nforce4max wrote:

Tinkered with one of my lessor Dell Inspiron 9300s and resolved the screen brightness issue as well did some updates to get thin […]
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Tinkered with one of my lessor Dell Inspiron 9300s and resolved the screen brightness issue as well did some updates to get things along. The battery appears to have fixed itself 🤣 (lithums gg wp), for fun I decided to give Minecraft a try and surprisingly it is not half bad on this machine.

6800 Go (not the ultra)
PM 760 (2GHZ)
1GB ram (going to upgrade)
1440x900 screen
24GB msta SSD (msata to IDE adapter)
Win XP

I bought this machine new back in 2005. Saved all year for it... it was a very nice upgrade for me at the time. Nice to know there is at least one other still out there..!

I've been trying to fix a tekram P5MVP3-A4 super 7 ATX board to no avail. It came with a shot PHD3055E MOSFET and I replaced it, along with some capacitors (there was leakage), the n-channel field transistor and the schottky rectifier transistor, but it still won't post. 🙁 Shame. I guess I'll have to strip it for parts...

My SS7 build is full of challenges. One of the Voodoo2 cards glitched up immediately, when I tool a closer look it has physical damage to most of the pins on the chips. Looks like it was tossed around a lot 🙁 I managed to unbend the pins so that they don't touch any more, the card works again but still causes freezes in 3dmark 🙁 I'll keep trying a bit, but I think this card is a goner.

Click the pic to enlarge, it's kind of hard to photograph with a phone.

There is this Aussie seller on eBay, selling cheap motherboards. Got these two Asus KVM-VM boards. Socket 754, VIA PCIe chipset, nothing fancy, but useful.

Anyway, both arrived. I do my usual motherboard prep. The first board posts, flashed the latest BIOS, caps look fine, all Nichicon in the VRM area. The other one, the famous KZG at the VRM out, all three rounded tops. That board didn't post.

I recently purchased 100! 3300uF 6.3V caps from Panasonic, because it's always these VRM out caps that seem to fail on the boards I'm getting.

De-soldered the three, put in the new ones, and all working again 😀

Was a 5 minute job and I'm a happy camper. First time I had a board that didn't post because of caps.

Cyrix200+ wrote:

My SS7 build is full of challenges. One of the Voodoo2 cards glitched up immediately, when I tool a closer look it has physical […]
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My SS7 build is full of challenges. One of the Voodoo2 cards glitched up immediately, when I tool a closer look it has physical damage to most of the pins on the chips. Looks like it was tossed around a lot 🙁 I managed to unbend the pins so that they don't touch any more, the card works again but still causes freezes in 3dmark 🙁 I'll keep trying a bit, but I think this card is a goner.

Click the pic to enlarge, it's kind of hard to photograph with a phone.

If it runs 10 minutes in 3dmark and then shuts down.
Try downclock it with the overclock tool.
It worked on a card that I was testing at some point.

#Phil.
At some point you will get the hands on such card.
Only one that I ever had to recap, was a Socket-A board.

Cyrix200+ wrote:

(thank you Vogonswiki for the How-To)

Me too.... Killed 5 FDD controller in the process of making a single sli cable. I was in luck, as I had many in the box.

EDIT:
Should be FDD-Cables... (wrote it without looking closer, sorry)

It freezes after a few seconds, so I don't think this will help, but I will try if I have some time! Kindof a bummer, I had three of these cards but traded one a while back.

brostenen wrote:

If it runs 10 minutes in 3dmark and then shuts down.
Try downclock it with the overclock tool.
It worked on a card that I was testing at some point.

Cyrix200+ wrote:

It freezes after a few seconds, so I don't think this will help, but I will try if I have some time! Kindof a bummer, I had three of these cards but traded one a while back.

It won't hurt to see if this helps. 😉
The card that I had issues with, was one of the normal 90mhz cards.
Lowering to 87mhz would make it run for hours and hours in UT99.
Going for 88 to 90mhz would make it freeze anything from 10 to 15 minutes.

Today. I gave my aging Unisys PW/2 system some new feet's. The original ones were missing, so I used som of those made out of filt, that are designed to be placed under a chair in order to not scratching a hardwood floor. Finally I upgraded the system from a Trident9000 card to a CL-5424 card. This is not to gain speed or get a faster system. This is to get rid of those horrible spaghetti lines on a TFT screen. Tested it all out by playing some lemmings for 30 minutes or so.

It's a decent 286 system now. 10mhz, VGA, 600mb HDD (not going to need that much space anyway) and finally a noname YMF-71x card. Exactly like the Audician32. Only difference is an IDE controller on that soundcard. (same layout and stuff like that)

@cyrix200+
It's not necessarily "gone". I have some BE and CK replacement chips for these cases.
Maybe you can fix it?
Please don't recycle it, I've been looking for those Magic 3D IIs for ages now 🤣

Doing some research into fast xp and future retro 7 sli/crossfire builds using currently modern boards. Missed out on high end 775 and the prices are creeping up now, many are at that point where they are pretty dodgy from neglect and abuse from their original owners. Sad seeing 780i and 790i boards encrusted in filth and next to no 680i boards at low starting bid at least in the us except for the low end versions.

Tested my recently bought pII 233 system that had a sb awe 64 gold with a old hdd that had Beos v5 installed onto it. It worked great.
Still great to see Beos boot onto the desktop within 30 seconds.

Okay, so I found out that enabling the OC Control Panel in the FastVoodoo2 4.6 drivers is easy. Then I figured out that it looked like the speeds was set to 95MHz? So I moved the slider around a bit, set it to 90MHz (that's default stock speed right?) and no crashes anymore!

Does anyone know if the FastVoodoo2 4.6 drivers do a standard overclock?

Anyway, quite happy with the results! Thanks brostenen for putting me on the right track! Now I'm going to try SLI and then call it a night 😀

EDIT: SLI is working great also 😀 I'm happy again!

brostenen wrote:

It won't hurt to see if this helps. ;-) The card that I had issues with, was one of the normal 90mhz cards. Lowering to 87mhz wo […]
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Cyrix200+ wrote:

It freezes after a few seconds, so I don't think this will help, but I will try if I have some time! Kindof a bummer, I had three of these cards but traded one a while back.

It won't hurt to see if this helps. 😉
The card that I had issues with, was one of the normal 90mhz cards.
Lowering to 87mhz would make it run for hours and hours in UT99.
Going for 88 to 90mhz would make it freeze anything from 10 to 15 minutes.

Cyrix200+ wrote:

Okay, so I found out that enabling the OC Control Panel in the FastVoodoo2 4.6 drivers is easy. Then I figured out that it looke […]
Show full quote

Okay, so I found out that enabling the OC Control Panel in the FastVoodoo2 4.6 drivers is easy. Then I figured out that it looked like the speeds was set to 95MHz? So I moved the slider around a bit, set it to 90MHz (that's default stock speed right?) and no crashes anymore!

Does anyone know if the FastVoodoo2 4.6 drivers do a standard overclock?

Anyway, quite happy with the results! Thanks brostenen for putting me on the right track! Now I'm going to try SLI and then call it a night 😀

EDIT: SLI is working great also 😀 I'm happy again!

No problemo.... I have noticed the 95mhz too. Downclocked the V2 I got a week or so ago.
They say that FV-4.2 makes a faster card, when using that instead of the official ones.
Hmmm..... Do FV-4.2 wear out the cards faster then?
At least it can be used to link two different manufactors of V2 together.

Tetrium wrote:

senrew wrote:

I think it was a stick of EDO that I pulled out of one of the G3/G4 Macs I picked up. The board is supposed to be able to take EDO but i dunno. Could have just been a bad stick.

Heh, well maybe not "exploded". There were several loud pops and bangs inside the unit and nice flashes and magic smoke. The PSU was giving me issues on one of the cable chains in another machine and I stopped using that particular one.

Any ideas what to do about the keyboard issue?

You mean an EDO DIMM? If using SIMMs, you have to use pairs. I don't know if memory from a Mac will work with PC hardware, it may or it might not.

PowerMac/iMac/eMac G3-G5 memory should work in PCs, Macs from those generations often used various OEM parts from well-known PC manufacturers (IBM, Hitachi, Philips, etc.). The same goes for Mac IDE hard disks and CD-ROM drives. It's unlikely that such a stick will cause a power supply to blow.

I'm pretty sure the PSU was ready to go on its own. The bent pin on the CPU may have helped short some other things out too. Still have no clue what caused the issue with the keyboard not being seen though. That is going to mess with my head for awhile. Perfectly good board just sitting there not being used.

Rescued these two today from my Grandparents place:

senrew wrote:

I'm pretty sure the PSU was ready to go on its own. The bent pin on the CPU may have helped short some other things out too. Still have no clue what caused the issue with the keyboard not being seen though. That is going to mess with my head for awhile. Perfectly good board just sitting there not being used.

Dead keyboard controller?

Could be. Is that something repairable or that can be bypassed with a card of some kind?