Ahh..sorry - I did not realize that these old versions are still shareware.

FFFFUUUU!!!!!!!

I have had to give up on my Athlon 2800+ build as there is no way on this earth I can give the board enough power. As soon as the system tries to go into video mode or do anything intense (Depends how much power the video card tries to draw) it blacks out and reboots or gets stuck in this weird limbo between on and off.

Now what am I supposed to do?

Start parallelling power supplies like there's no tomorrow? 🤣

I did that with a GTX 260 once, it had its own little Micro ATX Supply in the bottom of the case with the PS_ON triggered by a relay from the main supply. It wasn't pretty.

That was different though, I don't think I could just connect two supplies like that. I expect I would need diodes at the end of the leads to stop current flowing the wrong way due to the minor differences in voltage. I doubt I have, or could obtain, large enough diodes. Also the ATX connector gets hotter than hell, I am not even sure I would want to provide more current at this stage.

Maybe you should replace the video card with one that has an auxiliary molex power connector? Those might draw power from the 12V line, and reduce the power draw on the ATX connector itself.

I don't have any, they cost too much anyway. Doubt many would run well if at all in 98SE either. I think there were a few ATI cards which would run, but they have compatibility problems with some of my software.

I think all I can do at this stage is fix the Athlon 1500, something which I guarantee is not going to happen, or move everything to the Dual PIII. The latter option sucks as it means re-installing both operating systems. A tedious task with SCSI hard drives... Acutally, i don't really want to have to depend on SCSI drives that are nearly two decades old already and the PIII is a bit too slow for some of these tasks anyway. Guess that isn't an option either.

All I can do is look around and see if I have any other boards that will work. Worst case scenario, I guess I will just have to drop back to the MX440 and struggle with its limitations. It is all preferable to continuing work in Windows 7+.

Looked at my mobile Athlon chips, they actually draw MORE power. Sempron's use too much, Duron's are too slow. My 1700 is the old one so draws too much and I already know the 1500 is too slow. Older Athlon's use FAR too much and aren't even worth bothering with. My only P3 boards are all 440BXs and the one 820 I have died for unknown reasons. Perhaps I will make a thread, but to cut it short, it ran fine until one day it did not switch on. I cannot detect any shorts with the multi-meter and it all looks fine... Wonder if it is worth just grounding PS_ON and seeing what happens? The board is dead anyway, so if it blows up I haven't lost anything I suppose.

EDIT: YEAAAHHHH! Shorted the PS_ON for the i820 and it runs just fine. In fact, there is nothing noticeably wrong with it and it works without such intervention now so I can't really say what was wrong, guess something was somehow "lodged" in the wrong place though being electronic, I cannot really think how. Sucks that I will lose Sound Blaster support by moving to this board (Stupid audio codec sucks) and it is only Micro ATX, but I should be able to power a Tualatin just fine as they generally don't draw as much power as the Athlons did. Not really what I wanted, but close as I am going to get it seems.

What video card are you trying to use that is drawing too much power?

By the way, there are plenty of FX cards with auxiliary power connectors (I've seen FX5600 Ultra and FX 5700 cards with molex connnectors), so if you can find one of those for cheap, they should work great on Windows 98 SE. I know 6600 GT also has Windows 98 drivers, but those were released when Windows 98 support was on its way out (they are the last GeForce family to have drivers for Windows 98) so they might not be as compatible as the FX cards.

Also, is there any way to undervolt those processors without a hardware mod? I know K8 chips can be undervolted in software, but I never looked up if this is possible with K7 chips, If so, you might want to see how low can you drop VCORE until it starts hurting stability. This should not only drop the amount of power it draws, but also help with longevity (I don't trust K7 hardware to last as long as P3 and P4 alternatives).

Btw I think I remember you holding Pentium 4/D's reliability at a higher standard than Core2 and AMD stuff. Any reason as to why you want to have a K7 Win98 PC instead of a S478 P4?

GeForce 4 Ti 4600 or a Quadro4 900 XGL... Basically the same.

I do not have much faith in the FX series cards, I'd rather just throw production in the trash then resort to those to be honest. Never had one that works though ironically I am using a 5500 to test things with. They were fine under XP I guess and were more powerful than I expected. Locally, the FX series was always seen as a joke, everyone just stuck with their 4 Ti until at least the 6 or 7 series.

My motherboard allows me to lower the voltage but only as far as 1.675 volts, so I am actually over-volting the CPU by a tiny bit. The board officially maxed out with the T-Bred, this is a Barton. I'm actually quite impressed it runs it at all. I may be able to coax it a bit more, I would even settle for lowering the clock a little to achieve this as the board is somewhat flexible in that department (As in, it is an option, though control is not very precise) - never really thought of that.

Yeah, I'm the guy who thinks (Well, I actually did prove it) the Core 2 was a piece of shit. I am using a K7 because that is what I have, I am broke and have to replace the Pentium D before it runs out of water or dies of old age - you do not want to see what it looks like in there by now - so I don't really want to fork out for new parts. Plus I have owned so many K7 systems that I know them well, I know what they will do and how much I can get away with, also this Chaintech is the last surviving board I have really so I know it won't die on me... I just forgot to check the amperage on my PSU. I do have a spare Athlon 64 board I guess, but I do not know how well it works and if you thought I disliked the Core 2, then I absolutely despise the Athlon 64. I dunno though, might be a Socket 754, those were OK, it is just the 939 I don't like.

Edit: Oh, and actually, I prefer the Phenom II to the Core 2 for stuff from that era, but given the choice, I'd still take neither.

IMHO the greatest issues with the FX family were the changes of the numbering scheme (a side effect of them finally having their entire line up with the same basic feature set and a single family) and bad DX9 performance. The FX5600 Ultra (NV31) is the successor to the Ti 4200, and not the Ti 4600. Maybe NVidia thought they would get away thanks to the improved AA performance, as the FX5600 Ultra does performs like a Ti 4600 if you do enable AA and AF? Geforce FX are fine if you think about them as DX8 cards.

Oh, yeah, there was the atrocity called Geforce FX 5200 with 64-bit memory. That thing has no excuse to have ever existed. I had one that made my then shiny and new socket 754 Athlon 64 3000+ look unimpressive next to my old Duron 850 that had an MX440 AGP8x. Imagine how high-schooler me felt when I set up my brand new PC and realized some of my old DX7 games ran worse than on my preivous machine. This card is one I actually hate.

If it is any consolation to your high-school self, I was landed with an MX4000 for a while... You can bet I got shot of that pretty fast. Still have it, never use it unless I want to test an AGP slot I suspect might have killed a card.

nVidia's numbering schemes suck. My friend argued with a lot of people at LAN Parties back in the day because he had a Ti 4800... They kept telling him their Ti 4800 SE was newer and better than his card and no matter how many times he explained that theirs was just a 4400 with a new label and AGP 8x support (Ironically, most of them had 4x only motherboards) they would not listen and then got mad when he murdered them in benchmarks... Was quite fun. All the while our other friend sat there looking depressed with his GeForce 2 MX PCI and a beaten K6 using a modded Socket 7 board never even meant to run the K6-2. Poor Tim, he will never know how much amusement he gave us, made my MX420 look like a fast card - I don't mind the MX420/440 actually, they were good at what they did.

D-D-D-DOUBLE POST!!!

I have gotten it working. The board is happy to go as low as 1.56 Volts which is just low enough to run a 1.45 Volt Athlon XP-M Barton 2400+ (1800MHz) without issue. It saves just enough power that the system can now run without issue. I may try with a faster model later as I think I might have one lying around, but I'm not going to begrudge the loss of 200MHz as I still have a 512KB cache and performance seems to be fine where things are.

I just hope the extra voltage does not damage the current CPU. It idles at 40C which is lower than the 2800+ Desktop chip it replaced.

I may move the Athlon 1500+ gear to another case and give that the 2800+ if it works in that board (It is a 266MHz model) as I will miss it, I have said so from the start. Who knows. Either way, leaving the above information here for anyone googling the problems I have written out. If anyone does try this trick it would probably be wise to check your board's CPU support list against the voltages if you don't want to risk frying the CPU. You will also lose PowerNow, the multipliers will be a bit weird and the motherboard might not quite know how to identify the chip properly; Mine shows up as "Mobile AMD Athlon 1800MHz" on the POST screen, close enough.

Guess the mobile chip is fine... It is meant to take a lower VCORE, but it is also meant to be subjected to crappy laptop cooling. Congratz on reviving the i820 board 😀

It is not my day. I finished playing with my lovely working Athlon system and was shutting it down when I noticed I had left my GTA box on the shelves next to the desk.
"486 DX4 huh? I wonder if my Pentium OverKill will run that?"

Installer crashed, Windows 95 does not start, throwing an error during boot. I have decided I will leave it alone for today as I will be going to sleep soon anyway, but if I cannot fix it, I will have to re-install Windows 95. Thing is, it isn't that simple because of how I have it set up. At the very least I have to re-install 95 and the GAG boot manager (not fun on a machine without a working floppy drive) but if I set it up the way I think I did, it might mean having to also re-install DOS 6.22/WFW on the other drive.

Either way, my patience for today (and my mind in general) is exhausted. At least I got the Athlon working and it is nice to have the i820 board back, the OverDrive can wait until tomorrow as I don't really need it urgently. In fact, I was going to be working on it soon anyway so I might leave it until that comes up so it seems like less of a chore. I like working on old machines (obviously, that's why I am here) but it does get tedious when you have to repeat the same few steps over and over. Then, having unplugged the Athlon, I put the DVI-VGA connector thingy somewhere and can't find it and I need it to use my main workstation. Oh, well, I'm laughing at the situation anyway, it isn't the end of the world.

I installed Windows 3.11 on my DEC and purchased a 3com network card. I thought it might be fun to jump on Usenet or IRC. If anyone has some software suggestions I would appreciate it. I haven't used a Newsgroup reader or IRC client from that era in awhile.

bbhaag wrote:

I installed Windows 3.11 on my DEC and purchased a 3com network card. I thought it might be fun to jump on Usenet or IRC. If anyone has some software suggestions I would appreciate it. I haven't used a Newsgroup reader or IRC client from that era in awhile.

WS_IRC or mIRC work in win3.x. Use the former on my 286 and the latter on my 386DX33. When you say Windows 3.11 I asume you are not meaning Windows for Workgroups 3.11 If so you'll need a packet driver and winpkt for the nic and Trumpet Winsock to provide TCP/IP.

This link might be handy http://www.k7tty.com/Utilities/Windows31/

Yes...I did install Windows for workgroups 3.11. Is that a bad choice? Thanks for the link and some suggestions for an IRC client.

bbhaag wrote:

Yes...I did install Windows for workgroups 3.11. Is that a bad choice? Thanks for the link and some suggestions for an IRC client.

No it's not a bad choice. Just trying to determine exactly what you where referring to wrt Windows versions. Windows 3.11 is not wfw 3.11 though quite a few folk seem to refer to it as such. Have fun.

Sorry I didn't know there was a difference. Is regular Windows 3.11 a better choice than wfwg 3.11 ? Say for just your average user. Like for a guy who just bought an old pc and wants have some fun.

My capture computer received an upgrade! Stuck with Socket 1150 instead of going Skylake, much cheaper and all the kinks have been ironed out.

Will produce a video about it soon 😀

Here some images:

bbhaag wrote:

Sorry I didn't know there was a difference. Is regular Windows 3.11 a better choice than wfwg 3.11 ? Say for just your average user. Like for a guy who just bought an old pc and wants have some fun.

Not at all. I used WfW 3.11 with the Calmira II shell for quite some time.