The Post Your Old/Retro Builds Thread

I havent posted anything in a while, so I figured I would put some pics up of my Franklin PC8000. It is an interesting computer, as it is just 3 cards on a backplane with 2 floppy drives and a PSU. I got this 10 years ago from a friend who got it from an old lady that bought it new and never really used it, still has the original shipping box it came in also. It also still has the 2 cardboard protective cards in both of the floppy drives too.

Starfalcon said:

I havent posted anything in a while, so I figured I would put some pics up of my Franklin PC8000. It is an interesting computer, as it is just 3 cards on a backplane with 2 floppy drives and a PSU. I got this 10 years ago from a friend who got it from an old lady that bought it new and never really used it, still has the original shipping box it came in also. It also still has the 2 cardboard protective cards in both of the floppy drives too.

Click to expand...

Aaaah this is apple to me eyes. Gives me the comfort of nostalgia. I cant believe somthing this old but brand new.

939 Athlon 64 X2 4400+ and Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 , Asus A8AR32-MVP Deluxe (first full 2x pcie x16) ATI Crossfire Xpress 3200 chipset , ATI X1950 Crossfire Edition , Patriot Extreme PDC1G3200LLK 2x1gig sets , Creative X-Fi Extreme Music , Enermax PSU (still measures to spec) , WinXP Pro , newer case

Nice.. That reminds me I need to get my crossfire build up and running. I have a Sapphire Pure PC-A9RD580 with two X1950XTX's in storage that need to be unboxed. I've never done a crossfire build before.

Just finished up this Efika PowerPC build using a bplan Efika 5200b + Radeon 9250. It runs MorphOS.

w1retap said:

PowerPC

Click to expand...

PowerPC as in the CPU's that Apple used before they went to Intel (and then their own in-house SOC's)?
Is the AGP riser in a PCI slot if so how does that work?

Anyway looks really neat!

Yes, it is a Power PC 5200B CPU, as in Motorola/IBM/Apple type processor of the era. The PCI slot does include the AGP riser. Not 100% sure how it works as I haven't looked into the design used, but it works lol.

Format _C: said:

PowerPC as in the CPU's that Apple used before they went to Intel (and then their own in-house SOC's)?
Is the AGP riser in a PCI slot if so how does that work?

Anyway looks really neat!

Click to expand...

Apple wasn't the only company to exclusively have computer systems operate with IBM and Motorola PowerPC CPUs.
The PS3, 360, Gamecube, Wii, Wii U, Yellow Dog workstations, and many IBM servers and supercomputers use/used the PowerPC ISA.

w1retap said:

The PCI slot does include the AGP riser. Not 100% sure how it works as I haven't looked into the design used, but it works lol.

Click to expand...

AGP is a superset of the PCI specification, and must behave like a PCI device when the card is first brought up before switching into whatever AGP mode it was designed for. But that switch doesn't need to happen, you can wire up an AGP card to a PCI slot with an adapter and have it run in PCI only mode, with the obvious caveat of severe performance degradation. 3dfx did this with their VSA-100 video cards, like the Voodoo4 4500, Voodoo5 5500 and even the Voodoo5 6000. They just used an AGP 2x slot as a fast 66 MHz PCI bus.

The Radeon 9250 is an AGP 8x card designed for transfer speeds of 2133 MB/s and you're choking it down to 133 MB/s of a 32 bit 33 MHz PCI slot, a ~93.8% reduction in bandwidth. But since that bandwidth is shared due to PCI being a parallel drop bus, the actual bandwidth available is lower.

There are some cards this approach probably wouldn't work with, like the janky late "AGP" cards like the HD46x0 and some Nvidia 7000 series cards that used PCIe2AGP bridge chips. These cards are known to have compatibility issues with normal AGP motherboards.

I have an old Merlin i386 board with a Co-processor and maxed out memory in mothballs and I'm thinking about bringing it back from the dead. Back in the day i rented this system running Windows XP for several years and made a ton of coin even tho it was beyond slow. Thinking I should resurrect it for old times sake.