That half AT style plug was used for supplemental power on some dual slot 1 and slot 2 motherboards. It's a nice feature to have

overdrive333 wrote on 2020-08-17, 22:35:

No bad caps on mobo

🤣...
This board had ALWAYS bad caps...

verysaving wrote on 2020-08-18, 00:10:

overdrive333 wrote on 2020-08-17, 22:35:

No bad caps on mobo

🤣...
This board had ALWAYS bad caps...

This. Replace all the green caps. You may get away with leaving the others there, but the green ones will be bad 100%.

overdrive333 wrote on 2020-08-17, 22:34:

...
weird connector on psu ( half of AT power? )
...

That weird connector is probably an ATX AUX Power connector which is used on certain mainboards with higher power demands. I have a dual-socket Athlon MP system that requires it, for example.

Otherwise, impressive that this system survived without overheating... reminds me of the time I used to work in IT for a large printing plant. There were a few computers in the halls that looked similar on the inside because they collected the dust from the printing machines. It was a real mess.

This thread:
1) Makes me a bit jealous of some of your wonderful finds / gifts!
2) Reminds me that some years ago I was given a bunch of PCs and things too which still form a good chunk of my collection
3) Just how much working stuff must slip past both collectors and recyclers just to sit in landfill, never to be reused as it is nor as recycled material, this is the tip of the iceberg

Found some bunch of cards from a discarded HP pre-built, not much to write home about.

A Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS, a Hauppauge WinTV card, some unknown network card without the antenna and an unknown GPU with Svideo and CVBS outputs.

Oh and a Asus P4 S775 mobo, not sure if it still works, some heatsinks are missing. I picked up the PSU and the P4 it came with, which has a S-Spec of SL7J6.

The mobo is perhaps shot, the PSU is a beefy and fairly heavy Delta 300W unit.

Wow.. That was like an archeological dig..

Picked up a whole bunch of crappy PSUs yesterday for free.
The "JNC Vargáné és Tsa. BT." models have a significant part in hungarian computing history, these power supplies ruined thousands of computers in the late 90's and early 2000s. Nobody knew why it was necessary for a hungarian company to rebrand crappy taiwanese/chinese power supplies but they caused a lot of damage. Money laundering was a possible reason.
They were dirt cheap so people bought them like candy, shady computer stores loved to use them in their builds and it was the #1 choice for companies where cost-effective computers were necessary.
Soon they began to fail one by one but people still bought them because they didn't want to spend money on something that is invisible in their computer. This mentality never stopped so people still buy $1500 worth of hardware and power it with a $30 PSU.

Miphee wrote on 2020-08-19, 11:11:

Picked up a whole bunch of crappy PSUs yesterday for free. The "JNC Vargáné és Tsa. BT." models have a significant part in hunga […]
Show full quote

Picked up a whole bunch of crappy PSUs yesterday for free.
The "JNC Vargáné és Tsa. BT." models have a significant part in hungarian computing history, these power supplies ruined thousands of computers in the late 90's and early 2000s. Nobody knew why it was necessary for a hungarian company to rebrand crappy taiwanese/chinese power supplies but they caused a lot of damage. Money laundering was a possible reason.
They were dirt cheap so people bought them like candy, shady computer stores loved to use them in their builds and it was the #1 choice for companies where cost-effective computers were necessary.
Soon they began to fail one by one but people still bought them because they didn't want to spend money on something that is invisible in their computer. This mentality never stopped so people still buy $1500 worth of hardware and power it with a $30 PSU.

Same thing here in France with Heden and Advance (which are two brands from the same company!!!), these are infamous for blowing up and ruining computers... Hell, some of them don't even have any PFC or other protections of any kind.

Those were so bad that an article regarding these noname units was written (it's really worth the read imho, they also put some of those noname units through their paces and unironically, those noname units always fail in the most spectacular ways): https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en& … .html&sandbox=1 (the translation might be a bit inaccurate, but I could not locate a english translation of the article...)

Vynix wrote on 2020-08-19, 12:07:

Those were so bad that an article regarding these noname units was written (it's really worth the read imho, they also put some of those noname units through their paces and unironically, those noname units always fail in the most spectacular ways): https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en& … .html&sandbox=1 (the translation might be a bit inaccurate, but I could not locate a english translation of the article...)

My god, what a read! They were sued for conducting these tests and lost to PCA France after a 5 years long court battle? WTF?

They didn't really lose against PCAF per se, actually they won against PCAF, though they were asked to remove two paragraphs (I can't fully remember the specifics, but they did say that the tribunal recognized the quality of their research), I guess we could call that a tie.

If anything this lawsuit was probably an attempt to silence the critics.

Vynix wrote on 2020-08-19, 12:07:

Miphee wrote on 2020-08-19, 11:11:

Picked up a whole bunch of crappy PSUs yesterday for free. The "JNC Vargáné és Tsa. BT." models have a significant part in hunga […]
Show full quote

Picked up a whole bunch of crappy PSUs yesterday for free.
The "JNC Vargáné és Tsa. BT." models have a significant part in hungarian computing history, these power supplies ruined thousands of computers in the late 90's and early 2000s. Nobody knew why it was necessary for a hungarian company to rebrand crappy taiwanese/chinese power supplies but they caused a lot of damage. Money laundering was a possible reason.
They were dirt cheap so people bought them like candy, shady computer stores loved to use them in their builds and it was the #1 choice for companies where cost-effective computers were necessary.
Soon they began to fail one by one but people still bought them because they didn't want to spend money on something that is invisible in their computer. This mentality never stopped so people still buy $1500 worth of hardware and power it with a $30 PSU.

Same thing here in France with Heden and Advance (which are two brands from the same company!!!), these are infamous for blowing up and ruining computers... Hell, some of them don't even have any PFC or other protections of any kind.

Those were so bad that an article regarding these noname units was written (it's really worth the read imho, they also put some of those noname units through their paces and unironically, those noname units always fail in the most spectacular ways): https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en& … .html&sandbox=1 (the translation might be a bit inaccurate, but I could not locate a english translation of the article...)

Count Romania in too! We had them branded under Frontier or Torrent Computers (the latter actually being a computer store chain, and the former was a case manufacturer though I have no idea why they chose DEER) and some were even PREMIER. You can imagine my utter horror when one of these came in a Core 2 Quad Q6600 (Q6600!!!!) machine I had to repair for a friend. Luckily the rest of the machine survived but that Premier... let's just say it met one of my hammers. I gave him a semi-decent Spire 420W unit I refurbished with good parts and he didn't have any hiccups ever since.

PcBytes wrote on 2020-08-22, 10:24:

Vynix wrote on 2020-08-19, 12:07:

Miphee wrote on 2020-08-19, 11:11:

Picked up a whole bunch of crappy PSUs yesterday for free. The "JNC Vargáné és Tsa. BT." models have a significant part in hunga […]
Show full quote

Picked up a whole bunch of crappy PSUs yesterday for free.
The "JNC Vargáné és Tsa. BT." models have a significant part in hungarian computing history, these power supplies ruined thousands of computers in the late 90's and early 2000s. Nobody knew why it was necessary for a hungarian company to rebrand crappy taiwanese/chinese power supplies but they caused a lot of damage. Money laundering was a possible reason.
They were dirt cheap so people bought them like candy, shady computer stores loved to use them in their builds and it was the #1 choice for companies where cost-effective computers were necessary.
Soon they began to fail one by one but people still bought them because they didn't want to spend money on something that is invisible in their computer. This mentality never stopped so people still buy $1500 worth of hardware and power it with a $30 PSU.

Same thing here in France with Heden and Advance (which are two brands from the same company!!!), these are infamous for blowing up and ruining computers... Hell, some of them don't even have any PFC or other protections of any kind.

Those were so bad that an article regarding these noname units was written (it's really worth the read imho, they also put some of those noname units through their paces and unironically, those noname units always fail in the most spectacular ways): https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en& … .html&sandbox=1 (the translation might be a bit inaccurate, but I could not locate a english translation of the article...)

Count Romania in too! We had them branded under Frontier or Torrent Computers (the latter actually being a computer store chain, and the former was a case manufacturer though I have no idea why they chose DEER) and some were even PREMIER. You can imagine my utter horror when one of these came in a Core 2 Quad Q6600 (Q6600!!!!) machine I had to repair for a friend. Luckily the rest of the machine survived but that Premier... let's just say it met one of my hammers. I gave him a semi-decent Spire 420W unit I refurbished with good parts and he didn't have any hiccups ever since.

I've been there too, I had bought an old PC (an A64 X2, I just wanted to keep the case and swap the guts), that came with a rather questionable PSU (I can't remember the brand on top of my head, but I do remember that the unit felt rather odd... I can't quite put my finger on why though). Initially I thought nothing of it (since I would've used it with a system that I don't really care about), until that day where one of the cables might've gotten pinched or something (and subsequently started melting and burning).

After putting out the damn thing, I snipped the molten portion of the cable and isolated everything with electrician tape, it worked for about a few months before going out with a real bang, yep, a cap inside exploded, right as I was working on some boring and otherwise uninteresting Word document when I suddenly heard a gunshot coming from under my desk, and at this moment, the lights went out. Two days after, I tore it apart and found nothing out of the ordinary, except for...

...the sketchiest noname capacitors I had ever seen. There was no brand on them, just the "capacitance" and voltage ratings, one of the big eCaps was completly blown, like a tiny firecracker went off inside.

Needless to say this one went directly in the E-Waste dumpster, not after I meticulously snipped all the wires and snapped the PCBs in half. Just to ensure that it was truly dead. I only kept the enclosure and fan though.

I also have a Allied (which I heard is a rebadged DEER PSU) too, given how cheap it feels I've been too afraid to even power it. 🤣

So yeah, recently, I got ahold of an rather ancient 300W Delta Electronics PSU (which also feels pretty heavy by the way) to replace it, even though the old PSU that went kaboom was a 400W or so (probably 450 even, which was overkill for the build that it powered), that Delta PSU will be sufficient for the time being.

Edit: here is the Delta unit, I got it alongside the Audigy 2ZS and such that I picked up, came from a dilapidated HP Pavilion computer, one that was made during that odd era where WinTV cards were all the rage.

Here's some cards that I've pulled from a computer recycler.

It all works.
Except for the Voodoo 1. Something is buggy with it. Win98 detects it, but it spazs out under 3DMark 2000 and Half-Life (my two preferred benchmarks)

PcBytes wrote on 2020-08-22, 10:24:

Count Romania in too! We had them branded under Frontier or Torrent Computers (the latter actually being a computer store chain, and the former was a case manufacturer though I have no idea why they chose DEER) and some were even PREMIER. You can imagine my utter horror when one of these came in a Core 2 Quad Q6600 (Q6600!!!!) machine I had to repair for a friend. Luckily the rest of the machine survived but that Premier... let's just say it met one of my hammers. I gave him a semi-decent Spire 420W unit I refurbished with good parts and he didn't have any hiccups ever since.

I'm going to keep my 2 crappy rebranded JNC PSUs for historical reasons... to remember just how low companies are willing to go for the sake of low prices.

Vynix wrote on 2020-08-22, 17:14:

I also have a Allied (which I heard is a rebadged DEER PSU) too, given how cheap it feels I've been too afraid to even power it. 🤣

Indeed. I have a Deer B250ATX and this cap gave me quite the smoke show.
I replaced the cap and it worked fine but I never used it again.

It's like this cap is an offspring of those blasted RIFA smoke grenades (*ahem* filter caps that always love to go up in smoke), to be honest I never had a capacitor give out the magic smoke once. Either they went kaboom or silently inflated.

Vynix wrote on 2020-08-23, 17:51:

It's like this cap is an offspring of those blasted RIFA smoke grenades (*ahem* filter caps that always love to go up in smoke), to be honest I never had a capacitor give out the magic smoke once. Either they went kaboom or silently inflated.

I was lucky then, even had time to flip the circuit breaker above the desk.

Aublak wrote on 2020-08-23, 16:49:

Here's some cards that I've pulled from a computer recycler.

Over how long did it take to collect these? I would have thought most of this era stuff had been thrown years ago.
Very glad you saved them though!

chinny22 wrote on 2020-08-23, 20:39:

Aublak wrote on 2020-08-23, 16:49:

Here's some cards that I've pulled from a computer recycler.

Over how long did it take to collect these? I would have thought most of this era stuff had been thrown years ago.
Very glad you saved them though!

I found them over the course of a couple of months, so let that temper your excitement. Most have missing heatsinks and backplates.

I do find a lot of rare broken cards
-3 Geforce4 ti4600s
-4 Voodoo 2s
-a Geforce 256
-and other rare stuff that I can't recall now

I hold on to that stuff as well since I have some soldering skills. If I can match two broken cards together, I can sometimes make one working card.

Here's a Diamond Monster Sound that I haven't checked yet. Backplate is missing.