Maximum PC's dream machine!!

[rivan]

They did? The #9 cards I saw were S3-based

My old PCI Matrox would do 1600x1200, but only at 85hz. Still looked good on the screen though, nice and crisp. Had this huge fat vga cable that broke off into 5 twist-on coax connectors. God I hated moving that screen.

Yeah, they went down the tubes after being bought out by... uh, Hercules, I think? I could probably google the story of what happened, but once upon a time, they had their own in-house development and produced top notch cards.

 

[child of wonder]

I can still remember being in awe at Best Buy when I saw the first 300MHz computer. As I typed in Notepad on Windows 98 "Behold, I am the mighty 300MHz CPU. All other computers must bow before me," I failed to notice a salesman with two customers standing behind me.

He said, "we'll just wait a moment for this gentleman to finish." I looked back at them and said "I'm going to be a while" and kept typing for another minute or two while they waited.

 

[Arkaign]

Hah, thinking about this old stuff makes me think of the S3 Virge 3d decelerator Back when I didn't know any better, I put one into an extra system to play games with, and it was worse than whatever crap card I took out to begin with

I've seen one those O2 cards, it had plastic brackets at the end of the thing to fill an entire case length. Insane. Not sure what model, I think it was something odd like 24mb.

 

[JulesMaximus]

See, that is EXACTLY why I only spend a few hundred bucks to upgrade every few years.

 

[biostud]

the motherboard is a P55

 

[Rubycon]

I remember when the HX chipset came out. It was a big deal because you could have more than 64MB ram and it was all cached. 512MB RAM was a lot of memory back then!

 

[BoomerD]

I still have my Sony Vaio Pentium 200 mh (with MMX) computer. It came with 32 megs of ram (32 megs!!) and a 4.3 gig HDD. I bought another 32 mb of ram a couple of months later and vastly improved the speed. Unfortunately, it came stock with an ATI All-in-Wonder 2 mb video card...so I dropped $200 for the Monster VoodooII 8mb add-in card when they came out the next year. Quake II never looked better! IIRC, that box was $1999 in 1997, plus I paid $499. for the matching 15" Sony Vaio Trinitron multimedia monitor. I also still use the 19" Sony CPD 420GS monitor that I bought when The Good Guys got out of the computer biz in 98. I paid about $400 for it at the time...BIG savings over the normal $699 price tag.

 

[Arkaign]

There are some really questionable pieces of advice in there ..

(1)- VIA chipset mobo? really?

(2)- A $350 modem? For what?

(3) $700+ for a 2gb hdd? WTF I know it's SCSI but it's a single drive w/o raid.

 

[Gothgar]

sweet a zip drive

 

[Rubycon]

There are some really questionable pieces of advice in there ..

(1)- VIA chipset mobo? really?

(2)- A $350 modem? For what?

(3) $700+ for a 2gb hdd? WTF I know it's SCSI but it's a single drive w/o raid.

1) VIA wasn't that bad back then.
2) That's an ISDN modem
3) SCSI prices were expensive. Then again a 2GB EIDE drive was $300 too.

sweet a zip drive

I liked the SCSI jaz drives. 1GB and quite speedy. The 1.5GB Syquest Syjet was better but far more fragile IMO.

 

[Firsttime]

the motherboard is a P55

Haha I noticed that too.

Makes for an easy upgrade path. You can probably just drop an i5 in there and call it a day.

 

[Gothgar]

There are some really questionable pieces of advice in there ..

(1)- VIA chipset mobo? really?

(2)- A $350 modem? For what?

(3) $700+ for a 2gb hdd? WTF I know it's SCSI but it's a single drive w/o raid.

they were trying to make an overly priced top of the line computer

You can go through current builds and break them down the same way

 

[lxskllr]

Model M keyboards are legendary. Just don't drop water on them and keep using it instead of unplugging it right away. Killed three that way

Currently typing on one made on March 3, 1990.

The one I'm using now was made in 1998. I paid $3 for it a year ago :^)

 

[Tsavo]

The great thing about buckling key keyboards is that you always sounded 3x more productive than you actually were.

 

[Arkaign]

1) VIA wasn't that bad back then.
2) That's an ISDN modem
3) SCSI prices were expensive. Then again a 2GB EIDE drive was $300 too.
.

I've built PCs since the late 80s, and yeah, VIA wasn't as terrible back then. I think for a dream machine a 430HX would have made more sense though.

ISDN was pretty rare, I guess I could see it as an option, but I doubt many people would have gained anything over using a good old USR external.

SCSI was unholy expensive. I remember the Micropolis drives $700+ a drive seems a waste though there. For a $5k dream machine, I think it would have been a lot better to have a couple of 2.1 or 3.2g drives for the same price (and not need the SCSI controller at all).

 

[Gothgar]

The great thing about buckling key keyboards is that you always sounded 3x more productive than you actually were.

also, carpal tunnel

 

[Rubycon]

I've built PCs since the late 80s, and yeah, VIA wasn't as terrible back then. I think for a dream machine a 430HX would have made more sense though.

ISDN was pretty rare, I guess I could see it as an option, but I doubt many people would have gained anything over using a good old USR external.

SCSI was unholy expensive. I remember the Micropolis drives $700+ a drive seems a waste though there. For a $5k dream machine, I think it would have been a lot better to have a couple of 2.1 or 3.2g drives for the same price (and not need the SCSI controller at all).

ISDN stands for It Still Does Nothing.

SCSI back then meant copying a CD at 2X ON THE FLY while firing up Netscrape, AOL 4.0 and checking out binary newsgroups at ~100kbps.

 

[Arkaign]

they were trying to make an overly priced top of the line computer

You can go through current builds and break them down the same way

I thought the point was to make the best possible $5k PC? If they just wanted to be overly priced (but still give better perf), they could have easily done a $20k PC using a DP mobo/SCSI Raid/etc.

 

[Gothgar]

ISDN stands for It Still Does Nothing.

lol, I remember that

 

[Arkaign]

ISDN stands for It Still Does Nothing.

SCSI back then meant copying a CD at 2X ON THE FLY while firing up Netscrape, AOL 4.0 and checking out binary newsgroups at ~100kbps.

The sheer awesomeness!!

Forte Agent ; downloading alt.binaries.anime.wallpaper

 

[sdifox]

The one I'm using now was made in 1998. I paid $3 for it a year ago :^)

I think I still have six in the basement.

 

[sdifox]

The sheer awesomeness!!

Forte Agent ; downloading alt.binaries.anime.wallpaper

right. We all know which alt.binaries you frequent.

 

[sdifox]

also, carpal tunnel

That is not from the keyboard. It's from the positioning of yourself in relations to the keyboard and mouse.

 

[Gothgar]

That is not from the keyboard. It's from the positioning of yourself in relations to the keyboard and mouse.

how dare those with carpal tunnel set themselves directly in front of their keyboard and mouse? :awe:

 

[Homerboy]

The funniest thing in their list IMO is the SB AWE32 for $200.
That's just insane.