No SDRAM slot on motherboards with 430VX chipset.

For me it's definitely the cheap capacitor era. And during that time around 2002 were sold localy crappy PSUs by Morex company (200 - 250 watt or so), which tend to blow up and kill most of components with it 😒
Not forget to mention also coil whine on graphics cards.

lazibayer wrote:

No SDRAM slot on motherboards with 430VX chipset.

I have two SDRAM DIMMs on my 430VX board, not tested them yet, I suppose it will accept only older 32MB sticks and as long as I have only one 32M stick of SDRAM but 64MB of EDO SIMM memory, I'll leave it running with simms.

Computers from around 1998-2004 that did not come with an AGP slot.

Around 2000-2005 where motherboard manufacturers thought that penny pinching on caps would be a good idea.

The bad caps era was good times for me because I was doing PC repair during college for rent and beer. I was too stupid to recap then (give me a break I was an accounting major) and just had people buy replacement boards and/or psu. That died out fast when laptops took over anyway.

Nothing else really comes to mind besides caps. I bought a Sound Blaster Audigy II NX USB sound card along with Morrowind around '02-'03 with a 7.1 surround system, that sound card died within a couple months. I still have it in the closet but lost the adapter, after doing some reading, sure enough, 99/100 times it was a cheap cap.. So I should go ahead and fix it 😜

Fake Cache and thin PCB that break traces for no reason

Deksor wrote:

Fake Cache and thin PCB that break traces for no reason

Mother of nightmarish flashbacks! Instantly remember the name of the board too, PC Chips M912, socket 3 vlb board.. Notorious for being sold at trade shows on paper thin PCBs loaded with fake cache.. Otherwise the DX6900 were great boards if you didn't get one of the horrible knockoffs.

Thanks for that memory 😜

oeuvre wrote:

Computers from around 1998-2004 that did not come with an AGP slot.

I have one of those ECS boards based around the 845GV chipset that has an "AGP Express" slot which is not a real AGP slot it is and AGP slot connected to a special bridge chip that bridges the slot to the PCI bus since the chipset does not have AGP(well I think it might technically have AGP inside the chipset but it is permanently connected to the IGP)

The IBM PC as a whole is pretty annoying:
1) Quickly hacked-together graphics card, suffering from various bugs such as CGA snow, colorburst not working properly in 80-column mode, and lacking features that were common at the time, such as user-definable charactersets, support for sprites, hardware scrolling etc.
2) No sound support at all, except for a silly beeper.
3) Choosing the bandwidth-limited 8088 over a true 8086, or even better, a Motorola 68000.
4) Using an outdated 8257 DMA controller which only has a 16-bit address space, so you can only use it within 64k buffers.

When they released the PCjr, they got a few things right (they fixed the snow-issue, graphics was slightly more powerful, although still no user-definable characters, sprites or scrolling, and they added the basic SN76489 for acceptable audio)... however:
5) Removing the DMA controller altogether, so now your floppy and HDD access would suck up all CPU, instead of being executed in the background like on a real IBM PC.

Sadly Tandy was the only one who figured it out: You wanted the extra PCjr graphics and audio, but retain the DMA controller and full PC compatibility. The best of both worlds. Sadly no other clone builder did this, so the Tandy/PCjr audio and graphics remained an oddity, until EGA/VGA and AdLib eventually rendered them obsolete.

IBM still didn't quite get their act together with the PC/AT though:
6) Instead of fixing a proper DMA controller, they just stuck a second one on there for 16-bit transfers, but still having the 16-bit addressing limitation.
7) Because the DMA controller sucked, and was stuck at ~4 MHz, they actually *bypassed* the DMA controller, and started doing CPU-polled IO on harddisks, because it was faster (as long as you weren't planning to do anything else at the same time of course).
8) While PC/XT motherboards were available with enough memory sockets for 640k, the AT boards never took more than 512k, so you always needed an expansion card to get to 640k, which had become somewhat of a standard because most PC/XTs and clones would be fully loaded with 640k.

It's a shame the SN76489 was never accepted as an industry standard, despite beeing part of an official IBM product.
Even after IBM released another SN76489-like sound standard, the PS/1 Audio card, no one cared.

I wonder why this happened. Asian clone makers sure had access to cheap FM and PSG chips. Why didn't they inlude them ?
Compatibility sure wasn't endangered by a separate sound chip, was it ?

But if it was just a matter of cost, they could have integrated them into ASICs, as they did with other extra features.

ATX powersupply that don't have on/off switch on the back.

Socket A motherboards feeding the CPU voltage regultator with 5V instead of 12V (and lacking the P4 12V connector). I don't know if it saved the motherboard manufactures anything but I guess you could use a crappy cheap ass PSU instead of the P4 certified ones.

Intel forced limitations on all kind of stuff. It didn't cut Intels costs, but forced you to buy a much more expensive item if you required a specific funtion like support for a simple thing like ECC RAM.

430FX/HX/VX/TX boards with 256KB onboard cache but no COAST slot for upgrade to 512KB.

Oh, I still forgot one...
When IBM went PS/2, they did another 'cost reduction':
9) Introducing MCGA... giving you a 320x200 256-colour mode, but none of the fancy EGA/VGA features, so that it wasn't even backward-compatible with EGA.
Going for the lowest common denominator, a lot of early VGA games actually used the MCGA mode, so even if you did have a fully VGA-compatible card, it wasn't really being used.

Every sound blaster 16's issues (noisiness on the first models, hanging note bug, the removal of OPL3 at some point ...)

That's maybe not a cost reducing thing, but soldering Varta batteries on boards of many devices of that era was definitely a HUGE problem. It's the same for DALLAS batteries that are soldered instead of being socketed but at least DALLAS ones doesn't ruin completely your board. I wasn't born in that era, but as far as I know, non rechargeable batteries already existed, right ? Why putting rechargeable batteries in there that you couldn't remove at all was considered as a good idea ? Non rechargeable ones tend to leak less often than rechargeable ones. And even some rechargeable ones do not leak that way years after their manufacture. It always make me sad to see motherboards being half mint, half corroded because for most of them, I'm pretty sure that if there wasn't that pile of crap, the board would still function perfectly

The stock piece of trash heatsink design that Intel has been using since the early LGA775 days.

I seriously want to go back in time and punch the team in the throat that designed those.

Plastic clips on SIMM slots. Every board I get seems to ahve at least ONE broken one.

Adding to the issue about crap capacitors in power supplies from the early 00's, there were some really stupid penny pinching decisions by certain companies (Antec, I'm looking at you):

- I have seen many instances where the two large capacitors in the primary side are of a good brand, while the rest are garbage... if they use quality brands for those large caps, which are the most expensive, why go cheap with the rest? I never understood this

- Not only they screw you with Fuhjyyu crap, but also if you want to replace them you may find out that good quality caps don't fit because the PCB was designed specifically for those thin tall caps that are impossible to find in the good brands! It's like "hey, you wanna replace these? Well, you better get creative then!". Extremely annoying 😠

TheMobRules wrote:

Adding to the issue about crap capacitors in power supplies from the early 00's, there were some really stupid penny pinching decisions by certain companies (Antec, I'm looking at you):

- I have seen many instances where the two large capacitors in the primary side are of a good brand, while the rest are garbage... if they use quality brands for those large caps, which are the most expensive, why go cheap with the rest? I never understood this

- Not only they screw you with Fuhjyyu crap, but also if you want to replace them you may find out that good quality caps don't fit because the PCB was designed specifically for those thin tall caps that are impossible to find in the good brands! It's like "hey, you wanna replace these? Well, you better get creative then!". Extremely annoying 😠

HAHA, I hear you on that one. I have an old Antec 350w like this that I had to recap.

I ended up running extension wires for a couple of the replacement caps and zip tying them in place. Other than that annoyance, it has been a good power supply ever since.

Deksor wrote:

That's maybe not a cost reducing thing, but soldering Varta batteries on boards of many devices of that era was definitely a HUG […]
Show full quote

That's maybe not a cost reducing thing, but soldering Varta batteries on boards of many devices of that era was definitely a HUGE problem.
It's the same for DALLAS batteries that are soldered instead of being socketed but at least DALLAS ones doesn't ruin completely your board. I wasn't born in
that era, but as far as I know, non rechargeable batteries already existed, right ? Why putting rechargeable batteries in there that you couldn't remove at
all was considered as a good idea ? Non rechargeable ones tend to leak less often than rechargeable ones. And even some rechargeable ones do not leak that
way years after their manufacture.

My copy of Super Mario World has a backup battery that's still good. And it was made about 25 years ago..
I believe board makers assumed their products to be taken out of service long before the battery lost its charge.
But on the bright side, Dallas chips can be repaired, at least. I fixed them a few times already. ^^

Deksor wrote:

I wasn't born in that era, but as far as I know, non rechargeable batteries already existed, right ?

Yup, you're right, they alrady existed. 😉 By the way, originally, "battery" refered to something that contained two or more individual cells,
like for example some 9V bloc batteries or good old 4.5v LR12 batteries. A "primary cell" is what originally consisted of just one cell,
but people are now commonly referring to as battery, like popular 1.5v AA, AAA types.
Also, another term for rechargeable battery is "secondary cell" or, less common, "accumulator" (or just "accu").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_(electricity)

Deksor wrote:

It always make me sad to see motherboards being half mint, half corroded because for most of them,
I'm pretty sure that if there wasn't that pile of crap, the board would still function perfectly

Yeah, me too. Makes me sad everytime. And as time passeses, it only gets worse. 🙁
The only solution is to try to fix them. If the damage is only little, someone can add a few patch wires to make them work again.
Edit: Typos fixed-