pio

I've made some decent progress on my Jeep lately. Dad's metal shop has been super busy lately, so still waiting on the ladder we're building for the back to access the spare tire up there. But the basket's done now, with toolboxes.

The only one that's finished is the phenom. I'll happily boot her up tonight. What would you like to see? I've got cod4-black ops or mw3. Beamng.drive. Killing floor 2. Dirt 2-4. All benchmarks that are free of course. Ummm, rdr2 and cyberpunk but I'm pretty sure both of those complain about the 6970 not being dx12. I could toss an rx580 8gb in there to see though if needed. I'm just having fun. Was kinda shocked at how tiny 250mb is on a zip disk though. I recall fitting a heck of a lot more stuff on my zip100 disks back in the day lol. EDIT: I'll go ahead and do all the bigger games that I have currently installed on it, and a run of Heaven and Valley while I'm at it. Not going to try Cyberpunk or RDR2, not installed, never intended to install. But I'll get Beamng, DiRT, Crysis, GTA V....you know, the basics. Screenshots coming shortly.

Just wait for the 939 build...... Going full modded case on that one.

That's kind of the point. I have a 6 year old son who's starting to get into tech and computers. I'd like for him to know (eventually) how computers have evolved. My nephews are 7 and 10, and they have actually been asking me what some of this old gear is and how it works too, like the zip disks they caught me so excited about lol. That's why I've decided to go back even older than 939, and its what I grew up playing on myself too. I am, of course trying at the moment to see how modern I can make old junk play, but that wasn't entirely the point. "Museum" was the point. But yeah, I was surprised by the Phenom build. It plays my favorite game, Beamng.drive, just fine at 3840x1080. "Lowest" settings, but plays it smoothly, with easily an average FPS of 45-60. My Ryzen 3600 / RX580 can barely eek out playable framerates on "Ultra" same resolution, or "Normal" at native res of my monitor (5120x1440). Game is very very CPU heavy with lots of mods and cars spawned, and the Phenom can do the game playable. Kind of surprised me considering the game's requirements. I've been playing Killing Floor 2 on it too, but that's a little less surprising that it works.

Well, my Phenom rig is now 100% complete. Here's the specs and a few pictures. Asus M4A79 Deluxe Phenom 9850 @ 3.0GHz TRUE 120mm CPU cooler 8GB (4x2GB) DDR2-1066 @ 833, 5-5-5-15 Seasonic M12II 520w Sapphire HD6970 TP Link Wireless N Card (for older OS's) DIYPC case of some flavor / cheapie Iomega ZIP250 ATAPI drive Lite On DVDRW SATA drive Crucial BX500 240GB SSD White Label 2TB 7200RPM SATA HDD I have a whole lot of other stuff going on too. I'm about 99% done with my FX build. I'm about 75% done with my Thuban build. I have everything here for my 939 build minus the power and reset buttons (doing a custom case on that one). I have a second 939 build by accident (whoops) that's like 50% complete parts list. I have 2 Ryzen rigs of course. I need some high end GPU's but those are too spendy of course still. Oh, and I also ordered a Chieftec Dragon!!!! That bad boy is going to house my Socket A Windows 98SE rig (I have plans for 2 Socket A rigs, and eventually a Socket 7). Sorry for the delay on updates, the site's been dead for me / couldn't connect....and well, I've been busy scouring ebay for deals. I have every GPU I wanted either here or on its way (again short of modern high end cards starting after RX580). EDIT: The NZXT Source 210 that this rig WAS installed in previously is getting modded for the 939 build. So that's why I changed cases on the Phenom. I also figured out my GPU setups I wanted to use on these all so they'd make sense, so that's why I changed from a 4890 to the 6970 in here. This Phenom rig can play 99% of the games I play anyway still, even at 3840x1080 (it won't do native 5120x1440 for me). Honestly, I've been pretty impressed with its performance for its age. But yeah, I changed a few plans up to save myself from having to buy all new everything since I had some junk laying around already.

Grrrr, count this as the FIFTH freaking mobo I have to send back to ebay. This time, the stupid thing is even almost functional, except there's a BIOS password installed that cannot be removed by clearing CMOS. Why can't sellers check their junk before selling it on ebay? ?

A little late to the party, but my 2 cents...... I bought a B450 board myself even though X570 and B550 boards were available (got it cheap). Honestly, those couple of reasons aren't worth an upgrade to me personally. Adapters work fine for NVME drives if you really have a need for it. CPU expansion, you've already got a 3900x you said. My philosophy in this particular instance is going to be, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Unfortunately with Ryzen CPU's, there's such a limited margin for tuning and overclocking, its just not worth the hassle and cost of upgrading a motherboard alone....in my opinion.

I can't even express in words how much easier that makes it browsing the forums. Thank you E! By all means, make a switch or something if you want so it can be changed at user's preference though. I understand why you want the home page content the way it is. Sooooo much easier going back to the forums to go trolling now though!.....I mean helping, helping other people. ?

Little update: Sorry guys its been slow. I've had three motherboards come in DOA now for this project lol. Love fighting with ebay. Got a 990FX Sabertooth and FX8350 on the way, hoping to arrive sometime this week. That setup will be paired temporarily with an RX 580 8GB, but I intend to find a R9 290x for it. Already got most of the rig here since its replacing a dead LGA 2011 server setup anyway.

By the way, not to ruin all the good sales for myself or anything, I've been having some halfway decent luck at mercari. Scored several working (old) GPU's for dirt cheap there. Just got my 990FX Sabertooth for $90 there too, and an FX 8350 which I can't wait to tinker with. The pickings are slim there, but every once in a while there's a decent deal. The sellers seem more initiated to package well and describe their items well too.

I've lost count of the reasonings behind why they've arrived broken now lol. But yes, my last one was literally shipped naked in a flat rate box. -_- My Sabertooth I overpaid for came nearly snapped in half.....but that one was actually USPS's fault not the sellers. One board came with a CPU in the socket (as advertised), but there were bent pins underneath but it was advertised as "tested and working". Yeah, my ebay luck has been horribad lately.

Hopefully a simple feature to add on. Any way to make the logo in the top left corner of the page take you to the forums home page instead of the regular home page? I'd be perfectly content if there was some hidden setting I could change in User CP. My apologies if its already there, couldn't find it when I was looking. EDIT: I'm also sure there's probably a specific reason the home page is what it is. It's catchy, its modern. If you're wanting it to be default, maybe make it default for certain class of users perhaps? Like newcomers that haven't contributed much yet. Then maybe after some time on the site it opens up as an option in User CP.

Not bad. Colors seem really badly washed out in the video here. Now that "learn more" page though, some of those sliders are pretty good. Some of them absolutely look worse than the base game in my opinion. Seems to be lacking color in a lot of them, and they tried way too hard to make things more "green" in too many areas. It's supposed to look like the hills on the west coast. There's dirt there. Why'd they remove the dirt? ? Really neat stuff though.

I'll believe it when I can shake hands with one. ?

Interesting. Happens within 24 hours of Ether passing JPMorgan and VISA. The last day hasn't been a good day for crypto, that's for sure.

Still waiting. Just sent back my THIRD DOA motherboard to ebay yesterday, would really like to deal with people that actually give 2 thoughts about packaging and actually taking care of hardware. And that was just for one rig, lol. Also had another mobo come in naked in a USPS flat rate box, no packaging, not even an anti-static bag. That was promptly sent straight back without even trying that one (plus had a ton of corrosion that wasn't mentioned anywhere on the ad).

This is true, however still can't launch 64 bit executables though. I settled on a dual boot of 7 x64 and Kubuntu on it for now. Sorted out the issues I was having, was a rogue SATA cable wreaking havoc. Ordered new SATA cables, an SPDIF cable for the 8800's for audio over HDMI, and some jumpers so I can plug up the missing front panel audio since my case doesn't have AC-97, only HD Audio. So I am making some progress on it, just a little slower than inititally lol. Budget ran out, so now I'm back down to my normal just a few hundred monthly budget for fun lol. I could finish all of this in one go, but then I'd have nothing to tinker with the rest of the year. ? Currently, I'm stress testing....get this, 3.1GHz out of a 939 dual core! And over DDR400 speeds with 4x2GB sticks (8GB). Even back in the day when 939 was popular these speeds and RAM capacities were non existant.

Which MW? COD4? I'll hop on and play that one every once in a while when there's other players.

I actually gave up for a few days now lol. I got the rig put into a case, and now it won't POST for some reason. Was working, and just gradually quit wanting to POST. Guessing its an old SATA cable or something, I hadn't planned on buying cables since I have a giant stash, but they're all the wrong kind lol. I was able to get Windows 10 32bit to work, but that only gave me ~2.5GB of usable RAM left. After I put it in the case, was going to go ahead and just retire the 939 to XP x64 and a Kubuntu dual boot to "modernize" it, but then it quit POST'ing lol. I've got my main rig, my kid's rig, the Phenom, and my Broadwell server gaming rig all that need attention still too, especially if I'm going to participate in the fold-a-thon. Me trying to modernize old crap might get put on the backburner for a little bit.

Got some work done today, I present to you fine folks, "Tole-Hoe" (supposed to be a mix up between Toledo and tally-ho). Decided to go against naming it "Burny", too many bad memories with that name (for obvious reasons). I have FULLEST of faith this 939 rig WILL NOT catch on fire. ? Specs: Athlon x2 4200+ Toledo @ 3.0GHz (300x10) Currently 4x1GB Corsair XMS DDR400 @ 200Mhz, 2-3-2-5-2T (have 4x2GB ECC) Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe Xigmatek S1283 with 2 Yate Loon High Speeds Yate Loon Low speeds all over case + 1 Medium across GPU's DIYPC Cheapy Case Deepcool RGB Strips (for white) Cablemods (ebay) Cable Kit (blue) eVGA GTS 250 1GB SLI (x2) eVGA 700w PSU 1x 240GB Crucial BX500 1x HGST 2TB 7200 RPM HDD 1x 500GB Crucial BX200 (temporary for Linux / playing) 1x Samsung DVDRW Drive 1x Teac 3.5" 1.44MB Floppy Drive Windows 10 32bit for now, but eventually this will have XP on it

I already have 3 G92's though that are all very capable of PhysX. Those Ageia cards were tempting in the day though. Never tried that game or benchmark, never even heard of it before. I do see other people referencing it when searching Ageia PhysX stuff though. Update (minor win): I did get Windows 10 x86 to install to the 939 rig. It's functional, but of course.......32bit. So I only have 2GB of useable RAM if I put in the SLI setup, or 3GB with the 5870. But.....Windows 10 is now working on it kinda lol. It's looking more and more like THIS particular rig might just get XP loaded to it and put in the closet. I don't know if a 939 can be a daily driver in 2021 now without modern x64 OS support.

I know! I smile ear to ear looking at that picture everytime. No, definitely hardware. Monitor is definitely far too new. The 939 rig shouldn't really be capable of using it but here we are. It could be. I'll give 32bit 10 a try here in a bit. I've been reading similar when searching. I did try 8.1 x64 a few days ago and it did the same problem, just random freeze and reboot mid loading screen. 7 has been rock solid but obviously old. Just problems I should've expected but didn't stepping into this project. I figured I'd start having issues running Windows 10 when I jumped down to Socket A, and then have to settle for 7 or XP. Still dinking with the 8GB RAM kit, its hard to get stable, go figure. Also trying out some preliminary Steam titles that interest me, just to see if this 939 is even worth trying to modernize.

In pioneerisloud This just means I have to get more of my junk up and running in 2 weeks. I can do this!

Fixed editing above sorry for double post While I'm here though, I really should tease you guys with a giant collage picture of vintage goodness. My desk is messy though!!!! A couple of the cards really need cleaned too. Ahhhhhh...... I'll update this post if I decide to haul it all out here to my desk this evening for a photo shoot. If I do, please excuse the mess. Obviously have lots of projects going on here (my Jeep too lol). Okay, talked myself into it. Let's do a little triva. THREE individual items in this picture are original single owner (me) items. Well, not counting the newer junk that's obvious. Item descriptions (left to right, starting with large items first): 1. Apevia X-Plorer case 2. Dell Dimension L600r case only (mATX modded) 3. Ryzen 3600 rig (sig) 4. DIYPC JI80-BL Case for the 939 rig 5. Phenomenon (WIP here) 6. Kiddo's gimped Ryzen 2600 rig (back left again) 7. Socket 939 rig I've been playing with on the bench 8. G92 pile (1x eVGA 8800GTS 512MB KO / 2x eVGA GTS 250 1GB) 9. ATI made / branded reference HD2900XT 1GB GDDR5 10. Sapphire made / ATI branded reference HD3870 512MB-I think? 11. Asus non-ref HD4890 1GB 12. Sapphire Vapor X HD5870 1GB 13. Sapphire Vapor X HD6970 2GB 14. Asus RX580 8GB Armor-X 15/16 4x4GB Kingston HyperX DDR3-1600 that does DDR3-2200 / 4x1GB Corsair XMS DDR400 that does DDR500.