effy wrote on 2022-08-18, 14:00:

Radical Vision wrote on 2022-08-18, 08:52:

I never considered EVGA as quality brand too, many seems to think they are, cuz their custommer support is OUTstanding.

I have a friend who swears by EVGA. According to him, whenever there's a problem they replace it. Which, ok, that's good. But he doesn't seem to realize he's had to return 90% of the EVGA products he has purchased 🤣. I'd rather just not have to RMA everything I buy.

So ur friend have alot of problems with EVGA too ?

It is interesting, as some ppl seems to have way better exp. then others with some brands... Maybe it is a back luck, a karma, or a destiny, some ppl are problemFREE, others bang their heads on the wall, since some shit happens for no reason... But yes you can bet when someone is as negative as me, or others that are like that, will have problems from nothing, since well you know negative energy destroys things, and can cause plants to die, and electronics prob to fail or die... Some ppl ofc have x2 left hands, and cant work properly with anything...

Thermalwrong wrote on 2022-08-17, 23:39:

What's the infamous Intel messup that could cause problems with OverDrive sockets?

Intel issued a spec to support upcoming Pentium overdrives a year before Overdrive design was actually finalised, mostly embedded in the socket 2 spec. (And in case you never came across it, what is says on the socket 2,3,6, is only 80% reliable for determining what version of the spec, since low end manufacturers might grab old socket stocks for cheap and put lower number on higher number board, and conversely some manufacturers kept a model in production which was popular, ran out of original sockets and carried on with newer numbered socket, yet having old spec electricals) So by the time they actually turned all the marketing BS into hardware, they'd blown the power spec and also at least one of the pins had a different function or did it's signalling differently than the expectation enshrined in thousands of socket 2 boards out in the market. However, all the board makers had sold these saying "Intel Pentium Overdrive ready" or upgradable to Pentium etc. Intel when they realised their oopsie incorporated changes in the spec and released Socket 3 spec. But the engineering samples had not been spread around enough for absolutely every board maker to confirm operation, and again some of them just blindly believed intels spec AGAIN and implemented socket 3 and crossed their fingers... resulting in more minor bugs that nevertheless made their systems n0t 100% POD compatible. Intel had more CPU to worry about and rolled out the absolutely perfect nobody screw this one up now or I swear to god.... socket 6 spec which everything worked in... unless an old board design ran out of socket 3 sockets and they slapped a 6 on it.

Anyway, oldest "overdrive ready" boards might have two or three stoppers, lack of adequate power provision (sub 2A) and signalling problems, as well as non-flashable BIOSes for better support that were never upgraded anyway due to the electical probs. Some were over engineered and handled the power problem IBM managed to enable full POD support by releasing an interposer for their PC330 line. Then theoretically socket 3 boards, many worked fine, some "weren't quite there" and possibly 3rd party BIOS or BIOS chip swaps fixed them. By socket 6 everything was supposed to work fine with everything, unless of course it was manufacturer errata. Many boards now had flashable BIOS chips also, which helped in that small probs could be smoothed out with new BIOS release.

This meant that in the day, if you kept a sharp eye on things and were waiting for the 100% armor clad guarantee that your shiny new 486 board would run a POD, confirmed by review or otherwise with actual hardware, then you waited until socket 6 and by socket 6 you had Cyrix 5x86 and AMD 586-120 options appearing. Also, by the time that the situation solidified, socket 5 pentium boards had dropped enough, along with P75 pricing that it probably looked smarter to buy native Pentium*. The POD also looked 15% less sexy at this point than more recent benchmarks suggest because the apps, games and benchmarks were not pentium optimised, therefore it wasn't until a couple more years had passed it became a "real life" difference.

* In fact if I had known how well P75 overclocked at the time, I probably would have held out for one rather than the 5x86 setup I went with. Double performance for a third more money woulda made sense when same performance for third more didn't.

Radical Vision wrote on 2022-08-18, 14:51:

And yes as you mentioned some underDOG shit brands like PCchips, ECS, ASSrock, QDI and many others...

Right now I'm building a system on DFI CA64-TC. When the time comes, will you come and say that I built this on "underDOG shit" ? ))

Radical Vision wrote on 2022-08-18, 14:58:

effy wrote on 2022-08-18, 14:00:

Radical Vision wrote on 2022-08-18, 08:52:

I never considered EVGA as quality brand too, many seems to think they are, cuz their custommer support is OUTstanding.

I have a friend who swears by EVGA. According to him, whenever there's a problem they replace it. Which, ok, that's good. But he doesn't seem to realize he's had to return 90% of the EVGA products he has purchased 🤣. I'd rather just not have to RMA everything I buy.

So ur friend have alot of problems with EVGA too ?

It is interesting, as some ppl seems to have way better exp. then others with some brands... Maybe it is a back luck, a karma, or a destiny, some ppl are problemFREE, others bang their heads on the wall, since some shit happens for no reason... But yes you can bet when someone is as negative as me, or others that are like that, will have problems from nothing, since well you know negative energy destroys things, and can cause plants to die, and electronics prob to fail or die... Some ppl ofc have x2 left hands, and cant work properly with anything...

I mean some people are just lucky like that to never have issues with anything.

The friend above has had to RMA at least 2 GPU's, possibly more I'm not aware of. He RMA'd his last gen PSU from them twice. I don't think it's a secret that EVGA has high RMA rates, but their customer service does make up for it for most people. Not for me personally. They weren't around when I was working on these things professionally.

ynopot wrote on 2022-08-18, 16:43:

Radical Vision wrote on 2022-08-18, 14:51:

And yes as you mentioned some underDOG shit brands like PCchips, ECS, ASSrock, QDI and many others...

Right now I'm building a system on DFI CA64-TC. When the time comes, will you come and say that I built this on "underDOG shit" ? ))

I mean to be fair he didn't include DFI in the dogshit list 🤣

I love DFI and will stand behind them. I've got three different old boards I've picked up. An AK75 Socket A, P2XBL Slot 1, and Q4S600 P4 board (this is an industrial). All of them perfect, no repairs needed, no recaps. Just as stable as I remember them to be.

I need to pick up some LanParty boards for the early 2000's ridiculous color fun.

Radical Vision wrote on 2022-08-18, 14:51:

And yes as you mentioned some underDOG shit brands like PCchips, ECS, ASSrock, QDI and many others i rarely see them dead, i am not sure what the deal is with these doggo brands really, but they just dont die easy..

I actually still use AsRock boards. Work great for me and for previous generation stuff they seemed to offer features that other manufacturers didn't anymore. For instance they were including IDE and floppy connectors long after others stopped. Or the weirdo stuff like the boards with AGP and PCIe slots.

PCChips and ECS served a purpose. They were cheap components for systems builder businesses. The assumption was some bad ones will slip through. But typically not directly to customers. My experience was if the board was bad, it was either DOA or dead within a month. So if it made it into a customer machine, it was replaced under warranty quickly (since we have boxes of them in stock) and problem solved. We'd RMA them and move on. It wasn't even THAT common to get a bad one.

They got a bad wrap back in the day because they were featureless wonders (until ECS started being positioned as more of an enthusiast version of PCChips). You weren't going to do any overclocking. They weren't winning any performance benchmarks. But they worked fine. Stability issues were typically due to bad PSU or RAM choices. (or driver issues with SiS and Via chipsets).

I remember doing a side gig small office buildout for a customer back then. The customer was cheap. So I put together about 10 PC's with ECS K7S5A boards and Duron CPU's. I think I put whatever cheap ATI video card was around at the time in them. Those were solid little business machines. Never had to service any of them.

Btw the big thing I don't see discussed much anymore is PCChips also built boards for many of the name brands from back then that people fawn over.

effy wrote on 2022-08-18, 16:51:

All of them perfect, no repairs needed, no recaps.

I've had less luck with my board. But now everything is fine.

Those capacitors look super gross. I'm glad to hear that you were able to repair it.

Not been working on computers for a while, been busy working on several consoles over the past few days.

Not sure people would consider these "retro" or not, but they are nearly 14-15 years old 🤣 :

Applied new thermal paste to an Xbox 360 Pro (Zephyr). My previous re-pasting was a disaster, I evidently used too much thermal paste and the paste was clumping together and causing it to overheat and shut down. Cleared all that crap off, applied a different thermal compound and didn't use as much as before. Also bought a 2nd hand set of the outer plastic shell & side brackets, as the original case was cracked and broken. All looking as good as new again and working great, no more overheating either!

Also applied new thermal paste to a Fat PS3 console, but that thing is still an overheating nightmare without custom fan control courtesy of Webman MOD.

Today's retro activity is a bit more definitely retro:

Started work on repairing a Philips CD-I 210 that I received today. Drive tray belt is totally worn and needs replacing, but most frustratingly the discs were not spinning! Took me over an hour to finally get it to read discs, after seeing guides online about using a small straight screwdriver to gently prise up the plate that spins the discs, which gets stuck over time. Did the trick though and it is at least reading CDs now. Seems to be handling CDR ok too (even cheap crappy discs), so laser seems in good condition.

The wired controller that came with it had a mangled plug. I straightened all the pins, however ended up accidentally snapping 1 off! Luckily, the pinout diagram confirmed that pin wasn't actually connected and the controller works fine - I was quite relieved!

The IR remote needs some battery acid damage cleaning , but is otherwise functional. Half of the plastic of the control stick is broken and missing, so I'll have to investigate a 3D printed replacement.

All in all, this should be a fun little project over the coming weeks and I can enjoy all the amazing CD-I games....

... ok stop laughing. 🤣

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-08-18, 15:34:

Intel issued a spec to support upcoming Pentium overdrives a year before Overdrive design was actually finalised, mostly embedde […]
Show full quote

Thermalwrong wrote on 2022-08-17, 23:39:

What's the infamous Intel messup that could cause problems with OverDrive sockets?

Intel issued a spec to support upcoming Pentium overdrives a year before Overdrive design was actually finalised, mostly embedded in the socket 2 spec. (And in case you never came across it, what is says on the socket 2,3,6, is only 80% reliable for determining what version of the spec, since low end manufacturers might grab old socket stocks for cheap and put lower number on higher number board, and conversely some manufacturers kept a model in production which was popular, ran out of original sockets and carried on with newer numbered socket, yet having old spec electricals) So by the time they actually turned all the marketing BS into hardware, they'd blown the power spec and also at least one of the pins had a different function or did it's signalling differently than the expectation enshrined in thousands of socket 2 boards out in the market. However, all the board makers had sold these saying "Intel Pentium Overdrive ready" or upgradable to Pentium etc. Intel when they realised their oopsie incorporated changes in the spec and released Socket 3 spec. But the engineering samples had not been spread around enough for absolutely every board maker to confirm operation, and again some of them just blindly believed intels spec AGAIN and implemented socket 3 and crossed their fingers... resulting in more minor bugs that nevertheless made their systems n0t 100% POD compatible. Intel had more CPU to worry about and rolled out the absolutely perfect nobody screw this one up now or I swear to god.... socket 6 spec which everything worked in... unless an old board design ran out of socket 3 sockets and they slapped a 6 on it.

Anyway, oldest "overdrive ready" boards might have two or three stoppers, lack of adequate power provision (sub 2A) and signalling problems, as well as non-flashable BIOSes for better support that were never upgraded anyway due to the electical probs. Some were over engineered and handled the power problem IBM managed to enable full POD support by releasing an interposer for their PC330 line. Then theoretically socket 3 boards, many worked fine, some "weren't quite there" and possibly 3rd party BIOS or BIOS chip swaps fixed them. By socket 6 everything was supposed to work fine with everything, unless of course it was manufacturer errata. Many boards now had flashable BIOS chips also, which helped in that small probs could be smoothed out with new BIOS release.

This meant that in the day, if you kept a sharp eye on things and were waiting for the 100% armor clad guarantee that your shiny new 486 board would run a POD, confirmed by review or otherwise with actual hardware, then you waited until socket 6 and by socket 6 you had Cyrix 5x86 and AMD 586-120 options appearing. Also, by the time that the situation solidified, socket 5 pentium boards had dropped enough, along with P75 pricing that it probably looked smarter to buy native Pentium*. The POD also looked 15% less sexy at this point than more recent benchmarks suggest because the apps, games and benchmarks were not pentium optimised, therefore it wasn't until a couple more years had passed it became a "real life" difference.

* In fact if I had known how well P75 overclocked at the time, I probably would have held out for one rather than the 5x86 setup I went with. Double performance for a third more money woulda made sense when same performance for third more didn't.

Ah ha, that makes sense, I've noticed on a few boards that have a "Socket 3" labelled socket but the outer row of pins for P-OD is just not present. I'm glad I missed all of that, I was too young to have much say in what PC we got and we ended up with a Cyrix 5x86 😀

During the summer I haven't been playing around with computers much, but I did go and buy a bunch of stuff recently. Mainly to rebuild my Haswell based Win7 pc, ever since I saw Joseph_Joestar's Ivy Bridge WinXP build I've wanted one so I could have a machine that serves a dual purpose as a late WinXP pc and a Win7 pc. I do have a Sandy Bridge motherboard stashed away, but with Ivy you get 1600MHz DDR3 and PCIe 3.0. Won't make much of a difference for WinXP gaming but may come in use with later Win7 games. So here it is:

- MSI Z77A-G43
- Intel i5-3570 (non-k, no intention of overclocking. Also the k-models and i7's are weirdly expensive, this one was cheap and does everything I need. Wasn't pleased about the small gunk of thermal paste on the pin side though)
- Asus Strix GTX 960 DirectCU II OC 2GB (these seem to have lunatic prices, l was lucky to get a decent enough price)
- 8GB (4GB x2) G.Skill RipjawsX DDR3-2133 (my own old DDR3, running @1600MHz with this pc)
- Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer Fatal1ty Pro (pulled from my P4 rig, I'll get a PCIe X-Fi Titanium if I find one for a good price)

Noticed a weird little quirk with the MSI Z77A-G43, if I turn off the integrated LAN in BIOS an error message pops up for a split second during POST. Can't remember what the error was, but after some googling it seemed to have something to do with network stacking. I messed about with BIOS settings, but only way to fix it was to keep LAN enabled. Works for me, I just don't need it after activating Win7 but hardly an issue.

Also swapped the 9800 GTX+ for a 6800 GT in my P4 build, there was a big speed mismatch with the CPU and GPU. I always intended to get a 6800-7800 card when I was putting the P4 build together but that took a while. The stock cooler is a piece of crap though, ordered some thermal pads so I can replace the heatsink with one from Arctic Cooling Accelero X1 and use a 120mm fan with it. The X-Fi that went to the Ivy Bridge rig got replaced with X-Fi XtremeMusic.

Oh and finally ordered a SPDIF cable for my P3 build, only took half an year to do so 🤣

I'm trying to make a Creative CT6710 that doesn't boot working again. It's the brown version but with 81F161622B-80FN sdram memories bios SST 29EE010 Made in Singapore. It worked in the past but I had problems last time I tried to flash its bios again. Does anyone have another bios beside the vgamuseum.info page one I tried and which tool I could use to flash it? On a 440BX mainboard it give a long beep and a short one at boot, no signal.

Almost done with the SS7 setup. I bought a CDRW Yamaha blindly (I always wanted to have one) and you couldn't tell from the seller's photos what model it was (only front side photo). Of course, when it came, it was a SCSI model, so it was still going to buy a controller with a cable, which made the transaction a little more expensive. But it's done and it's not all bad: the rest of the build consists of a Gigabyte GA-5AA, K6-2 500, 128MB SDRAM, S3 Savage4 32MB AGP, Initio SCSI controller, Sound Galaxy Pro 16III-3D with Aztech 2320, Seagate U series 5 10GB IDE PATA , 3,5" Mitsumi FDD and Fortron AX400-PNF PSU.
Maybe not quite period correct, but I think a balanced setup for the games up to the year 2000.

It remains to find the bracket to the sound card and the I/O plate to the board.

Ydee wrote on 2022-08-19, 14:14:

Maybe not quite period correct, but I think a balanced setup for the games up to the year 2000.

))
I put GF2 MX 400 on my K6-2+ 450 (500-550) and got good performance in Q3, UT99. Before that there was ATI Rage 128 and Q3, UT99 were not very playable. Even Half Life 1 has improved with hardware Transform and lighting (T&L) which frees up CPU time.

Finished up recording the #septandy stuff and put the 1000A away, pulled out the 486 again. Been messing in FrogFind. Ordering a new screen for the P/75 this afternoon. Then I think all my hardware projects are done for awhile, save for the 2 Varta replacements (BSi FMA3500C and GEM 286). I can just enjoy playing games for awhile, which is nice.

Doing a long overdue checking and sorting of all my SCSI drives.
Sorting all drives that pass the error tests by noise and heat.
Interesting how seemingly identical drives can sound so vastly different.
Got the whole noise spectrum now, from free revving angle-grinder to almost inaudible.

Unfortunately I also found a few broken drives, including a Seagate 15k one with tons of surface errors.
And every error-scan I did on the drive produced more errors, i reckon there's a damaged head and some debris inside it =/

Did a new vintage-computer setup. I can use everything from C64 to Amiga and PC. Monitors are specifically bought for my hobby, and I have a Retrotink connected to the TV, if I need to use S-Video or composit connections. I have DVI, HDMI and VGA connections as well. The brown small shelf is made from an old dinner table plate, and it's feet's are old dead harddrives. There are even a casette tape holder with C64 software, next to the black homemade NAS, made from an OrangePI. I am happy with the result....

brostenen wrote on 2022-08-19, 17:14:

The brown small shelf is made from an old dinner table plate, and it's feet's are old dead harddrives.

I'm guessing you mean an extension leaf for a dining table. In one of my corners I've got a shelf standing on dead CD-ROMs 🤣 ... and I think I've got enough not worth the bother to fix to put another couple of layers.

I like repurposing furniture though, there's these two tall, supposed to be lit display cabinets, the wiring is flaky, the orig bulbs and fittings unobtanium, and the glass looks dirty 2 days after you clean it, and the fake gold trim is corroded, and wife hates them... but from about thigh height down they're not too horrible, so maybe decapitating the pair of them and putting a desk surface across.

However, I am a bit grumpy about shifting plans, we were gonna dedicate a larger room to an office area, and I thought I could have a large desk spread in there, but no, not now. Using a smaller room, which is all entrances, windows etc barely any wall. So modest desk now. Whereas before I could have not worried about heat output, would have been useful as the other room got cold, this one is less ideal too.

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-08-19, 18:52:

I'm guessing you mean an extension leaf for a dining table. In one of my corners I've got a shelf standing on dead CD-ROMs lol . […]
Show full quote

brostenen wrote on 2022-08-19, 17:14:

The brown small shelf is made from an old dinner table plate, and it's feet's are old dead harddrives.

I'm guessing you mean an extension leaf for a dining table. In one of my corners I've got a shelf standing on dead CD-ROMs 🤣 ... and I think I've got enough not worth the bother to fix to put another couple of layers.

I like repurposing furniture though, there's these two tall, supposed to be lit display cabinets, the wiring is flaky, the orig bulbs and fittings unobtanium, and the glass looks dirty 2 days after you clean it, and the fake gold trim is corroded, and wife hates them... but from about thigh height down they're not too horrible, so maybe decapitating the pair of them and putting a desk surface across.

However, I am a bit grumpy about shifting plans, we were gonna dedicate a larger room to an office area, and I thought I could have a large desk spread in there, but no, not now. Using a smaller room, which is all entrances, windows etc barely any wall. So modest desk now. Whereas before I could have not worried about heat output, would have been useful as the other room got cold, this one is less ideal too.

Extention leaf or something, yes. You know, when you pull on both ends of the table, and you can extend with an extra plate. My table have two extra plates, and fully extended there are room for 4 people on each side and one on each end. And if people cramp a bit together, I have table space for a total of 12 people. 😉

Yup. Using old furnitures for something new is indeed a good thing. And money can always be saved that way. Wich is good in these times of climate change and global inflation. Of course one can not always do this, but for small projects it is great. 😀

It is not good that you can not have some space in the large room. I went through something a bit like you with my ex girlfriend. When we moved in, it was all good and dandy. Then all of a sudden, I had to move my stuff. She suggested me to put it up under a roof that did not have any insulation under the tiles. Lots of moist and winther is cold. Uhhhhmmmmm..... My Amiga's up there? I think not, with the prices on those machines. Especially my 1200 that are recapped, brand new case, Tsunami 030 accelerator and IndivisionAGA-MK3 scandoubler. That machine is too expensive to put through shifting weather, moist and in a space were snow can get in, if there is a blizzard. Whatever she was thinking, then that was like a stupid thing to suggest.

But now I am master of my own home. I keep a tiny portion of the living room for this hobby space. Lots of space left for sofa, dinner table and tv area.

ynopot wrote on 2022-08-19, 14:45:

Ydee wrote on 2022-08-19, 14:14:

Maybe not quite period correct, but I think a balanced setup for the games up to the year 2000.

))
I put GF2 MX 400 on my K6-2+ 450 (500-550) and got good performance in Q3, UT99. Before that there was ATI Rage 128 and Q3, UT99 were not very playable. Even Half Life 1 has improved with hardware Transform and lighting (T&L) which frees up CPU time.

I have one too, and I've been thinking about it (or the GTS, V3 2000 or maybe the GF4MX400), but the CPU seems weak for these cards, not right? I think the GF2MX400 will make better use of the Mendocino 433@488 on the 83MHz FSB, which I have in the build on the VIA Apollo Pro.