I love a shitty build: Re: Retro computer builds that surprised you the most because they worked better than expected

I also love a test bench made from repurposed items:

So what is next for your masterpiece? We must see it in action.

Yes I could use a dedicated test rig/stand, I have in mind a particular kind of citrus fruit crate I have seen around, but whenever I come across one lately, it's bent broken or slimed.

So, I've got the board screwed down, 3 self tapping screws through base, the PSU screwed in, 2 screws on the back edge via "meccano" pieces. Got all the leg extensions installed, these are 2cm cube "beads" from the craft section of dollar store, seem to be made of hard beech. Two of those are stacked and a deck screw run through them, countersunk. They are offset because of the taper of the legs, so that sides if later attached will be vertical, and also they come to the corners of the lid without overhang. Got the card frame steadied, seems pretty solid when a card installed. Note the last PCI slot is obscured, but I still have 2 to use, and the 3rd one can still be used for internal cards, like a goldfinch, RAID card or PowerVR.

Pic of the Radeon that's going in. May mix it up with the GPUs later, maybe try a TnT2 and a SiS Xabre 200.

Need to figure out the optical drive, button/LED panel and card reader mounting. Figure they're going to dangle off the lid, but I don't really want screw heads on the top surface. Thinking maybe I could try pop rivets because they are lower profile, or I might epoxy in the brackets, but plastic and metal have a habit of flexing apart with wear.

Edit: Oh I meant to say something about the PSU, it's an "Orion" the only reason I'm using it at all is because it's got a CSA number and when I checked last year or so, they were still selling them, since a decade back or so. Thus not having been sued off the market, I figured it wasn't actually gonna burn my house down, but I'm still gonna keep it switched off when I'm asleep or out etc.
EditII: Looked it up again, found BadCaps teardown which makes me feel mildly better about it, not quite bottom of the barrel, they reckon it's good for 350W.. https://www.badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=8011

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-08-10, 02:36:

Pic of the Radeon that's going in. May mix it up with the GPUs later, maybe try a TnT2 and a SiS Xabre 200.

That card is a Radeon VE aka Radeon 7000. This card is not to be confused with the "Radeon SDR" that got later renamed (along with the Radon DDR) to Radeon 7200. The Radeon VE indeed uses DDR RAM, so the sellers listing that card as "DDR" are not wrong. In contrast to all other Radeon cards (including the Radeon 7200), the Radeon VE / Radeon 7000 doesn't include Hardware Transform & Lighting. While the Radeon 7200 used 128 bit memory access, the Radeon 7000 only uses 64 bit memory access, so the data rate of the Radeon 7000 with DDR RAM is very similar to the Radeon 7200 with SDR RAM.

I have the PowerColor version of that card, which IIRC looks identical. It's a slow, slow card that even manages to bottleneck the life out of a P2-450. At first, I placed most of the blame on the single pixel pipeline. Later on, when I had the card in an XP machine, I discovered through GPU-Z that it only has a 32-bit memory bus. 32-bit!

However, I don't believe all 7000/VEs use a 32-bit memory interface. This PowerColor is some late model, ultra-trash version that I picked up at Staples for 29.99 CAD in 2005 because I needed a third DVI output.

Yah a 450 is a bit of a bad combo for these no T&L cores apparently they need a few more mhz to wake up Anand's CPU scaling test ..
https://www.anandtech.com/show/721/11

Standard Def Steve wrote on 2023-08-10, 15:35:

Later on, when I had the card in an XP machine, I discovered through GPU-Z that it only has a 32-bit memory bus. 32-bit!

The memory chips on the Radeon 7000VE chips have 16 bits per chip. Usually, these cards have 4 chips, 16 Megabytes each for 64MB total. In fact, there are some cards having only two of these chips, a total memory 32MB and 32 bit memory bandwidth. They might be usable as DVI-capable office cards, but obviously they are not recommendable for 3D at all. When you want to go low-end Radeon for a non-3D-gaming build with DVI output, I would still suggest a Radeon 9000/9200/9250 over a 7000. On the other hand, if you care about analog VGA signal quality, stay clear of anything labeled Radeon 9200 or 9250.

Just loving that Meccano setup. I'll have to look out for cheap bits on my local marketplace to upgrade my balsa crate bench.

Yesterday kinda stalled out with interruptions, and that I went off on a false trail thinking about hinges for the top. I wanted the top to "stay in position" somehow, because otherwise hooking up the drive cables etc was going to be a bummer. Also altering anything inside with drives on the lid would be annoying. So I went off on some hinge hunts, drew blank, thought about various complex arrangements and... decided screw it, this is suppose to be crude and simple, using cable tie loops to hook on the uprights to keep the lid in position, first pic hopefully.

Then got into mounting drives on the lid, was going to do more brackets, but I got rather annoyed fighting with the rivet gun, it's like a fastener system that works all the time some of the time, spent more time digging the failed rivets out than anything else. It might be that I've got crappy rivets, they were breaking the stem bit at odd points, like a little up from where the notch was in it, where it's meant to break. They didn't seem to be clinching fully either. Some of it might be that the joint was an in between thickness, I had 1/4" inch long rivets and half inch long rivets, the quarter inch were clinching below the bracket and pushing it away, the 1/2" weren't fully clinching on it. So I guess I needed 3/8. Having only got two on there firmly, I was all "screw that, zipties for the rest".

Last pic is side view, not a lot of clearance. Looks a bit worse than it is on this pic, the drive is covering about a third of the HSF and since fans tend to draw most from the hub area and throw it out, this is probably not restricting as much as it seems. The graphics card isn't all that close either I can get two fingers between them... IDK if I'm gonna get some "snow" from the IDE cable being close though.

You might notice that the "back" of the board is at right side, and "back" of PSU is at the left, with nothing at the actual back, this is sort of a design decision of thinking "What if I could push it all the way back to a wall" rather than having to leave cable clearance.

edit: BTW never saw what case or system that button/light panel came from, arrived here stuffed in a bag with a other random case wiring in a box lot of used heatsinks I got ages back.

Pierre32 wrote on 2023-08-12, 00:26:

Just loving that Meccano setup. I'll have to look out for cheap bits on my local marketplace to upgrade my balsa crate bench.

Well then, additional "meccano" abuse is called for then. I figured some klutzy dope who might be using this machine might stick the end of a cable into the HSF by accident, so I put in some defenses... the large black piece is actually a punch out drive bay cover that's been hanging around for ages.

Ugh, just noticed the USB header pinout is screwy if the manual is right, it's got the left side pins in right order, right side in reverse order, if the card reader/usb had two single in line 5 pins I could just plug them in in different directions but no, got the 10 pin block. Possibly the idea was it didn't matter which way round you plugged it in, but that's what the key pin is for, gah. So tomorrow, scratching around to see if I have alternative hookups or whether I need to fiddle with that one and rewire.

Trash thrash, quick and derpy, low end socket A ...

Here's Derpy for you. Glad I could help. 🤗

source

Damn I need to have a proper tweener system for making HDD setups easy. My AM2 rig was being a pain the arse, with changing boot priorities all the time and having 3 separate menus to set the boot devices, and then I went and ran the live USB version of Ubuntu 22, which is dog f**king, dining and giving it a manicure and spa treatment slow, timing out a load of hardware checks I think, so spent all last night screwing around with that, and then it turns out GnuParted seems to have screwed up... in maybe two ways, maybe one, maybe didn't set active flag when it said it did, definitely didn't set up a logical drive right, which I fruitlessly copied a load of install files to. Thought it was a bit odd when I created the extended partition, then it wouldn't give me an option to create logical partition in extended partition, so I thought it had just max sized the logical partition and formatted it. Well despite looking fine on linux and letting me copy files to it, windows does not see it, only an extended partition with no FStype. For speed and accuracy I should have booted an old knoppix, at least I know that works.

Then this board is being weird with two hard drives plugged in, despite what you set it seems to want to try and fail to boot off first drive on primary, and is getting some 120 second timeout delays deciding on whether 80 conductor cables are good. I don't know if they are or whether the board signal integrity isn't all that great, but I figured I'd rather deal with the "not an 80 conductor" nag and use 40 pin ATA33 for now because I am trying to get shit going. Anyway, booted an old 98 install in safe mode, and I don't know whether looking to see what was going on in Fdisk caused it to drop the active flag on me, but now the drive I'm tryna install ain't got one. Was trying to avoid hooking up a floppy, but might be easiest. Though I'm gonna fire up a knoppix CD and see if I can sort it out with that.

Think I gotta get myself a 98Se generic install to just clone and stretch onto stuff and avoid all this nonsense, or just brace myself to do it tradit way boot floppy and CDROM

Gah, finally, Win98SE installed... I had to go via "screw this, Ima use a floppy..." then realised this PSU doesn't have floppy power and I couldn't lay hands on any of the adapter cables... and didn't wanna mess with balancing another PSU and the floppy and the HDD on top of it to get it done... so fired up Puppy Bionic Beaver 32bit on the AM2 and that was slick and fast and the GParted on that was a version that let me set flags direct, set boot flag, set LBA flag on extended partition (Think that's why it wasn't seen, did have log part in ext part, but something still a bit hinky with it because scandisk hung up, though it looks like it's reading now) and thennnnn, I still weren't not booting good...

So that board lets you set boot order by HDD0, 1, 2, 3 and for some reason, won't hit up the secondary master whatever you set it to when there's a primary master, jerk. IDK quite what is up with it, I'll see if the Chinglish on the BIOS updates makes sense for a prob like that (Boots secondary fine when nothing on primary). Anyway, finally just stuck them both on one cable, managed to boot off the slave which was an old Win98 volume, use that to sys the D: which was master I was trying to install on... and still no booty... "no operating system found".... why did I think sys set up the MBR??? is that only format /s ?? anyway finally realised it didn't, and secret incantation of fdisk /cmbr 2 was needed to finally sort it, and I could finally boot off the 20GB Quantum and run the setup.

So it's ended up running on the 40 wire cable in ATA33 mode, but apart from the nag at boot, it probably don't matter much, as the drive goes all of 2Mb/sec faster at peak for the first few MB of the disk. ... https://goughlui.com/the-hard-disk-corner/qua … -5-20-5gb-2001/ I think that's about what to expect, though that's the AS not the LCT, which I think is actually slower, IDK, Fireball used to mean fastest of the fast, then it meant "The label that sells anything" like Barracuda for Seagate.

Edit: meant to mention, there was an old version of SiSoft Sandra on the old 98 install drive, which booted in safe mode, and ran that and the bench scores were looking good not far behind PIII 1000 reference so think board is performing as it should, "Junior" in the story got his PIII 800 performance 8 months later.

Wow, that lasted all of 30 seconds...

Got the optical hooked up, most of the front panel, then took it for a spin, optical drive was stuck but manually opened and exercised it and seems to be working again. But then, stuck a CD in with some shareware versions of ID stuff on, got 30 seconds into E1M1 DoomSW and lock.... freezes up, HDD light on... unresponsive, no switching on numlock/capslock, no response to ctrl alt del, had to hold power down for 8 secs... turned off... fire it up again, the HDD light flickers then stays on, nothing else happens... unplug HDD... all power off unplug... blip switch discharge.. power on again same thing, one blip of HDD light and then stays on, nothing on screen... maybe had real faint burning smell, IDK was sniffing at it real hard. Not sure what the hell happened, mayyybe lost a cap... gotta tear it back down to basics and get the POST card back on it after lunch I guess.

Stupid thing has gone back to that "picking lottery numbers" fail mode, C1 C3 25 2B 1D etc no particular order.. half of them don't even make sense.. purpose "reserved" for 4.51pg but in other versions they're things like "checking 5th slot" it doesn't have a 5th slot. Took out the CPU and nuked it with the high power contact cleaner... no improvement... maybe I'll try the RAM slots but I had the impression it was more to do with the CPU socket last time... either I'm gonna need to detail clean about 800 contacts individually with a toothpick or it needs a reflow or something.

It's a precision instrument the same as a hammer is, but seem to have narrowed down problem area on board with freezer spray. Premium contact cleaner on RAM slots did "nothing" (They might be cleaner but didn't make it POST). Anyway, any time this area is hit with the freezer spray, I can get it to POST to system summary, and by that time the frost is gone and it blackscreens. I do not think it's the electrolytics as hitting them specifically does nothing, it seems to be some bad connection or one of the SMDs acting up. Gotta find a hard point in something non-conductive to press things with, pressing larger elements, packages, with a pen didn't seem to do anything, while powering on.

It's like where's Waldo, for geeks....

Holy crap, prodding and prodding and prodding and prodding... but none of the SMDs.... got it I hope though, that big green cap to the right, happened to wobble it and felt the very faint tick, yup, moves just like it shouldn't, it's loose in a hole... had to get board out, flipped it up, could only very barely see the crack line but the solder was just lifting off the via, damn. Didn't think I could get a pic of it though it was that hard to see. Touched it with the iron, now gonna try putting power to it again, cross your fingers...

edit: Impossible! How could that not be the big IT it ??? Getting the same errors again and wedging on C1 if I do them back to back without a minute or so in between. That voltage IC is getting ouchy hot, maybe it's RAM voltage that's going funky. How could it have glitched somehow working enough to boot windows safe mode a few times, Install windows98SE and play a round of hearts, then glitch out again following day, and be not glitching back in... though I did think I should have pulled that cap all the way off in case it lifted a trace on top and broke it.. but still, back to shooting cold make work for short while. Guess I gotta actually measure some stuff, my probes are too fat, better find some pins and clips.

EditII: Wednesday update, ignoring the hell out of it before I throw it through a window 🤣

Got real tied up with house and homestead stuff, organising a new roof and other matters. Kinda dropping a note to myself to be sure to fully pull the main power capacitors and look under them for fractured traces. Don't think I'll get back to this or other hands on retro until nearly November.

I like that you call a KM133 board that crappy.. I have a SiS 730 based PCChips here that might win that title 🤣 lmao