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[InflatableMouse]

Under a pile of dust barely recognizable and missing some items. I gamed hard on this thing. And this pc survived a lightning strike . I remember harddisk, memory and video card all died (ATI 9800 PRO) and onboard sound no longer worked.

After some digging around some more I found memory but I'm missing an IDE harddisk and a cooler.

I picked up a new cooler for 9 euros but I'm not willing to buy an old IDE harddisk so I have to think of something else. The mobo has 2 SATA ports but it doesn't boot from them ... also, I didn't manage to boot from a USB stick. I need to fiddle some more with it.

I thought I had 2GB in there but it only counts to 1,5GB. Probably incompatible or a broken DIMM.

But at least it booted up. It's so noisy its funny. It's deafening  

Oh its got a floppy drive too  

[JimH]

Nice story.  I suppose that half of the board members here were born after floppy disks went out of service.  They also missed  modems and Ronald Reagan.

[apostos]

Nice story.  I suppose that half of the board members here were born after floppy disks went out of service.  They also missed  modems and Ronald Reagan.

I managed to survive all of those 

Still have 5¼ and 3½ inch floppy disks in my basement that for some reason I'm reluctant to toss.

[Hendrik]

Even I know 5,25 floppys, and I'm not all that old, I grew up with them even on my dads old PC where i taught myself Pascal.
Some ancient 8086, 640kb RAM, 8mhz, 20mb harddisc, and a whole lot of 5.25 floppys which took 360kb each - and all on a amber/black monochrome display!

The oldest actual PC that still survived (and still works!) is my old AMD K6-2, which was my first gaming PC ever - after a few upgrades it served out its life as a linux-based router at my parents house, but now it has been replaced by a small dedicated router device with WiFi.

[mwillems]

Even I know 5,25 floppys, and I'm not all that old, I grew up with them even on my dads old PC where i taught myself Pascal.
Some ancient 8086, 640kb RAM, 8mhz, 20mb harddisc, and a whole lot of 5.25 floppys which took 360kb each - and all on a amber/black monochrome display!

The oldest actual PC that still survived (and still works!) is my old AMD K6-2, which was my first gaming PC ever - after a few upgrades it served out its life as a linux-based router at my parents house, but now it has been replaced by a small dedicated router device with WiFi.

Same (or similar here) here; my dad was a computer enthusiast and I spent a lot of time with floppy disks.  His main computer when I was very young was a Tandy model 3 (integrated green/black monochrome display) with a 2MHz processor and no hard drive. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80#Model_III.  

The system booted off of a 5.25" floppy disk, there was a lot of disk swapping to make anything happen.  I remember the first time I saw an actual hard disk drive.   It was 10MB and about the size of a micro tower case.   I also remember thinking that was an awful lot of space  

[JimH]

I remember the first time I saw an actual hard disk drive.   It was 10MB and about the size of a micro tower case.   I also remember thinking that was an awful lot of space  

I thought the same.  I still have mine around.  It was a Corvus drive for a Xerox 820 CP/M machine.  The drive cost $5000 and sounded like a jet engine.  It weighs about 40 pounds.  About 20 years ago, I took it to a talk I was asked to give to a breakfast club.  I said this was 10MB and cost $5000.  And this (reaching in my jacket pocket) is 200MB and costs just $800!  There was an audible gasp in the room.

[InflatableMouse]

The floppy drives in the TRS-80 were single sided drives. We had a model 4. When I found out about dual sided floppies I grabbed some scissors and cut out this part to allow writing on the other side. This worked for most of them but some of them didn't have a magnetic b-side.

[mwillems]

I thought the same.  I still have mine around.  It was a Corvus drive for a Xerox 820 CP/M machine.  The drive cost $5000 and sounded like a jet engine.  It weighs about 40 pounds.  About 20 years ago, I took it to a talk I was asked to give to a breakfast club.  I said this was 10MB and cost $5000.  And this (reaching in my jacket pocket) is 200MB and costs just $800!  There was an audible gasp in the room.

And now they make 128 Gb microsd cards the size of a pinky nail that a strong wind can pick up and blow away (ask me how I know).  It's enough to make you miss when data had some heft to it  

The floppy drives in the TRS-80 were single sided drives. We had a model 4. When I found out about dual sided floppies I grabbed some scissors and cut out this part to allow writing on the other side. This worked for most of them but some of them didn't have a magnetic b-side.

Oh wow, I wasn't old enough/savvy enough to retrofit the old drives; I just waited until we had a Tandy 1000 which really seemed like the future had arrived.

[KingSparta]

we had a few 8 inch floppy drives at our user group HQ back in the 70's.

[jmone]

Luxury! 

...what was wrong with Tape? my first baby!

[InflatableMouse]

So for a grand total of 8 euros I found a 40GB PATA-133 harddisk (with Smart info and surface test, 100% in order) for 3 euros, and for 5 euros a PATA DVD drive. Both items in my home town.

The reason for all this is not just because I'm bored, but my son (turns 11 in may) wants to do a project at school about computers. He wants to learn more about it and what better way than letting him assemble it? I did the CPU cooler myself though, as the core is unprotected on these models and its easy to damage it with a heatsink. But last night he was swapping memory sticks like a pro .

[Hendrik]

I did the CPU cooler myself though, as the core is unprotected on these models and its easy to damage it with a heatsink.

I remember that, that was totally risky to damage it while attaching the heat sink. Hooray for the heat spreaders we have today!

[glynor]

I had three of those boards: A7N8X-variants.  They were AWESOME boards.  Only one I liked better was my old ABIT BX6.

Two -E Deluxe ones and one -X version (a cheaper version).  They rocked.  I think it was my fourth (or maybe fifth) custom PC build.

One of the three is STILL in service at my house.  It was my firewall until last fall when I replaced it with a new-old board (it is running an old Core2Duo board now), and since then has been used (occasionally) as a drive-tester/wiper.  It works great for SpinRite and for nuking disks.

[glynor]

I remember that, that was totally risky to damage it while attaching the heat sink. Hooray for the heat spreaders we have today!

Yep.  I cracked one.

Luckily, it was later on (long after the CPUs were discontinued, and I had two more compatible CPUs to swap in).  It was the best one I had though (one of those later Athlon XP mobile chips that could overclock to high-heaven). 

[6233638]

I remember that, that was totally risky to damage it while attaching the heat sink. Hooray for the heat spreaders we have today!

Fortunately, MSI have finally solved this problem.
 
Hopefully Intel will go back to soldering the heatspreaders with Broadwell.

[glynor]

Hopefully Intel will go back to soldering the heatspreaders with Broadwell.

Might be better with Devil's Canyon.  They're talking the talk (finally, for the first time in a long while) anyhow.  We'll see.

[6233638]

Might be better with Devil's Canyon.  They're talking the talk (finally, for the first time in a long while) anyhow.  We'll see.

They're using better TIM, but that's unlikely to be as good as a soldered connection.

[glynor]

You have confirmation on that?  Everything I've read has been very vague, and there is certainly a lot of reporting that it is TIM, but that might just be echo chamber.  I heard some unofficial stuff on the TR Podcast a while back that seemed like that might not be true.

Either way, it is good to see them caring about the enthusiast desktop market again, even a little.

[Hendrik]

A proper TIM could help greatly already, anyway, and agreed, the acknowledgement of the issue is already quite a nice thing.
A big problem apparently also was the  distance between the die and the spreader being too big, so thats something they may be adjusting as well.

Interestingly, most OCers that did de-lid and try to fix the Haswell thermal characteristics only report a drop in temperature, but not a higher possible OC, so while its nice, its not "great".

I do plan to get a Haswell-E later this year, I hope they do those properly!

[6233638]

I do plan to get a Haswell-E later this year, I hope they do those properly!

I think I might be moving to X99 as well. Intel's focus on efficiency is nice, but they haven't brought a lot of the big improvements to the desktop (e.g. S0ix) and desktop performance has remained essentially unchanged for the last three years.
 
I need more CPU power than I can get out of my overclocked 2500K, and while moving to an i7 with HyperThreading would help, it seems to depend a lot on the task being performed.
 
Even though they are running at lower speeds and lower IPC, it seems like having 6/8 physical cores would make a bigger difference.

[Hendrik]

I'm not one to cheap out on the CPU, so lower IPC? nah!
But 8 cores/16 threads on the high-end model surely will be fun!

[6233638]

I'm not one to cheap out on the CPU, so lower IPC? nah!

On the consumer side of things, IPC has been gradually increasing, but each generation has been hotter than the last and won't overclock as much (which is only partially related to that heat) and that's why the overall performance hasn't really changed much in the last three years.
If you only run your CPU at stock speeds though, there has been some improvement in performance.

The LGA2011 chips are typically a generation behind, so they inherently have lower IPC than the consumer ones.
And as they add more cores with LGA 2011, the cores themselves get clocked lower.
 
There were a number of comparisons done around the time the new Mac Pro shipped, and an i7 Haswell would easily outperform any of the Xeons when the task only required 1-4 cores.
 
It's only when the software can really take advantage of those extra cores that the trade-off becomes worthwhile, and a lot of software will only take full advantage of up to four cores.
 
I think there are finally improvements beyond four cores with the Creative Cloud suite, but any of the Adobe applications prior to that actually show reduced performance as you add more cores to the system for example.

[glynor]

I'm not one to cheap out on the CPU, so lower IPC? nah!
But 8 cores/16 threads on the high-end model surely will be fun!

I'm considering going that route on my next rebuild as well.  I have a perfectly adequate Ivy in my main rig though, so it probably won't be till the gen after Haswell-E at the earliest.

[Hendrik]

The LGA2011 chips are typically a generation behind, so they inherently have lower IPC than the consumer ones.
And as they add more cores with LGA 2011, the cores themselves get clocked lower.

The high-end 6-core Ivy-E has a higher base/stock turbo clock than any Ivy or Haswell consumer part (3.6/4.0 vs 3.5/3.9).
While its true that the -E are a generation behind, due to the fact that Broadwell was delayed so much, Haswell-E actually managed to catch up a bit.

Who knows what the Haswell refresh will really bring which is rolling out very soon, maybe higher base clocks, but I still don't expect the Haswell-E to be really much lower clocked, and the whole point is a bit mood if you're upgrading from a previous-gen anyway.

The -E have extra cores, but they don't have the iGPU, which balances it out a bit. If you look at one of those fancy die x-rays (or however they make those), the GPU parts typically use up more space than the CPU cores.

[glynor]

The -E have extra cores, but they don't have the iGPU, which balances it out a bit. If you look at one of those fancy die x-rays (or however they make those), the GPU parts typically always use up more almost double the space than the CPU cores.

T, FTFY.