128 had lots of hardware improvements and at the time it was really strong card. It's quite important to note that it was great at displaying 32 bit colors without loss in performance. At the time some other accelerators couldn't even output 32 bit colors at all and overall it was perfectly competent in popular color modes too. 

Rage 128 Pro is enhancement of original Rage 128. 128 Pro had doubled geometry throughput, better texture filtering, DirectX 6 texture compression, AGP 4X support, DVI connector support and Rage Theater chip used for S-Video TV-in. 

It looked like big improvement of already great card, but sadly it wasn't as great as competitors. The area it lacked in was low clock speed (core), but I suspect that even back then someone just got Riva tuner and upped the clock a bit. Just like before, it had various models for everyone's taste, but this time it wasn't a leader, but nonetheless a respectable rival. 

128 Pro was against 3DFX VooDoo 3 2000, nVidia Riva TNT 2 (NV5), Matrox G400, 3DFX VooDoo 3 3500, nVidia TNT2 Ultra and Matrox G400 Max. Basically, just against everyone else as ATi didn't release low end models of it and just went with single model, but many configurations of it. 

Was it success? Maybe not, but it gave start to ATi's first dual GPU monster, known as Rage Fury MAXX, which used two Rage 128 Pro GPUs on single board. That thing was a pure beast. ATi managed to achieve pretty much perfect scaling of performance back then. The only problem was compatibility with OSes as older versions of Mac OS and Windows just didn't support dual graphics processors. At least it could still work, but use only one GPU. 

Here is the beast:









It was fast, competent, worked well and actually beat many other cards in power consumption metrics. AMD's modern Fury X was a joke and a massive failure compared to Fury MAXX.

I found atmosphere fitting video, that shows off what Rage Fury MAXX could do:


----------



## Anunnaki Spirit

I really do need to get around to building my Pentium 2 Xeon system someday. 

Not my rigs but they are very nice.


----------



## The red spirit

The Edwardian Spirit said:


> I really do need to get around to building my Pentium 2 Xeon system someday.


I just have one question, what is going to be the purpose of it? I'm just curious.


----------



## The red spirit

Found more old Tom's Hardware videos:


----------



## The red spirit

Turns out that in the past not only Intel had awesome tech like Bumpless build up layer, but we also had a freaking 81GHz CPU. Well, at least a semiconductor. So, Intel's plans on 10 GHz with Pentium 4 could have been realistic, if they used some of this awesome tech, but oh well

Link: https://www.geek.com/blurb/81ghz-diamond-semiconductor-created-551147/

This monster was made in 2003, just little bit later than first gen Pentium 4s.

Also it's quite amazing that they predicted, that CPUs will use 150-200 watts in the future. Now it's pretty normal to reach that and some processor have greatly exceeded that too (AMD FX, Intel i9, Intel P4 Emergency Edition).


----------



## The red spirit

A short video about how ATi cards were made:





It doesn't show much, but it was most likely a quick ad video.


----------



## The red spirit

Late 2000s. A time, when SSD were new and awesome:


----------



## orion83uk

Was having a look through my YouTube at old stuff I'd either liked/saved... and found this video:






Packard Bell I believe left the USA around 2000, but were still going strong here in Europe. 10 years ago they had everything from cheap Atom powered Netbooks, to the iPower gaming machines with a SLI nVidia graphics setup. These days, they are owned by Acer, and have like 2 desktop PCs on sale in the UK, both awful low end budget machines, and a website that looks like it hasn't been updated since 2014. Changed days.


----------



## The red spirit

orion83uk said:


> Was having a look through my YouTube at old stuff I'd either liked/saved... and found this video:


I would be confused if I wanted PC back then




orion83uk said:


> Packard Bell I believe left the USA around 2000, but were still going strong here in Europe. 10 years ago they had everything from cheap Atom powered Netbooks, to the iPower gaming machines with a SLI nVidia graphics setup. These days, they are owned by Acer, and have like 2 desktop PCs on sale in the UK, both awful low end budget machines, and a website that looks like it hasn't been updated since 2014. Changed days.


Nope, Packard Bell definitely wasn't going strong. They were one of the weakest players here in Europe. At least in my country the only models available were only the cheaper than anything else and with Atom inside. People definitely weren't very attracted to those things. Anyone, who wanted gaming PC or faster than majority PC, built their own. Dell, HP and other major brands of computers in general do very poorly in my country. Only some not very literate buyers buy them and only some companies/educational institutions buy them. 

If we want to compare Packard Bell with someone else, then they were similar to eMachines. Both bought by Acer and both were poor makers.


----------



## orion83uk

They were a strong "PC World" contender here in the UK for a long time right up to the days of Windows 7. It was after Acer bought them that their range started to diminish here. I get the impression Acer wanted to turn them into like a budget brand based on what is currently available here vs. what Acer currently have available.



The red spirit said:


> Anyone, who wanted gaming PC or faster than majority PC, built their own. Dell, HP and other major brands of computers in general do very poorly in my country


Yeah same here. I can't think of anything worse than buying an OEM gaming system.



The red spirit said:


> If we want to compare Packard Bell with someone else, then they were similar to eMachines. Both bought by Acer and both were poor makers.


Oooft that's VERY harsh LOL. eMachines were bloody awful machines. Here in the UK, they were always the cheapest machines in PC World, in cheap nasty cases, insufficient RAM and the worst of the worst integrated graphics. I remember my brother in-law had one back in the days when Vista was new. It came with 512MB RAM which was bad enough, but then 64MB of it was used for the integrated graphics. I can't remember the particular graphics system, but I remember it was incapable of running Vista/Windows 7 in Aero mode properly. Even with a RAM upgrade (and Windows 7) it never ran fast. It eventually died when the motherboard just 'went'.


----------



## The red spirit

orion83uk said:


> They were a strong "PC World" contender here in the UK for a long time right up to the days of Windows 7. It was after Acer bought them that their range started to diminish here. I get the impression Acer wanted to turn them into like a budget brand based on what is currently available here vs. what Acer currently have available.


Okay, I see UK was always a bit odd in terms of computers. I mean you had a true era of home computers and actual real manufacturers of them, not just assemblers.

Anyway, Packard Bell in general just looked like a weak brand to me. I looked at iPower model with SLI and it's okay, but meh. Yet it's supposed to be their best of the best. Plus it looked poor, ain't nothing like late 2000s gamerish aesthetic.




orion83uk said:


> Oooft that's VERY harsh LOL. eMachines were bloody awful machines. Here in the UK, they were always the cheapest machines in PC World, in cheap nasty cases, insufficient RAM and the worst of the worst integrated graphics. I remember my brother in-law had one back in the days when Vista was new. It came with 512MB RAM which was bad enough, but then 64MB of it was used for the integrated graphics. I can't remember the particular graphics system, but I remember it was incapable of running Vista/Windows 7 in Aero mode properly. Even with a RAM upgrade (and Windows 7) it never ran fast. It eventually died when the motherboard just 'went'.


To say the truth, I don't know much about Packard Bell's earlier days, but in later days it didn't matter, which computer you got. Acer, Packard Bell or eMachines, they all were truly awful from inside to outside. They only existed for their low price. Honestly, to this day it's hard for me to comprehend, that Acer actually makes something quality, because they have made lots of awful machines. By awful I mean, horrible screen, cheap glossy plastic, poor construction quality, poor keyboards and etc.

BTW Vista era was a disaster for anyone. OEMs sold shit, that couldn't run it, MS got blamed, because OEMs used Vista compatible stickers. Due to new driver architecture, everyone had to remake drivers. It was a mess and lots of people just didn't bother and stayed with XP. Yet, Vista by itself wasn't bad, neither hardware in many machines were, just that there was a major mismanagement. Still, many people remember those days with bitter taste in their mouths. If you said that Vista was good, you would get laughed at, but if you said that Vista was pretty much the same as 7, many wouldn't believe, many wouldn't care and in general you would be hated for that. Technically the last most similar to Vista OS is Windows 8.1, which to me isn't too bad, but I don't like interface much. even if many people say that 10 is better, honestly I don't feel that there are many differences 'under the hood'. Pretty much all software is interchangeable, drivers too. Vista and 10 are still pretty similar. Yet in this period, variations of same things were hated (Vista, 8) and praised (7, 10).


----------



## orion83uk

> Okay, I see UK was always a bit odd in terms of computers. I mean you had a true era of home computers and actual real manufacturers of them, not just assemblers.


Packard Bell were only one of a number of popular brands. Hewlett Packard, Compaq, Gateway, Tiny, Time to name but a few were also pretty popular in one way or another. HP and Packard Bell now being the only 2 left from that list.

Packard Bell was the first PC I ever got hence why they hold a certain place in my interests. January 1996: Pentium 1 75MHz, 8MB RAM, 850MB hard drive, 1MB Cyriss Logic video card (integrated onto the LPX motherboard). It looked the part, and it did introduce me to the game Descent which came in the "£1000 of bundled software" pack... but at its core, I admit, it was rubbish lol. The motherboard came with no L2 cache and the slots for adding L2 were not soldered to the board which made it impossibly to upgrade. The 1MB Cyriss Logic graphics were also hopeless even by the standard of the time.

Weirdly, despite having built a few PCs along the way, I currently own both a Packard Bell desktop and Acer laptop.


The Packard Bell desktop is an iMedia S3810 with an i3-550. Me and my partner bought it back 2010. It was being sold stupidly cheap (and I mean cheap for an i3 at the time) and it was literally bought to be nothing more than a file server. Little did I know over 8 years later it'd still be going (bare in mind, from our previous conversations, I don't really game). It weirdly ended up being used as a media centre PC for a time, then briefly as a work machine, before being used as just a regular desktop.

It has had a few upgrades: maxed out to 8GB RAM and an SSD thrown in. Its also ran every version of Windows since Win 7. The SSD was probably one of the best investments made on it - and lets face it, SSDs are a must for Windows 10. It also has a GT 730 (which I know is a crap card) which was added to give it dual monitor capability.

It will one day be replaced with a custom built machine but until the 1st gen i3-550 starts to show proper signs of being too weak, there is no point. I can still run two YouTube videos simultaneously on each monitor at 1080 60 without it breaking a sweat. I really want to build something that will be super energy efficient and near silent, with some scope for upgrade to basic gaming ability. 


Laptop is an Acer Swift 1 which I got 6 months ago, and was a very deliberate purchase. I wanted a laptop that had Ultrabook dimensions, and excellent battery life. It has the Pentium Silver N5000. Not powerful I admit, but I friggin love it. Plus these modern "N" series Pentiums are really not bad - apparently this is comparable to a 6th gen i3-6100u at everyday tasks. I can go for days without charging it, the IPS screen is seriously nice and it actually feels pretty decent. Don't get me wrong, it's not Apple build quality, and sadly the RAM is non upgradeable, but it'll get me by for a few years.


Tell me about your machines


----------



## The red spirit

orion83uk said:


> Packard Bell were only one of a number of popular brands. Hewlett Packard, Compaq, Gateway, Tiny, Time to name but a few were also pretty popular in one way or another. HP and Packard Bell now being the only 2 left from that list.


Never in my life I have heard of Tiny and Time. 



orion83uk said:


> Packard Bell was the first PC I ever got hence why they hold a certain place in my interests. January 1996: Pentium 1 75MHz, 8MB RAM, 850MB hard drive, 1MB Cyriss Logic video card (integrated onto the LPX motherboard). It looked the part, and it did introduce me to the game Descent which came in the "£1000 of bundled software" pack... but at its core, I admit, it was rubbish lol. The motherboard came with no L2 cache and the slots for adding L2 were not soldered to the board which made it impossibly to upgrade. The 1MB Cyriss Logic graphics were also hopeless even by the standard of the time.


Besides integrated graphics, overall it doesn't look like a tragedy.




orion83uk said:


> The Packard Bell desktop is an iMedia S3810 with an i3-550. Me and my partner bought it back 2010. It was being sold stupidly cheap (and I mean cheap for an i3 at the time) and it was literally bought to be nothing more than a file server. Little did I know over 8 years later it'd still be going (bare in mind, from our previous conversations, I don't really game). It weirdly ended up being used as a media centre PC for a time, then briefly as a work machine, before being used as just a regular desktop.


Well, 8 years is nothing for hardware.



orion83uk said:


> It has had a few upgrades: maxed out to 8GB RAM and an SSD thrown in. Its also ran every version of Windows since Win 7. The SSD was probably one of the best investments made on it - and lets face it, SSDs are a must for Windows 10. It also has a GT 730 (which I know is a crap card) which was added to give it dual monitor capability.


I wouldn't say it's needed, but it's a good thing to have. I still have HDD only system working. Yes, it's not agile, but overall very usable and besides booting up I really don't care about there not being a SSD inside. It ahs some weirdness, that whole system slows down sometimes due to HDD doing something, but I think it's just that specific computer.



orion83uk said:


> It will one day be replaced with a custom built machine but until the 1st gen i3-550 starts to show proper signs of being too weak, there is no point. I can still run two YouTube videos simultaneously on each monitor at 1080 60 without it breaking a sweat. I really want to build something that will be super energy efficient and near silent, with some scope for upgrade to basic gaming ability.


You think very similarly to me.




orion83uk said:


> Laptop is an Acer Swift 1 which I got 6 months ago, and was a very deliberate purchase. I wanted a laptop that had Ultrabook dimensions, and excellent battery life. It has the Pentium Silver N5000. Not powerful I admit, but I friggin love it. Plus these modern "N" series Pentiums are really not bad - apparently this is comparable to a 6th gen i3-6100u at everyday tasks. I can go for days without charging it, the IPS screen is seriously nice and it actually feels pretty decent. Don't get me wrong, it's not Apple build quality, and sadly the RAM is non upgradeable, but it'll get me by for a few years.


I have used Pentium P6200 and it's not bad. It feels fast, but it isn't. 



orion83uk said:


> Tell me about your machines


My main machine was once a locally assembled prebuilt, specs were:
AMD FX 6300 + stock cooler
Gigabyte GA-78LMT-S2P rev 5.0
Palit GTX 650 Ti 1GB
Seagate BBQuda
Codegen case
Codegen 500X PSU
TSST Corp DVD drive
Memory card reader

Costed 1569 Litas, around 550 Euros. After few initial week of usage I wasn't happy with it, I felt it was too slow, mostly because GTA 4 didn't run at max well. I knew it even then, that it was unreasonable to think it would run at max and what I got was very reasonable. Still PC was destined to constant metamorphosis. It got SSD, it good Hyper 103, it got new case, new PSU...

There never truly was any real upgrades to help it perform better, but time came for that too. Anyway, it was my first PC and I didn't really knew much, so I experimented. I tried lots of things, overclocking, dual booting, swapping OSes and lots of other shit. I just couldn't settle and was itching to try something. Overclocking was also fun, but required hardware swaps like cooler and fans. Honestly, I would have never touched the mobo if it didn't quit working, but oh well... At least it made FX 6300 run at 4.4GHz on all cores stable and 4.7GHz on 4 with VRMs being at 149C. Fun stuff. After that there was brown spot on the other side of motherboard. That didn't kill it tho. It lasted for year or two and then strange shit started. It rebooted, crashed and etc. So I replaced with the best motherboard, that I found still being sold.

I don't wanna write a book, but I will write specs, their replacements and shit I did with them:
AMD FX 6300 (5.288 Ghz overclocking record https://valid.x86.fr/reiqf3 https://www.overclock.net/forum/297...ions/678487-official-5ghz-overclock-club.html)
Gigabyte > Asrock 970 Pro 3 R2.0 (this thing was used for all my craziest overclocks)
Palit GTX 650 Ti (was overclocked, was BIOS modded, but still slow) > RX 560 4GB (stop gap) > RX 580 8GB (never really overclocked)
nothing > Samsung 840 EVO 120GB + Kingston A400 120GB (spare drive after failed RAID 0 experiment)
Seagate BBQuda 1TB (never replaced) + WD Caviar Blue 320 GB (got for free after replacing laptop's HDD to SSD)
Codegen Case > Cooler Master Knight 280 (was cut to add one 80mm top exhaust fan, was cut to have more rear exhaust holes, front 5.25 cover was modded to have 2x40mm fan mounts, put in 2 Noiseblock Black Silent Pros in there with Noctua voltage resistors)
Codegen 500X > FSP 700-50ARN (stock Yate Loon fan replaced with Arctic F12, now it's almost inaudible)
DVD drive 
Memory card reader
onboard sound > Asus Xonar DG (PCI) (that's my first step into audiophile world, but it was one of the best ones too)
TP Link TL-WN721N > Asus AC56 PCIe (I wanted to smash that TP-Link crap ahrd, it never worked right and sometimes caused BSODs, yet with Raspberry Pi worked totally fine, linux liked it too)
Windows 7 > Windows 8.1 > Windows 10 + experiments with hackintosh + experiments with linux + experiment with Windows XP and Windows Vista + some experiments with dual booting
no case fans > Enermax 80mm TB Silence > random cheap 120mm Cooler Masters > Akasa Vegas Green 120mm x2 + Scythe Slip Stream 800rpm 120mm > shit ton of mixing > Scythe Glidestream 800 rpm 1200 x2 + Scythe Slipstream 120mm 800rpm (side) + Enermax TB Silence 80mm (top modded)
basic Crucial 8GB ram > Corsair XMS 3 1333MHz 16GB 4 sticks (overclocked, messed with timings, but settled for stock settings)
AMD 95 watts cooling solution > Cooler Master Hyper 103 > Scythe Mugen 4 PCGH > Scythe Mugen 4 PCGH - stock fans + one Noiseblocker XL-P 120mm set at minimum speed in BIOS

There were time, when I hated this turd with passion, there were times, when I kinda liked it, but few things stayed true. It was good enough since the time I got it, it was experimentation partner and FX 6300 is a good CPU. Only some parts weren't replaced yet.

As you can see, lots of things were done with it, but I realized I had to stop. It was getting very wasteful and expensive and in the end neither investment was actually bringing much happiness. So, I had to slow down, but I still have quite a bit of parts and can just swap them to see what happens. In the end I pretty much started to aim at parts with good value, I started to value stability more, I started to value quietness more and power consumption too. All in all it was a great educational material. For now I think it's good enough and with the hardware it has I think I will try to keep it as it is for more years. My first guess was until 2024, because it would be 10 year anniversary since the time I got it, but it may not be actually realistic. I just figured out, that I won't set any dates, but will just do as I want, which most likely will be, when there will be a truly convincing options. What that means is at least 2 times faster PC at everything (CPU single threaded, multithreaded, GPU...) or maybe some new killer features. Also it must be affordable too. Max 2k Euros for it. Anyway, I see nothing interesting in terms of new hardware, neither I see anything interesting in terms of new software either. I also could live perfectly fine with much weaker machine too. 

But that's my only one PC, I have 3 more. I guess these threads will be more than enough:
https://www.personalitycafe.com/science-technology/1160874-athlonium-64-a.html
https://www.personalitycafe.com/science-technology/1279685-trs-lab-project-2-mild-velocity.html

Mild velocity got Alpenfohn Sella cooler, RX 560 4GB, Athlon X4 870K and Toshiba P300 1TB HDD. It's faster and enough for all my gaming and HTPC needs at 1080p. Athlon is at 4GHz and much lower voltage.

Athlonium 64 hasn't changed since the last time I posted, but some settings in BIOS certainly did.

The 4th PC is trashtop HP DV6000 upgraded to max:
AMD Turion TL-60 from 1.8GHz Sempron
4GB DDR2 from 512 MB 
nVidia 6150 Go
128GB Intel SSD from turd 80GB HDD

It's awful thing. It's slow, it doesn't have screen, keyboard, battery. Everything has to be hooked up and even then it's ancient slow turd. Those integrated graphics are so bad that there's no actually working hardware acceleration for many things. Ancient 3DMark 2001 SE score was also super low, only 1600 points. I fucking hate it, but don't throw it out. From the inside it's awful too. Whatever I touch, it breaks or is close to that. Construction is garbage. BIOS battery is dead, so everything in it resets. Since it doesn't have it's own keyboard, many times it can't access BIOS and I don't even know, which button lets access it. It also has problems with outputting BIOS video signal as by default it should be displayed on its own screen, which it no longer has. Even if it works, it sucks as it's slow and prone to hanging. I think, partly it's due to RAM incompatibilities as it was made to only work with 2GB DDR2 RAM and I put in 4GB in it. Even with graphics overclocked, they are horrible and can only run UT 2004 at 640x480 with medium-low settings at around 30-40 fps. That's the only game it can run. The FX 5200 card I have is literally times faster than that integrated crap. It doesn't have Windows anymore and has Mint linux. Still not usable. That's definitely the worst thing I have ever used in my life.

If you wanna know something more, just ask me. I'm just trying not to expand too much as every computer has lots of stories I could tell and that would be very exhausting to write everything and most likely impossible.


----------



## contradictionary

@The red spirit, take this as my reply to your pm, i think what you said in it deserve to be discuss in the thread anyway. Apologize for taking quite a while.

I have 2 amd machines at home:
1. Amd Phenom II X4 955BE, 8GB, 4xWD 500GB Black in Raid0, Radeon 5770 (which was half chip of the champion 5870), coolermaster haf case (IN RED!!), noctua nc h12 top down blower, dvd rw pioneer. Bought in 2010 and still going strong with 
2. HP Proliant Microserver N36L, Amd Turion N36L, 8GB, SSD, 4x WD Green 2TB in Raid 0, external samsung Blu-ray, functioning as file and media server attached to my tv and onkyo receiver. I add low profile geforce gt520 just to help encoding, have hdmi output and ability to render 3d movie cuz i like watching 3d movie in 7.1 setup. Bought in 2012, superbly functioning as such with low energy consumption. And it looks quite good too.

Others, Dell laptop inspiron 2in1 i3 with touchscreen for me, micro$oft surface pro 3 for the wife, acer windows tablet for the kid and old acer netbook from the past.

Re: your heat from the rx580 i believe there are many case cooling articles out there, my take is that better you have negative pressure i.e more fans blowing outside than inside. Then you may also want to add an intake fan which fit the pci slot that blow upward directly into the graphic card.


Something like this:

https://nerdtechy.com/best-pci-expansion-slot-cooling-fans
_Sent sans PC_


----------



## The red spirit

contradictionary said:


> @The red spirit, take this as my reply to your pm, i think what you said in it deserve to be discuss in the thread anyway. Apologize for taking quite a while.


I think I kinda solved my problem or in other words realized that there wasn't a problem. I just freaked out, once I saw monstrous wattage and heat output. After a while I remembered that RX 580 should eat around same amount of power as GTX 1080. So yeah, I bought shit and unsurprisingly got shit. 




contradictionary said:


> I have 2 amd machines at home:
> 1. Amd Phenom II X4 955BE, 8GB, 4xWD 500GB Black in Raid0, Radeon 5770 (which was half chip of the champion 5870), coolermaster haf case (IN RED!!), noctua nc h12 top down blower, dvd rw pioneer. Bought in 2010 and still going strong with
> 2. HP Proliant Microserver N36L, Amd Turion N36L, 8GB, SSD, 4x WD Green 2TB in Raid 0, external samsung Blu-ray, functioning as file and media server attached to my tv and onkyo receiver. I add low profile geforce gt520 just to help encoding, have hdmi output and ability to render 3d movie cuz i like watching 3d movie in 7.1 setup. Bought in 2012, superbly functioning as such with low energy consumption. And it looks quite good too.
> 
> Others, Dell laptop inspiron 2in1 i3 with touchscreen for me, micro$oft surface pro 3 for the wife, acer windows tablet for the kid and old acer netbook from the past.


Thanks for sharing, but I kinda expected more in terms of GPU. How does 5770 hold up nowadays?



contradictionary said:


> Re: your heat from the rx580 i believe there are many case cooling articles out there, my take is that better you have negative pressure i.e more fans blowing outside than inside. Then you may also want to add an intake fan which fit the pci slot that blow upward directly into the graphic card.


There's side fan mounting and I have intake fan there. RX is still hot. After lots of experimentation and cooling hardware changes, I came to conclusion, that even modded case is not perfect as it is simply too restrictive. It's possible that graphics card blocks the air flow too. I also realized, that there isn't any realistic load scenario, where CPU and GPU are maxed out, so I calmed down.

I don't remember what was that clicked to me that everything was okay, but all I have to know is that there isn't anything wrong in my PC anymore.

I actually tried out PCI slot cooler and it was exhaust blower. It worked well, but it was way too loud for me to bear it. I t was pure waste of time and money. It was from brand called titan and it connects via molex. That's inconvenient as I can't just plug it straight into 3 pin resistor cables to slow it down. 

Yet 2x40mm fan mod in 5.25' bracket actually works well, except those fans just simply don't generate much airflow.

After a while I decided to go for quietness and just left CPU at stock speed and undervolted. Swapped fans for quietest configuration I could and now it's a nice machine once again. In terms of heat, RX 580 is still a fucking Sahara under desk, but it works correctly and doesn't overheat. When GPU isn't used, computer is pretty much ice cold. Even with maximum CPU load it barely gets warm. 

I also figured out that all those fancy power saving features like C6 state, C1E state don't help much if at all, but they ultimately reduce responsiveness of whole PC. Turbo Core doesn't speed up single threaded tasks either. Technically everything is functional, but AMD's APM is just too dumb to use turbo properly and more often than not turbo actually does more harm than good. Without all those things PC can still be cool, quiet and power efficient, because for a very long time we had idle processes integrated into OSes and they work perfectly fine. All those power states are made to make turbo work. In FX 6300 case TDP is 95 watts. It's expected thermal output. I tried testing it without power saving crap and with it. Without anything enabled (power saving and turbo) PC ate 160 watts in OCCT testing. I got exactly the same result with all fancy stuff enabled, but the difference was that my clock speed was always ramping up and ramping down. I also get same or very similar scores in benches, so I see no reason to turn on all those things as I lose responsiveness of whole PC for no benefit and potentially I can have unstable framerates in games. To me it was a big discovery. This turned out to be true on all my computers. You should check it out too. 

If you are wondering about idle figures, then on FX 6300 with all fancy crap on there is a reduction of around 5-10 watts, that's it and these numbers are barely ever reached anyway as often idle power consumption is unstable. We are talking about 80 watts vs 70 watts. Loss of performance is just so much not worth saving those watts.

Since 8086 times programmers and engineers realized that computers would be wasting too much power in light workloads or when being idle, so idle code was integrated in operating systems. Basically speaking it's a small code to keep CPU busy in a way that CPU would be doing something, but being ready to start doing anything else. This technology works perfectly fine even today, so there's no magic in low idle wattage without all those gimmicky options in BIOS. If you wonder why we can't just cut off power delivery to CPU at all, well it's easy. All operating systems have to have CPU on to keep track of system resources, OS services and other crap. if we cut off power delivery to CPU completely, PC will simply stop working and will become totally unresponsive. As far as I know closest thing to that is putting unused cores into sleep alike state, which in AMD CPUs is known as C1E state. It helps a bit, but causes lots of latency and lack of responsiveness, when cores have to be woken up. C6 downclocks cores and reduces their voltage, but gains from doing so are very minimal as voltage isn't the only factor there and besides cores themselves, everything else in CPU have to be turned on. It helps a bit, but yet again causes higher latency. I tried to look at what Cool and Quiet does and I found out nothing. It had no effect on anything. But potentially it caused a bit of voltage fluctuations, that's it. On Athlon 64 series CPUs it reduced clock speed and voltage, when needed without perceiveable latency increase.

Random fact: FX 6300's stock voltage is only 1.275V and CPU itself is quite power efficient with those settings. That's a stock voltage for base clock speed of 3.5GHz on all 6 cores and it can be undervolted a bit more, yet without any real benefit on wattage. Idle wattage in my PC is ~80 watts and maximum CPU load wattage is 160 watts. Considering I have shit ton of random cards, lots of RAM modules and quite a bit of fans in there too, CPU power consumption alone should be much lower.


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## orion83uk

The red spirit said:


> Never in my life I have heard of Tiny and Time.


Lucky you. Tiny were truly awful. I vaguely remember them having a very poor reliability rate as well. 

Time, who were more of a rival for Gateway (or again, at least here in the UK they were), actually looked pretty decent. They used Leonard Nimoy in their TV adverts as well. 






I remember they were big on using the original AMD Athlons when they came out. They eventually bought over Tiny, then went bust around 2005. 



The red spirit said:


> You think very similarly to me..


In the sense you like to "sweat the asset" haha? 



The red spirit said:


> I have used Pentium P6200 and it's not bad. It feels fast, but it isn't.


I wouldn't imagine that would be too bad. My parents old laptop (which was originally kept as a spare) is a Dell Inspiron, also from 2010, and has the i3-380m (which I think the P6200 is from the same family). I upgraded it with an SSD last year, and they now use it more than their newer laptop weirdly. The new laptop has become the spare lol.

I need to go through the rest of your post to properly digest it, but one line I did pick up on:



The red spirit said:


> Anyway, it was my first PC and I didn't really knew much, so I experimented.


Amen to that! I genuinely believe playing around and experimenting is one of the best ways to learn. That plus the huge quantity of videos these days on YouTube.


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## The red spirit

orion83uk said:


> Lucky you. Tiny were truly awful. I vaguely remember them having a very poor reliability rate as well.
> 
> Time, who were more of a rival for Gateway (or again, at least here in the UK they were), actually looked pretty decent. They used Leonard Nimoy in their TV adverts as well.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I remember they were big on using the original AMD Athlons when they came out. They eventually bought over Tiny, then went bust around 2005.


Well, I couldn't really have known that much as I was only a kid by that time. Plus PC in my family appeared in 2005 too, so at best I would have been a noob then. Even if my family had a PC I could only use it for hour (parenting stuff) and there wasn't internet for me. Only parents could use dial up as it was expensive. So yeah, I only got to see PC magazine at best in 2006, yet the first time I bought one myself was in 2009. After that I became hooked forever and all I know about old computers is from researching, remembering some things from the past. I just never lived in those eras fully, so I lack that part. Perhaps, this whole thread is a bit cringe, when people come here, who lived in those times and pretty much all longer posts are written by me, the only one here, who didn't live in that era. 

But beside computers, I was lucky to have mobile phone in 2005, because my father just got one for himself and won one in lottery. So I had a rare opportunity. Most of the kids in school didn't have one back then. And while I wasn't first, I got to discover internet early with Nokia 3210, so I was relatively ahead everyone in tech literacy. After few years everyone had phones and there was a boom of everyone playing java games, bluetoothing shitty low fidelity mp3s. The best games were Gangsta series and Asphalt series as they were closest to being GTA and NFS alternatives for phones. Those games were a worthwhile reason to want a phone, that could run them. My Nokia was close to that, but due to older version of whatever OS it had, it couldn't run them, except one Asphalt. That was good enough. Later, when I got Siemens C70, I could play almost everything. 

Overall, I just lived in times, when people of my age were most interested in phones, not computers. But soon I became interested in computers and pretty much completely abandoned mobile tech. Simply, those were different times.




orion83uk said:


> In the sense you like to "sweat the asset" haha?


Maybe not, but in general I truly agree with buying a silent, power efficient PC, which also has a good value at the time and keeping it for quite long time. Add experimentation and good cooling + some style and it would be perfect. Anyway, you seem to value quite a bit of things, that I value too.

BTW I'm currently making FX system more power efficient and yesterday was undervolting RAM. With CPU undervolt and RAM undervolt, it's pretty efficient, cold and still powerful.

Athlonium 64 is actually very efficient too. It eats 120 watts max and idles at around 60. It's a shame, that BIOS is lacking undervolting options completely, because CPU gets like 1.475 volts and I suspect it could work perfectly fine with much less. I would be interesting to see it undervolted and see super low wattage numbers, but oh well. Considering that it has GPU too, 120 watts is certainly not a bad score already.




orion83uk said:


> I wouldn't imagine that would be too bad. My parents old laptop (which was originally kept as a spare) is a Dell Inspiron, also from 2010, and has the i3-380m (which I think the P6200 is from the same family). I upgraded it with an SSD last year, and they now use it more than their newer laptop weirdly. The new laptop has become the spare lol.


Oh, it is really slow CPU otherwise. In benches it truly scores very low. It's not too horrible, but in terms of speed it's similar to mobile Core 2 Duo or Turion X2. In Cinebench it doesn't even reach 100 points with all cores. Still, general usage feel good enough, but once you want it to do more, it struggles. I know, that Intel graphics are bad, but it barely runs NFS Underground at 640x480. That's not bad, but truly awful experience. And Underground isn't heavy game either. That laptop also has just 2GB RAM and small SSD. The good thing about it is that, if someone wanted, it could be upgraded to i7 and 8GB RAM. The bad thing about it is that it's already pretty worn out and the screen in it is horrible. A simple TN panel with awful colors, contrast and etc. I almost feeling like I'm getting blind, just from looking at it, because colours are seriously off, everything is blurry and poor contrast makes it all worse.

Good thing, that machine isn't mine and user of it doesn't complain. No one will upgrade it either, because it's worn out and old. So manufacturer probably wouldn't release drivers for it anymore and if it did, there would be a need for major hardware replacements. Those wouldn't make any sense as whole machine, when it was new wasn't forth much. Around 300 dollars tops.

If you wonder, what it is, it's Lenovo B560 I think.



orion83uk said:


> Amen to that! I genuinely believe playing around and experimenting is one of the best ways to learn. That plus the huge quantity of videos these days on YouTube.


Videos are okay and all, but if we are talking about nowadays, then I must mention, that technical quality of them is either unbearable or horrible, only very rarely is good enough. Let's be honest, most youtubers don't talk about actual tech much and would rather talk about RGB or how their case looks and as I see many people are fine with that. Meanwhile, who want to know more are minority. Perhaps, times are changing and priorities too. Not everyone cares about tech or wants to spend time learning about it, but most would be attracted to aesthetical appearance of PC and ease of use of one. Many things are just good enough, so nothing really forces masses to learn much due to lack of choice.


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## contradictionary

@The red spirit
Nice to hear that you figure things out yourself. My 5770 fare well with the kind of older games i ever have time to play albeit only in 720p. I am now playing Total War II, haha. Yet i'm pretty sure it can't handle modern games for its mere 1gb of vram.
@orion83uk
Around 2011 i bought a gateway allinone desktop pc with touch screen, for my daughter to learn to use pc and doodle on its 23" screen. Nice product although mine had problem with its builtin power supply. It was being supported by Acer's post sales service. Later i sold it to replace with win tablet.

_Sent sans PC_


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## The red spirit

contradictionary said:


> @The red spirit
> Nice to hear that you figure things out yourself. My 5770 fare well with the kind of older games i ever have time to play albeit only in 720p. I am now playing Total War II, haha. Yet i'm pretty sure it can't handle modern games for its mere 1gb of vram.


Well my GTX 650 Ti could handle GTA 5 at high settings and 1080p at around 25-30 fps. As long as textures were normal. It actually runs same game at 1366x768 resolution with high-ultra settings with more fps. 5770 should be much lower end card, but I don't think VRAM is the main limiting factor of its performance. 

Talking about games, I can't get myself to play anything new or old anymore on PC. I dunno why, but it feels like a waste of time or grinding. I guess things are changing. It's weird to say, but there are some days, when I think it's better to just study instead of trying to play a game. 

Oh and recently I'm talking with person, who is new to desktops and built a PC. He has a problem with PSU. It's Corsair RM850X (honestly, I still kinda dislike Corsair). The problem with it is that it's buzzing, when PC is turned off. Since I have no troubleshooting to do myself at home, I find this sort of stuff pretty interesting, even if not always I can help. 

I like learning about hardware, but I pretty much have nothing to do with perfectly running computers. Just yesterday I finished reading book "Inside Intel". It was interesting.


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## orion83uk

contradictionary said:


> Around 2011 i bought a gateway allinone desktop pc with touch screen, for my daughter to learn to use pc and doodle on its 23" screen. Nice product although mine had problem with its builtin power supply. It was being supported by Acer's post sales service. Later i sold it to replace with win tablet.


I could imagine that being a really nice system with a 23" screen back in 2011.

Gateway vanished from the UK probably around the time Acer bought them.

On that note, after mentioning Packard Bell above, basically Acer bought both brands around the same time (Gateway in 2007, Packard Bell in 2008). After that, they basically became the same computers. I remember a while back looking up Gateway via the North American section of their website out of general interest and discovered that their desktop and laptop range from around 2009/10 through to 2014 were all identical in every way to the Packard Bell desktop and laptop range being sold here in UK/Europe - same cases, motherboards and everything, just a different 'sticker' to represent the brand and splash screen on start up.

Our second 'family' PC when I was young was a Gateway (back in 1999). I would never have imagined that 10 years later they would become the same company (Gateway were leagues ahead of Packard Bell pre the turn of the century).


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## orion83uk

@The red spirit

I promise I'll make an effort to go through your last 2 posts. I can almost feel your passion with your posts and responses 

Something I just wanted to share with you though: 
My partner (who runs a computer repair/IT business) just acquired this 2007 model iMac (Core 2 Duo T7300 2.0GHz) that was literally being thrown away. It is in mint condition too! First 'modern' Mac I've also ever used. I appreciate this isn't quite retro yet, but can't be too far off and thought you may (or may not) appreciate (excuse the poor lighting in the pic).


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## The red spirit

Brainwashing starts in 3...2...1...


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## The red spirit

@contradictionary I don't know if you are interested, but this is my highest overclock yet:
https://valid.x86.fr/reiqf3










1.7 volts in BIOS
Cooler Master Hyper 103
2 cores enabled and totally unstable
over 300 watts used just to open web browser

Finally, I managed to OC my FX more than Pentium 4 in Tom's Hardware overclocking video from 2003

Came from 18th place to 13th:
https://www.overclock.net/forum/297...ions/678487-official-5ghz-overclock-club.html

With decent mobo and low end cooling solutions it's possible to reach 2nd place there.


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## contradictionary

I always interested in computer things you posted, red, only not always replying, haha. That's amazing to see amd ride past the 5ghz wall on air cooling, terrific achievement kamerad. Well done.

Heck, whatever i did my 955BE couldn't stably go past 4ghz :laughing:

_Sent sans PC_


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## contradictionary

orion83uk said:


> I could imagine that being a really nice system with a 23" screen back in 2011.


It was. A core i5 sandy bridge with built in dvd drive, 1080p screen and nicely sound speakers (for an all in 1 desktop).

To live and witness the industrial consolidation of brands, products and markets is quite saddening. We used to have more options.



_Sent sans PC_


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## The red spirit

contradictionary said:


> I always interested in computer things you posted, red, only not always replying, haha. That's amazing to see amd ride past the 5ghz wall on air cooling, terrific achievement kamerad. Well done.
> 
> Heck, whatever i did my 955BE couldn't stably go past 4ghz :laughing:


Don't talk like that, you pretty much always leave a comment. 

If I had Wraith Cooler, I would bet, that it would enough for 5GHz validation too. Sure, 70C with Hyper 103 just for validation is toasty, but it doesn't matter, as long as it doesn't fry it's fine. Anyway, with good cooling and decent motherboard I think 5GHz would be possible for 24/7 operation. Maybe even higher clock speed would be totally fine. The highest stable speed with all cores in my system is around 4.8-4.9Ghz. I haven't tested that much, but it's Cinebench stable and can survive OCCT for 10 minutes. I never ran it long at those speeds, because I think that VRMs may not survive that. I clearly remember my previous motherboard and VRMs, that heated up to 149C and there was a big brown stain on the other side. So, yeah, it's not the best idea to overclock FX processor with motherboard, which doesn't have any VRM cooling at all and only has 4+1 phases.

I have tried to overclock Athlon 870K, but my motherboard is POS and even with maximum voltage it BSODs at only 4.6GHz

I looked at AM3 overclocking results there on Overclock.net and it seems like those Athlons like yours can be very easy to overclock to very high speeds.


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## The red spirit

Anunnaki Spirit said:


> LEDs do degrade with age but it takes so much longer before it becomes noticeable, my precision m6600 has that many hours on it that I am going to replace the panel.


I said it was CCFL, basically it's a CFL bulb, but reengineered to work in screens. No longer used in displays due to their inferiority to LEDs. LEDs will last a long time. Basic rule of thumb is the brighter is glows, the faster it degrades. So reducing brightness can improve their lifespan. But anyway, my gramps had a laptop from 2009 and it still works as well as it did. Gramps didn't survive, but laptop certainly did. Screen itself was always awful, but at least doesn't get noticeably dimmer with time. The laptop I had was hand-me-down and I think it was 13 years old. The screen itself besides wear was garbage. The ghosting on it was nauseating. Basically any scrolling makes whole area blurred, mouse pointer looked like it had delay but it was just awful ghosting. Gotta say that the trend of putting shit screens in laptops hasn't died off yet. You can still buy on paper okay laptop and get a potato level screen. That and generally awful speakers, keyboards, trackpads, shit IO and many other abominations in those things makes me hate them. Seemingly everything inside those things is always gimped, made without any respect or awareness of what is good. In past at least you could sorta custom build one yourself, but now you most likely will be forced to overspend on mediocre hardware just so that things would be engineered acceptably well.


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## Anunnaki Spirit

The red spirit said:


> I said it was CCFL, basically it's a CFL bulb, but reengineered to work in screens. No longer used in displays due to their inferiority to LEDs. LEDs will last a long time. Basic rule of thumb is the brighter is glows, the faster it degrades. So reducing brightness can improve their lifespan. But anyway, my gramps had a laptop from 2009 and it still works as well as it did. Gramps didn't survive, but laptop certainly did. Screen itself was always awful, but at least doesn't get noticeably dimmer with time. The laptop I had was hand-me-down and I think it was 13 years old. The screen itself besides wear was garbage. The ghosting on it was nauseating. Basically any scrolling makes whole area blurred, mouse pointer looked like it had delay but it was just awful ghosting. Gotta say that the trend of putting shit screens in laptops hasn't died off yet. You can still buy on paper okay laptop and get a potato level screen. That and generally awful speakers, keyboards, trackpads, shit IO and many other abominations in those things makes me hate them. Seemingly everything inside those things is always gimped, made without any respect or awareness of what is good. In past at least you could sorta custom build one yourself, but now you most likely will be forced to overspend on mediocre hardware just so that things would be engineered acceptably well.


I seen that (eye roll) but yes ccfl hasn't been in use for almost a decade but LEDs do degrade with age though it takes much more time and does so differently from ccfl. I've had ccfl screens go pink in Dells and Thinkpads (both IBM and Lenovo eras). I really don't bother with consumer laptops as they are pretty much junk from the git go especially with their shit plastics and poor cooling.


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## contradictionary

The red spirit said:


> So what can it do? How's performance? What is power consumption? I'm curious.


It can play crysis now :laughing:

Crysis warhead at a little bit over 40fps in 1080p.

It's all that matter, right? 



_Sent sans PC_


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## contradictionary

varikvalefor said:


> If the Intel Core 2 Duo is now considered to be a "retro" central processing unit, then, man, I feel old.


Lmao. I've been amd customer since 80386 era. 



_Sent sans PC_


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## The red spirit

contradictionary said:


> It's all that matter, right?


Needs to run Stalker, CS 1.6 and GTA 4 for cheeki breeki experience.


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## Anunnaki Spirit

Some lols


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## Anunnaki Spirit




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## Anunnaki Spirit

One of my favorite laptops of the 2000s and it has far more ports than anything in recent years with 6 usb ports plus it is a great retro xp/7 machine.


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## stevieg306

I know of someone who has done full HD rendering on a 333MHz pc with 256MB of ram


* *




it was all web based using an external server




I do have what I would call a retro computer at home, 1 GHz G4, 512MB ram, combo drive. Only upgrade I have done is put an airport card in it. Only apple computer in the house and I only really use it to play around on when I'm really bored.


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## Anunnaki Spirit




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## The red spirit

Anunnaki Spirit said:


> Some lols


Dunno about you, but it was just painful seeing those videos. They got so many details wrong, it's pretty much a misinformation at this point. Just shows how they have zero idea what they are talking about and most likely wanted to make some forced gags. At first I thought that garbage content could only some from people unaware of Android phones, but when they showed Samsungs it was clear that they are aware of them and believe in horrible misinformation. 

I watched these two videos week ago and watched them now. I will say it clear, they still trigger me.

And I know that nobody is gonna give shit about this, but this thread is about retro hardware and computers, so content like this should be posted somewhere else. Perhaps in perC tech lounge.

Well, if you want I can break down every single sentence of that video and explain why it's not true or is only partially true, but I will do it in PMs.


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## The red spirit

I accidentally found out that South Koreans had a quite popular back in the day console, called Zemmix. It was made by Daewoo and was based on MSX. MSX computers pretty much dominated Japanese computer market for a long time and was also used as game console. And yet somehow I haven't seen anything as MSX based console only to find out that Koreans made it and it was popular there.

This is how it looked like:









And green version:









It's really adorable little console, I love the looks. And Koreans actually had many localized consoles, most of them were just Nintendo or Sega consoles with different names. For example, famicom in SK was called Hyundai Comboy (that's the real name, sounds like Commie Boy to me), Sega Mega Drive was called Sega Super Gam*Boy, later Super Aladdin Boy. 

Zemmix was special, because it was a completely Korean made console for Korean market from 1985 to 1995. Internals of it looked like home computer's too. Zilog Z80, 8KB RAM, 16KB VRAM, Texas Instruments TMS9918ANL video chip, MSX PSG.

Here's some ancient ad of that thing:





And the reason why this thing is in retro computer hardware thread is that it frankly was just a MSX computer remade into console. With some hacking it is capable of loading MSX-DOS, well sort of...:





To be honest, graphics of Zemmix looked way better than Famicom's. At least it has a nice looking color palette and crazy thing is that it was made exactly when NES was made. So it suggests that famicom wasn't pushing tech boundaries of the time. And according to MSX.org it cost 81000 wons with gamepad. That's just 60 Euros if converted today and Nintendo sold famicom for around 150 dollars. So, Zemmix is cheaper and better console overall. And since it's based on MSX platform, the library of games is great too. Probably better than famicom's. Zemmix also had some exclusively made games just for Zemmix and most of games for console also work on MSX computers. That's really cool console, way better than famicom and yet completely unknown.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_consoles_by_region#South_Korea

No wonder that it outsold famicom. Still, Sega won in SK back then. Which is fair, because it was a cool console too.


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## contradictionary

Cleaned up. Zero dust. Cable tidied. Fans rearranged 

Getting prepared for the soon released FF7 Remake. :wink:











_Sent sans PC_


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## contradictionary

This is... Cute...








_Sent sans PC_


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## ShirleyDubois

I agree with contradictionary.


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## Anunnaki Spirit




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## Anunnaki Spirit

Here is something for collectors to drool over even though most of us are too broke. 

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Evans-Suth...718022?hash=item3b42ad3506:g:rnIAAOSwXk1eU5J-


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## The red spirit

Anunnaki Spirit said:


> Here is something for collectors to drool over even though most of us are too broke.
> 
> https://www.ebay.com/itm/Evans-Suth...718022?hash=item3b42ad3506:g:rnIAAOSwXk1eU5J-


I read that it was used for some military stuff to simulate tanks or something. Either way it's not for your usual consumer. Obviously it's a retro card, but it's not for us. Even if somebody decided to blow over 1 grand on it, I don't think that it would work well. Pretty sure that it would need some special drivers, which are probably imposible to get. And it's possible that it may not be good for games or legacy workstation software. Still, it's a pretty kickass card and it's impressive that they could get away with such modest cooling (which is probably very loud). It has 1GB VRAM (probably split into 256MB chunks for each GPU) and 64 pipelines. One 9800XT scores around 19000-20000 in 3DMark 2001 SE. My GTX 650 Ti also has 1GB VRAM and it scores 36000 in same 3DMark. Makes me wonder if this quad GPU card could actually beat GTX 650 Ti. In theory it would be potent enough, but at least modern multi-GPU set ups are bottleneckfests and only scale somewhat fine up to 2 GPUs. This card was made when they knew how to get near 90% performance scaling on multi-GPU set ups and they didn't need an AIO to cool just two GPUs. Oh and just AGP 4x connection probably means that it's better for non-real time tasks, so it might be still pretty kick-ass at [email protected] Probably even faster than my 75 watt RX 580.


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## Anunnaki Spirit

The red spirit said:


> I read that it was used for some military stuff to simulate tanks or something. Either way it's not for your usual consumer. Obviously it's a retro card, but it's not for us. Even if somebody decided to blow over 1 grand on it, I don't think that it would work well. Pretty sure that it would need some special drivers, which are probably imposible to get. And it's possible that it may not be good for games or legacy workstation software. Still, it's a pretty kickass card and it's impressive that they could get away with such modest cooling (which is probably very loud). It has 1GB VRAM (probably split into 256MB chunks for each GPU) and 64 pipelines. One 9800XT scores around 19000-20000 in 3DMark 2001 SE. My GTX 650 Ti also has 1GB VRAM and it scores 36000 in same 3DMark. Makes me wonder if this quad GPU card could actually beat GTX 650 Ti. In theory it would be potent enough, but at least modern multi-GPU set ups are bottleneckfests and only scale somewhat fine up to 2 GPUs. This card was made when they knew how to get near 90% performance scaling on multi-GPU set ups and they didn't need an AIO to cool just two GPUs. Oh and just AGP 4x connection probably means that it's better for non-real time tasks, so it might be still pretty kick-ass at [email protected] Probably even faster than my 75 watt RX 580.


Why is it a big deal to you to write that post??? There is a difference between people who like to collect things and those who only make purchases to use. That sentiment wouldn't be popular with communities like vogons as people like to explore different types of hardware as their main hobbies.


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## The red spirit

Anunnaki Spirit said:


> Why is it a big deal to you to write that post??? There is a difference between people who like to collect things and those who only make purchases to use. That sentiment wouldn't be popular with communities like vogons as people like to explore different types of hardware as their main hobbies.


Um, no big deal. I'm just a little bit curious what that thing can potentialy do. But if we are here, then I have to admit that just collecting computer hardawre without ever using is just sad. Even if I was making some expensive purchases of old cards, for example 3DLabs Wildcat Realizm 800, I would still would like to set up a PC and perhaps run some demos and benches to see what it can do uniquelly. Completely dead hardware just for looks isn't really cool. I would use that old/collectable hardware for a while even if it's complete piece of fuck. And I would really like to use that quad ATi monstrosity for some Folding, because irght now is the best time to do that.


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