First post, by RichB93
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I have an old PC Chips M530 430VX Socket 7 motherboard which has had a tough life. My brother used it in the late 90s and early 00s but since around 2003/4 it has been outside of a case and nestled in between a bunch of clothes, no doubt getting a ton of static damage you would have thought. Same goes for the 4 sticks of 16MB RAM which were scattered around the place! The board also has a COAST module installed.
So anyway, I plug the machine in and boot it up. It has an Intel Pentium 166 (non MMX) in there. I install Windows 95 without a hitch. Pretty cool, it appears to work, but I'm guessing as soon as I stress this machine it will probably crash. I switch the machine off, set the multiplier to 3.0 and power on. The machine POSTS at 200MHz, so a nice 33 MHz overclock over the stock speed. Again, Windows boots fine. The SiS 6326 graphics card I put in there isn't fantastic but at least it works under Windows 95, unlike the PowerVR Kyro card I try initially. I couldn't find one of my ISA sound cards so instead I put a generic C-Media 8738 in there (probably the widest supported card I know, it has drivers from Windows 95 all the way up to Windows 7 64-bit!!). I put 3DMark 99 MAX on there and load it up, fully expecting it to crash on this dusty old machine. I run the demo and....
It plays from start to finish without a single hitch. Of course the SiS card is terribly slow but nonetheless it plays fine. I run Memtest+86 to test the RAM. All 4 sticks are fine and do not have any problems either.
Maybe I'm just over-reacting a little but considering how poorly this hardware has been treated I'm astonished that it still works absolutely fine!! What do you guys think, do you have any hardware that still works like despite looking beat up? 😜