Old Thrashbarg wrote:

You're assuming the CPU would need to be replaced. There's a fair chance that the existing chip will run just fine at 25mhz.

Hell, some of the 'real' 25mhz 286 systems used 20mhz chips... such things weren't particularly uncommon amongst the less reputable manufacturers. There were also a fair number of 386SX/20 systems with 16mhz chips, and SX/25 systems with 20mhz chips.

I seriously doubt that Harris would deliberately under rate their chips given the price premium that they could get just for marking them up to 25mhz if they were capable of running at that speed. They had a hard enough time competing without giving money away.

Would a 286-25 with a good video card run wolfenstein 3d smoothly?

dirkmirk wrote:

Would a 286-25 with a good video card run wolfenstein 3d smoothly?

Here it is running on a 386SX-25 which probably isn't going to be more than about 10% faster than a 286-25. I know Wolf3D runs fine on a 10-12mhz 286, though.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgjwYiB0v_E

You're probably not going to see any videos of it running on a 286-20 or 25 because they are so hard to find.

I have a 286 board, which originally had a socketed siemens 16MHz. When I got a 20MHz Harris 286, I swapped it, and also desoldered the crystal. Then I placed a socket for the crystal so that I could easily change it. I tried with a 50MHz crystal, in order for it to run at 25MHz, but it would hang just after starting to load the o/s. But as I said my board was originally meant to run at 16MHz. Let's hope that a later 20MHz model, has more chances to overclock.

Markk wrote:

I have a 286 board, which originally had a socketed siemens 16MHz. When I got a 20MHz Harris 286, I swapped it, and also desoldered the crystal. Then I placed a socket for the crystal so that I could easily change it. I tried with a 50MHz crystal, in order for it to run at 25MHz, but it would hang just after starting to load the o/s. But as I said my board was originally meant to run at 16MHz. Let's hope that a later 20MHz model, has more chances to overclock.

It may have a lot to do with the chipset, too. I know that the VLSI chipset seems to be pretty successful at running at 25mhz and so is Headland.

dirkmirk wrote:

Would a 286-25 with a good video card run wolfenstein 3d smoothly?

sliderider wrote:

You're probably not going to see any videos of it running on a 286-20 or 25 because they are so hard to find.

133MHz to the rescue! 😁

PC Diagnostic (POST) card picking up SB16 digital sound data from ISA bus? - YouTube

In that video I'm playing Wolfenstein 3D on a 20MHz Harris 286. Runs quite smoothly!

133MHz wrote:

133MHz to the rescue! :happyhappy: […]
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dirkmirk wrote:

Would a 286-25 with a good video card run wolfenstein 3d smoothly?

sliderider wrote:

You're probably not going to see any videos of it running on a 286-20 or 25 because they are so hard to find.

133MHz to the rescue! 😁

PC Diagnostic (POST) card picking up SB16 digital sound data from ISA bus? - YouTube

In that video I'm playing Wolfenstein 3D on a 20MHz Harris 286. Runs quite smoothly!

EL OH EL!!! Its more fun to watch the post card than the actual monitor!

Okay, so I've got a Voodoo5 5500 here for my "Voodoo Rocket" build. There's just one problem. The bearings on these fans are completely shot. What would be the best course of action for replacement cooling? The stock heatsinks are pretty much crap, so I'm thinking possibly some beefy northbridge heatsinks?

The fans were very noisy on my V5-5500 as well.
I took them off, gave the heatsinks and fan blades a good clean, peeled the sticker off the back of the fan and lifted the small cap covering the bearing. Oiled the bearings with some sewing machine oil, and the fans quietened down a lot. Stil la little noise but I can't hear them when the card is inside a case.

Any chipset cooler should fit (you might need to use thermal epoxy to stick it on) but I don't know if I'd trust them with just a passive cooler, they do get quite hot.

DonutKing wrote:

The fans were very noisy on my V5-5500 as well.
I took them off, gave the heatsinks and fan blades a good clean, peeled the sticker off the back of the fan and lifted the small cap covering the bearing. Oiled the bearings with some sewing machine oil, and the fans quietened down a lot. Stil la little noise but I can't hear them when the card is inside a case.

Any chipset cooler should fit (you might need to use thermal epoxy to stick it on) but I don't know if I'd trust them with just a passive cooler, they do get quite hot.

I was thinking I'd use some appropriately sized new fans to go with the NB heatsinks.

m1919 wrote:

Okay, so I've got a Voodoo5 5500 here for my "Voodoo Rocket" build. There's just one problem. The bearings on these fans are com […]
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Okay, so I've got a Voodoo5 5500 here for my "Voodoo Rocket" build. There's just one problem. The bearings on these fans are completely shot. What would be the best course of action for replacement cooling? The stock heatsinks are pretty much crap, so I'm thinking possibly some beefy northbridge heatsinks?

Do they use the same AAVID fans that the Pentium Pro uses?

You don't need much to upgrade the cooling on a v5 5500 and I used nb coolers on mine but reused two old thermalshield fans (3dfx logo) along with two zalman ramsinks on the back.

With very special thanks to forum member Jolaes76...

Cloudschatze wrote:

With very special thanks to forum member Jolaes76... […]
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With very special thanks to forum member Jolaes76...

Oh nice! 😮

Cloudschatze wrote:

With very special thanks to forum member Jolaes76... […]
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With very special thanks to forum member Jolaes76...

Is that a modern repro of an Adlib card? It looks too clean and new to be vintage.

would this be a joystick gameport with port speed adjustment jack... like an Thrustmaster ACM?

It's a Commodore SID chip on an ISA card.

m1919 wrote:

Okay, so I've got a Voodoo5 5500 here for my "Voodoo Rocket" build. There's just one problem. The bearings on these fans are completely shot. What would be the best course of action for replacement cooling? The stock heatsinks are pretty much crap, so I'm thinking possibly some beefy northbridge heatsinks?

The best way for alternative cooling is to remove the STB heatsinks and then use some Vantec Icerbeq 4 coolers (they're pure copper and have quieter fans that spin faster):

These coolers use push pins and will work with the holes in the voodoo's PCB. So you don't have to use nasty thermal glue. Just apply some arctic silver thermal paste, pop the coolers in, and you're good to go!

Removing the voodoo 5500 heatsinks can be difficult (and DANGEROUS if you attempt to just pop them off with a knife, you can rip off the BGA chips), but I did a video on how to remove them safely with a can of compressed air.

Picked this up for free thanks to a local retro gaming forum (fellow member moving and needing to clear some stuff out):

• AcerPower 386SX desktop PC
• Compaq LTE Elite 4/50E laptop
• Intel Pentium II 266 processor
• Intel LGA775 HSF (copper base)
• Sound Blaster AWE64 (CT4500) with a broken trace
• S3 Trio64v+ PCI video card
• PCI TV capture card based on the Conexant Fusion 878A
• Bunch of 16MB FPM/EDO RAM sticks

He told me the 386 PC was working the last time he powered it up. When I powered it up, no POST. POST card showed no POST codes at all. I then noticed that a Philips chip on the motherboard was getting really hot (marked in red):

It's a Philips S87C552-4A68 and the Internet tells me that it's a 80C51 microcontroller with built in OTP EPROM, 8 channel ADC and a bunch of other stuff. Even if I could source a replacement chip I wouldn't be able to get the appropriate software that it needs to work on this motherboard so unfortunately thanks to this dead IC the whole board is worthless 🙁.

It's a real shame, it looks like a nice board that could even be upgraded to a 486 and I really like its large footprint. Since its form factor is proprietary it makes the Acer case worthless too 😢. On the plus side I get to keep the working power supply, floppy drive and the two hard drives that were installed on it (85 and 130 MB, no bad sectors!). The drives came wiped with a stock DOS/WFW 3.11 image and judging by the file access dates it was last tested in 2009.

I can't bring myself to throw the motherboard away so I'm thinking about depopulating it with my hot air rework station and turning it into a decoration or something. 🙄

The Compaq laptop is a 486DX2-50 with a nice monochrome TFT LCD and a 250MB hard drive. It turns on but it doesn't boot from the hard drive, it errors out with the following message:

Disk I/O error
Replace system disk and press any key to continue

I hooked up the hard drive to another laptop and it boots MS-DOS correctly so I assume that the BIOS settings are wrong. I couldn't find any way to get into the BIOS setup, then I found out there's no BIOS setup program at all, it's one of those Compaq machines that requires a Setup disk. Unfortunately the floppy drive is bad so that's the end of that. Totally unusable. 😢

I have already repaired the broken trace on the SB AWE64 (see if you can spot it) but I haven't got around to test it yet. If it works it's definitely going into my current P1 build.

I have tested the S3 Trio64v+ and straightened out the pins on the feature connector, it'll probably go into my P1 build too.

All of the FPM/EDO sticks pass Memtest86 without errors. 😀

That desktop case is the sex. Shame about the form factor. I'd ask if you wanted to sell/trade it to me, but shipping on that thing would be killer..