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I got a socket 939 Gigabyte K8N Pro SLI today.
It was supposed to work. The northbridge heatsink had been torn off during shipping but no damange done (well the pushpins were broken).

I have three other Gigabte K8N boards, two of them wont post.
This board looks great and I was sure it would post at the first attempt, it has dual bios and stuff so I was not even a little bit worried.

Well it diddnt, I tried 4 different memory modules in each memory slot, different video cards, even PCI ones but the tham thing would not post. I removed the battery and shorted the pins for an hour and still nothing, I changed PSU still nothing. I changed the CPU that was mounted on the board when I got it to a known working one, still nothing. I was going to accept that the board was dead, not just resting but thought one LAST last try... and the tham thing posted and seems to be working fine now WTF!? What is wrong with the K8N series of boards?!

Just now a MU-50 boxed http://www.ebay.de/itm/131323791554 for 110 Euro.
Oh brain you make me poor.

My lastest boughts where:

Cardex Tseng ET4000 W32p 2MB

Diamond Stealth 64 DRAM with S3 TRIO 64 (one of the better VLB cards)

Two of these nice long black 34pin floppy cables.

Also got a Sandy bridge Core i7 2600K for one of my systems iam now working on.

Lately i have decided to reduce on buying these retro stuff.. Because most i have already here. And also need to think about other things that have need my attention.

Finally got the camera charged.

Here is an image of my new motherboard that did not want to post until I was about to give up.
It is at least a good looking board.

Gigabyte GA-K8N Pro SLI Nforce4 socket 939

4x1GB that I got with the board, not pictured an Athlon X2 4400+ also included in the package.

Some new acquirements:

ASUS MEDIA BUS AV264GT - 3D Rage II with 4MB memory and Vibra 16C


Matrox MGA PCI (later called Ultima). 2MB upgradable version.

AWE32 CT3900

Wow! That Asus card sure is an odd duck.

What slot does that Asus card go into?

Apparently, it uses the Asus Media Bus, which was Asus' way of saving money by combining an ISA slot with a PCI slot. The graphics will be running over the PCI bus, and the sound over the ISA bus. Based on Wikipedia, it's a rev 2.0 version.

The media bus is no more than the standard PCI bus with an extended slot behind it like Vesa local bus..

Why they designed the media bus? This was because they could produced cheaper systems.. Normally you had to have a few expansion cards in your system, that would drove up the price of that whole unit..
Because they could the soundcard part on the graphics card part, so they could actually reduce the costs.

The AMR slot had back then the same idea, to provide a cheaper solution for internet connection with a cheaper version of the dial-up modem.

Robin4 wrote:

The media bus is no more than the standard PCI bus with an extended slot behind it like Vesa local bus..

It was not like VESA. Media bus is two separate buses, PCI and shrinked ISA, located to work in a single slot. If VLB was a step forward from ISA, Mediabus is a step backward from PCI.

Skyscraper, why is the cooler facing this odd direction?

I ment its the same idea like vesa local bus.. The pin-out wouldnt be the same at all..

I had an similar card, with Vibra Sound, SCSI interface, and i think cirrus logic video.

Ahhh what an interesting concept 😀 Thanks for the info guys!

Got an Ensoniq Soundscape card, the simplified S-2000 variety that lacks the CD interface ports (which is just fine). Here it is installed in my IBM Netfinity (behined it is an AWE64G , for the Sound Blaster and AWE portion of things obviously)

got it set up and working for every game I want except Sam & Max Hit the Road. The game has a "Soundscape Midi" option in the sound setup , but freezes if I try to test the option or run the game with it selected.

Nice! I'm running the retail 2MB ROM version of the card but basically the same setup as you with your AWE64. Pretty sure it's my favorite MIDI card - tough call between Ensoniq and Roland.

Artex wrote:

Nice! I'm running the retail 2MB ROM version of the card but basically the same setup as you with your AWE64. Pretty sure it's my favorite MIDI card - tough call between Ensoniq and Roland.

yeah its quite a nice card, though Im not sure I like it better than the AWE64 , kind of depends on the game.

in Doom for instance, using the General Midi on the Ensoniq sounds great, generally I like it better than the AWE32 option, as does Blackthorne. Warcraft 2 on the other hand, sounds a bit odd on it and I generally prefer the AWE64 for that one.

if only Sam & Max would work it would great, as there is really only that or the standard Sound Blaster business (there is of course the Roland, but Ive yet to actually get one, Its very difficult for me to justify the price to myself at least)

Interesting - I would be interested in finding a comparison of the instrument samples between the 1MB and 2MB versions of the card. I really think the card shines in most of the games I've played, especially the ones that support it natively. ROTT for example, sounds amazing!

I don't seem to be able to take decent photos, but here's what I bought lately:

GF MX 440 AGP 8x
Voodoo Rush [Alliance] with three outputs [vga, RCA, something else]
Voodoo Rush [Macronix] apparently with 8mb
FX5500 with a broken fan which I may set up with a big passive heatsink if a self-adhesive thermal pad will hold an old CPU sink on

Also bought some less relevant stuff;
M-Audio Delta Audiophile 2496 for recording music
Gigabyte AM2 motherboard GA-720-US3 to replace my Sapphire AM2-RD790 whose southbridge CAUGHT FIRE

And a couple of new computer cases:
Aerocool DS200 used with the gigabyte board for my main rig
Antec G700 which I'm using for my P4 ISA system. Amazingly close in layout to the Aercool, I wondered if they are made in the same factory.

Not a recent purchase but I dug my "mib" Sonic Tower out and set it up on my P4. Sheesh that is one seriously annoying fixing mechanism [for 478] I really doubt it's going to last either, and if I ever have to undo it I may well chuck it 🙁

Very nice! I have the BX version of this very board with a single 500 in it. I haven't gotten around to it, yet butI have a pair of 500's and 850's or so that I could drop in this thing. I've never been interested in the whole Slotket scene so I won't touch on that, but I'd love to get this up and running on Win2K... or should it get NT 4.0? It's a little old and I don't remember what would be better on that rig. Maybe I could turn it into a router with a linux distro. *shrug*

Good find in any case! I love SuperMicro.

-Matthew

Skyscraper wrote:

This beautie. New in Box. ~23 Euro buyout. Also included 2x550 MHz P3 550 (used), Unspecified amount of memory (used). […]
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This beautie. New in Box. ~23 Euro buyout.
Also included 2x550 MHz P3 550 (used), Unspecified amount of memory (used).

Seems someone planned a build a long time ago...