Ah, it's cut off to the right.

I'm going to start with my K7 benching today but I had to do something else first!

A year ago a bought a lot of 10 or so broken motherboards to use as spare parts, if I could not fix them that is. The price ended up ~75 SEK + 89 SEK shipping = ~15 euro if I remember right and the motherboards were shipped in a box without much protection. When I got the box I heard rattling inside and decided to not even open it until I needed something like a flash chip or the like.

Some days ago I opened the box and inspected the motherboards, the seller who had tested the boards had included notes taped to each board with his tesing results. One motherboard caught my eyes, a DFI nForce4 SLI LanParty Expert, a kind of rare and sought after Socket 939 motherboard.

This is how the motherboard arrived, I guess the chipset cooler got loose during shipping.

This is the sellers note. It translates as "SLI (what he calls the motherboard) February 15. Starts but do not post, not with PCI nor with PCI-E."

What could be the issue? Lets remove the chipset heat sink so we can get a better look. You do not need to be rocket scientist to understand why this board do not post...

This looks much better but the chipset has really taken a beating.

Will the motherboard work? We will soon find out!

The DFI nForce4 SLI LanParty Expert seems to work just fine.

I will test this motherboard at a later date to see how well it overclocks. Now I need to get back to setting up my Socket A test system.

Installed a Matsushita CR-563-B for the first time in about 25 years. The one I bought back in the day came with the controller card, but this one I hooked up to a SB Pro 2 CT1600. Found the drivers in a Vogons thread, and it works great.

Using it in a Wang 386SX-20. The motherboard has built-in IDE, but the BIOS doesn't seem to recognize IDE CD-ROM drives.

Enlisted the reflexes of my 12 yr old son to help me clear the "Catch the Light" puzzle at the end of Level 7 on Legend of Grimrock.
This: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YdDnI83X9g
Since this was an optional puzzle, I originally decided to just skip it. But he took up the challenge and helped me clear it after about 20 tries. 😊

Played a bit with the network version of the QNX demo floppy on my 486 this wekend:

Pulled my VP-1000 apart to fix what I thought was a failing motor. But between the gas laser and heat from recent use has coused it to do a funny thing with all the corrosion.

And yes that is corrosion. Well ladybugs cover in corrosion believe it or not. Yes you read that right, some of the dead ladybugs are covered in corrosion, I filled them down and fround each lump to have a ladybug inside. But oddly not one bit of corrosion on the electrics.

I'm at work reading old Socket A related threads on the "xtremesystems" forum. I just stumbled on a thread titled "Artifacting in nature, please help", I love the overclocking community of yesteryear.

Yesterday I was messing around with a SS7 build. I bumped into an old Acer/AOpen AT keyboard and it flew off the desk and hit my chair's armrest hard. Several keys don't work anymore and I did not feel like removing 30 tiny screws from the bottom to see what the damage was. So I grabbed my IBM PS/2 from the basement and found that the DIN connector was smashed into an oval. 😠

I've actually spend about 2 hours looking through a couple boxes of DIMMs (small boxes 🤣) looking for any VC-RAM but alas didn't find any 🙁

Tried to test the Soyo 025D2 motherboard but no cigar.
PSU runs, Keyboard light goes shortly on, floppy lighted up shortly but no post/no boot.
I used a second hand 17" Medion TFT that worked on a Slot1 system an hour before.
Removed everything except the isa Trident 9000B and tried again. Still nothing, so I swapped the Trident for another Trident 9000B which I already tested other systems with and no beep/post of image on the screen. Also tried the attached speaker but no beep whatsoever.

Smacking my head against the wall, I started to think the Soyo board won't post if not atleast some battery is attached. Could that be possible?
Postcard was giving smoke when used in another newer system a few days before so I unfortunatly don't have one at the moment 😠
Gonna try more this evening.

First couple of donations for my Pentium MMX build arrived today:

Actually came with a Pentium 133 installed but I took the liberty of replacing it with my Pentium 133 MMX

The Pentium 133 removed from the board. Never saw a Pentium processor with an integrated heatsink like this, it appears impossible to remove.. The fan can be replaced. Is this regular? Never owned a Pentium PC, moved from 486 straight to Slot Pentium II back in the day..

And some EDO RAM.. The bottom two are 8MB/piece I believe but the top two, I have no idea. Anyone can tell?

@appiah4

That is not a Pentium 133. The integrated HSF indicates a Pentium Overdrive chip. Not sure which one, but it can potentially be MMX (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_OverDrive) and is probably 166Mhz (the only 133Mhz that was made was for the socket 4).

Also, regarding your MMX cpu, I didn't think they made one at 133Mhz except for laptops. My understanding is they started at 166Mhz.

Whaaat? 😀

The MMX is indeed 166MHz my error.. as for the Pentium Overdrive I have no odea what this is.. SMH..

looks like it might be this

http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Pentium/Intel-P … BP80503166.html

If it's a PODMMX, then it might support test register manipulation with Setmul. This would make it much more flexible for slowing down for older DOS games.
Just stick it back into the computer, power it on and run CHKCPU (assuming you haven't changed the motherboard jumpers that it was set to before you removed it). If so, hopefully you can remember how it was jumpered.

clueless1 wrote:

If it's a PODMMX, then it might support test register manipulation with Setmul. This would make it much more flexible for slowing down for older DOS games.
Just stick it back into the computer, power it on and run CHKCPU (assuming you haven't changed the motherboard jumpers that it was set to before you removed it). If so, hopefully you can remember how it was jumpered.

Changed the jumper for voltage from 3.3v to 2.8v only easy to change back.

Is a POD 166mmx better than a regular p166mmx? Why is the vcore so high? Is it basically an OCed lower Pentium?

Depends, as clueless1 noted. The best way to check is to load DOS and try altering the TR12 test registers with SETMUL. If it works, you have a great DOS slowdown CPU!

The vcore at 3.3 so that it is electrically compatible with socket 5. There is a voltage regulator under the HSF that converts to 2.8v in the cpu. That's why it's an Overdrive chip, so you can upgrade older socket 5 systems to MMX.

appiah4 wrote:

Whaaat? :-) […]
Show full quote

Whaaat? 😀

The MMX is indeed 166MHz my error.. as for the Pentium Overdrive I have no odea what this is.. SMH..

It looks like a regular boxed Pentium MMX. The PODMMX looked different.