And more

Of course needs tidying up a bit but it's running.

Ssd is working well, sure I have no trim but it's booting fine.

Many thanks to vogons for the driver archive and many guides/information. Much appreciated.

Bad capacitors are a plague for Athlon era systems. It took me several attempts to find the motherboard I wanted without too many caps to replace.

Are you keeping it "not overclocked" on purpose ?
2500+Barton at 333 x 11 were quite often used at 400 x 11 (3200+ equiv.)

acl wrote on 2024-06-02, 18:52:

Bad capacitors are a plague for Athlon era systems. It took me several attempts to find the motherboard I wanted without too many caps to replace.

Are you keeping it "not overclocked" on purpose ?
2500+Barton at 333 x 11 were quite often used at 400 x 11 (3200+ equiv.)

For now yes, until I get a better PSU, and fix the two caps. the board seems quite stable though, and I have 'pushed it'.
so yes I will OC it once done.

only downside of the jetway is of course only has the 20pin atx and not the P4 4 pin plug as well.

I paid £26 (uk pounds) for the board, the cpu, the 512mb ram and the cpu cooler as one lot.
So it's a bargain as the cpu is worth that alone.

board is also known as the Acorp 7NFU400 (sometimes came as blue PCB under this alias)

basic mcp on southbridge but that doesn't bother me. its the fact its nforce 2 that counts.

Good choice on the case - period correct cases for Socket A tend to have inadequate cooling. My suggestions would be to replace all of the caps of the voltage/capacitance/brand of the ones which are failing. Over the decades the thermal paste on the northbridge chip has likely dried out and is now the consistency of chalk, so removing the heat sink and cleaning and reapplying it is a good idea.

Repo Man11 wrote on 2024-06-02, 20:22:

Good choice on the case - period correct cases for Socket A tend to have inadequate cooling. My suggestions would be to replace all of the caps of the voltage/capacitance/brand of the ones which are failing. Over the decades the thermal paste on the northbridge chip has likely dried out and is now the consistency of chalk, so removing the heat sink and cleaning and reapplying it is a good idea.

Thanks, yes that case has good airflow for sure. as for the thermal paste, thats already done and I had applied artic MX4. I do plan to install an active northbridge cooler for it as well.
I am crap at soldering but my friend said he would recap the bad caps for me if I supply the replacements.

it's definitely worth saving given its an ultra board.

I have just successfully (thanks to wayback machine) flashed the last ever bios (A10). I will gladly donate that file to the driver archive if need be.

My challenge is to find a replacement psu. it's in parameters but something odd with minus 5 volt. not that I think it needs it mind.

Volts from bios - in windows it shows 3.55V for the -5v rail..

I recently picked up one of those exact cases for free - mine came with a power supply and a Gigabyte Z68 motherboard and an i5 2600. Small world sometimes.

Repo Man11 wrote on 2024-06-02, 21:19:

I recently picked up one of those exact cases for free - mine came with a power supply and a Gigabyte Z68 motherboard and an i5 2600. Small world sometimes.

very good, thats a bargain

on my quest to find a beefy +5v PSU I have found a company called 'vida'. they appear to be in the UK (has an address of Bournemouth so up the road from me) but we know stuff still originates elsewhere.
interestingly they sell PSU's with or without the 'lite' part.

the lite versions seem to have weaker 12v but 5v and 3.3 is at 36A and 30A respectively if you go for the 500w. the 650 seems to be +3.3v = 30A, +5v = 36A, and +12v = 30A.

this might just be the ticket for that barton CPU.

the specs look good however, the million dollar question is though is it bad quality? not sure. Given though uk stores seem to be stocking them I may give it a punt and I could always pay them a visit if it blows up my PC. 🤣

The whole batch of caps must be replaced asap not just the bulgy boys.
Like for the Santa Cruz.

Bruno128 wrote on 2024-06-03, 18:33:

The whole batch of caps must be replaced asap not just the bulgy boys.
Like for the Santa Cruz.

The santa cruz is fine, that's already been tested. Plenty of life left in that one. For a soundcard it's fairly loud on headphones too. Clean audio as well, no issues.

The board will be sorted though.

Nice build!

I have pretty much the same motherboard combined with the same CPU and a 9600 non-pro video card.
Actually, I have the lower-end model of that mobo: the N2PAP-LITE. Aside from onboard video and extra memory slot, I don't see that many other differences.
You'll definitely want to recap that motherboard, though - sooner preferable than later.
I did that with mine back in 2013 and made a detailed post on Badcaps. Here it is, if that might be of any help to you or whoever you send it in for a recap:
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/troubleshooting … therboard-recap

*edit*
Just wanted to note something in regards to the recap I showed on Badcaps forums: some of the capacitors I used for the recap of my N2PAP-LITE may no loner be available for sale or may be very old stock (notably Nichicon HM, HN, and HZ series.) For these, feel free to use:
Rubycon ZLH, ZLK, ZL
Panasonic FR, FS, FM
Nichicon HV and HW
United Chemicon KZH and KZM
They are not quite as good as HM, HN, and HZ, but are "reasonably" close and at least still on par with the original GSC/Evercon caps.
You could also use polymers too... or do a mix to get the best of both worlds.

*edit 2*
I see the two bulging capacitors on your picture... looks like the filters for the Northbridge Vcc/Vcore... which is what interconnects the CPU and RAM data, as socket A CPUs didn't have onboard mem controller yet. That'll explain the occasional crashes you see.

BTW, I also just noticed... does that label say "RADION" on the back of the video card? 🤣

biohazardx9 wrote on 2024-06-02, 20:50:

My challenge is to find a replacement psu. it's in parameters but something odd with minus 5 volt. not that I think it needs it mind.

Don't.
That 300 Watt Delta is a solid choice for a retro PC. Just open it up and give it a visual inspection for bad caps too. If needed, send it for a recap when you get to send the motherboard for the same treatment. Most Delta PSUs are bulletproof. Same with HiPro/Chicony from the same era.

biohazardx9 wrote on 2024-06-03, 09:55:

on my quest to find a beefy +5v PSU I have found a company called 'vida'. they appear to be in the UK (has an address of Bournemouth so up the road from me) but we know stuff still originates elsewhere.
interestingly they sell PSU's with or without the 'lite' part.

the lite versions seem to have weaker 12v but 5v and 3.3 is at 36A and 30A respectively if you go for the 500w. the 650 seems to be +3.3v = 30A, +5v = 36A, and +12v = 30A.

36 Amps on the 5V rail and 30 Amps for the 3.3V rail?? On a recent/modern-day production PSU??? 🤣 🤣 Nah, man, no way!
It's probably going to be a cheap China POS PSU.
run away!!!

biohazardx9 wrote on 2024-06-03, 09:55:

the specs look good however, the million dollar question is though is it bad quality?

How bad do you want to find out? 🤣

Repo Man11 wrote on 2024-06-02, 20:22:

Good choice on the case - period correct cases for Socket A tend to have inadequate cooling.

Indeed... well, most of them anyways.

Repo Man11 wrote on 2024-06-02, 20:22:

My suggestions would be to replace all of the caps of the voltage/capacitance/brand of the ones which are failing.

It's a Jetway motherboard from the early 2000's, so over 90% chance it's going to be littered with GSC/Evercon capacitors, which are all garbage. Thus a full recap will almost certainly be needed.

Excellent resource there, and yes I will pass that onto my friend.

yes the only differences is the northbridge, you have the Nforce 2- 400 vs my nforce 2 - ultra. Which simply means you don't have dual channel DDR, not the extra USB ports. other than that identical.

Any nforce 2 board is worth saving. if you think the delta is upto the task, I'll stick with it. does the pap2 use the -5v? mines showing some odd values.
What I'll do is when the board is out for re-cap, I'll pop the PSU and take a look.

yes powercolor were lazy and mistyped the GPU label. it's a terrible shameful card. its 100% identical to the 9600 Pro. even the card says R96 on the PCB. yet they shamefully plugged it with a locked 9550 bios and shoved a few stickers on it.

A RaBit edit later and a forced flash with flashrom's -sst switch and in we go restored back to stock.

biohazardx9 wrote on 2024-06-04, 15:42:

does the pap2 use the -5v?

You don’t need minus 5.
That’s for Pro Audio Spectrum from 1992 and similar ISA cards.

I have a similar build:
- BioStar M7NCD Ultra
- Barton 2500+ running at 3200+ speed
- 2GB DDR 400
- 128GB Samsung SATA, using a a promise PCI adapter, I couldn't make the SIL 3114 work on my system.
- Creative X-FI Fatality
- Radeon 9800XT, I would love to use my 9700PRO on this build, but I don't trust it won't burn, so I keep the 9800XT that has way better cooling.

I use a modern power supply from a Lenovo Desktop and never had an issue, even with the CPU overclock and the way more powerfull video card. The 5V requirement for socket A is somewhat exagerated.

Pino wrote on 2024-06-04, 18:25:

I have a similar build: - BioStar M7NCD Ultra - Barton 2500+ running at 3200+ speed - 2GB DDR 400 - 128GB Samsung SATA, using a […]
Show full quote

I have a similar build:
- BioStar M7NCD Ultra
- Barton 2500+ running at 3200+ speed
- 2GB DDR 400
- 128GB Samsung SATA, using a a promise PCI adapter, I couldn't make the SIL 3114 work on my system.
- Creative X-FI Fatality
- Radeon 9800XT, I would love to use my 9700PRO on this build, but I don't trust it won't burn, so I keep the 9800XT that has way better cooling.

I use a modern power supply from a Lenovo Desktop and never had an issue, even with the CPU overclock and the way more powerfull video card. The 5V requirement for socket A is somewhat exagerated.

Interesting, I'd like to see the specs of that psu.
Mind you the 9800 has it's own power connector.

For the sil3114 I flashed the ide bios, and inside the bios I chose hdd-0 as first boot device.
Once in windows I installed the driver that also gives the control panel.
Been fine although I know the promise is much better.

My experience has been that the Sil-3114 works very well when it works at all - in the systems I've tried it in where it didn't work, nothing I could do seemed to make any difference. But in the systems I've tried those PCI SATA cards in where it did work, it had no issues at all and gave me good transfer speeds.

Repo Man11 wrote on 2024-06-04, 20:55:

My experience has been that the Sil-3114 works very well when it works at all - in the systems I've tried it in where it didn't work, nothing I could do seemed to make any difference. But in the systems I've tried those PCI SATA cards in where it did work, it had no issues at all and gave me good transfer speeds.

I must have been very lucky it seems.