Retrofitting - making your oldies go another round.

Anything to do with New Zealand Classic or Vintage Computing not covered in the other forums

Re: Retrofitting - making your oldies go another round.

Postby Carcenomy on Mon Apr 11, 2011 5:20 pm

As I've said, it's an awkward one. Each case needs to be weighed up very very carefully before any work proceeds. The PC10 for example was an easy choice - at the time when it was modified originally I owned five of them - this was the non-runner, and my spare boards appeared to be faulty too. No further PC10s were harmed in the making of this production. The other four have since gone on to live with an XT-era PC collector in Christchurch, and I've obtained another example for myself in tidier condition - makes a nice contrasting shot when the stock as a rock classic PC10 is sitting next to the watercooled dualcore nightmare. Sort of like if you had a vintage '32 Ford sitting next to a '32 street rod.

A good modder never, EVER destroys something of major value, and anyone with half a brain about them would always do plenty of preliminary investigation first. Again, I speak for myself and the few other modders I know who work with old gear - there's always going to be some turkey elsewhere who will desecrate something truly rare (modified PET, anyone?)

The other problem is the quality of workmanship that comes with some mods. There's a huge difference between the likes of Iain Sharp's SE30 conversion (he used a 9" VGA monochrome CRT from a gameshow studio even) and the gung-ho hole-drilling type modifications that have been known to exist. Heck, I don't rate my own modifications that highly... they still need a lot of fine tuning to get them looking right.
Just the local Commodore hobo and middle-aged PC hoarder.
eisa on Trademe. A lasting reminder of a Compaq fetish when I was younger.
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Re: Retrofitting - making your oldies go another round.

Postby Carcenomy on Sun Sep 11, 2011 5:43 pm

Who says old and new can't coexist?

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My FreeView decoder's power supply failed this week, so I finally got the UHF antenna sorted and got the PC10 installed. It's final configuration is an Intel G31 board, Pentium Dualcore 2GHz CPU, 4GB RAM, 250GB drive, Audigy soundcard, Geforce 8600GT graphics and a Hauppauge HVR4000 tuner card. The CPU, GPU and northbridge are all watercooled. It's running Windows 7 Professional, with Media Centre configured to record to our home server. It works really well and looks fantastic snuggled in there next to the CDTV, if I do say so myself :)
Just the local Commodore hobo and middle-aged PC hoarder.
eisa on Trademe. A lasting reminder of a Compaq fetish when I was younger.
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Re: Retrofitting - making your oldies go another round.

Postby coogie on Sat Oct 15, 2011 1:49 pm

Carcenomy wrote:
My FreeView decoder's power supply failed this week, so I finally got the UHF antenna sorted and got the PC10 installed. It's final configuration is an Intel G31 board, Pentium Dualcore 2GHz CPU, 4GB RAM, 250GB drive, Audigy soundcard, Geforce 8600GT graphics and a Hauppauge HVR4000 tuner card. The CPU, GPU and northbridge are all watercooled. It's running Windows 7 Professional, with Media Centre configured to record to our home server. It works really well and looks fantastic snuggled in there next to the CDTV, if I do say so myself :)


Very cool 8) like the addition of the Audigy - I have one of these installed in my PC with external breakout box etc, are you running optical out to the Yamaha? Your sound quality should be pretty good if you are using loss-less files etc.

BTW re mods last year a past colleague of mine grabbed a spare Mac G5 case we had lying around and fitted a late model Intel i5/i7 board into it, so he could enter into the PC World best mod competition (he got beaten by a toaster!) and if my memory serve's right he finished it off by putting OSX on it to thoroughly confuse us all... Lots of Fun :wink:
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Re: Retrofitting - making your oldies go another round.

Postby Carcenomy on Wed Oct 19, 2011 7:39 pm

Funny you should mention putting OS X on a converted G5... one of my other projects that I haven't quite finished is an iMac G3 slotloader. Its display hardware had failed (typical iMac), so it's been stripped, converted to take an mATX motherboard and fitted with a 15" HP LCD. It's currently fitted with a Core 2 Duo E6600 and an EFiX module that I picked up a few years back. Runs Leopard without any modifications to OS X to achieve it... I just haven't quite got around to finishing all the final type stuff that needs done. Routing ports to the side, fitting a new slotload drive... stuff like that.

As for the Audigy, mine doesn't have optical out, only coaxial... but it just doesn't seem to work. I have it cabled up correctly but I'm told now (after I installed it of course) that such a configuration doesn't work on the Audigy, you need the breakout box malarky first. So tempting to use my spare X-Fi instead... ;)
Just the local Commodore hobo and middle-aged PC hoarder.
eisa on Trademe. A lasting reminder of a Compaq fetish when I was younger.
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Re: Retrofitting - making your oldies go another round.

Postby Carcenomy on Wed Jan 25, 2012 7:20 pm

Just checked the coolant levels, all is well in PC10 land.

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Just the local Commodore hobo and middle-aged PC hoarder.
eisa on Trademe. A lasting reminder of a Compaq fetish when I was younger.
Carcenomy
 
Posts: 782
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Location: Invercargill

Re: Retrofitting - making your oldies go another round.

Postby Carcenomy on Sat Apr 28, 2012 11:10 pm

No photos but the PC10 received a tasty upgrade today after the 775 board failed. It's now packing an Intel DH55TC board with an i3 530, 8GB DDR3 and a GeForce 9800GT. How did I accidentally build a semi-competent gaming rig out of my home theatre PC?

It's also given up its water cooling system as the water pump had a failing bearing and was driving me nuts! :)
Just the local Commodore hobo and middle-aged PC hoarder.
eisa on Trademe. A lasting reminder of a Compaq fetish when I was younger.
Carcenomy
 
Posts: 782
Joined: Tue Aug 12, 2008 10:59 pm
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Re: Retrofitting - making your oldies go another round.

Postby Carcenomy on Fri Jan 09, 2015 7:25 pm

Clym5 mentioning putting an ATX board in an AT case reminded me that this thread existed.

The Aptiva hasn't had any more modifications made but is desperately aching to be upgraded from its Pentium 4 configuration. Unfortunately IBM themselves don't exist any more to get a manufacturer-correct board from, and the Pentium 4 board it has is from the generation where IBM went slack on capacitor quality.

The PC10 got a full strip and rebuild once again. This time I did much more significant work on the metalwork and it's now much tidier and easier to work on. It's also had an i7-860 installed and the 9800GT swapped for a Radeon 7770 GHz.

If anyone has questions about case modification, feel free to ask.
Just the local Commodore hobo and middle-aged PC hoarder.
eisa on Trademe. A lasting reminder of a Compaq fetish when I was younger.
Carcenomy
 
Posts: 782
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