Please teach me everything about 87-92, 97-99 and what's the most expensive piece I can come upon...

Please teach me everything about 87-92, 97-99 and what's the most expensive piece I can come upon, namely custom hardware.

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Anybody out there?

For 97-99, the most expensive card will probably be a GeForce 256. Super rare and sought after.

What's so special about it?

You can never go wrong with the Voodoo 1 and 2s. Not that rare, but they're highly sought after because of the Glide API that literally all the 3D games of 95-99 used. Theres lot of people buying the Voodoo2's in pairs for SLI, not so much out of practical need, but to scratch a certain nostalgic itch. Having not one but two quite expensive Voodoo2s in SLI mode for playing @ 1024x768 was the godliest and most decadent tier of PC gaming hardware setups that every kid at the time dreamed of.

Technically the world's first GPU. Has an integrated T&L. There aren't many of them because the GeForce 2 series launched a couple months later for better performance and better price.

GF256 isn't particularly rare. Its DDR variant might be.

The most rare and expensive consumer card of that era would probably be Voodoo5 6000, a card too retarded to exist.

GF256 wasn't the first card with T&L, it was just the first gaymen card with that. (Also, technically Savage2000 had T&L a bit earlier, but had nodrivers so it doesn't count)

vogonswiki.com/index.php/NVIDIA
I found this site a while back looking at the highest performance high DOS compatibility setups.

There were some Voodoo 5 cards which were given to people as samples, but never made it to stores. Those are probably the rarest.

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Sometimes I forget how dark were the times before the discovery of heat pipes and welded copper fins.

>A card too retarded to exist
Stop making fun of its size :(
youtube.com/watch?v=_3iHV0NvLPI
youtube.com/watch?v=ZmCEXbspWuI

>Savage2000

i had that. It was good at ut

As an electronic engineer I'm absolutely astounded by this guy's dedication to memes. It looks like he designed and produced real PCBs and soldered real chips on them, even without any routing that's a lot of work and money.

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Holy shit, when he turns the voodoo 9000 on its like he enters a wind tunnel

When the shit did meme cards like Voodoo get so expensive? I'm seeing this shit at 60-80$ in my country compared to 2-5$ for a TNT2 or Ati 98 Xpert. When did these specific obsolete cards get so expensive? I bet not too long ago considering the millennial generation.

IIRC some 3dfx cards can be used as replacement parts for old arcade cabinets.

Retro PC building keeps growing in popularity, especially late 90's. Stuff like Voodoo cards keep going up in price due to everyone wanting to experience Glide. (I don't understand why they don't use nGlide) The only thing worse are sound devices, high end MIDI devices and sound cards will probably cost you a kidney depending on what brand.

Consumer-wise the Voodoo's 5500's, Radeon DDR Maxx's and whatever was the TOTL GeForce stuff
On of-the-shelf stuff probably the TOTL Number 9's, they are shit though
On pro-graphics the fully decked out Onyx 2's
On prototypes the last Voodoo 6000 boards and the Rampage prototypes
When guys like Techmoan, LGR, and the bald jew basedboy became quite popular

For 1997-1999 a rare find would be working motherboards with the original capacitors. Maybe somewhat exotic boards like the ABIT BP6 that let you run dual overclocked Celerons, or boards that used Rambus RAM instead of DRAM.

A BeBox (1995-1997) would be a neat find and is very custom.

Intel's attempt at making a video card might be worth something, as nobody bought them originally.

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- A lot of late 90s games run better with Glide than with D3D/OpenGL, and some support nothing but Glide. If you want an authentic retro 3D gaymen experience, you get a Voodoo card.
- 3D accelerators weren't very widespread, so even the most successful ones sold a pittance compared to something like today's GTX 1070.
- Voodoo4/5 are kinda rare simply because they were a failure and few people bought them.

I remember seeing quite a lot of i740s back then. They were cheap, had passable drivers (by late 90s standards), and could run most games if you weren't particularly demanding. But I guess not many survived since everyone treated them as e-waste after they stopped being useful - same with pretty much any card that wasn't an OEM favorite.
(An exception would be i740 PCI, a silly card that is probably worth a lot simply due to its extreme rarity)

What does Techmoan have to do with graphics cards? Guy deals in vintage audio players.

Still got my Canopus Pure3D II.

>unironically wanting to be a hipster

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FAKE NEWS

He has helped making retro/vintage stuff more popular, even SEGA sent him some cassette with vidya music, his target audience overlaps with the likes of LGR

That top left card could push some serious resolution and color depth for Windows 3.

>guy reviews vintage audio tapes and discs
>sega sent him a cassette once
>his audience overlaps with %someone%

>hurr he's responsible for late-90s 3d cards becoming expensive

I mean there's stretching it, and there's being a literal avatar of Stretch Armstrong.

Voodoo 2’s in “SLI” configuration was the first real game changer. Then the Rage, TNT and Voodoo 3 cards came out.

The game changer of the late 90s was the original Voodoo, which provided a simple, low-overhead, easy to implement API, plus enough horsepower to run games smoothly. Voodoo2, as a single card or in SLI, was more of the same, just with higher resolution and/or frame rate.

What do you actually want to know? Most expensive PCs? Workstations? Servers? Graphics cards? None of the mass market consumer grade shit posted ITT so far is particularly expensive, fast or rare in the grand scheme of computing.

PC-wise the fastest and most expensive single system in 1999 was probably an SGI VW 540, which you could load to up to 2 GB of RAM, quad Xeon 550/2Ms and three 10K SCSI disks internally. Cobalt graphics weren't gaming-oriented but they blow OpenGL out of the water and paired with a Voodoo2 SLI setup they can be pretty kickass for anything but probably DirectX or games which won't run under Windows NT (or 2000 if you cheat)

I'd probably say an IBM PS/2 model 95 with a 486DX/2-66 or DX-50 and XGA-2 graphics would be a decent choice for 1992. I don't really know how the XGA-2 ranks up against the likes of the Tseng ET4000 or other popular DOS gaming cards for that kind of usage, though. Maybe a higher-end VLB DX/2-66 would end up being better depending on what you were doing.

But none of these were the absolute fastest or most expensive. For 1992 you probably would have been looking at a deskside system like an R4400/150 SGI IRIS Crimson RealityEngine or a quad-50 MHz SPARCstation 10 ZX. For 1999 probably a quad R12000/400 Onyx2 InfiniteReality, maybe a quad-450 MHz Ultra 80 with dual Elite3D m6 graphics cards.

1. Nvidia NV1
2. those 3dfx prototypes, you know which ones.

Time to fix my voodoo1, lel

>SGI VW 540
Not really pc compatible, Win2k and NT4 were the only windows that it could boot - which means no win9x gaymes for you

Rage 128: ati chip with flawless 2D acceleration, pretty OpenGL visuals (for its day) and good drivers across Linux, BSD, I think BeOS and even windows.

Matrox G200: multi head, flawless 2d acceleration, decent drivers, and built in bump mapping support for OpenGL. Remember, this was before shaders in consumer end cards by 5 years at least.

I fucking hated that pass through cable and the shitty quality of the 2d when you weren't in 3d mode

NT didn’t have a problem with games as long as they were well-behaved. My VW handles a lot of Glide/OpenGL games from around that era just fine with 2000.

But OP wasn’t really specific anyway, if we’re talking about the fastest of the fast I don’t think there’s anything that came close to the 540, definitely nothing that was built for 9x.

~ 1992 I'd say the ATI Graphics Ultra Pro EISA
the EISA version really takes advantage of the 32-bit bus.

the VLB version may be faster (?), but I think it came out in 1993

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Ok. Tell me since im building a retro pc(mostly to watch SD videos on my crt tv via s-video but would like to play dos/old win games) whats the best gpu to pair with a pentium 3 (or was it a celeron?)in a socket 370? Its about 1.1 GHz. was thinking a geforce 6200 or radeon pro 9600 but think it might be too much.

The hardest part is identifying cards with no names on them at the market fair.
Would you Jow Forumsamers be able to identify anything if I sent pictures?

Radeon 9700 pro

Gravis Ultrasound MAX. Don't know if most expensive, but very dear to me.

I regret never getting that RAM upgrade to 1 MB. I wonder if a suitable chip can even still be found. The instructions for upgrade were to literally find a bare chip and push it into the dedicated slot on the board kek.

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weird to have IDE and floppy connectors on a sound card...

Ohh I actually have a Virge+Voodoo combo somewhere in a box

>Technically the world's first GPU.
No, that's what Nvidia marketing wanted the world to think, and looking at you they partially succeeded

Wait what? I have a fully working Diamond Monster 3D and a Monster 3D II that had one or two borked VRAM chips IIRC. Am I rich? (in terms of a poorfag)

yep. You're pretty much sitting on a gold mine

not strange at all for the time. What good is a sound card from the 90s without a cd player? Considering many motherboards in the early 90s completely lacked IDE, it made sense for sound cards to include IDE.

Why do I constantly see cards like pic related lacking a chip or ten chips? Should I look for the cards which have the most spices on it?

>and the shitty quality of the 2d when you weren't in 3d mode
voodoo and voodoo2 did not do 2D at all. low quality was either your 2D card's or your pass-through cable's fault

>The most rare and expensive consumer card of that era would probably be Voodoo5 6000, a card too retarded to exist.
for an unreleased card, it isn't that rare

>technically Savage2000 had T&L a bit earlier
no, get your timeline right
and gl trying to make that TL unit work

if you want older 3D games compatibility go for some GeForce FX

Video cards used to have PS2/other game controller ports.

It is because Voodoo 1/2 and Banshee are still sought after by people who want setup retro-PC boxes since good number of gaming titles mid to late 90s titles requires GLIDE which is only available on 3DFx chips. They are also PCI (Banshe came in both AGP 1x and PCI) which means they are compatible for nearly every system made 1995-2013.

Voodoo 3, 4, 5 not as desirable because they are AGP 1x only. They only work with first and second generation AGP of capable motherboards. Any AGP motherboard made after 2002 (AGP 2x-8x) will not work.

is it worth building a retro gaming pc with these parts?

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Rage family was plagued stupid driver issues under 3D gaming and 9x/NT family until towards the end of the brand's life. This is when ATI started to turn itself around with Radeon 8xxx-9xxx.

The two larger ports are actually a proprietary drive interface for CD/DVD drives at the time. IDE/parallel ATA still had issues with CD/DVD drives. Parallel SCSI was expensive as fuck.

Creative really pushed hard for them until IDE standard matured enough to handle CD/DVD drives.

I still my 9700PRO and it work the last I time fired it up a few years ago when I still have AGP-capiable hardware on hand.


It is the SKU that famously caused Nvidia to loose its composure and the a massive turning point for ATI which at the time was known for buggy 3D solutions (software issues) and OEM channels.

Pentium 1 doesn't even support that GPU type.
If you want to go really cheap and don't need DOS compatibility get an early pentium 4, otherwise a pentium 2 or 3

>Pentium 1 doesn't even support that GPU type.
non-sense

Pentium 1 boards had AGP?

No, unless you count Super Socket 7.
But TNT2 runs with Pentium.

Oh right, forgot about those
That GPU would stil be a bit overkill for the CPU

Gotta use a file cabinet for a case with that card.

We had a bunch of those in Gateway 486s at work that drove these massive Cornerstone CRT monitors everyone who considered themselves to be a power user HAD to have.

>good number of gaming titles mid to late 90s titles requires GLIDE which is only available on 3DFx chips.
To be fair it's not that they REQUIRE a glide capable card nowadays as there's a couple OpenGL->glide wrappers out there. I'd guess it's just for the full retro feeling

>get an early pentium 4
might as well settle with DOS-Box

Don't let the thread die just yet.

Are there any rare rams?

Wouldn't one of the somewhat-functional Rampages be even more rare?

VLB should be better off by virtue of sitting straight on the 486's CPU bus.
If you run into one of the elusive dual 486 boards, it's time to break out the onahole.

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Oh, I had

1 3
2

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It was released like a month earlier (with no T&L drivers as I mentioned), just to be the first. Sort of like how Nikon technically beat Canon at adding video to DSLR cameras, but nobody cared because their implementation was total shit.

Pre-MPS IIRC. Probably requires customized software too.

Yes, but I don't think a prototype qualifies as a consumer card. At least Voodoo5 6000 made it to samples sent out for testing, IIRC.

>Dual CPU
>it's fucking 486 SX
For what purpose?

This is what I got:

3dfx Voodoo 3 2000 pci x 2
ATI Xpert 98 pci (Rage Chip)
ATI Radeon 32mb SDR pci (not the gimped V.E later rev either;this sucker is full function rage 6 core)
ATI Radeon 9600XT (Sapphire)
Geforce 6800 GT AGP
Geforce 8800GT (dead,displays artifacts under lots of use)
Misc/other:
Geforce 6100/6150 onboard chips were pretty decent options in the days when most onboard chips sucked. Full functional geforce 6 class gpus. Got two boards with them. Asrock 939 Dual SataII board - Full speed PCI-E16 & AGP 8X slot. Rare cause most offerings gimped one bus or the other. Even rarer is that you could setup a trifecta PCI + PCI-E + AGP w/9 displays for regular desktop use. Then it had a yellow "future cpu" slot that would take a separate daughter card w/AM2 cpu & DDR2 ram. I got one of these boards. Don't got the daughter card though.

60% millenials getting nostalgic for the cards they couldn't afford.
40% YouTube retro ecelebs (LGR, PhilsComputerLab) bringing in some gen Z hipsters on the boat.

>ATI Radeon 32mb SDR pci (not the gimped V.E later rev either
I had a Radeon LE that could turn into the significantly more expensive full Radeon with a BIOS reflash and a fan added, good times.

>Full functional geforce 6 class gpus
Really slow though. Sure it could *run* contemporary games, but you could only get playable frame rates in older ones. I remember trying to play Doom 3 on one of those integrated GeForces and it was unplayable even after dropping all settings to lowest.

Its CGI you fucking tard

If that's CGI, I'm even more impressed. Flawlessly integrating a 3D CGI board into footage taken with a shaking, defocusing camera, with correctly modeled lighting from flashing LEDs, that's some ILM tier skill.

>Want to build an awesome Windows 98 gaming PC
>look up Super Socket 7 mobos
>over $100 for most models
Jesus Christ was not expecting that.