Author Topic: OLD COMPUTER  (Read 6685 times)

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Offline rrinker

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Re: OLD COMPUTER
« Reply #25 on: February 13, 2018, 03:47:57 pm »
 LGR has a video on how 3D gaming killed Cyrix - it was all about the FPU.

 

Offline MrsRTopic starter

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Re: OLD COMPUTER
« Reply #26 on: February 14, 2018, 06:21:57 pm »
Thanks for all the info guys.
I put the new drive in and found the MAXTOR software driver which saved me from having problems with DOS capacity restrictions.
You may like to know I still have a ACER 8086 still in use.
It has upgraded memory and a Maths co processor  It runs a A3 Dot Matrix printer that is handy for printing out full size aircraft Airfoils and bulkheads when doing repairs.
I use to write programs in  fortran & fortral77  and basic for the output to my plotters and printers.
The 86 has a wyse 700 CAD screen.
The old stuff still does the job. The problem is that the new computers don't have serial and parallel ports.
If any one is interested I will try and post some pics.
Just one more thing when I bought the 486 in 1990 they were not available in Aus. So I had to get the mo.board and 486 processor from over seas, it ended costing $4500 AU Tax exempt  you could buy a good system for that money now.

THANKS EVERY ONE

Rachael
 

Offline james_s

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Re: OLD COMPUTER
« Reply #27 on: February 14, 2018, 10:02:54 pm »
Heck you could buy several good systems for that money now. Used to be easy to spend $10k on a nice PC, now you almost have to try to spend more than $2500.

Always nice to see vintage stuff still trucking along.
 

Offline Halcyon

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Re: OLD COMPUTER
« Reply #28 on: February 20, 2018, 09:00:19 am »
Ever since 2011, to this date, the CPU industry has gotten interesting, with AMD's effective dropping off the face of the performance charts, when Intel made their platform a bit pointless with Sandy Bridge.
Now that AMD is back in the game, the performance balancing act is going to get interesting, especially with the looming event of the end of Moore's law, where CPU manufacturers will have to start to get more creative.

I've never actually owned a Cyrix chip, and to my knowledge I have never owned an x86 CPU not made by AMD or Intel (I might have and just not know it in some sort of embedded application).

You're right. AMD have been on the back-burner for a while, with both CPUs and GPUs. These days I find (especially with their GPUs) the slight performance gain isn't worth the extra pain and suffering in terms of component failure and trying to keep the damn things "cool enough". It takes a lot to cool a server rack, let alone a whole room.

It's always been a cat and mouse game between AMD and Intel and I think we haven't seen the end of it even as we approach the "Moore's Law limit". You'll just start seeing multi-processor boards becoming even more popular than they have in recent years and I/O becoming faster and faster such as NVMe (developed by Intel).

I owned a few Cyrix-based machines back in the day. They were nothing to write home about in terms of performance but they were reasonably stable and ran far cooler than the AMD chips of the day. When you were relying on a pissy little heatsink and fan, this was important.

 

Offline Ampera

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Re: OLD COMPUTER
« Reply #29 on: February 20, 2018, 09:33:18 am »
I'm an aberration in this household. We almost all have AMD solutions, and the K8/K10 platform is a recipe for stability and just working for almost no money. I got a 4790k because there was NOTHING that AMD had AT ALL for performance. The BEST they had was a 230W joke that required substation grade power management.

My next machine is AMD. Meltdown has thoroughly pissed me off with Intel, and I have lost any respect for them as a company from their poor and sometimes inexcusable actions.
I forget who I am sometimes, but then I remember that it's probably not worth remembering.
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