VCF West 2025 - The Nvidia Trade Show PC
The Specifications
- 2.66GHz Core 2 Quad Q6700 (4 cores, 4 threads)
- 4GB DDR2 SDRAM
- 128GB SSD/1TB HDD
- Nvidia Quadro K4000 (3GB)
- XFX 680i-SLI Motherboard (nForce chipset)
- Cooler Master Praetorian case
- Lightscribe optical drive (of course)
- 1.44MB floppy drive (if the header's there, dang it, I'm gonna use it!)
The Story:
This machine actually originally began as my overkill Windows XP machine. It had a relatively middle-of-the-road Core 2 Duo, with a potato-tier GT640 (that got moved over to the Shuttle!) that would have probably sucked in the context of the year that it released, but it's good for us because it has XP drivers and runs XP-era games beautifully. I was even able to get the "holy shit!" UT2004 Easter Egg (for maxing out your settings) and it ran great!
Unfortunately, the main case I had ready for this machine wouldn't fit. It was some fun Corsair case that looked like it should take a full ATX motherboard, but in fact only took mATX. Boo. So I had to grab this beige case that looked like it was from the AT-ATX transitional period to make it all work. This case was not meant for such high performing parts, so airflow was...bad. Not bad enough, yet. But bad.
The previous motherboard was a Gigabyte EP35-DS3L, and I liked it because it had modern stuff but also a bunch of legacy I/O. The board was a bit quirky though, as it would randomly refuse to boot and required a couple of manual BIOS flashes in an EEPROM programmer to get it to act right. It also had some bent pins on the CPU socket, but these were redundant power pins and not shorting, so that shouldn't have affected it.
Fortunes changed when I found another board in my stash, one I had completely forgotten about: The aforementioned XFX 680i board. With a Core 2 Quad in it. Oh yes. Now we're talking. Better yet, this board still supported XP, so we were pretty much good to go to stick this in and have the ultimate Windows XP machine!
Of course, this is the point at which the previous case started presenting airflow issues, so I put out a call on the Bay Area Discord and thankfully there was an answer: Compgeke had a selection of mid-2000s cases and among them was the Praetorian with a laser-etched acrylic window that had Nvidia's old logo and their slogan. This was perfect. Perfect.
Before all this happened though, I needed a GPU for the Shuttle SS30G2, which was being built up in tandem. The GT640 didn't run super hot and could be reduced down to a single slot with some difficulty, so it was the perfect GPU. Leaving me in the lurch for another GPU for this system.
Thankfully, it wouldn't be long: Onii (who's running the table next to mine!) offered to keep an eye out for good candidates at ewaste, and found a few Quadro cards, among them a K4000. These cards were never meant for gaming, sure, but they can definitely play older games perfectly fine!
The Quadro acquired and installed, I installed the drivers, held my breath, and restarted the system, expecting a load of artifacting and a broken heart. But it worked! And it worked well! Short of the fan bouncing around because someone robbed the screws. Feh. I was able to find replacements.
I did pull the card back out and cleaned/repasted it (which it certainly needed, there was a carpet in there!) and hopefully now it'll survive for at least another 11 years.
Wait, Vista? Why?
When I began planning this exhibit last year, my original plan was to just do something controversial and bring Windows 7, mostly because there has been a LOT of nostalgia about the Frutiger Aero aesthetic (which is a term that makes me uneasy, which is why I went out of my way to avoid using it in the exhibit title) flying around social media. But also because I'm really tired of retro gatekeepers who try and tell people what is and isn't retro/vintage.
This sentiment was mostly brought on by some in the vintage Mac community swearing up and down that despite turning 20 years old very soon, Intel Macs will never "be one of us". I think this notion is, frankly, bullshit. Time marches on, and all things eventually become vintage.
Windows 7--despite just recently falling out of third party software support--strikes me as pretty damn vintage. It's almost 20 years old, it's a product from a bygone era of computing (remember when technology wasn't just developed to exploit us for every nickel and dime we have?) and people are actively going nuts over the aesthetic. Plus I wanted to challenge the people who try to say "things aren't vintage".
But after running a poll on Mastodon, I had a change of heart. Vista, if you think about it, was a fun little blip in Windows' history. It launched in 2006 (2007 if you weren't an OEM), really lived and breathed the aesthetic that Windows 7 became known for, and went largely forgotten after 7 launched and we danced in the streets, finally able to ditch our XP installs for something good again.
So, screw it. Why not Vista? The OS that walked so 7 could run? It would be an experience for me, too, because while I did run Vista back in the day, I was still in high school and my parents suddenly took a hard turn into strictness and I wasn't allowed to have free use of a computer anymore. So I never got to really actually sit with it.
So, what about you?
Perfect segue into this: I first got into Vista when a friend of mine at school who had a far larger internet pipe than I did managed to grab the RTM version, and we installed it on our machines. He had a MacBook, I had a MacBook Pro. We were actually kind of impressed with it. Aero Glass looked cool as hell. The whole OS had some weird design decisions but ultimately the coat of fresh paint was much appreciated.
As I said, though, this was when my parents (well, mom and step-dad) decided to take this sudden and harsh turn into being insanely strict, so I never got to really dig deep into Vista because that MacBook Pro was never allowed to be in my possession. I was only ever allowed to use it if my schoolwork permitted it and no more than that. (It was bought for college and my parents were strict about that. Even though I got to have tons of fun with it back when I first got it, before they became strict. Yay.)
Past that I only ever dabbled with it lightly but by the time I had graduated/moved out/etc, we were in the Windows 7 era.
It was interesting though, because in school I did cozy up to people adjacent to the IT department and found out that the summer I graduated that they'd be ripping out all the old computers (it was some eccentric mix of Win3.1/95/NT/98/2000 machines) and replacing them with Vista machines, and because of this they needed to spin up their own Windows activation server. There was talk about how much fun that was going to be.
Part of me wished I could have stayed another year just to watch the absolute chaos unfold once the summer was over.
I did get another shake with Vista, though it didn't last long: I went to community college and took some computer science classes, and as a part of that I was able to get a copy of Vista Ultimate for very, VERY cheap. I ended up dropping that class (and my laptop would end up getting stolen not long after) so my time with Vista was again cut quite short. By the time I had another laptop (sharing a laptop with my then-girlfriend) the 7 beta had been released and I was already onto that.