Repo Man11 wrote on 2022-08-11, 02:54:

Today I stopped by a thrift store I've never been to before, and they had a tower for sale! It's an independent shop and whatever written or unwritten policy that causes St. Vincent DePaul and all of the other thrift stores around here to never sell such things isn't a policy they observe. So I got this for $15.00: Antec case, Asus K8V SE Deluxe (I hoped it was Socket 939, but it's 754) a Thermaltake 480 watt PSU with a 40 amp +5, a 3400+ CPU, a pair of WD PATA hard drives, a BFG 7300 GT 512 AGP card, and a mix of Corsair and generic DDR.

At first it refused to POST, and after much fooling around I removed some of the memory and then it booted up. After more fooling around, I realized that if it had one of the Corsair CMX1024 sticks it would work, but if I put the second one in it would only sit there with the fans spinning with no sound coming from the POST speaker. I tried some other memory and it had no issues. I'm not sure how that Corsair memory ended up in this thing because it seems unlikely that it was working fine then just stopped.

I've never before seen a motherboard with yellow PCI slots.

I have the Non-SE version of the same board in my Socket 754 AGP PC, I love it. As far as I know there are only minor revisions between the two (the NIC is different, maybe also the Codec). My setup is Athlon64 3700+, 2GB RAM, X800XT PE, Audigy2 ZS, Windows XP.

I believe I had to swap a few bloating caps before use, so be sure to give it a good visual inspection.

I've recently completed a couple of new PCI/VLB card siblings:

Matrox Ultima PCI/VLB lite:

Diamond Stealth 32:

Diamond Stealth 64 PCI/VLB (also have a 4 MB PCI version somewhere in storage)

And ATI Graphics Ultra Pro:

Got a Matrox Millennium II for 5 EUR. Condition was unknown/untested but the card seemed to be in decent condition visually, aside from some bent pins.

I cleaned the contacts with isopropyl alcohol and straightened the pins. So far, the card seems to be working fine in my test system.

This one has 4 MB of WRAM and sports a 250 MHz RAMDAC. Image quality is excellent, as is the norm for Matrox cards. I was curious about MSI acceleration for DOS games, so I tried Tomb Raider. It needed the newer 1.03 Matrox patch and would only run in pure DOS, but it did work. Should be fun to experiment with other games which support this API.

mpe wrote on 2022-08-11, 13:10:

And ATI Graphics Ultra Pro: […]
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And ATI Graphics Ultra Pro:

Very nice collection. Now try to get the EISA version as well. 😉

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-08-11, 03:49:

Does anyone here like Wildcats ?

I have 4 or 5 different models, and 3 Oxygen VX1 (one still sealed NIB). On my list to eventually get benchmarked, and probably resold once confirmed working.

bjwil1991 wrote on 2022-08-11, 03:48:

Let alone a brown PCB. Excellent find, my friend. I wish some thrift stores had something interesting. The last system I got was the 386 running on a 486DLC-33 back in 2020 for $10 and that system got upgraded to a better board.

dfi had several plates with pci yellow and also green, soltek also had yellow and several other colors.

Bancho wrote on 2022-08-11, 11:02:

Picked up this Soyo SY-P4I845PEISA Socket 478 motherboard which came with a 3.06 533fsb CPU. Should make for an intersting high […]
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Picked up this Soyo SY-P4I845PEISA Socket 478 motherboard which came with a 3.06 533fsb CPU. Should make for an intersting high end DOS/Win98 build

I've never before seen a P4 board with three ISA slots.

mpe wrote on 2022-08-11, 13:10:

I've recently completed a couple of new PCI/VLB card siblings: […]
Show full quote

I've recently completed a couple of new PCI/VLB card siblings:

Matrox Ultima PCI/VLB lite:

Diamond Stealth 32:

Diamond Stealth 64 PCI/VLB (also have a 4 MB PCI version somewhere in storage)

And ATI Graphics Ultra Pro:

Damn much ATi Mach 32 cards, is one of the few models i am missing in order to have the complete full ATi collection and VESA too... And all cards are premium brands too, the S3 are Diamond with the old logo, that MatroX VESA seems pulled out from some OEM system prob Compaq or IBM. Nice stuff. Most Rage cards are easy to find/ get for cheap, ofc the Rage Fury MaXX does not mostly... And i have never seen in AD ATi cards below Rage...

https://imgur.com/a/3aZU1

Repo Man11 wrote on 2022-08-11, 16:00:

Bancho wrote on 2022-08-11, 11:02:

Picked up this Soyo SY-P4I845PEISA Socket 478 motherboard which came with a 3.06 533fsb CPU. Should make for an intersting high […]
Show full quote

Picked up this Soyo SY-P4I845PEISA Socket 478 motherboard which came with a 3.06 533fsb CPU. Should make for an intersting high end DOS/Win98 build

I've never before seen a P4 board with three ISA slots.

Believe or not there is even LGA775 boards with ISA slots... That SOYO have better models called Dragon and the even better Dragon Platinum white PCB very nice stuff.... Strange SOYO is a brand that uses only VIA chipsets, i never saw them using nVIDIA nForce...

Dear god have mercy, I'm at it again.

Sold a (very nice Sony) VCR on eBay. Decided to use the proceeds to treat myself to a Radeon X1600XT AGP. You see plunty of X1600 Pro cards in AGP, but I hadn't seen an XT before. Apparently VisionTek released this at an insane price point ($220 when PCIe X1600XTs were at $120ish) and not very many sold. Figured it was interesting enough to add to the collection for $35. I sort of neglected the mid end ATI cards during my initial buying spree some years ago.

I also bought a GeForce 6600 (non-GT) 256MB PCIe, it was cheap and GeForce6 is still my nostalgia achilles. Weird to see a 256MB non-GT

On a sidenote the seller listed the X1600 as "Untested with 30 day DOA warranty" and has it sitting on anti-static material. Instantly book marked that seller, immediately made himself look honest and legit unlike the probably half dozen or so sellers I've bought "tested" shit from just for them to admit it was untested when it didn't work. Like I don't even mind doing the extra work to test this shit thoroughly (which I do anyways unless its cheap garbage) and maybe deal with a return as long as the seller is pricing stuff sanely and being up front about it.

timmyz wrote on 2022-08-11, 12:17:

Repo Man11 wrote on 2022-08-11, 02:54:

Today I stopped by a thrift store I've never been to before, and they had a tower for sale! It's an independent shop and whatever written or unwritten policy that causes St. Vincent DePaul and all of the other thrift stores around here to never sell such things isn't a policy they observe. So I got this for $15.00: Antec case, Asus K8V SE Deluxe (I hoped it was Socket 939, but it's 754) a Thermaltake 480 watt PSU with a 40 amp +5, a 3400+ CPU, a pair of WD PATA hard drives, a BFG 7300 GT 512 AGP card, and a mix of Corsair and generic DDR.

At first it refused to POST, and after much fooling around I removed some of the memory and then it booted up. After more fooling around, I realized that if it had one of the Corsair CMX1024 sticks it would work, but if I put the second one in it would only sit there with the fans spinning with no sound coming from the POST speaker. I tried some other memory and it had no issues. I'm not sure how that Corsair memory ended up in this thing because it seems unlikely that it was working fine then just stopped.

I've never before seen a motherboard with yellow PCI slots.

Ripoff of DFI Lanparty colorscheme 😁 1GB is enough ram for 754 XP / 98 PC anyway so 1GB single channel ddr400 is plenty for the platform. 754 is undervalued platform for the os-support it has. I have one of these board in box too and was going to do 98/xp build with ATI 9800 pro but ended up on Asrock 775Dual-VSTA for now.

The board has no issue with two gigs of RAM, I set it up with some other memory - trying the Corsair RAM in another computer made it clear that one of the two sticks is faulty.

The board seems fine, but I put a faster hard drive in it to do a test install of Windows XP, and while I was doing it the 7300 GT video card began failing. So it goes, but it would have been really sad if it had been something nicer.

Following the topic about using radeon 9600 Pro is lowest power, I scored a 9600 XT that need little repair for little cost and within Canada. 😀

Cheers,

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2022-08-11, 21:36:

Dear god have mercy, I'm at it again. […]
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Dear god have mercy, I'm at it again.

Sold a (very nice Sony) VCR on eBay. Decided to use the proceeds to treat myself to a Radeon X1600XT AGP. You see plunty of X1600 Pro cards in AGP, but I hadn't seen an XT before. Apparently VisionTek released this at an insane price point ($220 when PCIe X1600XTs were at $120ish) and not very many sold. Figured it was interesting enough to add to the collection for $35. I sort of neglected the mid end ATI cards during my initial buying spree some years ago.

I also bought a GeForce 6600 (non-GT) 256MB PCIe, it was cheap and GeForce6 is still my nostalgia achilles. Weird to see a 256MB non-GT

On a sidenote the seller listed the X1600 as "Untested with 30 day DOA warranty" and has it sitting on anti-static material. Instantly book marked that seller, immediately made himself look honest and legit unlike the probably half dozen or so sellers I've bought "tested" shit from just for them to admit it was untested when it didn't work. Like I don't even mind doing the extra work to test this shit thoroughly (which I do anyways unless its cheap garbage) and maybe deal with a return as long as the seller is pricing stuff sanely and being up front about it.

On a side note, literally just received the G6600. "Works great" yeah I'm sure it did, with the 5 vented capacitors on the front. Obviously was never tested (or at least not within the last decade). Why are there so many dirtbag sellers in the retro computer parts space?

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-08-11, 05:45:

There were some minor exceptions where NVIDIA tried to differentiate itself with special drivers for major packages like AutoCAD and 3D Studio MAX. It's possible that there were some optimizations to be had there, but the software specific optimizations fell away in favor of more generic "certified" drivers.

Didn't NVidia supplied HEIDI drivers for Autocad and 3DSmax for some of their older Quadro offers, which could interface with the Nvidia Windows Display driver (nv_xx.dll, nv_xx.sys) and be managed by it directly?
Also, I somewhat remember nVidia supplying SoftImage3D drivers their cards too. SoftImage before the XSI versions needed special drivers to get full acceleration from the card, as the application used to drive the screen "directly", bypassing all the Windows APIs (even the GDI ones).

debs3759 wrote on 2022-08-11, 14:10:

I have 4 or 5 different models, and 3 Oxygen VX1 (one still sealed NIB).

3DLab Oxygen VX1 card has its driver source code for both Display and DirectX available in the Windows DDK.
This card had an important niche userbase if you wanted to learn how to program DirectX enabled Display Drivers, as you could compile the source with debug PDB and breakpoints enabled, which could be instrumentalized and traced with WinDBG or any of the available tools in the day.
Unfortunately its ICD OpenGL driver code isn't. It was only available in a very obscure Windows OpenGL DDK which probably only video card manufacturers could access on. There is only traces on old archived magazines, and that's all.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2022-08-12, 17:38:

On a side note, literally just received the G6600. "Works great" yeah I'm sure it did, with the 5 vented capacitors on the front. Obviously was never tested (or at least not within the last decade). Why are there so many dirtbag sellers in the retro computer parts space?

Eh, I don't think they're that bad, folks selling broken from use / worn out stuff is better than sellers that are selling things with crushed cores and loads of missing SMD components.

Really though I think even spotting 'bad fan' / 'bad caps' is a lot of ask of most sellers, but it's nice they're still selling these things rather than putting them out for scrap, especially where there's an obvious fault (that hopefully hasn't lead to worse faults...).

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2022-08-12, 17:38:

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2022-08-11, 21:36:

Dear god have mercy, I'm at it again. […]
Show full quote

Dear god have mercy, I'm at it again.

Sold a (very nice Sony) VCR on eBay. Decided to use the proceeds to treat myself to a Radeon X1600XT AGP. You see plunty of X1600 Pro cards in AGP, but I hadn't seen an XT before. Apparently VisionTek released this at an insane price point ($220 when PCIe X1600XTs were at $120ish) and not very many sold. Figured it was interesting enough to add to the collection for $35. I sort of neglected the mid end ATI cards during my initial buying spree some years ago.

I also bought a GeForce 6600 (non-GT) 256MB PCIe, it was cheap and GeForce6 is still my nostalgia achilles. Weird to see a 256MB non-GT

On a sidenote the seller listed the X1600 as "Untested with 30 day DOA warranty" and has it sitting on anti-static material. Instantly book marked that seller, immediately made himself look honest and legit unlike the probably half dozen or so sellers I've bought "tested" shit from just for them to admit it was untested when it didn't work. Like I don't even mind doing the extra work to test this shit thoroughly (which I do anyways unless its cheap garbage) and maybe deal with a return as long as the seller is pricing stuff sanely and being up front about it.

On a side note, literally just received the G6600. "Works great" yeah I'm sure it did, with the 5 vented capacitors on the front. Obviously was never tested (or at least not within the last decade). Why are there so many dirtbag sellers in the retro computer parts space?

There are still at least a few decent ones out there. I was bidding on a Quadro card that had visibly bad caps (and the price reflected that) but then the seller messaged me saying that he'd tested it before shipping it and it had no display. He then asked me did I still want it? I didn't, so he canceled the auction.

Thermalwrong wrote on 2022-08-12, 23:20:

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2022-08-12, 17:38:

On a side note, literally just received the G6600. "Works great" yeah I'm sure it did, with the 5 vented capacitors on the front. Obviously was never tested (or at least not within the last decade). Why are there so many dirtbag sellers in the retro computer parts space?

Eh, I don't think they're that bad, folks selling broken from use / worn out stuff is better than sellers that are selling things with crushed cores and loads of missing SMD components.

Really though I think even spotting 'bad fan' / 'bad caps' is a lot of ask of most sellers, but it's nice they're still selling these things rather than putting them out for scrap, especially where there's an obvious fault (that hopefully hasn't lead to worse faults...).

These caps were full on vented. Like you don't need a PHD in electronics to know caps shouldn't look like THIS:

If they were just bulging or hairline vented I would be more understanding but these have gone full blossom. Like this objectively a level of failure you should recognize if your selling electronics in any capacity.

This being said the seller did issue a full refund fairly quickly, so I'll probably still leave positive feedback. I might try to recap this piece of shit at some point, I need to order caps for a 6800GT I've had for years anyways (I hate ordering caps, such a pain)

Found a seller selling these DOM units, decided to take a chance and grabbed a pair of 512mb modules, if they check out then I might grab a couple of 2gb one since they are going for reasonable prices. (They are used industrial ones that dont look to have been used at all)

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2022-08-13, 01:19:

This being said the seller did issue a full refund fairly quickly, so I'll probably still leave positive feedback.

from my experience it's common practice for sellers to sell things as "fully working" without testing or looking at it first all the time, it's less effort for them to just refund the odd one that doesn't work and in turn just sell quickly and for more cause everything is advertised as working.

Saw this Sun UltraSPARC IIi pop up in my Slot 1/Socket 370 saved search and assumed it was an error in listing. But sure enough, the seller sent it sitting in a PGA370 socket - all the pins mate. I'm going to chalk it up reuse of an existing cheap and plentiful socket unless someone can tell me otherwise.