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So you have vintage computers, whats your newest/fastest one?

I don't know specifically, but my paranoia tells me that desktops are going to get more and more expensive and go the way of the mini. The days of the powerful multi-purpose computer for everyone may be numbered. :(
 
Ole Juul said:
The days of the powerful multi-purpose computer for everyone may be numbered. :(
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This is my feeling too. It seems a natural progression actually. Now that computing technology is cheap enough and minaturised enough, to seems logical to produce small, inexpensive consumer devices dedicated to particular functions rather than big jack-of-all-trade desktops. Even in the office, a thin client connected to a fast link (now that those links are reliable and fast) may be the way things will go.

Cloud computing anyone?

Tez
 
My main desktop computer is a 3.2Ghz Pentium Dual Core with 2G RAM (just ordered 2 more G for it), NVidia GeForce 7300 video card, 250G drive for the OS, 1.5T drive for data running Win 7 Pro. I'm submitting this post from it.

My main laptop is a 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo with 3G RAM and 250G HD running Win XP Pro.

My newest computer is a 2Ghz Core 2 Duo Mac mini, 3G RAM, 120G hard drive running Snow Leopard.

Just today I put together a computer for my daughter. It's an AMD Athlon 64 +3200, 1G RAM, NVidia GeForce 7600GT video card, 40G and 200G HD, running Win XP Pro. Got most of the parts from my sons, left overs from upgrades they have done. She had been running an old P4 hand-me-down machine that died last evening.
 
I'm all for miniaturization myself. There are very few reasons left to have hulking desktops. I now run a 2.4GHz Dual-Core laptop as my "everything" machine; I run an external monitor/keyboard/mouse setup when at home, and the machine itself comes with me on the road. All the data I need, right there. Of course, that does have the one downside that it is easy to steal, and, if stolen, I lose it all. But the reduced space and noise is fantastic.

It used to be a problem that a shrunken case meant you couldn't add-on lots of peripherals ... but, first of all, all common peripherals are now pretty much always on-board (even Wi-Fi in newer boards), and for those few extras you must have, USB takes over successfully most of the time. I think for the rest they ought to standardize and popularize something like mini-PCI Express (maybe make an x16 version for video cards?) Video is about the last thing that needs a truly high-speed bus and best suited to direct motherboard connection.
 
southbird said:
It used to be a problem that a shrunken case meant you couldn't add-on lots of peripherals ... but, first of all, all common peripherals are now pretty much always on-board (even Wi-Fi in newer boards), and for those few extras you must have, USB takes over successfully most of the time.
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So, do you know of any good USB 1/2" Pertec-interface tape controllers? :)

Actually, if the truth be told, it should be possible to set up a USB interface to an ISA bus and run the software that goes with it under emulation of some sort.

I used to agonize about the sheer waste in a laptop that's seen its day. But heck, people are taking whole desktops to the recycler or leaving them on the curb nowadays. I read something somewhere recently that says less than 5% of consumers upgrade or build their desktop boxes. Shame. I had an XT case that did duty for 15 years, hosting everything from an 8088 to a 486.
 
southbird: I'm all for miniaturization myself. There are very few reasons left to have hulking desktops. I now run a 2.4GHz Dual-Core laptop as my "everything" machine; I run an external monitor/keyboard/mouse setup when at home, and the machine itself comes with me on the road. All the data I need, right there.
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That makes sense, but even with the miniaturization, you're still running a powerful multi purpose computer similar to a desktop or the older mini. BTW, here is a picture of a classic mini: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/Pdp7-oslo-2005.jpeg It's from the Wikipedia article on minis.
 
Hard to imagine buying a 'new' computer. The only way I will ever find my way to a dual or quad core computer is if I find one at the recycler that someone walked away from due to a faulty hard drive, failed memory, etc.

Amazing how much prices have dropped in years gone by. I picked up several pallets of gear not too long ago to get a few pieces of old electronic test equipment that was scattered across the lot. I ended up with 20ish working P4's in the 1.4-2.0 range as well as another 50+ P2,P3 units. I sold the P4s on CL for a whopping 25-40$ ea (including crt, mouse, kb, etc) and was happy to get that. Back when I was a kid there was no way you could get a 'modern' computer for what lunch for 2 would cost at McD's.

-Lance
 
Unknown_K said:
Volume, I think laptops sales have overtake desktop sales for years now.
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Another peculiar aspect is that server memory (184 pin DDR, but registered with ECC) is cheaper than unregistered DDR. I've been considering picking up a server board just to be able to take advantage of the prices.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Another peculiar aspect is that server memory (184 pin DDR, but registered with ECC) is cheaper than unregistered DDR. I've been considering picking up a server board just to be able to take advantage of the prices.
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Too bad registered RAM will not work in most motherboards. My old Intel PR440FX Dual PPro overdrive server has 1GB of memory in it (4 x 256 EDO ECC Buffered RAM) that probably cost a fortune when new and cost me $13 shipped years ago because nothing else can use it. Server RAM is much cheaper because few can use it outside of a server motherboard (which is obsolete).

I would like a dual P3 server motherboard someday with tons of RAM.
 
My latest acquisitions are a couple of Acorn Electrons from 1984. Two are fully working and have aftermarket tape players :D, one appears to be dead apart from a working PSU and one tries to start up with a grey screen and no sound :(.

I'm hoping that the almost working one might just need a minor repair or a new ULA.

In a few weeks I will lay my hands on a Plus 1 interface for one of them and then it could be on to getting hold of an MMC interface, so that I can load games from a solid state "disk".
 
My fastest computer is my current desktop. AMD Phenom II X4 @ 3.2Ghz, 8GB RAM, 2 x 1TB WD Caviar Black, 1 500GB WD Caviar Blue (old HDD from my previous build), 2 x Samsung DVD-RW, 2 x nVidia GTS250 SLI, Corsair 850W PSU (70A on the 12V rail) mounted in a CoolerMaster HAF932 tower case. Vista 32-bit for gaming, Ubuntu Linux 9.04 for everything else.

As you can imagine, this is a media and gaming rig. Like many people, I build one notch below top-of-the-line and I expect to get 3 or so years out of a rig with one mid-life update. That usually entails video card, RAM and/or HDD upgrades. On this box, I will likely opt for liquid cooling and gain performance via overclocking.

Next to that is an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ dual-core that inherited my old hardware. "Old" being defined as a BFG 800W SLI power supply, 4GB DDR2-800 memory and an nVidia XFX 9800GTX+ video card. I use this as a web surfing and EVE Online box.

That, of course, is modern vintage. :)

On my actual vintage hardware, my 2nd fastest is my dual processor SGI Octane. Sadly, this unit just came out of storage and showing evidence of corrosion. Steel case and all. Mainboard SCSI and serial connectors are rusty. Fortunately, I have two 2nd revision mainboards in storage that are fine and I can swap the RAM and CPU out.

Current biggest high-performance vintage box is my Sun Ultra 2. 2 x 400Mhz UltraSPARC processors, 2GB RAM, 2 x 36GB SCSI and CD-ROM. Actually labelled as a Netra but it has a Creator3D card in it. Got it for $10 in a local eBay auction a couple years ago.

Most recent acquisition is another SGI Indy. I have an Indy in rough cosmetic shape (case is cracked and split) so I bought another to restore one to good working condition and have some spares.

I just pulled my other vintage hardware out of storage and gave some away. Kept my SS5 and SS10 hardware. I have two bins full of SCSI cables, MBus and SBus cards, memory, hard drives and so on. I keep one SS10 fully operational and the others act as spares sources. I can't explain my obsession with the old Sun workstations except to say I lusted after one in college when they were $10-20K pieces of hardware and now I can afford to collect them on the cheap. Same goes for SGI. I like owning what was once a $10K+ graphics workstation (SGI Indigo with Elan 24-bit graphics, 4 GEs).

Slowest machine has to be my six Timex Sinclair 1000s. I bought an old IBM terminal keyboard and I am in the process of mounting a good TS1000 into it using the mechanical keyboard to replace the destroyed membrane keyboards. I have one good membrane keyboard and four bad (dark grey screen) TS1000 boards. So one good board is getting reworked along with a 16K expansion. It was first computer ever so I have a nostalgic attachment to the machine.

My vintage collection isn't large (perhaps 30 or so machines, half of them old laptops) but respectable enough. It's more than machines. I collect software and books too. I consider my original IRIX CDs for my SGIs to be the most valuable vintage item I own (IRIX 4.x, 5.3, 6.2, 6.4 and 6.5.19).

Matt
 
Unknown_K said:
Too bad registered RAM will not work in most motherboards. My old Intel PR440FX Dual PPro overdrive server has 1GB of memory in it (4 x 256 EDO ECC Buffered RAM) that probably cost a fortune when new and cost me $13 shipped years ago because nothing else can use it. Server RAM is much cheaper because few can use it outside of a server motherboard (which is obsolete).

I would like a dual P3 server motherboard someday with tons of RAM.
Click to expand...

I recently built a Tyan LE-T motherboard with Dual Pentium III 1.4 ghz Tualatins with 1gb of registered ECC PC-133 memory.
The motherboard can fit in atx cases. On ebay, you can get the processors for $10 shipped each. Just wanted a dual cpu system on the cheap.
 
My daily-use machine is built off an Intel S5000 workstation motherboard with dual Xeon 5420s and 12GB RAM. Storage is two Intel X25-E SSDs in RAID 0 for the system volume, with four Fujitsu 15k SAS drives in RAID 0 for data (yeah, no redundancy, it backs up to the server over 2 bonded Gig-E links every night). Video is a GeForce GTX 285 which is overkill really considering I don't play games on it, but it works great with the 3D packages I use.

This machine would be ridiculous if all I did was the typical MS Office and web browsing stuff, but I do a lot of work that requires significant computing horsepower. Working with 1GB graphics files is torture on a more typical machine, and stuff like Maxwell Render will use all the CPU and memory you can throw at it...
 
nathan said:
My daily-use machine is built off an Intel S5000 workstation motherboard with dual Xeon 5420s and 12GB RAM. Storage is two Intel X25-E SSDs in RAID 0 for the system volume, with four Fujitsu 15k SAS drives in RAID 0 for data (yeah, no redundancy, it backs up to the server over 2 bonded Gig-E links every night). Video is a GeForce GTX 285 which is overkill really considering I don't play games on it, but it works great with the 3D packages I use.

This machine would be ridiculous if all I did was the typical MS Office and web browsing stuff, but I do a lot of work that requires significant computing horsepower. Working with 1GB graphics files is torture on a more typical machine, and stuff like Maxwell Render will use all the CPU and memory you can throw at it...
Click to expand...

Nice rig. I must say, when you decide to upgrade to "Nehalem", you will be happy; but at this point, we're close enough that you might as well hold out for the six-core "Gulftown" procs.

My current top-end rig is one of two:
Intel S5500 server board with two W5580 Xeons and 12 GB RAM. My storage is three Seagate Saavio 15K.2 drives in RAID-5 (sadly, only the "software" Intel RAID-5,) plus a Western Digital "Green" 1 TB drive for storage. (Backed up regularly enough.) I'd love to trade my Saavios for Intel Extreme SSDs, but those are just too darned expensive. (But holy crap are they fast; I got to play with a 16-drive RAID made from them, and it was astounding.) Onboard video only at the moment. I have a Radeon 4850 I could throw in, but the PSU doesn't have a PCI-e power connector, and it's not my game machine, so I haven't bothered. If I ever get Mac OS X hacked on to it, I'll probably throw the 4850 in then. Mostly this machine is used for video compression, a task where CPU speed is obviously the most important. The only reason I even have the three 15K SAS drives is because I got them cheap. Before those, I had an old 40 GB SATA drive as the boot drive.

My other is my "home server". Given as a 'parting gift' from the last major company I worked at. The company was clearing out all their Itanium stuff, so I got myself an Itanium: Intel SR9000MK4U server with four Itanium 9150M CPUs (the top-of-the-line Itanium,) and 16 GB RAM. Only two hard drives; both 400 GB SAS. I really don't know what to do with this machine, it's such a beast. It just sits under the stairs acting as a space heater now that it's starting to get cold at night. I have it running SETI@home; the only Itanium native app I can find that I actually have a use for; yet it is outrun by a GeForce 9600GT running SETI on the GPU. (And a GeForce GTX 295 a friend has outruns it by two orders of magnitude!)
 
Nothing Fancy...

Nothing Fancy...

"Banshee"
Athlon 1ghz
512MB RAM
2 80GB hard disks (1 IDE, 1 SATA)
DVD burner
Winfast TV tuner card
sound card
USB2 card
10/100 network card
Adaptec SATA controller card
GeForce MX4 4000 128MB AGP video card
Running XP Pro
First time in a while I've had a full ATX board with all of the slots filled.

"Slug"
P3 1ghz
384 MB RAM
2 9.1GB Ultrawide SCSI drives
Adaptec 2940U2W SCSI controller card
10/100 network card
USB2/FW PCI vard
GeForce 6200 128MB AGP video card
Running Ubuntu 9.04
 
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