Unofficial PC Master Class Thread: Games to Hardware: Vintage and New

[smokehouse]

Same thing basically happened to me. I wanted to build a Win95 gaming rig so I bought them like a decade ago. Life happened, forgot about them and now I don't know where they are.

I bought them when they were ace, in 1998. I was building a "serious" gaming rig to play Unreal. I remember It had a AMD K62 500MHz, a whopping 128mb of ram, two of those Voodoo 2 cards and some 8Mb 2D card. For the time, it was the shit, actually. It ran Unreal amazingly well. I bought a nice Viewsonic CRT monitor as well...

...and then 3DFX freaking ate-it...

 

[greedostick]

I have two of those sitting in a box somewhere in storage...fucking things, became bricks overnight.

You should rip the disc and share it over at the Vogons driver page.

 

[smokehouse]

You should rip the disc and share it over at the Vogons driver page.

Those discs are Looooong gone...

All I have at this point are the cards...

 

[Electric Grave]

Dat Wacom Greedo, damn, so sweet!

 

[Tripredacus]

You should rip the disc and share it over at the Vogons driver page.

Why is that something they need? I still have my 3dfx driver CD-ROMs.

 

[greedostick]

Why is that something they need? I still have my 3dfx driver CD-ROMs.

Im not sure which ones are needed. Havent looked for awhile. Have you ever tried to locate old drivers and install discs online. It's like finding a needle in a haystack of virus.

 

[Claudia Schiffer]

I bought them when they were ace, in 1998. I was building a "serious" gaming rig to play Unreal. I remember It had a AMD K62 500MHz, a whopping 128mb of ram, two of those Voodoo 2 cards and some 8Mb 2D card. For the time, it was the shit, actually. It ran Unreal amazingly well. I bought a nice Viewsonic CRT monitor as well...

...and then 3DFX freaking ate-it...

Haha, K6-II - I loved those things. The build I was going for was going to have K6-III and a Matrox Millenium II for the 2D. Basically, the dream machine that I couldn't afford when they were cutting edge.

 

[Tripredacus]

Im not sure which ones are needed. Havent looked for awhile. Have you ever tried to locate old drivers and install discs online. It's like finding a needle in a haystack of virus.

Yeah. I did run into a situation where a guy needed a specific SoundBlaster driver that didn't exist online, and I had it on Cd but I couldn't upload it at the time due to redistribution rules. It was a wrong-place, wrong-time situation.

 

[NeoSneth]

This one actually made me chuckle. there's so many games where the slider just adds grass and shrubs.

 

[cdamm]

i joined the master race fairly recently:

core i5 7500
16gb ddr4
240gb ssd boot drive
1tb storage drive
gtx 1060 6gb

 

[Gamefan]

i joined the master race fairly recently:

core i5 7500
16gb ddr4
240gb ssd boot drive
1tb storage drive
gtx 1060 6gb

Nice!

 

[greedostick]

You guys are making me jelly with all these SSD's and RAM. I really need to upgrade those.

 

[BladeDancer314]

You guys are making me jelly with all these SSD's and RAM. I really need to upgrade those.

The boot time for Windows 10 is almost none existent with an SSD, love it.

 

[Tripredacus]

The boot time for Windows 10 is almost none existent with an SSD, love it.

I think you will find this true no matter what OS you are booting on an SSD.

 

[Gamefan]

So I was playing The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt on 1080 SLI and one card just stopped working. Went back to the store, told them the issue and they said it was a known issue when using ASUS Strix cards in SLI.

I returned both 1080's and now own one 1080 TI ASUS Strix OC card.

Man!

 

[NeoSneth]

I have yet to see SLI work well. ever.

 

[RAZO]

The boot time for Windows 10 is almost none existent with an SSD, love it.

I agree, it's crazy how fast it is. I'm a few seconds faster with the same ssd on Win10 then I was on Win7. Right after the Bios Screen, it maybe takes 5 or 6 seconds.

I remember the Winxp days walking away from the computer for 1 or 2 minutes to load windows.

 

[smokehouse]

I have yet to see SLI work well. ever.

Like I said earlier, those Voodoo 2's ran just fine in SLI. I remember being shocked that the entire thing worked so easily, figuring I was running 3 graphics cards all at once.

 

[Dr Shroom]

Someone need a Soundblaster 16 PCI? Ripped one out of a shitty Gateway 2000 PC from 1997.

 

[NeoSneth]

Like I said earlier, those Voodoo 2's ran just fine in SLI. I remember being shocked that the entire thing worked so easily, figuring I was running 3 graphics cards all at once.

Ah, that's because Voodoo SLI is not the same as nvidia SLI. nvidia took the acronym, but it's a completely different technology.

 

[Claudia Schiffer]

Ah, that's because Voodoo SLI is not the same as nvidia SLI. nvidia took the acronym, but it's a completely different technology.

Yeah at this point it's probably something different altogether. They did buy up 3dfx's IP when they went out of business and used it to develop the initial nVidia SLI implementation.

 

[Heinz]

I really want to get rid of the two SSD's I have on sata3 and go NVMe SSD with a PCIe card adaptor or just an Intel PCIe SSD. But no space on motherboard for more PCIe

One day Intel or AMD will release a CPU worth upgrading to from my i5 2500k....

 

[Tanooki]

Either I've had back luck over the last year but as of the other day I'm down yet another 1TB HGST 7200rpm HDD, it choked. I swear these modern OS's (8-10) are made to chew up old drives and spit them out. If it wasn't for a 3yr warranty I'd scrap the damn drive.

 

[lordnikon]

This is my current most powerful gaming PC:

CASE:        NZXT NT-H2-B Silent Mid-tower Computer Case
MOTHERBOARD: ASUS M4A88T-M/USB3 Socket AM3 MicroATX Motherboard with AMD 880G chipset
CPU:         AMD Athlon II X4 645 Propus 3.1Ghz Socket AM3 Quad Core Processor
RAM:         16GB DDR3 1333MHz (PC3-10666), Patriot G2 Series Division 2 Edition
COOLER:      Noctua NH-U9B SE2
PSU:         Antec EDGE 550 (550W ATX12V / EPS12V 80 PLUS GOLD, Modular PSU)
OS:          Windows 7 64bit Ultimate

SSD: (OS)    120GB SSD, Intel DC S3500 MLC Memory (w/ power loss protection capacitors)
SSD: (Games) 750GB SSD, Crucial MX300 (w/ power loss protection capacitors)
SSD: (Music)   1TB SSD, Samsung 840 EVO

The case has room for 7 slots, but the motherboard only has 4 card slots being a MicroATX. I wanted to max out its potential, while bringing faster SATA speeds for game installs/playing. With PCIe x1 5Gb/s speeds, we can best the mobo's native SATA II 3Gb/s ports. Here is what I did:

CASE SLOT 1 (PCIe  1x) : Vantec USB3 4port Card + Silverstone SST-CP09 19pin Adapter (2 ext, 2 int)
CASE SLOT 2 (PCIe 16x) : XFX Radeon HD 7750 1GB GDDR5 (single slot)
CASE SLOT 3 (PCIe  1x) : Addonics 6G 2port SATA Controller
CASE SLOT 4 (PCI     ) : HT Omega Claro Halo (soundcard)
CASE SLOT 5            : HT Omega Claro Halo "Midi/Joystick Expansion" Cable
CASE SLOT 6            : 2x eSATA Port Bracket (1 to -> Addonics SATA Controller, 2 to -> mobo)
CASE SLOT 7            : Addonics 5port 6G SATA Port Multiplier (to -> Addonics SATA Controller)

I originally obtained the case, mobo, cpu, and ram in a custom PC order back in late 2011. It sat unused for a long time, as I was transitioning to laptops for workstation tasks. About a year ago I surveyed my computers, and decided I should improve my existing desktop machines before building anything new.

So I really commited myself to the Socket AM3 platform here, and I have been happy with the results. It can play games 2014 and prior at 60fps on Ultra at 1080p, such as Dark Souls II and Unreal Tournament III.

I am still not done evolving the build. Future upgrades include:

CPU: Phenom II X6 1100T Hexcore 3.3ghz (6MB L3 Cache, up to 3.7ghz Turbo Core)
GPU: XFX RX 460 4GB GDDR5 (single slot model)

 

[kuze]

Either I've had back luck over the last year but as of the other day I'm down yet another 1TB HGST 7200rpm HDD, it choked. I swear these modern OS's (8-10) are made to chew up old drives and spit them out. If it wasn't for a 3yr warranty I'd scrap the damn drive.

Get a cheap low capacity SSD for your OS, then use your HDD drive(s) for storage.