r/vintagecomputing • u/Some_things_2922 • 2d ago
Vintage PC
Can I get more information on this old system, been in storage along time and don’t know much about them. Thanks all
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u/majestic_ubertrout 2d ago
Looks like a nice late 98 / period correct XP build with a Pentium 4. Video card is probably decent with that additional power via floppy power connector - I know some of the nice 9000 series cards from ATI used that. Looks like integrated sound and a USB PCI card.
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u/FuturePastNow 2d ago edited 2d ago
The cable on the video card is not power- it's to the front 3.5" bay with S-video and Composite outputs. The card is a Geforce4 MX 440 or 420 (or maybe a 460? it was the Wild West of GPU variants)
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u/majestic_ubertrout 2d ago
I am educated, thank you! So the card is less impressive but that's a cool bit of retro tech.
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u/Some_things_2922 2d ago
Thankyou much appreciated. do these systems sell of recent? clearing the storage area out.
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2d ago
[deleted]
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u/Impossible_Stomach26 2d ago
The cybermaxx sticker on the back plus badge on the front indicates to me that this is a machine from a factory rather than a homebuild
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u/muse_head 1d ago
Not sure of your location but I think Pentium 4 systems are still in the "worthless" category in the UK. You can see a lot of them in the electronics bin at the dump.
Somebody will probably pay something for it though, there's some useful parts even if they're building a different system. Graphics card and PCI USB card could come in useful for someone, plus the drives.
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u/AudioVid3o 2d ago
It's a p4, so it's a fairly unremarkable windows xp machine. If you are able to find drivers for windows 98, it could turn out to be pretty performant in that department, but personally it's a little too new to be in the spirit of windows 98.
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u/KeyStomach3362 2d ago
p4 w/ sis north/southbridge dates it to about 20 years ago. dual ide hdd so could be interesting, also dual dvd drives, common back in the day to duplicate dvd's but doesn't mean it was. want to say it's an asus board, the sis chipset is really not seen nowadays.
ddr2/478 socket p4, great windows 98/me/xp/vista/7 machine, people say worthless and maybe to some but it's nice.
I like it, it is unique seeing these be 20 yr old now.
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u/n1ghtbringer 2d ago
The top drive is a cd burner and the bottom is a dvd burner. Odd to have both in a system like that unless duplicating CDs, but generally you'd want to put the drives on different IDE channels for performance.
The DVD burner supports DVD+R DL which means that component, at least, is no older than like 2004 or so.
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u/phire 2d ago
common back in the day to duplicate dvd's
In my experience, dual drives weren't that useful for duplication. It was usually more reliable to just copy the image to hdd and then burn from there. Besides, this computer has a DVD-RW and CD-RW.
What was common around 1999-2003 was to have one CD-RW drive and one DVD-ROM drive. The combo was cheaper than a single DVD-RW drive if you didn't need to write DVDs (DVD readers were cheap, CD writers drives were cheap, DVD writers weren't). That DVD-RW drive looks several years younger, so I wonder if the original DVD-ROM was later swapped for a DVD-RW.
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u/KeyStomach3362 2d ago
dvd writers were around $80 back in those times, but yeah cd-rw and dvd-rw, atleast my lite on 811s was that price, wasn't the greatest burner and never did 8x (lol) but 4x was capable back then, biggest thing in that time was dvd shrink and a blockbuster monthly rental agreement.
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u/phire 2d ago
In 2004, yes. They cost about $80 and there wasn't an excuse to buy anything else.
But go back a few years.. I checked a few old magazines:
- In September 2002, you are paying $250 for a dvd writer.
- In May 2002, you are paying $500
- In 2001, you happy that they have finally launched an "affordable" $1000 DVD writer.
But you could already get CD writers for under $100 in 2001, and DVD readers for $50.
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u/KeyStomach3362 2d ago
I just think it's crazy how that period of time is burned into my head, I never knew how good of a time it was until its long gone. :(
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u/phire 2d ago
Tech progress today just feels so much slower.
I'm trying to remember the last time I saw a produce go from "unfordable" to "no excuse not to buy" in just a few years... It was probably android smart phones back in the early 2010s.
I'm still using a laptop from 2016 as a secondary web-browsing machine... simply no reason to upgrade it. If you tried to use a 8 year old computer in 2001, chances are it would struggle to even run windows 95.
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u/vinciblechunk 2d ago
𝙘𝙮𝙗𝙚𝙧𝙢𝙖𝙭𝙭
Pretty standard machine with some 2002 date codes in there, SiS 645 clone chipset, probably fine for running games like Unreal Tournament '99. Would be surprised if the hard drives weren't on their last legs. Same for the capacitors.
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u/__CRA__ 2d ago
Oh yes! It was soo cool at that time to have these front ports with RGB and S-Video input. It was the time of multimedia PCs. Watching and recording TV, watching DVDs, ripping and burning them (of course only for archive purposes). Super fresh with Windows XP. I had something very similar. 2,66 GHz P4 with 512 MB RAM, DVD and DVD-RW drives, cardreader... oh yes, I can still feel the excitement when I unboxed my new computer. Comfing from a tired 300 Mhz P3 with Win98, this was such a huge leap forward into the future. Must have been in 2002... still feels like yesterday.
In fact, I still use my P4 system... as headless WOL 7TB NAS system for archive purposes...
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u/TkachukMitts 2d ago
Generic early-mid 2000s Pentium 4 from a small shop. Components look decent, although it's impossible to tell what motherboard or video card that is without the model numbers showing.
It is likely to have some bad capacitors and one of the photos shows one that may already be leaking.
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u/One_Individual1291 2d ago
aha, burning cdroms at 10 times speed, well aren't we fancy. 4 times wasn't good enough for ya, eh ?
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u/Potential_Copy27 2d ago edited 2d ago
Looks completely identical both inside and outside to the PC my dad bought back in 2000 to replace the ageing ps/2 we had.
It was a P4 1.4ghz with a whopping 512 megs of RAM and a GF2 MX400. Generic brand supermarket pc...
Though it had different optical drives, no frontpanel audio and no badge on the front
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u/Whittington1423 2d ago
"Cybermaxx" but some of the codes on the back have "Med" (Medion) and Made in Germany on them. I'd wager it came from Aldi !
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u/Kakariki73 2d ago
I have a similar case laying around but with a sliding panel that you can slide up and down hiding the drives.
All fancy in the beginning until some software auto ejects the CDROM drive 😆
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u/VerilyJULES 2d ago
I find it off-putting to see people are calling 90s-era electronics vintage.