Yep. Wonderful stuff.

That poor sad Packard Bell though, ouch.

I wish there was a way to get stuff from recyclers here 🙁 all those nice old machines just getting trashed...

some stuff from the last year still:

another AWE64 Gold and a míro FM10

Windows soundsystem card and a "Sound Commander EX"

Number 9 S3 Vision968 card and a Via dual PCI riser

imi wrote on 2021-01-08, 14:50:

some stuff from the last year still:

Wow! All of those seem to be in excellent condition. New old stock?

I particularly like the Miro. Nice to see the OPTi 82C929 chip on a hi-end sound card for a change.

I wish ^^ almost nothing I get is NOS, most from scrap lots or just single loose cards, I just dusted them off a bit before taking pictures, the WSS is quite scratched.
occasionally there's the odd boxed one in there.

as long as I get them to work I'm happy 😀

I buy broken/messed up/as-is/untested stuff. It's in my nature to love a good fixer-upper.

Bought another Versa M/75 - most expensive Versa by far, but for the plastic, it's worth it since the case is in 100% perfect condition. So if it does not work, as it's AS/iS, I'll just rehouse the good guts into it. If it does work, I'll keep the other system boards as spares and/or rehouse them in a custom Alumilite molded clone of the NEC Versa M/75 chassis using the new one to make silicone molds for the bottom and the keyboard bezel.

Now all that's left for the Ultra-Mana Versa-Thon Youtube video is the Ultralite and the Versa V. Yes, I'm making a huge youtube video that goes over all 5 submodels, original prices, parts available, old PC Mag Benchmarks, and Current Day benchmarks, and brief overviews of common issues. It's sort of an expansion on the video Beige-O-Vision did. I plan to collect all 5 - most likely before the purge begins, so I can find the best ones.

I've got some other plans beforehand too - like a battery for the older non-smart Versas, and the touch screen as I've figured it all out on the M/75 touch panel I have, including the stylus.

After that, focus is moving mostly to guitar projects as me and my wife are starting a side hustle building custom guitars and pedals, but at the same time, I may fit a few PC projects in there too. Actually, if I do the M/75 rehousing project, I'm thinking about making that one out of Alumilite using the one I just bought to make molds of the original parts and then modify the molds to improve structural rigidity. If it's good, I might start doing this for other Laptops as well. Goes with another idea I had to get a Metal Brake and start making custom retro hand-made PC, XT, and AT cases as well.

I just got these boards out of a scrap lot I received in the mail today:

I asked the seller to please (please please PLEASE!) put some cardboard or some other material around a couple of the boards to protect them. Thankfully, the Asus P5A seems to have survived almost completely intact with only a piece of a cereal box to protect it. That IBM 6x86 PR300 was loose in the box and the ceramic carrier made a HUUUGE gouge in another board in the lot (one I was interested in but thankfully ended up being nothing special). Surprisingly, the CPU only had one pin that was seriously bent and it straightened with ease. I cleaned it off a little and I'm amazed at how clean it is. Really a nice example of a late IBM x86 chip in my opinion.

The micro ATX boards, I believe, come from Micron systems. Sure, they have no AGP slot, but you get a 440BX micro ATX board with an integrated Riva 128ZX (8MB 125Mhz SGRAM onboard I think) and an ESS Maestro 2M! I have found very limited information about the Maestro 2M. It's a bit unclear where this one falls, but some of the Maestro variants have significantly better DOS/3.1 support than what you get on most of the Maestro PCI cards and there are mixed reports regarding what kind of FM and GM synth you get. I hope to dig into this a bit more in it's own thread at some point. The boards seem to be mostly intact, aside from some damage to the battery holders and a couple bent caps. Assuming the P5A works, it is worth 5x what I paid, so anything else in this lot was a bonus. 😀

Oh, and I also stole the six retaining clips from the DIMM slots on the board that was irreparably damaged (not pictured). I have a few boards with damaged clips, and these looked like the same style. I'm hoping they fit. Turns out the easiest way to remove them is to open the clip, slip a flat head screw driver down into the top of the clip area and just tilt it side to side to break the plastic away. Then the clip comes right out without any damage or bending. I'm not quite enough of a hoarder at this point to feel bad about damaging the dimm sockets on a completely unusable motherboard.

EDIT: Forgot the pictures. 😁

Nice score on the P5a and the IBM 6x86. The micron boards with the on board Riva's are nice as well you can make a compact but still decently capable DOS gaming system without needing to many other parts.

Got this tired poor old barn mare, just to see if I can bring it to life. Turned that the mainboard, cpu, ram and graphics card worked fine, after some fiddling. Neither of the three CD drives worked, the floppy is brhaving weirdly and one of the two hard drives burned out after few mins of running. I will try snd see what is on the second drive, my P166 rig did not recognize it though. Didn't try the PSU, for obvious reasons 😀

Man that poor computer is in rough shape but seriously awesome that it still works. It's really nothing a good cleaning and some elbow grease couldn't revive.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-01-08, 21:09:

Nice score on the P5a and the IBM 6x86. The micron boards with the on board Riva's are nice as well you can make a compact but still decently capable DOS gaming system without needing to many other parts.

I was just thinking about slim desktops that only take low profile cards. If I ever find one, I'd put one of these in it for a tiny retro build. 😀

imi wrote on 2021-01-08, 14:50:

Windows soundsystem card and a "Sound Commander EX"

Nice, a MediaSonic Sound Commander EX. I have one of those and it works pretty well, but there's barely any information on these cards that I can find. The FX model seems to be a lot more common.

Bought a couple of GeForce 8800GT 512MB PCIe graphics cards.

Also got an AMD Phenom X4 9650 CPU.

Assuming the cards are working as they're supposed to be, 1 of the graphics cards along with the Phenom CPU will be going into my Socket AM2+ Hackintosh (replacing an Athlon 64 X2 5000+ & Radeon HD 5450) and I'll also set up a dual boot with Windows for a circa-2007/2008 PC/Mac gaming build.

The other GeForce 8800 will be going in my Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 PC, for an upcoming 2nd 2007 gaming build.

winuser_pl wrote on 2021-01-07, 09:28:

I bought IDT WinChip C6 200 MHz for $10 incl ship. The processor legs are not straight, but the CPU itself is in working condition. My plan for the CPU is to fix the legs and get rid of that sticky glue from top.

The second item is the motherboard - Gigabyte GA-7N400S with yellow Socket 462 😁 It is brand new condition, but I/O ports cover is missing for some reason. It is nForce 2 mobo, supports Athlons, Durons, Athlon XPs and Semprons.
Price: ~ $9

Brand new with clearly defective capacitors, you can see the tops blowing on two in that pic.

Make sure to memtest the hell out of whatever memory you put in there (after you repair the board). I have yet to experience an nforce 2 motherboard in person that can run memtest86 for any appreciable amount of time without errors, I think all of them are just straight up trash.

I just gor this beautiful midi tower. I build in a 486 AMD DX2-80 system after cleaning. Think I made it my main 486 now as I l really love the 80mhz Display.
[attachment=-1]IMG_20210108_015150.jpg[/attachment]

Bought vintage ATX case with few goodies. Been looking for that particular case for nearly 5 years. Happy now, waiting for it to come here, had to pay bit cost for UPS shipping but case and goodies were $30 USD.

I had this case when bought one for my old work. Back in the day, this case was only made for white box early slot A athlon 750MHz, motherboard, and proper PSU, that's it. Stores who bought these out fitted them for reasonable sale. Price was low on these to clear out the old inventory of slot A stuff.

This means finally a decent case to use for one of my vintage computing.

Cheers,

pc-sound-legacy wrote on 2021-01-09, 00:41:

I just gor this beautiful midi tower. I build in a 486 AMD DX2-80 system after cleaning. Think I made it my main 486 now as I l really love the 80mhz Display.
[attachment=-1]IMG_20210108_015150.jpg[/attachment]

I really like that case. That was a great find.

pete8475 wrote on 2021-01-09, 00:40:

Brand new with clearly defective capacitors, you can see the tops blowing on two in that pic.

Make sure to memtest the hell out of whatever memory you put in there (after you repair the board). I have yet to experience an nforce 2 motherboard in person that can run memtest86 for any appreciable amount of time without errors, I think all of them are just straight up trash.

This made me curious, as I have an overclocked Abit NF7-S 2.0 system that has been used, in some capacity, almost constantly since I built it 2003. I just ran memtest on it for the first time since I last tweaked it about 8 years ago. It ran for 50 minutes, long enough to do a full pass, plus some. No errors detected. I don't do anything super critical on it, so I didn't feel like running it for a 24 hour test, but I've never had stability problems with it.

Since I built it the system has been running an Athlon XP 1700+ (Thoroughbred "B", 1.47Ghz... $50 CPU at the time!) at 2Ghz, cooled with a Thermalright SK-7 and an 80mm Panaflo fan, running a modded Merlin Tai Pan BIOS. I cleaned and oiled the northbridge fan at some point, upgraded it to 2GB DDR-400 (2x512MB in one channel, 1x1GB in the other) in 2012 or so and at that time I readjusted the overclock to match the new RAM (had DDR-333 before, I think the CPU was somewhere just above 2Ghz). I swapped out the PSU with a more modern Seasonic 550HT a year or two ago to keep it safe. It was used as a PC repair workstation after it was no longer my main machine, then it was used as a daily driver for music, movies, internet etc. by my sister for several years, then when I got it back I used it for some retro stuff and now I use it for testing late AGP cards, which I do pretty frequently.

I have a Chaintech 7NJL6 (Nforce 2 Ultra 400 as well, with MCP-S southbridge) and it is also tested and functional though I haven't used it much. I also have an A7N8X Deluxe (another NF2 Ultra 400 with MCP-T) in my repair box. I can't remember exactly what it needed... I don't think it was caps, but it may have been.

Anyway, I just wanted to add that anecdote. Nearly the entire Nforce line of products were released during the capacitor plague era, which is very unfortunate. And once the plague was nearing it's end, bad solder was an issue on later chipsets (like the 600 series with the IGP). Definitely not a surprise that nvidia left that market after that mess. I still think the Nforce 2 Ultra 400 was a great chipset at the time and they were plenty of great boards out there that used it. The Nforce 3 Ultra and Nforce 4 chipsets were also rock solid (other than Nforce 3 AGP support in Vista+... grr). Whether they lasted was entirely dependent on if the manufacturer picked the right caps or not, but this was the case with all other boards from that time period as well. There just weren't many nforce boards made outside "the plague days", so you're just as likely to find one that needs new caps as one that doesn't.

Couple of Speeze RaptorCool I

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2021-01-09, 04:57:

Anyway, I just wanted to add that anecdote. Nearly the entire Nforce line of products were released during the capacitor plague era, which is very unfortunate. And once the plague was nearing it's end, bad solder was an issue on later chipsets (like the 600 series with the IGP). Definitely not a surprise that nvidia left that market after that mess. I still think the Nforce 2 Ultra 400 was a great chipset at the time and they were plenty of great boards out there that used it. The Nforce 3 Ultra and Nforce 4 chipsets were also rock solid (other than Nforce 3 AGP support in Vista+... grr). Whether they lasted was entirely dependent on if the manufacturer picked the right caps or not, but this was the case with all other boards from that time period as well. There just weren't many nforce boards made outside "the plague days", so you're just as likely to find one that needs new caps as one that doesn't.

Well, nVidia got out of the chipset market not because of the RoHS lead-free switchover or the capacitor plague - it happened because they were frozen out of x86 for the most part. They only had an agreement with Intel for chipsets up to the Core2s and the first Atom, the AMD market doesn’t really exist anymore since AMD ship their APUs with practically everything (well, so did Via, really), and there’s no perceived benefit to an nVidia Southbridge.

Yeah, the nForce 2 was a good chipset, as were the MCP79/ 89 on the Ion netbooks / Penryn MBP13s/MBAs. It’s too bad It stopped after QPI became a thing and nVidia is not allowed to make platform controllers (like the rumored MCP99 for Clarkdale/Arandale) for it.