And 3/3...

Asus CUR-DLSR server board.
Got it with the complete 1U server for 30€ + 0.99€ shipping... (yes, and it's 20Kg)
With Dual 1Ghz Coppermine and 1GB of SDRAM

And a Quadro NVS280 PCI (~FX5500 with better clocks. 15€) to go with the dual PIII card (it only have PCIX interface)

And that's it... i think i will slow down a bit because i have a lot of things to play with now...

ChrisK wrote on 2023-03-02, 09:12:

It's always a good idea to clean the AGP (or PCI or whatever) contacts with some alcohol (aka IPA) in such cases. Even if they are gold finished and don't seem to be polluted/oxidized in any way. I had cases where cards just didn't run before a little cleaning session. Could also have been that capacitor thing, who knows, but hey, what do we loose? 😀

I hit the contact edges with Deoxit, same for the slot ..it tends to get a bit dirty and covered in corrosion dirt after switching GPUs when testing.

Just grabbed a matched pair of these Phenom II X2 521 CPUs for about 5 USD ..shipping thankfully was only 10USD, seems like a rather odd CPU since these are rebadged Athlon II cores, I wonder if they can be unlocked? Better yet can one core be disabled ..making it a stupidly fast AM2 based 98box.

https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/K10/AMD-Phenom … 521OCK23GM.html

Might grab a Athlon II X2 280 and do some benchmarks against the 521, only poking around with these CPUs because they are dirt cheap right now and I need a change from Intel.

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-03-01, 20:49:

I like that your external floppy came with an internal adapter to use whatever native controller you already have. I have an external floppy with a parallel cable on it that I still have yet to test.

How many pins are on your cable? More or less than a parallel cable?

The connector is a DB37. Most of those are most likely just ground, because system uses regular floppy controller and cables as a base, so there is only drive power as an extra.

acl wrote on 2023-03-02, 09:25:

2/3 […]
Show full quote

2/3

Boxed stuff.
I don't hunt for boxed components, but if i find some for a good price... well.

R-IMG_20230301_232504.jpg

From top left to right bottom :

• A-Trend Intel740 (new open box ~11€ + shipping)
• Point of view GeForce Fx5200 AGP (new open box ~10€ + shipping)
• Rage 128Pro (don't remember price)
• Zalman cooler (brand new. 5€ + shipping)
• Matrox Parhelia 256MB AGP (i actually have it for a long time, not bought in the past month. 50€ + 50€ TaskRabbit pickup + shipping....)
• GeForce 3 (non ti) complete in box (7€ + shipping !!!)
• Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty (quite a long name for a sound card. 15€ iirc)
• AsRock 4CoreDual-Sata2 (20€ iirc)

Not hardware, but still related :

ATI Ruby action figures. Bought separately, but form a set of 3. Limited edition of ~6000... but easy to find for sale online.
Paid around 13€ each (separately)
R-IMG_20230225_223955.jpg

AMD K6 Label pins 😁
R-IMG_20230225_224107.jpg

Other hardware :

R-IMG_20230301_233443.jpg

From top left to bottom right:

• Socket Super 7 Asus P5A (currently not working. Got fo free from a local collector. Thanks !)
• Socket 939 Asus A8N SLI Deluxe (I have one for a long time. I bought the other recently because i thought the first one was dead... ~40€)
• Slot A Aopen AX63 Pro (As a replacement of a nearly identical card i used and that stopped working in december. Shown with a Celeron 300A on the picture. 20€)
• Daewoo Super Socket 7 card. (Got from the same local collector as the P5A)
• Xeno Killer NIC (with USB and Audio jacks)
• Guillemot Maxi Studio ISIS (without the external connectors. Part of a cheap 20€ lot)
• Other... Two NEC Usb PCI cards. Two Serial PCI cards. One raid controller, one Audigy PCI card

Adata Vitesta DDR500 2x 512MB kit (20€ + shipping)
R-IMG_20230222_222813.jpg

Some nice finds, congrats on successful hunts. I will also grab boxed stuff if I come across it for reasonable prices, but I am not going out of my way or paying a premium for it. We might want to hear more about that Daewoo, don't think too much is known about them, my brain is foggily rambling something about Aldi/supermarket PCs but I don't know if it knows anything solid or deeper, unless it suddenly pops to the front in the next few days.

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-03-02, 11:27:

Just grabbed a matched pair of these Phenom II X2 521 CPUs for about 5 USD ..shipping thankfully was only 10USD, seems like a rather odd CPU since these are rebadged Athlon II cores, I wonder if they can be unlocked? Better yet can one core be disabled ..making it a stupidly fast AM2 based 98box.

https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/K10/AMD-Phenom … 521OCK23GM.html

Might grab a Athlon II X2 280 and do some benchmarks against the 521, only poking around with these CPUs because they are dirt cheap right now and I need a change from Intel.

Yeah that's a slightly strange one, AMD are somewhat famous for OEM specials. Like I think the sole reason for the K6-2 380 is Compaq. I think the regor core means there's nothing there to unlock though. I was under the impression that 98 just ignored cores other than the first one, so don't think you need to lock #2

Investigating which type of DX4 an acquired system contains. Happy days. 😀

L2 cache seems bad, stuck at Updating ESCD. When the L2 cache is disabled, it boots. So I ordered some new 15ns cache chips and while I am at it, it is going to be 512kB total. I hope the TAG chip is okay, that one is 12ns.

PD2JK wrote on 2023-03-02, 16:02:

Investigating which type of DX4 an acquired system contains. Happy days. 😀
DSC_2980.JPG

L2 cache seems bad, stuck at Updating ESCD. When the L2 cache is disabled, it boots. So I ordered some new 15ns cache chips and while I am at it, it is going to be 512kB total. I hope the TAG chip is okay, that one is 12ns.

Nice! There's your 16KB cache. 🥳

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-03-02, 15:21:

Some nice finds, congrats on successful hunts. I will also grab boxed stuff if I come across it for reasonable prices, but I am not going out of my way or paying a premium for it. We might want to hear more about that Daewoo, don't think too much is known about them, my brain is foggily rambling something about Aldi/supermarket PCs but I don't know if it knows anything solid or deeper, unless it suddenly pops to the front in the next few days.

Thank you !
Another pictures of it :

It is referenced on TheRetroWeb (https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/daewoo-cb581x-vi) but with some errors on CPU supported.
Mine came with a k6-2 400 and worked fine with it. Jumper settings are documented up to 100 x 6 so it supports a wider range of CPUs than suggested by TheRetroWeb

It may be an OEM version because i could not find an official documentation.
There is a doc online that seems to have been written by an individual (an a French person !) : http://musaran.free.fr/CB581X-VI/CB581X-VI_E.html

I already had a SS7 motherboard and was looking for a replacement because it was a baby AT and i wanted an ATX SS7 board for convenience.
So i will probably replace my Soltek SL-54U5 by the Daewoo-CB581X-VI. It's the same chipset but since the Soltek seems to have more cache, the performance could be a bit lower.

Nabbed this untested Asus P3V4X 1.02 board, comes with a iWill FC-FPGA compatible slotket too. No idea what CPU it has under that cooler and the seller doesn't want to pull it apart, which I can understand so itll be a surprise to find out. The board looks like it has been pulled and left as was . .covered in dust and fluff so it'll need a good clean before I fire it up.

Don't have a Slot 1 Via 133A chipset board but the reviews have this one with what looks to be a freaking huge range of bus speeds and overclocking options, so fingers crossed its still alive. (No bloated or vented caps which is a nice sign)

It was dirt cheap too since it was untested and the seller just wants it gone, well im more than happy to add it to my testing pile 😁

The Slotket is interesting too, I have a bunch of them now but none with caps and crazy fluro yellow jumpers.

I would like to talk to some Dell experts to learn where this system fits into their history, because there is absolutely zero information about the existence of this machine online aside from the trademark registration in 1993 and one 20 year old post from someone saying they repurposed the chassis of one of these.

It's a Dell Exclaim 486/50 (DX2-50) desktop, with original keyboard, mouse and monitor in original box. As a bonus, someone had upgraded this with a Media Vision multimedia kit, so it has a PAS16, 2x SCSI CDROM and fancy Labtec stereo speakers! So far, everything works, and the CRT is absolutely gorgeous! Perfect blacks, excellent color.

I found it listed recently and managed to get it for a great price in untested condition. Thankfully, the seller not only packaged it back into the box appropriately (base off of monitor, original packaging in place and double boxed to protect the artwork!!).

Inside it is incredibly clean and the CMOS battery is, thankfully, external. It had slightly corroded the battery negative battery pin but there appears to be no damage on the top of the board (haven't pulled it yet to check the back). Everything else seems to be working great though! I get a tiny bit of sporadic noise from the power supply so I will probably crack that open and see how things look in there.

To my astonishment, I managed to get the hard drive reading by just setting the drive parameters to auto (not as shown in the picture above... those are the defaults due to the lack of battery) and rebooting the PC. It has DOS, Windows 3.1 and an interesting startup program called Dell Library Menu.

Also, there are hand-written labels on the pull tabs on all of the drive ribbon cables... but not on the CD-ROM cable which was added later. Surely, the writing didn't come from Dell, did it? 🤣

Anyway, I plan on making a thread about this but I had to post something now. I'm super excited to get it 100% cleaned up and to get all the kinks worked out.
From my reading online, non-business-oriented Dell PCs were barely a thing in 1993, which is when this was manufactured. It's very well built too. The back of the chassis is painted and looks very "premium", except for the fact that the keyboard "hole" is obviously DIN\AT sized but has a PS/2 port in the middle of it... which tells me this case wasn't tooled exactly for this machine.

I really vibe with the look of this Dell box, I know some have issues with the Dell brand but their early systems look ok. I feel you may have problems finding much about the early Dell builds, much like there isnt a lot of info about other brand from this era.

This one has a nice two tone retro look to it, I dig it !

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-03-03, 06:29:

Nabbed this untested Asus P3V4X 1.02 board today, comes with a iWill FC-FPGA compatible slotket too. No idea what CPU it has und […]
Show full quote

Nabbed this untested Asus P3V4X 1.02 board today, comes with a iWill FC-FPGA compatible slotket too. No idea what CPU it has under that cooler and the seller doesn't want to pull it apart, which I can understand so itll be a surprise to find out. The board looks like it has been pulled and left as was . .covered in dust and fluff so it'll need a good clean before I fire it up.

Don't have a Slot 1 Via 133A chipset board but the reviews have this one with what looks to be a freaking huge range of bus speeds and overclocking options, so fingers crossed its still alive. (No bloated or vented caps which is a nice sign)

It was dirt cheap too since it was untested and the seller just wants it gone, well im more than happy to add it to my testing pile 😁

Asus P3V4X.jpgRevision.jpgiWill Slotket.jpg

The Slotket is interesting too, I have a bunch of them now but none with caps and crazy fluro yellow jumpers.

There are at least two electrolytic caps missing, next to the "P3V 4X" text (CE20, CE23). Wouldn't fire it up before replacing them...

Edit: There's another one missing on the slotket I'd say.

ChrisK wrote on 2023-03-03, 08:32:

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-03-03, 06:29:

Nabbed this untested Asus P3V4X 1.02 board today, comes with a iWill FC-FPGA compatible slotket too. No idea what CPU it has und […]
Show full quote

Nabbed this untested Asus P3V4X 1.02 board today, comes with a iWill FC-FPGA compatible slotket too. No idea what CPU it has under that cooler and the seller doesn't want to pull it apart, which I can understand so itll be a surprise to find out. The board looks like it has been pulled and left as was . .covered in dust and fluff so it'll need a good clean before I fire it up.

Don't have a Slot 1 Via 133A chipset board but the reviews have this one with what looks to be a freaking huge range of bus speeds and overclocking options, so fingers crossed its still alive. (No bloated or vented caps which is a nice sign)

It was dirt cheap too since it was untested and the seller just wants it gone, well im more than happy to add it to my testing pile 😁

Asus P3V4X.jpgRevision.jpgiWill Slotket.jpg

The Slotket is interesting too, I have a bunch of them now but none with caps and crazy fluro yellow jumpers.

There are at least two electrolytic caps missing, next to the "P3V 4X" text (CE20, CE23). Wouldn't fire it up before replacing them...

Good spot, was going to go over it while cleaning it, any idea what these caps should be ?

Also noticed the Slotket may also have one missing (EC6) - Jinx (The 4 caps on the Slotket are all identical, easy enough to replace that one)

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-03-03, 08:23:

I really vibe with the look of this Dell box, I know some have issues with the Dell brand but their early systems look ok. I feel you may have problems finding much about the early Dell builds, much like there isnt a lot of info about other brand from this era.

This one has a nice two tone retro look to it, I dig it !

Yeah, I really like it too. It was a spur of the moment kind of purchase, so I really don't have room to keep it forever, but it will be fun to get it all working and looking as nice as possible.

The first thing I did was install my Parallel CF-Card reader and copy the contents of the hard drive to the CF card, just in case the drive takes a poo. I will probably dump the BIOS and VBIOS tomorrow too, just to be sure those get preserved.

I am also not a fan of most Dell PCs, other than some of the late 90s Optiplex and XPS systems (which were fantastic). This is my first experience with a Dell system made prior to the Pentium II era. One thing I noticed immediately was the extremely detailed specs listed on the box. It mentions having 1MB local bus video (its an integrated GD5426) and explains how 128KB cache makes the system much faster (unlike Packard Bell that didn't even bother giving you cache at all half the time, even on a Pentium). Also, it has really fantastic BIOS setting descriptions. It's a far cry from modern boards where there are so many hundreds of BIOS settings that they don't even bother describing 90% of them, and the ones that are described are in such broken English that it's nearly useless... or, my favorite, the description simply says that this settings changes this setting (AKFNWF = "Turns AKFNWF on or off.")

Fun times ahead. 😁

EDIT: Also, is there a DOS or Windows 3.1 program that works like Macrium Reflect in that it will allow me to do a complete 1:1 image of the drive? I think that Dell library menu may actually be on a separate partition and I have no idea how I would recover that. I'm almost positive that the 170MB hard drive will not be readable on any of my newer systems or via a USB adapter.

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-03-03, 08:34:

ChrisK wrote on 2023-03-03, 08:32:

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-03-03, 06:29:

Nabbed this untested Asus P3V4X 1.02 board today, comes with a iWill FC-FPGA compatible slotket too. No idea what CPU it has und […]
Show full quote

Nabbed this untested Asus P3V4X 1.02 board today, comes with a iWill FC-FPGA compatible slotket too. No idea what CPU it has under that cooler and the seller doesn't want to pull it apart, which I can understand so itll be a surprise to find out. The board looks like it has been pulled and left as was . .covered in dust and fluff so it'll need a good clean before I fire it up.

Don't have a Slot 1 Via 133A chipset board but the reviews have this one with what looks to be a freaking huge range of bus speeds and overclocking options, so fingers crossed its still alive. (No bloated or vented caps which is a nice sign)

It was dirt cheap too since it was untested and the seller just wants it gone, well im more than happy to add it to my testing pile 😁

Asus P3V4X.jpgRevision.jpgiWill Slotket.jpg

The Slotket is interesting too, I have a bunch of them now but none with caps and crazy fluro yellow jumpers.

There are at least two electrolytic caps missing, next to the "P3V 4X" text (CE20, CE23). Wouldn't fire it up before replacing them...

Good spot, was going to go over it while cleaning it, any idea what these caps should be ?

Also noticed the Slotket may also have one missing (EC6) - Jinx

Take the value of CE19 for the board.
Same for the slotket, use the value of one of the still existing ones.

ChrisK wrote on 2023-03-03, 08:46:

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-03-03, 08:34:

ChrisK wrote on 2023-03-03, 08:32:

There are at least two electrolytic caps missing, next to the "P3V 4X" text (CE20, CE23). Wouldn't fire it up before replacing them...

Good spot, was going to go over it while cleaning it, any idea what these caps should be ?

Also noticed the Slotket may also have one missing (EC6) - Jinx

Take the value of CE19 for the board.
Same for the slotket, use the value of one of the still existing ones.

Appear to be 6.3v 1000uf caps, likely filtering caps for the SDram slots.

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-03-03, 08:51:

ChrisK wrote on 2023-03-03, 08:46:

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-03-03, 08:34:

Good spot, was going to go over it while cleaning it, any idea what these caps should be ?

Also noticed the Slotket may also have one missing (EC6) - Jinx

Take the value of CE19 for the board.
Same for the slotket, use the value of one of the still existing ones.

Appear to be 6.3v 1000uf caps, likely filtering caps for the SDram slots.

Sounds reasonable and would be a typical value.
When I look again at the pictures there's also CE29 missing, just next to the RAM slots.
I wonder why would someone pull all those caps from the board? I mean, this doesn't look like it happened by accident.

ChrisK wrote on 2023-03-03, 11:45:

Sounds reasonable and would be a typical value. When I look again at the pictures there's also CE29 missing, just next to the RA […]
Show full quote

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-03-03, 08:51:

ChrisK wrote on 2023-03-03, 08:46:

Take the value of CE19 for the board.
Same for the slotket, use the value of one of the still existing ones.

Appear to be 6.3v 1000uf caps, likely filtering caps for the SDram slots.

Sounds reasonable and would be a typical value.
When I look again at the pictures there's also CE29 missing, just next to the RAM slots.
I wonder why would someone pull all those caps from the board? I mean, this doesn't look like it happened by accident.

Yup another one ..this one might be harder to ID (Its possible its a smaller diameter version of the larger ones, worth a shot since the board is dead without it)

As to why . .no idea, but I want to at least give the board a chance to live again so I may as well repair it, thankfully it was dirt cheap so I really don't mind that it was untested and well damaged.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2023-03-03, 08:39:

EDIT: Also, is there a DOS or Windows 3.1 program that works like Macrium Reflect in that it will allow me to do a complete 1:1 image of the drive? I think that Dell library menu may actually be on a separate partition and I have no idea how I would recover that. I'm almost positive that the 170MB hard drive will not be readable on any of my newer systems or via a USB adapter.

I often recommend dolly to image harddrives in DOS, you can find it on https://www.sac.sk, or an old version of Norton Ghost would do the job.