Hands up who remembers when...

[alpenwasser]

I might have to try and get it up and running... Windows 95 ah....

I wish you the best of luck. PM me if you need treatment for PTSD afterwards. :lol:

Seriously though, I have been wanting to do a retro build for ages, with ancient OS and
software and everything. But ah well, neither time nor funds at the moment (not that I can
complain, I've just spent it on other nice things ).

EDIT:

I remember buying my first CD burner. It was SCSI and 12x. Cost? £170 without the SCSI card.

I remember we needed a SCSI card for our first scanner.

It had overburn technology and was the first to do so. That was why I didn't jump on the CD burning wagon for so long because blanks were £6 each and nine times out of ten you ended up with a coaster.

It was so bad that when burning a CD you had to literally not use the computer AT ALL because you would end up with buffer overflow and it would just spit the CD out.

Wasn't it called a buffer underrun or something like that? I remember having to bin quite a few
"coasters" after having dared to move the mouse while burning a CD. :lol:

 

[alienware]

I remember we needed a SCSI card for our first scanner.



Wasn't it called a buffer underrun or something like that? I remember having to bin quite a few
"coasters" after having dared to move the mouse while burning a CD. :lol:

I had a black and white hand scanner :lol:

I'm not sure what the technical term for it was but I'm sure the marketing name was overburn. In fact no, just did some looking and overburn is cramming more data onto a cd.

It was called Burnproof it seems.

http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burn_proof

 

[alpenwasser]

I had a black and white hand scanner :lol:

I'm not sure what the technical term for it was but I'm sure the marketing name was overburn. In fact no, just did some looking and overburn is cramming more data onto a cd.

It was called Burnproof it seems.

http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burn_proof

Ah yes, that does sound more familiar .

The buffer underrun actually also has its wiki article.

EDIT: Just noticed the Enlish version of Burn Proof actually leads to that article

 

[Xenomorphical]

Ugh i don't even know the components of my first REAL pc my parents bought me for school to run Autocad lol.
I do know besides the house and the car it was one of the most expensive things they ever bought hehe.

One of the first games i ever played after messing around with swapping them large floppy's was this game called "Beast"

I remember how it would run alot faster suddenly when they CPU got upgraded, because the gamespeed was designed for the older CPU cores speeds hehe.

Anyways to get back to the AMD v/s Intel war, the only thing i can see happening is both sides will keep on trying to make the best CPU or GPU which is only good for us peeps right?

Myself i run a i7 3820 @ 3,6 stock and i can keep up fine with the latest games.
Except for BL2 with physx on tho, thats just broken for me atm :/

About the multi core part, i use source hammer SDK alot and this is what i get while compiling my maps:

This is while mapping for CS: GO btw seems pretty optimised for intel CPU's?
Then again it all matters on what you do with ur rig.

 

[Zoot]

I used to have an Athlon 64 based system at one point. I didn't game much on the PC back in those days so I sold it for a Sempron 2600+. All of my desktop builds as of late have been with an AMD CPU at the helm, with the exception of the machine I had with the Intel Q9450 back in 2008.

Anyway, I always thought AMD were dead on to throw in the towel in competing with Intel at the high end. In reality Intel is simply untouchable for AMD given their R&D budget, and their massive advantage in Fabrication.

Instead they're gunning for Intel where it hurts - the Atom. The early demos of the Temash based tablets are looking really cool indeed, particularly the one of it playing DiRT 3 with decent frame rates. I may even pick one up.

 

[Kei]

Our old 386sx25 had a turbo button too and our first cd burner was a scsi yamaha 4x4x16x unit with no buffer underrun protection. Did a remarkable job considering it was paired up with a cyrix686 166MHz on windows NT 4.0. Barely had any coasters off that unit using traxdata and kodak media. Sadly i ended burning my old athlon XP 2500 out when i mounted the cooler backwards on the socket meaning it barely made contact. Was a bad day as that cpu was awesome overclocked to 2.3GHz.

I'll have a dig around in the loft and see if i can find some of my antiques as I know I have a stack of socket 3 cpu's up there including an amd K5 and even a UMC green. Should be a socket 7 cpu or two aswell.

 

[Mysterae]

All that talk of cd-roms reminded me of some messing around I did for my build - I needed the metal casing so I stripped one apart...

Anyway, while taking the drive apart I was intrigued on how it worked. I discovered that the drive (think it was a dvd drive because of this) had two lenses; the small one you see at first, and an even smaller one underneath. It has a tiny electromagnet arrangement to alter the height of one of the lenses, to help it focus on the the other layer presumably.

I took these two lenses out and placed them really really close to my eye and with a little adjusting of the distance between them, looked at the tip of a screwdriver...holy microscope batman! . Then looked at the surface of a dvd, quite fascinating, to a geek like me!

If you have an old and defunct dvd drive lying around, take it apart if you are interested! Words of caution though - be careful of strong and reflected light, as you could blind yourself, just like looking at the sun etc.

Apologies for the thread derailment!

 

[alpenwasser]

I used to have an Athlon 64 based system at one point. I didn't game much on the PC back in those days so I sold it for a Sempron 2600+. All of my desktop builds as of late have been with an AMD CPU at the helm, with the exception of the machine I had with the Intel Q9450 back in 2008.

Anyway, I always thought AMD were dead on to throw in the towel in competing with Intel at the high end. In reality Intel is simply untouchable for AMD given their R&D budget, and their massive advantage in Fabrication.

Instead they're gunning for Intel where it hurts - the Atom. The early demos of the Temash based tablets are looking really cool indeed, particularly the one of it playing DiRT 3 with decent frame rates. I may even pick one up.

True. While I do remember the days of Athlon glory very fondly, I'm not really looking for
the most powerful CPU on the market from AMD. What I do want is for them to put some
pressure on Intel in the mainstream. For one thing, developing mainstream CPUs is not as
costly as shooting for the top, and market volume at the very high end is pretty small
anyway, there's much more money to be made in the middle and low end segment. And
making money is what AMD needs to do in order to stay in business so that they can
prevent us from being utterly and completely at Intel's mercy.

All that talk of cd-roms reminded me of some messing around I did for my build - I needed the metal casing so I stripped one apart...

Anyway, while taking the drive apart I was intrigued on how it worked. I discovered that the drive (think it was a dvd drive because of this) had two lenses; the small one you see at first, and an even smaller one underneath. It has a tiny electromagnet arrangement to alter the height of one of the lenses, to help it focus on the the other layer presumably.

I took these two lenses out and placed them really really close to my eye and with a little adjusting of the distance between them, looked at the tip of a screwdriver...holy microscope batman! . Then looked at the surface of a dvd, quite fascinating, to a geek like me!

If you have an old and defunct dvd drive lying around, take it apart if you are interested! Words of caution though - be careful of strong and reflected light, as you could blind yourself, just like looking at the sun etc.

Apologies for the thread derailment!

Holy crap, that sounds awesome! I'll definitely have to try that out once our lone remaining
optical drive in the household has given up its ghost. :lol:

 

[Zoot]

True. While I do remember the days of Athlon glory very fondly, I'm not really looking for
the most powerful CPU on the market from AMD. What I do want is for them to put some
pressure on Intel in the mainstream. For one thing, developing mainstream CPUs is not as
costly as shooting for the top, and market volume at the very high end is pretty small
anyway, there's much more money to be made in the middle and low end segment. And
making money is what AMD needs to do in order to stay in business so that they can
prevent us from being utterly and completely at Intel's mercy.

Well any market needs competition, the consumer loses out otherwise.

Back in 2006/2007 and onwards where Intel used to charge 1000+ for their CPUs with an unlocked multiplier (Core 2 Extreme), AMD came along with the first gen Phenom and Phenom II's with totally unlocked multipliers, and now we've mainstream Intel CPUs with unlocked multipliers.

Nvidia's pricing of the GTX 4XX series was another example, the HD 4870 forced them to lower their prices. The same happened with the GTX 6XX series forcing AMD to also lower their prices.

Competition in the upper tier of the CPU market would be nice, but given Intels position in the industry and the declining PC competing with them isn't really an option for most.