Finally got around to testing the VGA adapter I bought for my Voodoo3 3500TV. It lets me use the card without the octopus dongle. Works great! Now I have to find a buyer for the card. Letting my son play some UT99 against some bots as a test. 😉

Welp, my VooDoo3 2000 PCI card overheated, which caused artifacts and a system restart. I installed a heatsink from my K6-2 300 heatsink and placed a big CPU fan on the CPU Heatsink (motherboard). I'm going to spray some contact cleaner on the GPU pins to help clear that out. My old STB Velocity 3D card did that as well. Baking it isn't an option as the heatsink is epoxied.

bjwil1991 wrote:

Welp, my VooDoo3 2000 PCI card overheated, which caused artifacts and a system restart. I installed a heatsink from my K6-2 300 heatsink and placed a big CPU fan on the CPU Heatsink (motherboard). I'm going to spray some contact cleaner on the GPU pins to help clear that out. My old STB Velocity 3D card did that as well. Baking it isn't an option as the heatsink is epoxied.

Woah, is it dead? 🙁

xplus93 wrote:

bjwil1991 wrote:

Welp, my VooDoo3 2000 PCI card overheated, which caused artifacts and a system restart. I installed a heatsink from my K6-2 300 heatsink and placed a big CPU fan on the CPU Heatsink (motherboard). I'm going to spray some contact cleaner on the GPU pins to help clear that out. My old STB Velocity 3D card did that as well. Baking it isn't an option as the heatsink is epoxied.

Woah, is it dead? 🙁

Some of the text is good, the rest is not. It's probably dirty contacts on the VGA port itself, so when I get home, I'm going to spray the contact cleaner in the VGA port and see what happens. It still gets detected without issues, just artifacts across the screen.

You can get the heatsink off without too much trouble.

One trick back in the day was to stick in in the freezer for a while and then it should pop up pretty easily.

The other way is to wedge a razer blade in between the heatsink and the GPU to get it to pop off.

If it were me, I would just run some clean-free flux under the GPU and then use my hot-air soldering gun to re-melt the balls to make sure that it wasn't a broken solder joint causing the issue.

cyclone3d wrote:

You can get the heatsink off without too much trouble. […]
Show full quote

You can get the heatsink off without too much trouble.

One trick back in the day was to stick in in the freezer for a while and then it should pop up pretty easily.

The other way is to wedge a razer blade in between the heatsink and the GPU to get it to pop off.

If it were me, I would just run some clean-free flux under the GPU and then use my hot-air soldering gun to re-melt the balls to make sure that it wasn't a broken solder joint causing the issue.

I put the card in the freezer right now and I'm going to Lowe's before work to get the flux that is electrically safe and check the caps for issues as well. And on Tuesday, I'm getting new heatsink compound and a new heatsink with a fan and adapter to hook up to the motherboard.

Also, would a heat gun work as well or not really?

I always let the card heat up in a system, the spray a can of air upside on the heat sink, then twist the sink. Dont pull or wedge as you coukd pull the cire off the pcb.
The freezer trick is not a very goid idea do to condensation.

Jade Falcon wrote:

I always let the card heat up in a system, the spray a can of air upside on the heat sink, then twist the sink. Dont pull or wedge as you coukd pull the cire off the pcb.
The freezer trick is not a very goid idea do to condensation.

I put the card in a freezer bag for 15 minutes and I got the heatsink off with no issues, and I noticed a cap had crust around it, so new caps are a must, get a new heatsink with a fan and thermal paste, and reballing the card.

bjwil1991 wrote:

Jade Falcon wrote:

I always let the card heat up in a system, the spray a can of air upside on the heat sink, then twist the sink. Dont pull or wedge as you coukd pull the cire off the pcb.
The freezer trick is not a very goid idea do to condensation.

I put the card in a freezer bag for 15 minutes and I got the heatsink off with no issues, and I noticed a cap had crust around it, so new caps are a must, get a new heatsink with a fan and thermal paste, and reballing the card.

Reballing a chip is not a simple task. If you have experience and know what you're doing, ok. Otherwise, have someone else do it.

xplus93 wrote:

Reballing a chip is not a simple task. If you have experience and know what you're doing, ok. Otherwise, have someone else do it.

This, you can risk the card the hit it with a heat gun, but even if you know what your doing you can kill the card.

bjwil1991 wrote:

cyclone3d wrote:

You can get the heatsink off without too much trouble. […]
Show full quote

You can get the heatsink off without too much trouble.

One trick back in the day was to stick in in the freezer for a while and then it should pop up pretty easily.

The other way is to wedge a razer blade in between the heatsink and the GPU to get it to pop off.

If it were me, I would just run some clean-free flux under the GPU and then use my hot-air soldering gun to re-melt the balls to make sure that it wasn't a broken solder joint causing the issue.

I put the card in the freezer right now and I'm going to Lowe's before work to get the flux that is electrically safe and check the caps for issues as well. And on Tuesday, I'm getting new heatsink compound and a new heatsink with a fan and adapter to hook up to the motherboard.

Also, would a heat gun work as well or not really?

I wouldn't use a heat gun unless you have a nozzle for it to limit the heat to only the size of the GPU itself.

Reballing is not the same. Reballing would involve completely removing the GPU, cleaning the old solder balls off of the GPU and the card and then using a stencil to set new solder balls and then resoldering the GPU back onto the board.

Using a hot air solder gun is just to melt the solder balls again to correct any cracked solder joints. If you use too much air flow or move the GPU any other way while the solder balls are soft/melted, you are screwed.

If you do decide to try and use a hot air gun, then make sure to get "no-clean" liquid flux. Not sure that Lowe's would even carry that, and if they did it would probably be WAAAAAAAAY overpriced. I buy mine off of eBay.

Don't people usually just bake their cards at 170C instead of trying the heat gun?

appiah4 wrote:

Don't people usually just bake their cards at 170C instead of trying the heat gun?

While that may work temporarily if you're trying to repair a damaged card.. it won't work long term. If you're actually trying to replace chips / reball it, they actually heat it up to near 400c for that. (Source: I've seen instructional youtube videos for replacing the actual gpu chip for a 6800 Ultra.)

I technically did this a few days back, but I finally got around to ordering a new click wheel assembly for a somewhat knackered iPod mini 2nd-gen I got from the neighbors that have all the bitten fruit stuff. The iPod worked, except I couldn't control it; I even tried resoldering the ribbon cable, to no avail.

Turns out that all I needed was a new click wheel ribbon cable instead of the whole wheel, but oh well, hindsight is 20/20 and all that.

Anyway, I had already done some prior SD-to-CF and battery replacement mods, so it should work considerably better than new. I even ordered a FireWire cable so I could experiment with using it as a Mac boot drive; it works for this, but OS X Leopard runs slower than winter molasses on that iBook G4. I'd only use it as a sort of fallback/recovery given the speed limitations.

I suppose the next thing on my retro to-do list is to recap my Mac IIcx's mobo and hope it'll boot up then. Just gotta figure out what caps to order, where to order 'em, wait a few days and solder them all in.

My dx4-120 was treated with a new "home". I moved the guts from an ATX case to an AT case...

- FIC 486 VIP-IO motherboard.
- Amd 486dx4-120 (running stock speed, no overclocking and passive cooling)
- 32mb Ram.
- Cirrus Logic CL-5446 2mb PCI.
- Creative AWE64 Value/Standard.
- CD-Rom drive.
- 512mb Transcend CF card in adaptor, mounted inside an removeable drivebay.
- A-Open 300watt ATX PSU with an homemade ATX to AT converter.

brostenen wrote:

My dx4-120 was treated with a new "home". I moved the guts from an ATX case to an AT case... […]
Show full quote

My dx4-120 was treated with a new "home". I moved the guts from an ATX case to an AT case...

- FIC 486 VIP-IO motherboard.
- Amd 486dx4-120 (running stock speed, no overclocking and passive cooling)
- 32mb Ram.
- Cirrus Logic CL-5446 2mb PCI.
- Creative AWE64 Value/Standard.
- CD-Rom drive.
- 512mb Transcend CF card in adaptor, mounted inside an removeable drivebay.
- A-Open 300watt ATX PSU with an homemade ATX to AT converter.

dx4-120.jpg

Interesting system. I need to get a case for my Socket 7 system (planning on upgrading to a Socket 370 AT with a Pentium 3 1000 processor) since the case that is used right now has little to no threads left in the case at all and my HDD caddy is about to fall off since there's only 1 screw holding it in. Speaking of computers, I'm planning on purchasing an Intel WiFi Link 5100 512AN_MMW Mini PCIe card for my Compaq Presario C700 notebook computer since the Atheros card would crash and drops the connections all the time, but I have no idea if it'll work or not. The system uses the full size Mini PCIe card, and I also need to buy some screws to hold down the card since there's only 1 mounting point left on the motherboard to mount the wireless card.

bjwil1991 wrote:

brostenen wrote:

My dx4-120 was treated with a new "home". I moved the guts from an ATX case to an AT case... […]
Show full quote

My dx4-120 was treated with a new "home". I moved the guts from an ATX case to an AT case...

- FIC 486 VIP-IO motherboard.
- Amd 486dx4-120 (running stock speed, no overclocking and passive cooling)
- 32mb Ram.
- Cirrus Logic CL-5446 2mb PCI.
- Creative AWE64 Value/Standard.
- CD-Rom drive.
- 512mb Transcend CF card in adaptor, mounted inside an removeable drivebay.
- A-Open 300watt ATX PSU with an homemade ATX to AT converter.

dx4-120.jpg

Interesting system. I need to get a case for my Socket 7 system (planning on upgrading to a Socket 370 AT with a Pentium 3 1000 processor) since the case that is used right now has little to no threads left in the case at all and my HDD caddy is about to fall off since there's only 1 screw holding it in. Speaking of computers, I'm planning on purchasing an Intel WiFi Link 5100 512AN_MMW Mini PCIe card for my Compaq Presario C700 notebook computer since the Atheros card would crash and drops the connections all the time, but I have no idea if it'll work or not. The system uses the full size Mini PCIe card, and I also need to buy some screws to hold down the card since there's only 1 mounting point left on the motherboard to mount the wireless card.

HP used bios whitelists around that time, they probably still do. It's even picky when you use hp parts.

Received a so-called iMac G3/600 Slot-Loading SuperDrive via FedEx, and I didn't receive any brackets whatsoever, and the CD Drive adapter didn't fit at all. I'm kind of pissed off right now, and the site claimed it's for the iMac G3 Slot-Loading, but my invoice said for the MacBook/MacBook Pro.

bjwil1991 wrote:

Interesting system. I need to get a case for my Socket 7 system (planning on upgrading to a Socket 370 AT with a Pentium 3 1000 processor) since the case that is used right now has little to no threads left in the case at all and my HDD caddy is about to fall off since there's only 1 screw holding it in. Speaking of computers, I'm planning on purchasing an Intel WiFi Link 5100 512AN_MMW Mini PCIe card for my Compaq Presario C700 notebook computer since the Atheros card would crash and drops the connections all the time, but I have no idea if it'll work or not. The system uses the full size Mini PCIe card, and I also need to buy some screws to hold down the card since there's only 1 mounting point left on the motherboard to mount the wireless card.

That's no good, that case you have. Luckily it is still somewhat usefull to an extend. Though I perfectly see that you need a new case for it. You might want to look into a case like the one I had that 486 in. It is the A-Open HX45 case. Really nice, thick plates, beige and the power switch has this old school AT feel to it.

Speaking of my 486 system. Yes, it is a really interresting system. Not the fastest by far, though it has some parts that are a bit nice. The motherboard has VLB, PCI and ISA. (obviously ISA, because of the VLB). Then there is that 486 dx4 CPU. I don't really know how rare it is as such, yet from reading about builds that users here have, they usually have a 100mhz clocked at 120. On ebay, I have a really hard time trying to track down a 120 edition. You could argue that a 100 essentially is a 120, on the other hand, mine is a real 120. All this does not really matter that much, as people who overclock a 100 have the same performance as a 120. I guess it is super rare yet not really something that are that sought after for obviously reasons. Everything else about this system are more or less just standard for it's class of 486 machines. A typically late era 486 system that runs duke3d well. 😜

Decided to give a purpose to my Coppermine PIII 1GHz PC today, which was simply laying in storage doing nothing. I wanted to play around with OS/2 and realised that the spec of this system should suffice, so I installed eComStation 2 on it.

Spec:
Toshiba Equium 3300M PC
Socket 370 Motherboard (not sure of make/model at the moment) with Via Apollo Pro 133 Chipset
768MB PC133 SDRAM
20GB IDE HDD
Nvidia GeForce 4 MX440 64MB AGP Graphics
Via AC'97 Onboard Sound
Intel Pro/100S PCI Ethernet

Spent most of the day playing around with it. Quite the learning curve as I'd only ever briefly used OS/2 Warp 4 in the past and so had to learn the basics from scratch. Some very weird GUI design choices that will take some getting used to.

Installed quite a few programs & libraries, including yum/rpm, Zippy, Microsoft Office 4 (for Win-OS/2), Star Office 5.1 & the latest available version of Firefox. Played a few simple Windows 3.1 games, plus tested out a couple of DOS games (limited support/no sound as expected).

Strange OS that I probably won't use often, but at least it gives this PC a purpose other than another generic DOS/Windows retro system and I can finally learn to operate something new.