Boards arived in the mail today.... And because I did a quick video, then I can mind as well post a couple of pictures before I start the build.

I bought the black board, because the form factor is awesomme. And fans of the Alien universe might notice why the blue looks the way it does. 😉 😜

IBMFan wrote on 2021-04-08, 06:55:

Got this s370 Celeron mechanical sample. It's a dummy CPU but boy is it hard to find!
This completes my s370 Mendocino collection.

Truly interesting, never seen such a dummy CPU.
I bet it's just as 'fast' as a Covington. 😆

PD2JK wrote on 2021-04-08, 13:25:

Truly interesting, never seen such a dummy CPU.
I bet it's just as 'fast' as a Covington. 😆

It was made to test CPU sockets and heatsink dimensions in the early stages of development. They don't contain a functional CPU die so it's for collecting purposes only. Since they don't actually work they were usually discarded and only a few of them remained intact.

Won the following on Shopgoodwill's site:

GameBoy DMG-01 Play it Loud! Clear version with Tetris Blast, Paperboy, Galaga/Galaxian, Defender/Joust, Super Battletank, and Turn and Burn, along with some manuals, and a case:

Not-so-retro: ASUS A8V-UAYVZ Socket 939 with a CPU of some kind and 4 sticks of RAM (no I/O shield, but it might be easy to find one):

Wow that's a nice game boy and the 939 motherboard is a great find too. Nice hunting!

I am a simple man. I see a cheap Tualatin motherboard, I buy.
In this case, a Fujitsu Siemens D1219, seems to be quite sought after. Listed as „Old Motherboard“ for 10€ + shipping.

Other good stuff I found recently on the classifieds and on eBay, all for quite cheap, some very cheap:
- Asus CUBX bundled with some mildly interesting CPU, GPU, RAM, Intel network card and crappy soundcard
- AWE64 Gold
- Soundscape Opus
- Vortex 2 with some ripped off caps
- Elsa TNT card
- GeForce 3 Ti 200
- A whole bunch of low capacity IDE HDDs
- Razer Boomslang 2000 gaming mouse (with a ball! One of the first of its kind)

That's a great haul. But man a boomslang I was in middle school when those came out and boy did I want one.

The Asus EISA board turned up today. Fully boxed and appears to be in great condition. Came with Manual and EISA Configuration utility disk. Love the clamshell box design! Also had a nice cheap Dell 9800 Pro turn up too!

After a few months searching I finally found a working MX400 PCI. I guess now my Pentium 233 is finally complete.

bjwil1991 wrote on 2021-04-09, 04:42:

Not-so-retro: ASUS A8V-UAYVZ Socket 939 with a CPU of some kind and 4 sticks of RAM (no I/O shield, but it might be easy to find one):

ASUS-A8V-UAYVZ.jpg

Basis for a Win98 SE ultimate performance monster?

Pair of Micron P300 100GB SSD drives arrived today. Will test them later.

Cheers,

Finally found a Pro Audio Spectrum Plus... The card in between the PAS 8-bit dual OPL2 card and the PAS16.

It was mislabeled but I immediately recognized it from the pics.

Hakeshu wrote on 2021-04-10, 15:10:

After a few months searching I finally found a working MX400 PCI. I guess now my Pentium 233 is finally complete.

one of the criticisms i've heard of pentium 1 is that as a rule the P1 class machines quickly lost out in terms of playing late 90's 3d games due to emergence of P2 and early 3d agp cards in around 1997/8 along with more demanding games like Half Life, Unreal & UT, Quake 2 and 3 and more

but with this combination you can run quite a bit from that later period on an otherwise modest P1 set up

gerry wrote on 2021-04-12, 10:03:

Hakeshu wrote on 2021-04-10, 15:10:

After a few months searching I finally found a working MX400 PCI. I guess now my Pentium 233 is finally complete.

one of the criticisms i've heard of pentium 1 is that as a rule the P1 class machines quickly lost out in terms of playing late 90's 3d games due to emergence of P2 and early 3d agp cards in around 1997/8 along with more demanding games like Half Life, Unreal & UT, Quake 2 and 3 and more

but with this combination you can run quite a bit from that later period on an otherwise modest P1 set up

I get your point but to be fair I don't think this is at all specific to the P1 - this had always been the case since the mid '80s . During this period, computing technology was developing so quickly that you'd get 2 to 3 years of useful life out of a machine if you wanted to play the latest games or run the latest software. After that it would become slightly obsolete and in need of an upgrade! I feel the curve only started to flatten significantly in the mid to late '00s (e.g. a core2quad machine is still useable today)

Inspired by some positive reviews I bought this desoldering gun.

Quickly tried to remove a few caps and NiCD battery from my boards and it makes an amazing difference compared to the butchering I've done before. I should have bought this years ago!

Vacuum desoldering gun:

Able to do this on motherboard? This is major issue.

Cheers,

Finally two new pieces for my XP+Vista C2Q build have arrived.

One is the other set of Kingmax DDR2-800 MHz RAM.
For some reason the motherboard was very picky about which stick goes to which slot. At first I thought the new sticks might be faulty, but no.
It only works if the new sticks go to DIMM0 and DIMM2 and the old sticks to DIMM1 and DIMM3.
This way WinXP-32 can use 3.25GB of the 4GB RAM. It was to be expected. Aida64 memory tests found no issues, I'll give it some stress test this weekend.

The other is an AT-to-PS/2 adapter so I can actually use my keyboard of choice, which is an unbranded BTC 5139.
Really nice sounding keyboard. It maybe even beats the the ASUS Strix Tactic Pro I use for my daily driver.
https://youtu.be/RJNE27sztSo
And it's a really sturdy one. Though not as heavy as the Strix.

Now I only need to free the drive I want for Vista. I was also thinking about adding a 250GB hard drive to store some disk images and have a shared drive between the two OS.

mpe wrote on 2021-04-12, 16:37:

Inspired by some positive reviews I bought this desoldering gun.

Quickly tried to remove a few caps and NiCD battery from my boards and it makes an amazing difference compared to the butchering I've done before. I should have bought this years ago!

DSC_9595.jpeg

Great purchase! It's the best tool any retro enthusiast should own. I remember when I got mine and I was removing caps like no body's business!

Won a EISA DC-620B IDE Cache Controller card for my new 486 build. I believe its made by Tekram but it has Data Care International on it.

cyclone3d wrote on 2021-04-10, 19:38:

Finally found a Pro Audio Spectrum Plus... The card in between the PAS 8-bit dual OPL2 card and the PAS16.

It was mislabeled but I immediately recognized it from the pics.

I saw that a week or so ago... those are pretty hard to find! I was interested but didn't want to spend that much since I'd found one a couple years ago as well.

I keep shaking my head thinking about the 1st gen PAS that was sold, with box, a couple months ago for almost nothing.

gex85 wrote on 2021-04-09, 18:06:

I am a simple man. I see a cheap Tualatin motherboard, I buy. In this case, a Fujitsu Siemens D1219, seems to be quite sought af […]
Show full quote

I am a simple man. I see a cheap Tualatin motherboard, I buy.
In this case, a Fujitsu Siemens D1219, seems to be quite sought after. Listed as „Old Motherboard“ for 10€ + shipping.
44DFBEF3-91BE-4D8A-924B-060499DCFC11.jpeg

Other good stuff I found recently on the classifieds and on eBay, all for quite cheap, some very cheap:
- Asus CUBX bundled with some mildly interesting CPU, GPU, RAM, Intel network card and crappy soundcard
- AWE64 Gold
- Soundscape Opus
- Vortex 2 with some ripped off caps
- Elsa TNT card
- GeForce 3 Ti 200
- A whole bunch of low capacity IDE HDDs
- Razer Boomslang 2000 gaming mouse (with a ball! One of the first of its kind)

I recently sold one with an ISA slot 😉