The Good old days of computing

[maxfly]

awesome thread!
you guys and your excellent memories. my first one was um, well...all i know is that i played civilization on it day and night and it cost a friggin fortune. then i fell in love with consoles. in the next phase i bought a p3 rig from gateway because my friend convinced me that pc games had wayyyy better vids. he was right. it was glorious. other than p3 i cant remember the specs except that the hdd was a seagate barracuda 10gb and it died 3 times. the gateway succeeded in making me hate pc customer and tech support so much i made it my mission in life to figure out how they worked and to build and maintain my very OWN. i guess i owe alot to gateways useless support being that it brought me to where i am now! after those it was the socket a amds, nvidia/ati gpus and this thing called ocing that made me crazy. next came WATERCOOLING... muhahahaha. aluminum rads, gold plated koolance cpu blocks, itty bitty pumps and 1/4id hose that had to be thrown out every 3 or 4 months. ah the good ol days.

btw you have no idea how hard it was to remember the name gateway, not kidding. all i could come up with was a mental picture of the cow pattern they used for their boxes.

 

[batboy]

Abit, once the maker of the best overclocking motherboards available, got into financial problems and was acquired by another company which mostly liquidated them I think.. I stayed with Abit until the end. Some of the Abit boards I remember owning are: BH6, SE6, TH7-II, AG8, AW8, AA8XE, AW9D-Max

 

[||Console||]

Abit, once the maker of the best overclocking motherboards available, got into financial problems and was acquired by another company which mostly liquidated them I think.. I stayed with Abit until the end. Some of the Abit boards I remember owning are: BH6, SE6, TH7-II, AG8, AW8, AA8XE, AW9D-Max

I miss my abit nf7s with my 2400+ mobile

 

[JLK03F150]

My most recently acquired PC has a BE6 in it. Haven't had much time to play with it yet, need to find to right Win98 driver to get the USBs working.

The other Abits I have are AI-7, IC7-g Max II (not the lusted after III), two AA8XEs, and AW9D-Max.

The Abit AI-7 865PE was the first mobo I got with the goal of overclocking. I had a Dell with a s423-s478 Powerleap 2.4A CPU, 100MHz FSB, no HT. It had an overclocked Geforce Ti4400 in it. Moved everything to the AI-7, put some TT copper heatsink with the god-awful orange fan on top of the CPU. I reached 3.0 GHz pretty quickly and became bored with that. It wasn't as much as I wanted. I upgraded to a 3.2 GHz northwood & XP-90 cooler and was able to get about 3.6 GHz stable. That started me on the 'needing more' computing journey.

I just remembered Monarch Computer from back then. It was in Atlanta and where I bought most of my components in-store. Great place until their mismanagement & crappy online customer service forced them out of business.

 

[batboy]

I've been looking for old photos. Here is the same case I'm still using, this photo is from 2003 when I first got into watercooling. If I remember right, I first had a Northwood P-4 under the waterblock, but the next year I was one of the first to try a Prescott P-4 (aka Pres-hot). That was one reason why I had gone watercooled was I knew the processors would keep getting hotter. The other reason was I was tired of high speed fans making my ears ring after an evening of gaming (probably Medal of Honor or Call of Duty).



Here's what the same rig looked like in 2007 when I was competing in the Forum Wars benchmarking competition.



Here's what it looks like now.



The loop really hasn't changed much. Still using barbs and clamps and still using thin wall flex hose. What has changed is the size of the video cards.

 

[Tír na nÓg]

My first big OC. [email protected],1.55v, OCCT with 20c ambient, 42c max: the bong works well! And look at the Mobo model

 

[Daleon]

I just remembered Monarch Computer from back then. It was in Atlanta and where I bought most of my components in-store. Great place until their mismanagement & crappy online customer service forced them out of business.

I went to Monarch quite a bit also. Always had the good stuff yeah until they fell apart. Ginstar back in the day was my home though with a good bit of CompUSA mixed in.

 

[maxfly]

yeah man the ic7-g3 was sweet but hard to find and expensive!, i went with the asus p4c800-e deluxe primarily. altho i killed a couple asus p5b deluxe and a few others during the 875/865 era, i beat the hell out of those mbs! used the socket 479 adapter on the p4c800 to run a mobile cpu. i think i killed at least three cpus with that mb lol.

I went to Monarch quite a bit also. Always had the good stuff yeah until they fell apart. Ginstar back in the day was my home though with a good bit of CompUSA mixed in.

hahaha good ol comp usa, man i bought tons of gear from them! back when i was building i went there religiously for odds and ends. used to drive the managers crazy for trying to act like they knew what they were talking about then calling them out, hehehe.

@batboy i bet everyone of us can remember a rig set up just like that at some point!

 

[batboy]

Here is an Abit motherboard (SE6 circa 2000, I think). I put a heatsink on the clock generator and used a northbridge passive heatsink on the southbridge chip. I added a fan to the northbridge sink. I have a blower card fan next to the modded video card to exhaust hot air from the GPU out the back. The video card is heavily modded too. Everywhere you look in this pic there are cooling mods done. That was a massive CPU heatsink and fan too for a socket 370 back then.

 

[EarthDog]

Invalid attachment for me...

Why a link anyway? Put the image inline.

 

[Tír na nÓg]

Same here.

 

[JLK03F150]

Daleon, I never went to Ginstar, but spent lots of time at CompUSA. There was another shop on Dawson Blvd near Ginstar called HiQ. I bought a P200 system from them back in the '90s. Maxfly, I was in awe of the 479 adaptor back in the day. A mobile 1.6 overclocked to 2.4 in an adaptor was on par with my 4.0 Prescott.

 

[batboy]

Invalid attachment for me...

Why a link anyway? Put the image inline.

I am putting it inline. If I use the OCF image insert thing, why would I link? This has happened several times now, not sure what's up.

EDIT: I inserted the same image exactly the same way I did the first time. Like I said, not sure what's going on. We'll see if it stays like it's supposed to.

 

[EarthDog]

Whatever you did, i can see it now. We'll keep an eye out and see if others are experiencing what you are.

 

[batboy]

I can't be the only one that has done this while benching (2007). But, not anymore, I can do closed case benching now.

 

[Mr.Scott]

Benchers don't use cases.

 

[maxfly]

Maxfly, I was in awe of the 479 adaptor back in the day. A mobile 1.6 overclocked to 2.4 in an adaptor was on par with my 4.0 Prescott.

hehe yeah it was a fun toy to play with!

- - - Updated - - -

I can't be the only one that has done this while benching (2007). But, not anymore, I can do closed case benching now.

View attachment 194460

hahaha i remember using a big ole box fan!

 

[Tír na nÓg]

Benchers don't use cases.

Yep.

With all the bays and panels removed, my Enthoo looks more like a vertical test bench

I might order a new case and turn the former into a proper bench...

 

[batboy]

Benchers don't use cases.

I can imagine Scotty hunched over his benching bench, muttering, "Aye, I'm givin' her all she's got, Captain."

 

[Tír na nÓg]

I can imagine Scotty hunched over his benching bench, muttering, "Aye, I'm givin' her all she's got, Captain."

He is our beloved Captain!