Skyscraper wrote:

Jed118 wrote:

^^ WHat'd the XT keyboard go for? I've got a Model F I've been thinking about selling - I'll likely never use it.

The AT flavour of IBM model F keyboard sold for about $366 on the Swedish auction site Tradera not long ago. I guess the XT model is perhaps a bit less sought after.

https://www.tradera.com/item/340854/300345000 … #view-item-main

Goddamn I have one lying around under my bed - I don't think I'll ever use it. Problem is, I don't have a way to test it...

I bought this today though! Just around $35

I've been wanting one for a while and I missed my chance recently at a $25 version, so I got this one with some money from eBay proceeds. This is going into my 486DLC.

Something arrived in the post today, so was busy testing this evening:

A Supermicro P3TDLE dual So370 FC-PGA2, so with Tualatin support - and yes, that's a PIII-S 1266 running there. Also has an ISA slot, but no AGP.

The previous owner obviously didn't have a clue what to do with it - it arrived with 4 DIMMs, but only one of them was registered ECC. After removing the three offending unbuffered beasties, it got further than beeping insultedly about RAM, but refused to give video output on the PCI VGA I used. Fortunately I had an ISA card, which worked, but at the slowest speed I have seen an x86 run. Just building up an ASCII screen in BIOS took the better part of a minute. It reminded me of my old ZX81. Checked the primary display option (I suspected it was 'absent') but that was normal (VGA). After I spent 15 minutes setting time & date correctly (yes, that slow...) and saved, it would recognise a PCI VGA, but weird stuff in any event. Once I had settings sorted out, it worked fine, booting straight into a Linux LiveCD. Only disappointment was with my other new acquisition, the SATA controller in the top 64b PCI slot. It has universal keying and I sort of hoped it would not just do 3.3V (which it did) but also 66MHz. No such luck. Still, that's earmarked for a low-profile i815EP system, so not really an issue.

In a bit of a twist about what to do with it. On the one hand a dual Tualatin system is much wow etc., but on the other I have no sensible reason to want one and actually would prefer a SiS635T-based Tualatin system, particularly one with an uATX motherboard (i.e. the Jetway 635CS - AFAIK the only uATX SiS635T board). So should I dig up a second PIII-S 1266 - or just sell the thing...? Enough to mill over tonight.

Started working on this machine again. Some living room floor action.

I put it together but it sat in its box for ages, so i decided to set it up. Will put it through its paces over the next couple of weeks.

Inside is the following hardware

AMD 2600+ Throughbred
Abit KT7A Raid
512mb Crucial PC133 ram
Radeon 9700 Pro
Aureal Vortex 2 Sound Card
Sound Blaster Awe 64 Gold
80gig Hard Disk
Plextor CD Writer
Pioneer Slot Load DVD Drive
New Desktop Case i found on ebay.

@dionb

if shipping wasn't an absolute bastard, you could sell it to me. 😀 I bought the big brother to that board a few weeks ago. I was surprised to see yours didn't have onboard video. anyway. I love these systems they make great XP rigs.

I replaced the belt in my Siemens PCD-4ND's floppy drive (Citizen W1D).

I was freaking out a little bit over accidentally damaging or misaligning the read/write head, since I never opened one of these before, but it totally worked afterwards.

So, probably a noob question, but:
One thing I did notice afterwards is the slow read speed. I've owned several older desktops (386s etc.) as well as several '95/'96-ish laptops with floppy drives, and on all of them the files just plopped right up in the explorer windows/shell when you read a disk. On this Siemens laptop, the files show up in increments, so to speak. You can hear the drive head going back and forth a few times before everything gradually shows up in the explorer.

Is that just because it has an older, slower floppy controller? Or did I do something to the drive?

I formatted a complete disk to see if the drive head is obstructed or something, but it worked fine and the time it took to format seemed "normal" to me.

Bancho wrote:

Started working on this machine again. Some living room floor action. […]
Show full quote

Started working on this machine again. Some living room floor action.

I put it together but it sat in its box for ages, so i decided to set it up. Will put it through its paces over the next couple of weeks.

Inside is the following hardware

AMD 2600+ Throughbred
Abit KT7A Raid
512mb Crucial PC133 ram
Radeon 9700 Pro
Aureal Vortex 2 Sound Card
Sound Blaster Awe 64 Gold
80gig Hard Disk
Plextor CD Writer
Pioneer Slot Load DVD Drive
New Desktop Case i found on ebay.

Really black keyboard ... Also the monitor will be better as CRT then TFT..

Radical Vision wrote:

Bancho wrote:

Started working on this machine again. Some living room floor action.
<snip>

Really black keyboard ... Also the monitor will be better as CRT then TFT..

You use what you have.

Not really, if you want to look properly. As i will not take pictures of some old system if it not look right...
Now if the monitor was also black was going to be ok

Played around with the GA-486AMS and the Riva TNT today and finally broke the 'timedemo' demo 3 record in Doom Shareware.
I got ~70.3 fps - a "good" 0.2 frames more than the current highest score.
How did I do it?
The obvious "trick" was running the PCI card at 50mhz bus frequency which the RivaTNT can withstand. I will add better cooling to it because it's such a dandy card and the official solution is clearly sub-par.

On another note - 3DBench2 ran at 103.4 fps.

Radical Vision wrote:

Really black keyboard ... Also the monitor will be better as CRT then TFT..

You vary rarely have anything positive to say do you? Seems to be a common theme across your posts.

I do have a nice white keyboard and mouse and a CRT monitor but they are on another machine. I was just testing this build and the TFT monitor is easier to move and the keyboard was a spare one i had at hand.

The DoomII intermission screen always hints at something good.
Nice looking system.

Bancho wrote:

You vary rarely have anything positive to say do you? Seems to be a common theme across your posts.

I do have a nice white keyboard and mouse and a CRT monitor but they are on another machine. I was just testing this build and the TFT monitor is easier to move and the keyboard was a spare one i had at hand.

You're supposed to feel bad for not meeting his standard.

Bancho wrote:

Radical Vision wrote:

Really black keyboard ... Also the monitor will be better as CRT then TFT..

You vary rarely have anything positive to say do you? Seems to be a common theme across your posts.

I do have a nice white keyboard and mouse and a CRT monitor but they are on another machine. I was just testing this build and the TFT monitor is easier to move and the keyboard was a spare one i had at hand.

There need to be people like me too, or the world will be not interesting right...
And when i look something that is not right, i point it as things need to be perfectly well build, matched and do on the right way...

Repaste (all 3) my Radeon HD 4770.

Radical Vision wrote:

And when i look something that is not right...

Then you should remain silent and let people decide themself what is right for their needs and what is not. 😒 I believe many people would appreciate it. 😉

Srandista wrote:

Repaste (all 3) my Radeon HD 4770.

Was the old thermal paste still in acceptable condition? I remember once I tried to remove heatsink of Asus GF 8600GT (passive version) to do a reflow.... and the old one was so dried up it glued the heatsink to the chip completely. And when I removed it by force, piece of the GPU remained attached on the heatsink. Luckily it wasn't ''deep enough" to damage the actual active part of silicon where the transistors are. After reflow and putting the heatsing back on it was alive and working. 🤣

Radical Vision wrote:

Bancho wrote:

Radical Vision wrote:

Really black keyboard ... Also the monitor will be better as CRT then TFT..

You vary rarely have anything positive to say do you? Seems to be a common theme across your posts.

I do have a nice white keyboard and mouse and a CRT monitor but they are on another machine. I was just testing this build and the TFT monitor is easier to move and the keyboard was a spare one i had at hand.

There need to be people like me too, or the world will be not interesting right...
And when i look something that is not right, i point it as things need to be perfectly well build, matched and do on the right way...

You mean you point out that you dislike some decisions or choices you do not find right, which is fine to do. But as everybody has their own opinion and your opinion doesn't make it a fact you could rephrase the way you bring the message. 😒
It's not the message you give but the way you express yourself. Saying "it would look better if..." sounds more nicely then "stuff is shit and it should be like I think it should be.."
I hope you understand what I mean with it.

Radical Vision wrote:

And when i look something that is not right, i point it as things need to be perfectly well build, matched and do on the right way...

havli wrote:

Was the old thermal paste still in acceptable condition?

Yeah, it was ok-ish. Of course it wasn't liquid anymore (it's 9 years since relase after all), but also it wasn't transformed into glue. For sure, all 3 of them will work in system without problems even with old paste, but since there is just 4 screws and one cable for fan (no RGB rubbish anywhere), it was job for 10 minutes tops.

When I replaced the thermal paste on my GPUs, I had to stick the card in a zip-lock bag in the freezer for 30 minutes since it was impossible to break it off with a flat blade screwdriver. I use Arctic 5 Silver thermal compound from CPUs and GPUs to chipsets and certain types of RAM, and it does wonders. But, replacing that thermal compound can be challenging and a PITA: when I attempt to remove the heatsink off of a processor, the processor comes along with the heatsink because I either forget to wiggle the heatsink back and forth, or use a screwdriver (with tape around it to prevent scoring of the heatsink and CPU).

Nvm1 wrote:

You mean you point out that you dislike some decisions or choices you do not find right, which is fine to do. But as everybody has their own opinion and your opinion doesn't make it a fact you could rephrase the way you bring the message. 😒
It's not the message you give but the way you express yourself. Saying "it would look better if..." sounds more nicely then "stuff is shit and it should be like I think it should be.."
I hope you understand what I mean with it.

Even better, say something like "I don't like to do it that way because...". You're absolutely free to have an opinion, but never assume you wear a mantle of authority greater than any others.

Played around with trying to set up the XTIDE Universal BIOS onto a boot ROM on a 3C509B network card. I configured the card to enable the BOOT ROM etc, but no luck yet. I will experiment further, I think I know why now after some research. Should be an easy fix.

Also created a ROM image of 2 old BIOS chips from 2 different 486 motherboards that are long dead. That was mostly just to test out the TL866 programmer I just received.