I found this card on my auction site. It's Media Vision PRO AUDIO SPECTRUM 16 PLUS (650-0014 rev. C) - probably OEM (?)

I know nothing about this card. Does it sound good? Was it worth 10USD equiv? 😀

I won a motherboard with a 1 euro bid some time ago.

The motherboard was sold as "Mainboard Intel PBA 634468-807 Socket 5 Motherboard" but the picture showed a 486 VLB board with memory and cache. I thought that the seller just diddnt know what he was selling. I still let the motherboard be but it diddnt get sold and when it was relisted and nobody seemed to want it yet again I put in the 1 euro starting bid. If the motherboard would be too corroded to save I thought that the memory, the 256KB cache, a keyboard controller and a BIOS Chip + socket would cover the 1 euro + 12.90 euro shipping cost.

This is the sellers pickture of the board. Its clearly not an Intel Socket 5 board.

This is the board I got. It's an Intel Advanced/ZP Socket 5 motherboard, Intels first i430FX motherboard released Januari 1995. This exact board has no L2 cache so it was probably paired with a P75, the boards sold with faster CPUs nomally had 256KB cache.

I guess I can't really complain as I got exactly the motherboard described, just not the one pictured. It would have been nice if it had cache but I guess that if I pair the motherboard with a P100 it won't matter much.

Brand-spanking-looking 2940UW and 2902A with SCSI1 to SCSI3 adaptor. Will test these in my 486 prior to a trade 😀

I haven't actually bought these, but they caught my eye and figured this would be a good place to ask... what am I looking at here?

It looks to me like a Socket 7 (or 370?) board with S3 video chips and Opti sound chips on it, but it also looks like it has a daughterboard attached near the Opti chips, which to me looks like a wavetable card. The whole thing apparently attaches to the backplane in front which says Compaq on it.

What am I looking at here? And is it really as unusual as it seems to me?

It is a Socket 7 Compaq motherboard based on the OPTi Viper chipsets. Sound is provided by an ESS chips.

I have no idea as to the daughter-board, it is entirely possible it serves some other purpose such as a modem.

i do not remember which model used this motherboard or what options it offered.

Ozzuneoj wrote:

what am I looking at here?

a backplane and a fitting mainboard?

HighTreason wrote:

It is a Socket 7 Compaq motherboard based on the OPTi Viper chipsets. Sound is provided by an ESS chips.

I have no idea as to the daughter-board, it is entirely possible it serves some other purpose such as a modem.

i do not remember which model used this motherboard or what options it offered.

I see. I didn't know that OPTi made motherboard chipsets... hence the confusion! I'd only ever come across their chips on sound cards, which is why a motherboard with tons of OPTi chips and a daughter-board seemed so strange to me.

... move along, nothing to see here... 😊

Ugh... I'm so weak... Impulse buy...

http://www.ebay.com/itm/BFG-Technologies-NVID … 2wAAOSw2GlXGPN-

... BFG Geforce FX 5950 Ultra AGP for $20, working with a 7 day DOA guarantee. Would have preferred a Dust Buster model for my collection, but this is still a decent price for such an uncommon card, guaranteed working.

Ozzuneoj wrote:

I haven't actually bought these, but they caught my eye and figured this would be a good place to ask... what am I looking at he […]
Show full quote

I haven't actually bought these, but they caught my eye and figured this would be a good place to ask... what am I looking at here?

strangeboard1.jpg

strangeboard2.jpg

It looks to me like a Socket 7 (or 370?) board with S3 video chips and Opti sound chips on it, but it also looks like it has a daughterboard attached near the Opti chips, which to me looks like a wavetable card. The whole thing apparently attaches to the backplane in front which says Compaq on it.

What am I looking at here? And is it really as unusual as it seems to me?

This is the guts to a Compaq system, and the way compaq implemented their motherboard, it is "split" in to two pieces. The golden edge connector on the first board plugs in to the brown slot on the second one. And then the expansion slots on the second board would then connect to the first one.

The problem with this is it's designed to work in a Compaq brand tower. No other computer tower that exists in the world will ever house it correctly internally. And besides that it uses a unique, compaq-designed, non-standard power supply.

Basically if you don't have the original tower, you won't get it to work. If you don't have the original power supply that came with the tower, it won't even power on either. And if you try using any other power supply with it, even an AT one with split power connectors, it will "let go" ala magic smoke and potentially sparks if you power it on.

As if all this wasn't bad enough, this entire design was only used on 2 compaq models and there was a very limited upgrade path. This was compaq's design: prevent users from using any spare parts other than genuine compaq parts, so they could charge 4 times the going rate for hardware because it was the only thing that would work with it.

Also the limited upgrade path by these systems guaranteed that if you wanted anything faster you would have to buy an entirely new compaq computer of a different model. AKA Planned obsolescence.

This is very common practice and standard for all OEM's.

Hi All, my first post so though i would share some of the hardware i picked up having starting getting back into old PC's and hardware. These are not exactly the oldest but are still old hahaha 😀

I picked up this New Old Stock Relisys 17" CRT today for £10. Thought i would need a CRT to go along with the older hardware.. and it was cheap and local.

I also acquired this Mesh Matrix XP tower. AMD Athlon XP1700+, 512mb DDR ram, Asus A7A266-E Motherboard, MX400 GPU and 80gig Maxtor HD. Slightly yellowed plastics but the case is brilliant.

346.jpg[/img][/url]

I saw a guy selling a load of AMD stuff on ebay locally, so £20 got me 3 CPU/MOBO/RAM bundles and a load of GPU/add-in cards and a spare AMD Athlon XP 2800+. Pretty good deal i thought.

First Board, Gigabyte GA7DXR+, AMD Athlon XP 1900+. 1gig DDR (512 & 2X256)

Second Board, Asus A7N8X-E, AMD Athlon XP 3000+, 1gig DDR (2x512)

And Third Board. Asus A7V266-E, AMD Athlon XP 1800+, 1gig DDR (2x256 1x512)

meljor wrote:

i810 and tualatin? That doesn't work...

Maybe not the i810. But the i810E2...

Funny, I never would have expected much to come out of a Packard Bell system.

http://www.uktsupport.co.uk/pb/mb/challenger.htm

Ozzuneoj wrote:

I haven't actually bought these, but they caught my eye and figured this would be a good place to ask... what am I looking at he […]
Show full quote

I haven't actually bought these, but they caught my eye and figured this would be a good place to ask... what am I looking at here?

strangeboard1.jpg

strangeboard2.jpg

It looks to me like a Socket 7 (or 370?) board with S3 video chips and Opti sound chips on it, but it also looks like it has a daughterboard attached near the Opti chips, which to me looks like a wavetable card. The whole thing apparently attaches to the backplane in front which says Compaq on it.

What am I looking at here? And is it really as unusual as it seems to me?

Looks like a Compaq motherboard and backplane to me. Probably socket 5/7 with the extra VRAM option. You need a special case for setup.

Bancho wrote:

And Third Board. Asus A7V266-E, AMD Athlon XP 1800+, 1gig DDR (2x256 1x512)

There WERE motherboards with the ACR slot? 😀

Gamecollector wrote:

Bancho wrote:

And Third Board. Asus A7V266-E, AMD Athlon XP 1800+, 1gig DDR (2x256 1x512)

There WERE motherboards with the ACR slot? 😀

Shure.... (no real practical use for them)

Hey, don't you want to recycle one of those OEM winmodems?

I've been trying to nab an original IBM VGA card for some time, but I've never been willing to shell out the big bucks. I finally found one that was mislisted on eBay that wouldn't break the bank:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/IBM-XT-AT-PC-8-Bit-IS … r-/361538779163

I'm planning to stick this baby into my IBM AT connected to a 5175 PGA display using a converter.

https://picasaweb.google.com/misterzeropage/IBM5170319

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I've been trying to nab an original IBM VGA card for some time, but I've never been willing to shell out the big bucks. I finally found one that was mislisted on eBay that wouldn't break the bank:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/IBM-XT-AT-PC-8-Bit-IS … r-/361538779163

I'm planning to stick this baby into my IBM AT connected to a 5175 PGA display using a converter.

That's a nice find!

I picked up this bundle of sound awesome recently from a great local seller. He knew his stuff, delivered it personally, and gave me a very reasonable price. The Creative CT3910, Roland MBC-1, and cables (including the original Roland RCA leads) were thrown in for free, which was very generous I thought.

Question regarding the MBC-1 – this thing can only be used with a LAPC-I can’t it? It physically fits a gameport, but it can’t be used as a MIDI breakout on just any old sound card – is that correct?

And I also snagged this NOS ASUS P5LD2 motherboard and Zalman fanmate (a doodad for altering fan speed) as backups for my P4 machine. I sleep better at night knowing I have backups!

h-a-l-9000 wrote:

Have a look at the bottom-most ISA slot. If pins A/B7 are bridged the board may be toast. If you are lucky only a 74*245 needs to be replaced.

The board arrived today and I immediately had a look at that spot. Turns out that it was just a piece of debris. This board is quite clean overall, and at some point there is clear indication that the onboard battery was replaced. There's no signs of leakage from the previous or current battery - still going to remove it though. Next step is to see if it works.

These could aswell go in the dumpster find thread as I think the seller works at a recycling center in southern Europe but as I did pay for the items I'm posting the stuff here.

Two weeks ago I posted the sellers picture of an XT clone motherboard I bought just to get the NEC V20 CPU. The shipping was rather expensive and the seller had some other "untested" hardware for sale so I bought some more stuff.

The extra shipping cost ended up ~2 euro for each additional item, the cards were 3 euro each and the 486 motherboards 10 euro each. I found these prices reasonable as the motherboards came with CPUs + memory and from experience I know that "untested" ISA video cards work more often than not. The cards were bundled 2+2+2 so I could not cherry-pick only the VGA-cards. As usual with these kind of sellers and items everything came with bubble wrap as the only ESD protection. 🤣

The soldered cache on this PC Chips M601 do not seem to be fake? If the cache is fake they have at least spent some time on marking the chips correctly. 😀

The chipset is damaged though which was not visible on the sellers image. I'm not too upset as I need boards to take spare parts from, it will donate the Keyboard jack to save a FIC 486 motherboard.