Unobtainium?

[skipsneeky2]

I wish there was a good reason to justify putting together an old 3dfx powered windows 98 machine but really glide wrappers kind of make that pointless

I nearly got Windows 2000 pro to work with my b75 based i7 3700 rig,i lacked working usb 2.0 ports but 3.0 ports worked lol.770 is to new considering the last official series from nvidia that supported y2k was the 7000 series.All else worked though.

My first official computer was a old Gateway "desktop" desktop pentium 3 1GHz that had y2k,got it for a song and a prayer back in 2006. Wanted to revisit those times.:biggrin: Fun project to try out.

 

[lavaheadache]

An evolution




Arrival

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Sweet! Not only did you manage do snag a mint 5800U, but it's a BFG to boot!

 

[skipsneeky2]

The days of 4 pin molex power! Nostalgia at its finest.How much power can a 4 pin molex deliver anyways?Did any of the uber beast cards need 2 even?

 

[lavaheadache]

I'm pretty pumped. Even the package looks brandnew. Not a speck of wear. The card was clearly well cared for. Some people just know how to take care of stuff. I've gotten new cards in that look older than this nearly 12 year old dawg. Big shout out to fchuber

 

[NTMBK]

Nice one! Are you going to hook it up, see how it performs? If the noise is as bad as they all say?

 

[lavaheadache]

Nice one! Are you going to hook it up, see how it performs? If the noise is as bad as they all say?

I did. It performed pretty well compared to how well I remember the last time I fired up a 9800 pro ( A couple weeks ago). As far as the noise... I don't know what the heck they were thinking. My wife was sitting at her desk in our office and looked over at me while I was fooling around with the card for about a minute and said "you can stop that now". Lol, she never has said anything about fan noise coming from any of my gaming rigs before. As anyone who has first hand experience with one of these cards, it's the pitch more than the actual volume.

I actually dig the cooler and design. They should have used a better fan and it's speed variable instead of just an on/off switch.

 

[lavaheadache]

The days of 4 pin molex power! Nostalgia at its finest.How much power can a 4 pin molex deliver anyways?Did any of the uber beast cards need 2 even?

6800 Ultra AGP had 2. I'm willing to bet it was needed.

 

[NTMBK]

I actually dig the cooler and design. They should have used a better fan and it's speed variable instead of just an on/off switch.

Does the cooler suck in air through one half of the slot, and exhaust through the other half? That sounds like an airflow and turbulence nightmare! You're going to be sucking the hot air straight back into the GPU

 

[Rvenger]

I did. It performed pretty well compared to how well I remember the last time I fired up a 9800 pro ( A couple weeks ago). As far as the noise... I don't know what the heck they were thinking. My wife was sitting at her desk in our office and looked over at me while I was fooling around with the card for about a minute and said "you can stop that now". Lol, she never has said anything about fan noise coming from any of my gaming rigs before. As anyone who has first hand experience with one of these cards, it's the pitch more than the actual volume.

I actually dig the cooler and design. They should have used a better fan and it's speed variable instead of just an on/off switch.

Exactly why I sold it back then. Sounded like a vaccum cleaner with a sock lodged in it.

 

[skipsneeky2]

6800 Ultra AGP had 2. I'm willing to bet it was needed.

Funny i forgot that,i had one for a brief time too

Also funny note about the noise and your wife,i had a 6990 and a 7970 reference at one point and my wife always asks me if the card i want to buy makes as much noise as those.I link her a reference 290x cooler video off youtube and all she said was hell no!I was considering a refurbished 290x and it had the stock cooler lol. Its worst then your card by far i am certain of it

 

[Rvenger]

Funny i forgot that,i had one for a brief time too

Also funny note about the noise and your wife,i had a 6990 and a 7970 reference at one point and my wife always asks me if the card i want to buy makes as much noise as those.I link her a reference 290x cooler video off youtube and all she said was hell no!I was considering a refurbished 290x and it had the stock cooler lol. Its worst then your card by far i am certain of it

Its not worse since at least it has some kind of fan control to keep it from going to 100%. The FX5800 Ultra fan was 100%, 100% of the time and made such a "whirring" noise one couldn't stand for a long period of time. At least the 290x didn't have a harmonic pitch to it.

 

[sm625]

I have a 7900GTX. It is actually impressive how it competes with an ivy bridge IGP, but not so impressive when you look at the kill-a-watt meter.

 

[RussianSensation]

Funny i forgot that,i had one for a brief time too

Also funny note about the noise and your wife,i had a 6990 and a 7970 reference at one point and my wife always asks me if the card i want to buy makes as much noise as those.I link her a reference 290x cooler video off youtube and all she said was hell no!I was considering a refurbished 290x and it had the stock cooler lol. Its worst then your card by far i am certain of it

Don't do it.

You already know that an after-market 290 = reference 290X in performance. You can also pick up an after-market quiet R9 290 like the Tri-X for about $225. No point at all considering a reference 290X.

----

Lava, always happy to read about a happy ending with you finding a rare card and sharing with us your experience on various cards. I truly do appreciate your love for GPUs and it's refreshing and always welcome to read about the history of GPUs and seeing the evolution of PCB/GPU cooler and power usage over the decades. Looking forward to many years of you sharing your card collection with us. Perhaps one day you'll actually arrange a Dropbox album or similar with all the cards in chronological order presented with a DSLR/Micro 4/3rds quality. :wub:

 

[lavaheadache]

So Today 3/3/14 I met locally with somebody to pick up a like new in box 9800 XT for cheap. When I opened the box this is what I found



That's a developers sample 5900 Ultra in mint condition. The person I bought the card off of was the wife of an ex-video game developer who had the "9800 XT" because it was a launch Half Life 2 product. Wonder what happened here lol. Anyway all is good. I needed a box for my 9800 XT. Another funny thing is that all the accessories are sealed even the unscratched HL2 redemption code.

Here is the dev board next to one of my retail cards to show the difference.

 

[Headfoot]

Funny i forgot that,i had one for a brief time too

Also funny note about the noise and your wife,i had a 6990 and a 7970 reference at one point and my wife always asks me if the card i want to buy makes as much noise as those.I link her a reference 290x cooler video off youtube and all she said was hell no!I was considering a refurbished 290x and it had the stock cooler lol. Its worst then your card by far i am certain of it

Reference 290/x cooler is nowhere even close to as bad as those old 5800 Ultras

 

[Headfoot]

Here is the dev board next to one of my retail cards to show the difference.

I had no idea the dev boards could be that different, the capacitors are in different locations and the GPU is slightly moved. Do they run at different clocks? Really cool find

 

[lavaheadache]

I had no idea the dev boards could be that different, the capacitors are in different locations and the GPU is slightly moved. Do they run at different clocks? Really cool find

Same clock speeds. GPU-Z doesn't know the difference between the cards either other than the subvendor which is "unidentified" on the dev board

better pic

 

[Geforce man]

That's a lot of extra circuitry on the developer board ! I wonder if it over clocks higher .

 

[JoJoman88]

Hah yes, the FX5000 Gpu's are what made me switch to ATI. Had NV form TNT to Ti 4200 and didn't go back to NV until a 7900 GT or was it GTX,can't remember now.

 

[Harrod]

I had a 5900 Ultra, back in 2003, it was a pretty crappy card, I replaced it with a saphire 9500 and flashed it to a 9700 pro added a peltier and ended up eventually burning the card up by overclocking it.

 

[MongGrel]

Still have an old BFG T-Shirt I got with one once

 

[stormkroe]

Here's my BFG Asylum 5900 (non ultra), bought new for $154. 5900s were so much better than 5800s, and this was an amazing bang-for-buck card.
Above it in the picture is the mighty Diamond Monster II 12mb, imo the best voodoo 2 available. It was $249.99 at bestbuy and changed gaming forever (upgraded from a voodoo rush, which never gave me any if the problems that plagued others).

 

[lavaheadache]

Nice cards

 

[Valantar]

Arrival

It scares me a bit how similar that cooler is to the one on my Radeon 4850s. Those were also horrendously noisy and regularly ran at >95 degrees C. Ended up replacing the coolers with Arctic Accelero S1s, which was a pain in the a** due to taking up two extra slots (severely complicating my CF setup) and requiring a fan directly over them to avoid VRM overheating. But I got it working just in time to realise that 512MB of RAM was insufficient for 1920x1200. Not my proudest moment(s) in PC building.