Silenced vintage/old/retro PC builds

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pm.stacker
Posts: 197
Joined: Wed May 14, 2008 2:54 am
Location: Northern Italy

Silenced vintage/old/retro PC builds

Post by pm.stacker » Tue Nov 29, 2011 6:38 am

Having quite a bit of old hardware laying around I decided to rebuild some of my past configurations in a quiet way, I know it may sound strange but I'm having fun rebuilding machines I owned years ago and see that they still work... :-D. I'll try to use only contemporary components, unfortunately not all since I don't have many ATA drives anymore and not that much old CD-RWs or DVD-ROMs :-(.
Unified components (for all builds)
Case is my soundproofed LIanli PC-C34BF, the front 4x3.5" bay can be easily adapted to accomodate ATA drives by removing the SATA backplane (of course no hotswapping in ATA mode... :wink:)
PSU is a modified Enermax EG495AX (Noisetaker v2.0) by adding connectors to fit every vintage platform I have (P-III, P-4 478, P-4 775, Core2, ATA, SATA, SCSI...)
Hard drive groups
ATA133: Maxtor 6B200P0, 6L200P0, 6Y120L0, 6Y120P0, 2F040J0, Seagate 7200.x ST3320
SATA: Maxtor STM250, Seagate 7200.5 ST3250, WDC WD5000AAKS, WD740ADFD "Raptor 2"
Optical drives available
Asus DRW0402PD from 2003 (OEM Pioneer DVR105)
LG GDR8162B DVD-ROM from 2004
Plextor PleXwriter 16/10/40A
Plextor UltrapleX PX-40TSi

Build 1
Video editing system, main hardware was used for professional-made wedding and other videos in years 2000-2001
CPU: Intel Pentium IIIE 750 MHz (PGA-370)
Heatsink: Globalwin FOP38 with Verax VB60KP fan
System memory: 1024MB PC-100 SDRAM
Board: Asus CU-BX i82443BX+PIIX4E
Video and consumer TV card: ATI All-in-wonder 128PRO 32MB (AGP 2X)
Audio card: Creative Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold (ISA)
LAN card: Roper ROLAN100WOL (RTL8139 with WOL funcion)
IEEE1394a card: D-Link DFW-500 (SIIG DV-kit OEM)
Analog editing and pro TV-out card: Pinnaclesys miroVIDEO DC30+, based on the famous Zoran ZR36000 chipset
DVD-RW drive: Asus DRW0402PD (Pioneer DVR104 OEM)
DVD-ROM drive: LG GDR8162B
Boot drive: Maxtor Fireball3 2F040J0 (onboard CMD controller, ATA-66)
Storage controller: paired Promise Ultra100TX2 controllers, total 4 ATA-100 channels
Storage drives: the ATA133 Maxtor drives, all connected as single Master drive on a Promise port. Unfortunately the glorious IBMs DJNA-372200 and DJNA-371350 I had for video capture have reached "Museum" status, i.e. they still spin up but they ain't reliable anymore :-(
No USB2.0 card, we didn't have one on this mobo, we used the IEEE1394 card to capture DV video from the ProDV JVC deck and the 3+2 USB1.1 ports were enough :wink:
Editing on Premiere was good, first analog only with v5.x on Win98 and miroINSTANT (an early "smart-rendering" plug-in), using S-video I/O (S-VHS625 shoulder camera and Panasonic VCR), then on Win2000 and Premiere v6.x capturing direct DV (ProDV camera and deck) via 1394 and outputting to VHS via the miroVIDEO card, which has an excellent broadcast-grade TV output stage. In Win2000 the CMD ATA66 chip didn't work so we had to buy the Promise cards to get adequate throughput for full D1 (PAL 720x576) video editing, and even latest official Win2k versions of the Miro card driver were crap so finally we used the JVC deck as an ADVC converter (Firewire->TV). Today with WinXP and thanks to a German programmer everything works well, the CMD controller is natively supported and the Pinnaclesys card is back to work after 10 years. I remember those years we worked with 512MB system memory, later (2005/06) when we recycled this mobo for a home server we tried 1024MB but we had all different PC100/133 sticks so it didn't work, now I was able to find four Kingston PC100 256MB sticks for $20, so I can express the full i440BX potential, since this CUBX board has 4 DIMM slots.
I'd say it's still good as for performance, low-power and cool (25W 180nm CPU idles at 32C), it was an advanced platform back then, where we tested the first MPEG2 encodings before the DVD-R era (first drive purchased Jan 2003), this mobo/CPU combo lasted as our homeserver until 2010 :shock: :-D and it still works 8-) for some pictures, will try puttin' em up tonight.

Fire-Flare
Posts: 422
Joined: Sun Jun 13, 2010 12:44 pm
Location: Seattle

Re: Silenced vintage/old/retro PC builds

Post by Fire-Flare » Fri Dec 16, 2011 1:28 am

Old/vintage/retro PC eh? Okay, how about the FIRST 'Personal Computer', The IBM 5150?

DSCF0003.JPG
Originally I just swapped its all-hub cooling fan with a Scythe Slip-Stream.

But after the novelty wore off and it became a hopelessly obsolete waste of space, I parted out everything but the case and rigged it into a passively cooled ITX server.

(Why aren't things built to last like that anymore? I doubt any modern hardware will work in 30 years, but the 80s comps in museums still fire right up)
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KadazanPL
Posts: 144
Joined: Mon Apr 27, 2009 9:58 am
Location: Poland

Re: Silenced vintage/old/retro PC builds

Post by KadazanPL » Fri Dec 16, 2011 1:52 am

Fire-Flare wrote:(Why aren't things built to last like that anymore? I doubt any modern hardware will work in 30 years, but the 80s comps in museums still fire right up)
I still have my Commodore Amiga 600 - still perfectly operational, even though the mouse is almost dead. My first PC however, a Celeron 366MHz died within two years (mobo busted beyond repair). This is called "planned obsolescence"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence

Sometimes, the designers take "planned obsolescence" too far, and have to correct and apologise for their hardware, vide Intel's SATA controller in "Cougar point", designed to degrade performance over time.

Fire-Flare
Posts: 422
Joined: Sun Jun 13, 2010 12:44 pm
Location: Seattle

Re: Silenced vintage/old/retro PC builds

Post by Fire-Flare » Fri Dec 16, 2011 1:55 am

KadazanPL wrote:
Fire-Flare wrote:(Why aren't things built to last like that anymore? I doubt any modern hardware will work in 30 years, but the 80s comps in museums still fire right up)
I still have my Commodore Amiga 600 - still perfectly operational, even though the mouse is almost dead. My first PC however, a Celeron 366MHz died within two years (mobo busted beyond repair). This is called "planned obsolescence"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence

Sometimes, the designers take "planned obsolescence" too far, and have to correct and apologise for their hardware, vide Intel's SATA controller in "Cougar point", designed to degrade performance over time.
Okay, that's a new low right there!

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