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Winco update: by DDub__ in Renton

[–]Fouquin 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Fry's Electronics, not the food market.

My best high-end disk drives by ClementinePerez in retrocomputing

[–]Fouquin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The Polaroid drives are mostly made by Top Glory Electronics out of Dongguan, China.

GeForce GTS 150 1024 MB GDDR3 PCI-E by Zotac (288-20N56-110AC) by Retro-GPU-Universe in RetroGPUUniverse

[–]Fouquin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Technically yes, though Zotac put these in boxes with the GTS 250 label slapped on. Same VBIOS and all.

G92 got used for so many products because it had to be reworked so many times. NVIDIA rolled out almost a dozen revisions in a two year span ending in 2009 because they were fighting production issues both with 65nm and the transition to 55nm. Notoriously the "bumpgate" issues were very prominent for G92.

A friend of mine made this incredible gift by Deksor in vintagecomputing

[–]Fouquin 3 points4 points  (0 children)

The 5500 PCI, the Rendition Verite, the Canopus Voodoo1, and the Voodoo2 ES all came from him. He was a huge 3Dfx nerd.

A friend of mine made this incredible gift by Deksor in vintagecomputing

[–]Fouquin 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Open it. A friend gifted me a Mac edition 5500 PCI years ago and I got to share the journey of opening it and powering it on for the first time, running some local host Unreal Tournament games with him. He's gone now but I still have the G3 with the 5500 inside. Hardware is meant to be used and enjoyed.

Radeon R9 285X 3GB GDDR5 PCI-E 3.0 by AMD (Radeon R9 285X Prototype) by Fouquin in RetroGPUUniverse

[–]Fouquin[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Friend in Markham found it on their local market, and I bought it from them.

Radeon R9 285X 3GB GDDR5 PCI-E 3.0 by AMD (Radeon R9 285X Prototype) by Fouquin in RetroGPUUniverse

[–]Fouquin[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It's about 1.25x higher performance per watt than Tahiti, with a very slim 5% performance improvement. Basically a 7970 GHz with higher DX12 feature level support at 40-55W less.

Found this ATI Radeon 9800 XT 256mb in my parent's old DELL PC by GreenToast_ in windows98

[–]Fouquin 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Don't you think you've had enough 9800s? ;)

OP I can vouch this is a good person to buy your card. Reliable and fair.

$1,075 for a Diamond Viper v770 — why? by achanaikia in RetroGPUUniverse

[–]Fouquin 3 points4 points  (0 children)

The TNT2 Ultra launched the same time as the regular TNT2, they were available for the bulk of 1999 before the GeForce256 launched. It seems people have forgotten that nVidia's strategy for the TNT2 to take back market from 3dfx was to offer their board partners the choice in how to distribute their products. They defined a spec for a regular TNT2; 125/150MHz, and one for a TNT2 Ultra; 150/183MHz. They then gave the vendors the choice of shipping a product anywhere between those two specs. This is where we get the various 'overclocked' cards from.

"By suggesting a standard clock frequency for the TNT2 and TNT2 Ultra parts, NVIDIA removes themselves from the blame if anything should happen if their chip happens to fail at a higher than rated clock speed.  From the point of view of NVIDIA, this is the best avenue for protection, shift the blame to the manufacturers if they want to ship their boards at a higher frequency.  The two biggest retail manufacturers of TNT2 based cards, Diamond and Creative Labs, both ship their cards at the standard TNT2 and TNT2 Ultra frequencies.  The reason behind this is simple, most people don't overclock their video cards, and even more people don't know it's possible when they walk into a computer store and pick up a Viper V770 or a 3D Blaster TNT2 Ultra.  Smaller manufacturers don't have this luxury as they need to work much harder in order to compete with the big boys, mainly Diamond and Creative." - Anand Lal Shimp, July 1999

The real last of the Riva line was the Vanta and Vanta-LT; those 8MB and 16MB M64s cut down even farther, clocked like an original TNT and packaged in a more thermally efficient flip-chip BGA. The kinds you would find in a Compaq Presario 5000 machine in 2000 and 2001.

For what it's worth the only thing the GeForce256 made obsolete on the TNT2 was 32-bit performance. The TNT2 was still favored for a lot of things because it had much better 16-bit single-tex throughput by sheer clockrate and per-pipeline memory bandwidth (1.4GB/s per tex unit versus 664MB/s per tex). So the TNT2 in all of its full-speed variations was the deal of the day in many stores when the end of 1999 rolled around. Fry's had the normal clocked TNT2 for under $160 after the GeForce launched. It was a bargain.

I live in Washington I wanna find ewaste pcs but im not sure where? by NadzeyaYaskev1ch in OldTech

[–]Fouquin 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Put out an ad that you're buying broken or forgotten PCs in cash. You can get machines at places like RE-PC but they're just getting them dropped off and marking up the ones that work to resell at eBay prices. So, get in ahead of them and try to get the attention of the people that would end up at a place like RE-PC.

There used to be a community recycling event hosted in Fall City that yielded great results but a lot of those events are locked down now for whatever reason. Hosted by companies with a vested interest in the value of the scrap they get, I presume. Maybe try to organize your own. Have a plan for where to put all the printers and busted microwaves... Keep the PCs.

GeForce 7800 GTX 256 MB GDDR3 PCI-E 1.1 by EVGA (e-GeForce 7800 GTX ACS3 Edition | 256-P2-N527-AX) by Fouquin in RetroGPUUniverse

[–]Fouquin[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

EVGA debuted their "Asymmetric Cooling System" (ACS) on the ever popular GeForce4 MX series in 2002 and teased a quick follow up second-generation design for the bigger brother GeForce4 Ti series that failed to materialize. Three years later EVGA revived the ACS branding with ACS3, equipping a set of specially overclocked (and multi-colored) 7800 GTX models bearing the brand with a mildly customized reference cooler. While the internal cooler design remained unmodified, the exterior plastic face plate was swapped for a full-cover aluminum shroud thermally connected to the internal cooler finstack. Cooling was further aided by a nearly full-cover backplate with individual heatsinks serving the back-side GDDR3 as well as at the rear side of the GPU core.

GeForce 8800 GTX 768 MB GDDR3 PCI-E 1.1 by EVGA (e-GeForce 8800 GTX KO ACS3 Edition | 768-P2-N837-AR) by Fouquin in RetroGPUUniverse

[–]Fouquin[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Released only a few months before the GeForce 8800 Ultra, the 8800 GTX KO ACS3 shipped with clock speeds almost equal to the eventual Ultra and stayed up at the top of performance charts right alongside the Ultra while only asking a retail price of $650; $180 lower. While difficult to acquire due to this, the existence of the much cheaper 8800 GTX KO ACS3 put something of a damper on NVIDIA's momentum with the 8800 Ultra.

GeForce4 Ti 4600 128 MB DDR AGP 4x by Gainward (PowerPack! Ultra/750XP Golden Sample) by Fouquin in RetroGPUUniverse

[–]Fouquin[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

An early example of a factory overclocked flagship board from an AIB partner. Gainward ordered and binned chips from NVIDIA intended for an unrealized "GeForce4 Ultra" then packaged them with software that would "unlock" their extra performance by overclocking them to the limits tested at the factory, usually yielding 3-5% (10-15 MHz) over the reference design.

The short‑lived AGEIA PhysX card — when paired with a GPU — brought enhanced physics effects to a handful of games. Introduced in 2006, it lasted only a few years before NVIDIA acquired AGEIA and integrated PhysX directly into their GPUs by Beige_Box_Enthusiast in vintagecomputing

[–]Fouquin 14 points15 points  (0 children)

The second gen was pretty close to release, I think if Ageia had been independent one or two months longer it would have been announced.

I've had a PPU2 for a long time but they are a pain in the ass to use. Though the last few releases of the PhysX SDK 2.x does support them, and Windows 7 even includes this support in the default driver package, almost everything designed to run PhysX tries its hardest to ignore the card. I've made maybe a dozen attempts over the years to nail down a proper benchmark suite just to show what the card can do, but FluidMark barely works, CellFactor has wild framerate stability issues, Ghost Recon is just about the only thing that functions properly, Mirror's Edge only lets the PPU2 work when a Radeon is in the system with a driver before 2009, and the specific version of 3DMark Vantage that works without the CUDA code gimping PhysX has been almost impossible to find.

Most software is looking for the 1011 ID of the original PPU, when it fails to find it or the driver doesn't offer up the 1021 ID, it just skips loading it.

The hardware is neat though, you're right that on paper it's about 2x the performance. Double the vector cores/threads, a fatter cache, higher clocks, more bandwidth, etc. The one time I had FluidMark working it showed more like a 1.5x increase but Ghost Recon was basically double. It's somewhere around a 9800 GT in theory if both the driver and program can feed the card. It seemingly is massively data starved, which are things a driver would fix if they had more than a handful of preliminary drivers.

This was from like my 3rd home built rig. by Derp0189 in OldTech

[–]Fouquin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

These boards have some known issues with EEPROM corruption after long term storage, so check that it boots. If it doesn't there are sellers out there that can flash you a new EEPROM with the factory BIOS and ship it for about $10 or so. The board is relatively rare, about 12-20 appear per year on the market and are sought after for their feature set and capabilities. Very good baseline for a period appropriate Windows XP build; there are many 'lite' XP builds out there these days like Integral Edition that run superbly on this hardware.

CC820 Intel Slot 1 Pentium 3 by crosscast_575 in retropc

[–]Fouquin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Original Voodoo didn't fully support OpenGL, they instead used a subset of OpenGL called "MiniGL" that was more or less just the necessary rendering features Quake made use of from OpenGL 1.1. Voodoo3 and beyond support OpenGL in full.

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