gdjacobs wrote:

ODwilly wrote:

I had my favorite 17inch LCD die today while I was away running Windows update. Got home and it simply refuses to turn on, no matter how much I mess around with it. Only thing I own with DVI gosh darn it!

Pop that guy open and see if you've got failed caps!

Oh that is not a bad idea, it is a Viewsonic VA912B. One more thing to add to the recap list!

Tried repairing my v5 5500 agp, the cards was pretty smashed because of improper shipping and was missing a Lot of ceramic caps from the backside of the card plus one of the main caps from the front side. The front side was easy to fix despite one of the pads was completely gone so had to creative with a bit of wire to the +5 pen on the molex. On the back side I pretty much had no choice but to learn how to solder smd ceramic caps with a cheap iron and used a small flat tip screw driver to hold them in place as I soldered one end at a time. 😵

End result, I get power on both gpus now however the card stalls every board I try so no post and starting to suspect this card may have not been working before it was damaged. Going to try to use a pci card alongside and see if I can get post that way then check to see if there is anything visible to utilities ect.

petro89 wrote:

Nice setup, and I agree...the Phenom 2 is a wonderful CPU. I have 2 Phenom II x4 setups, the 945 has been used regularly for nearly 7 years without a single issue. I briefly had an fx8350, and despite a few tasks that I could see a noticeable difference, I was surprised at how well my 975 @3.8 ghz performed against it, especially considering both of my setups are on DDR2 boards, not DDR3. The 975 will remain my main system until next year some time whenhopefully Zen comes out (and is hopefully a bigger performer).

I have always wanted one of those x6 varieties though! Let's see some more pics of the system!!!

I will definitely be doing a photo shoot once this thing is complete. Right now it still kinda looks like a test bench. 😊

I'm loving this little experiment more and more. The performance and overclocking are great. I already have the 1090T running at 4GHz with barely an increase in voltage. I can't wait to see what it'll do under a decent cooler. At 4GHz the performance in both single-core and multi-core benchmarks is so far ahead of my 3.33GHz Q6700 that I wish I had a Socket 1366 system just to see how it would compare with a first-gen i7. The only area where the Q6700 even comes close is in synthetic pure-SSE2 benchmarks. To be fair, the Q6700 is on an nForce 650i board hobbled by DDR2-667 memory. The Ph2 on the other hand is cruising along with DDR3-1600.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

I also like the Phenom chips. Got a 555 BE which fully unlocks 😀

Best thing for me is the socket. You can buy a current board, and it will take these chips no dramas.

With Intel, there are so many sockets, so while you can get cheap, older processors, you can't get a decent new board anymore.

This is why I like AMD. They did absolutely nothing to prevent people from unlocking full cores in those Ph2 X2s. Intel? It took them no time at all to prevent motherboard manufacturers from allowing non-K Skylake overclocking.

Sure, Intel processors are power efficient and speedy (I love my 4930K!) but man does that company need another A64-style wake up call. I truly hope Zen kicks ass.

Yep. A strong AMD benefits everyone.

petro89 wrote:

Yep. A strong AMD benefits everyone.

Yea but sadly those days are behind us, I was bit of an AMD fan until Bulldozer hit the scene.

Standard Def Steve wrote:

I truly hope Zen kicks ass.

Not going to happen... unless Intel is planning to abandon Nehalem derivatives in favour of something Netburst-like.
The A64 success wasn't only caused by K8 being good, it was mostly because of Netburst fail. If Intel decided to use Pentium M architecture for desktop back then, maybe AMD wouldn't even be here today.

There is a bit of a fail for Skylake though....

And which one is that?

havli wrote:

And which one is that?

And so spake Chipzilla: "Thou shalt not overclock thine mundane Skylake processors."

My retro activity today was making some serious progress in Wing Commander 1. After being stuck on Rostov mission 1 for a couple of weeks (maybe a dozen attempts), I decided to get as many kills as I could before ejecting (mission failure), knowing I could still advance to the winning path if I didn't lose any more missions. Well, something interesting happened...somehow I beat Rostov 1 and kept my wingman alive. Then, I dove right into the next mission and beat it on the first try, then the next, the next, and the next, all on the first try. I am now on Venice mission 3. If I beat it and mission 4, I win the game.

clueless1 wrote:

My retro activity today was making some serious progress in Wing Commander 1. After being stuck on Rostov mission 1 for a couple of weeks (maybe a dozen attempts), I decided to get as many kills as I could before ejecting (mission failure), knowing I could still advance to the winning path if I didn't lose any more missions. Well, something interesting happened...somehow I beat Rostov 1 and kept my wingman alive. Then, I dove right into the next mission and beat it on the first try, then the next, the next, and the next, all on the first try. I am now on Venice mission 3. If I beat it and mission 4, I win the game.

Nice!

Good luck with the missions from the expansion packs. They are ridiculously hard 🤣

Started messing around with my TL866 programmer. My local electronics store had some 27C801 EPROMs in stock so I've started messing around with making those work in my SNES.

Skyscraper wrote:

As I failed to get any really good SuperPi scores with my Gigabyte GA-5SMM SiS 530 board I thought I would see just how fast I c […]
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As I failed to get any really good SuperPi scores with my Gigabyte GA-5SMM SiS 530 board I thought I would see just how fast I could get the built in SiS 6306 video controller.

The VESA video memory bandwidth in Speedsys is among the best I have seen and the FPS in DOOM is also among the best I have seen with a Socket-7 system. The SiS 530s CPU performance is really sucky though so "CPU heavy" Quake only performs so so. Both my PC Chips 577 MVP3 board and my Gigabyte GA-5AX Aladdin 5 board are faster when it comes to anything that depends mostly on CPU or memory speed.

K6-3+ @620 5x124 motherboard cache off 256MB

The attachment S620_124.jpg is no longer available

Quake: 75.5 FPS
Doom: 140.66 FPS (2134 gametics in 531 realtics)
3dbench2: 342.6 FPS
PCPbench: 138.5 FPS

This setting seems fully Windows stable at 2.2V (2.3V set, 2.2V sensor)

I also have a SiS 530 based motherboard, it's a Acer V75M from an IBM Aptiva. Mine has a K6/2 450, the original CPU it came with.(fastest socket 7 CPU I have).

Here are my scores with onboard video and 128mb PC 100 SDRAM, 8mb allocated to graphics RAM.

Quake 51.2
Doom 109.2
3D Bench2 249.3
PCPbench 91.5

Now here are my score using a S3 ViRGE 325 2mb PCI card.

Quake 55.2
Doom 88.29
3Dbench2 229.2
PCPbench 99.1

So my figures agree with yours in the speed of the 530 for doom & vesa,and slower for CPU intensive stuff with the onboard VGA controller.
Both of these are entered into Phil's spreadsheet here. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lvF9n … f=2&pli=1#gid=0
I could re-test with a SiS 6326 PCI VGA card, both mine also a marked as "AGP" chips despite being on PCI cards! At least for DOS stuff I found my 4MB card was faster than the 8MB one.
This is the 4MB card.

And this the 8MB one, clearly marked as pine technology.

Best,
Chris

Just noticed something on that 8mb pine 6326, the INTA jumper is closed, what does that actually do?

BSA Starfire wrote:

Just noticed something on that 8mb pine 6326, the INTA jumper is closed, what does that actually do?

I have no idea what the jumper does but its good you confirmed that the SIS 530s on board video is really speedy, at least in VGA mode 13h in DOS when its not bottlenecked by something else.

Here is a picture showing my very slow PCI SiS 6326AGP.

Got a pure copper low-profile heatsink, I believe it was originally meant for Socket 370 (or maybe Socket A?), quite heavy for its size! I tried it on a spare SS 7 board I have for testing purposes and... What an overkill solution!! But i like it 🤣 🤣. So I cleaned it and I'm lapping the bottom right now, need to find a silent fan to replace this old piece of junk

EDIT: Confirmed, Socket A. Those 4 pad markings are unmistakable 🤣

I don't know if this is "retro" enough, but I soldered a new capacitor on an old firewire card during the weekend. It went quite well and testing the firewire card was also succesful.

Skyscraper wrote:

I have no idea what the jumper does but its good you confirmed that the SIS 530s on board video is really speedy, at least in VG […]
Show full quote

BSA Starfire wrote:

Just noticed something on that 8mb pine 6326, the INTA jumper is closed, what does that actually do?

I have no idea what the jumper does but its good you confirmed that the SIS 530s on board video is really speedy, at least in VGA mode 13h in DOS when its not bottlenecked by something else.

Here is a picture showing my very slow PCI SiS 6326AGP.

SIS_6326AGP.JPG

Looking at your card it also has that same jumper(INT A) in the same position as my slower 8mb card, maybe we should try these with jumper in other(off) position?

BSA Starfire wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

I have no idea what the jumper does but its good you confirmed that the SIS 530s on board video is really speedy, at least in VG […]
Show full quote

BSA Starfire wrote:

Just noticed something on that 8mb pine 6326, the INTA jumper is closed, what does that actually do?

I have no idea what the jumper does but its good you confirmed that the SIS 530s on board video is really speedy, at least in VGA mode 13h in DOS when its not bottlenecked by something else.

Here is a picture showing my very slow PCI SiS 6326AGP.

SIS_6326AGP.JPG

Looking at your card it also has that same jumper(INT A) in the same position as my slower 8mb card, maybe we should try these with jumper in other(off) position?

It cant hurt to try! 😀

I will test tomorrow the SiS 530 motherboard with both my SiS 6326 cards, the 8mb I will run with both INTA jumper in both on/off positions, perhaps we will learn something new(to us!).
Best,
Chris