Lets talk to myself:

I could use this mainboard: Aopen i945GTm-VHL
http://www.aopen.nl/products_detail.aspx?auno=2064

And the chip that looks like a PIII is the northbridge.

Perhaps try the trick of putting the mainboard in the oven... there's a pretty good chance it'd fix the graphical corruption issues.

How about this
http://www.wonderhowto.com/how-to-hack-lcd-sc … projector-9105/

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

Perhaps try the trick of putting the mainboard in the oven... there's a pretty good chance it'd fix the graphical corruption issues.

I did not put it in the oven, but used a little torch to heat op the graphics chip, as shown here: YouTube - DV9000 blank screen fix! Video problem BGA
And... I just got myself a second laptop I guess (in addition to the eee 1000HE I bought two weeks ago), everything works fine again. 😀 Put a little heatsink and some thermal compound at the trouble chip to hopefully prevent future overheating problems.

PS. The thing has a 1440x900 resolution, which is not well supported by older windows games, as I cannot run them on 1200x900 (4:3). So it is either stretching or using centered 1024x768 output.

Well it was fun for a while, but the laptop broke down again recently.

There now is a good offer for a Mini-itx board which can use the CPU+mem of the laptop. But does anyone know what is the deal with a PCI express 1x slot being placed behind a PCI slot? see attached image.

image source: http://www.missingremote.com/review/itox-np101-d16c

perhaps it's not a PCIE slot but some sort of proprietary thing?

TheMAN wrote:

perhaps it's not a PCIE slot but some sort of proprietary thing?

It is positively identified as a PCI Express x1 slot in the documentation, several Mini-Itx boards have it there behind the PCI slot...

EDIT: somebody told me this PCI Express x1 slot can be used with a flexible riser (the one with the flatcable).

I put the Core2Duo CPU and Memory on this "no brand" Mini-Itx mainboard which I bought on ebay for 65 Euro including shipping. Some unofficial support site for this item with pictures:
http://datenspeicher.neogen.info/miniitx/

Kinda happy with the result. It is a small and snappy box. With a slowed down 50x50 fan it hardly gets warm. Got about 7000 3DMarks2001 with the intel GMA 950 graphics. Somehow much higher then the same graphics chipset in an eee PC 1000HE (atom 280): 3000 3DMarks2001.
But I consider putting in a HD5450 PCI Express X16, using a filed out PCI Express X1 extension cable.
The case is currently a normal size ATX case, a bit unsuitable.

I was missing the PS/2 headers badly. the only USB keyboard I had (wireless) would not work in the BIOS or in DOS. So I had to solder a PS/2 adapter to the board to get any control over the thing.

Edit: nice surprise; Put in a Aureal Vortex 2 PCI and I got soundblaster pro emulation working in DOS, plus now there is midi daughterboard music. Tried an ESS Solo too, but not much luck with that one.

By now this topic seems more at home in the "System Specs"...

Attached a picture of the current temporary setup. As I wrote, these are leftover laptop parts mounted on a no name mini ITX mobo. The CPU is a Core2Duo 1,83 GHz 2MB. The Mainboard has an Intel 945GT Chipset. I installed XP 32-bit.

SOUND
There is Realtek sound on board, but for fun I tried a PCI Aureal Vortex 2 (Montego 2) to see if I could get a 1994 Midi DB working. It works fine, but I noticed that in games this card causes occaisional stutters. So for general usage the Vortex 2 will not do.

GRAPHICS
There is intel GMA950 graphics on board. But instead I bought a MSI Radeon HD5450 1GB DDR2. One has to disable the GMA950 in the BIOS for it work properly. I had to use a modified PCI Express X1 riser cable to fit this X16 card. As there is no X16 slot, and the X1 (v1.0 speed) slot is placed strangely. As it is now it cannot fit any case slot.

It results in 13460 3DMarks 2001. I was hoping to get a little more out of it. So I consider trading the Radeon back for a DDR3 version or a HD5550 with 128-Bit DDR3. If that would do me any good. In what way does the PCI express X1 bottleneck affect this? Only during the loading of textures or also during rendering?

Edit 1: To try and answer myself:
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_587 … Scaling/26.html

Edit 2: I borrowed a card, a Club3D Geforce 9800 GT 1GB GDDR3 256-bit 550/700MHz (44,8 GB/S). Using the humble PCI express X1 1.0 slot I get just 20674 3D Marks 2001. So I guess there is not much sense in trying to improve on the HD5450.