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Bought these (retro) hardware today

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Reply 56720 of 56742, by PcBytes

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Update: unknown 430TX mobo from the M577 bundle turned out to be a Tekram P5T30-B4E

"Enter at your own peril, past the bolted door..."
Main PC: i5 3470, GB B75M-D3H, 16GB RAM, 2x1TB
98SE : P3 650, Soyo SY-6BA+IV, 384MB RAM, 80GB

Reply 56721 of 56742, by Trashbytes

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zuldan wrote on 2025-05-06, 21:06:
PD2JK wrote on 2025-05-06, 17:57:
Yet another mystery box, a local listing with a very concise title: old pc. Two pictures as well. […]
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Yet another mystery box, a local listing with a very concise title: old pc. Two pictures as well.

When you see this, a retro enthousiast knows enough:

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I just had to have it, so I did. Lost a kidney again but still happy.

Crappy pic:

The attachment DSC_4013.JPG is no longer available

(PT-2006 board in the background)

Now to get some Sega controllers.

Might be a good time to go buy a lottery ticket 😉

The NV1 was an interesting Quad rendering card, the fact it used squares over triangles made it difficult to program for though. Very cool card but has very limited potential use aside from collecting, the NV2 was also rumored to use quads and due to how poorly the NV1 was received got dropped. A lot of the research and development got moved to the NV3 better known as the Riva 128 and well the rest is history as they say.

I place this card right alongside the Fury MAXX, both damn cool cards to have in the collection but neither are terrible useful as retro gaming cards. (I still don't own a NV1, they are priced out of reach of your average collector unless you get lucky)

Nvidia made the right choice to drop quads, it was a cool experiment and showed that other forms of rendering besides triangles could work, the industry however spoke and went with the easier to program for triangles. IIRC they are also easier for the GPU computationally requiring less time to process in the rendering pipeline.

Reply 56722 of 56742, by pete8475

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I made a silly ebay purchase today. An Asus TUA266, I've always wanted a 370 board with either RD or DDR ram so here we are. I paid WAY too much, attached is the sellers pic.

Reply 56723 of 56742, by gerry

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pete8475 wrote on 2025-05-06, 23:14:

I made a silly ebay purchase today. An Asus TUA266, I've always wanted a 370 board with either RD or DDR ram so here we are. I paid WAY too much, attached is the sellers pic.

Looks good though, some high end P3 based possibilities there.

Reply 56724 of 56742, by PcBytes

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Laptop purchases from the bay. @3lectr1c might like them 😀

- Maxdata MP-989 (Chicony rebrand, my fave since it uses the full blown desktop Award Bios 4.51!)
- Compaq Armada 1598DT

"Enter at your own peril, past the bolted door..."
Main PC: i5 3470, GB B75M-D3H, 16GB RAM, 2x1TB
98SE : P3 650, Soyo SY-6BA+IV, 384MB RAM, 80GB

Reply 56725 of 56742, by appiah4

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I don't buy much anymore, but when one of my regular junkyard guys rang me up with two miserable looking 386 boards and CPUs I said OK and paid up.

They took a bit of work to get working, both had battery damage and one had pretty terrible corrosion all over. They both work now, though.

Reply 56726 of 56742, by Intel486dx33

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appiah4 wrote on 2025-05-07, 13:12:

I don't buy much anymore, but when one of my regular junkyard guys rang me up with two miserable looking 386 boards and CPUs I said OK and paid up.

They took a bit of work to get working, both had battery damage and one had pretty terrible corrosion all over. They both work now, though.

Good buy.
Hard to find good 386 motherboards today.

Reply 56727 of 56742, by lepidotós

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Well, I won a Voodoo2 (without the FBI, so I'd have to source one of those) for $32 total, but it seems I wasn't 100% accurate in budgeting so I'll have to see if I can get paid before it lapses because I'm literally a few dollars short.

Reply 56728 of 56742, by PD2JK

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This Western Digital WD93028-X came in today.
Upon testing, the spindle motor did work for one second. Then some magic smoke came from the PCB and the external power supply went in short circuit protection mode (blinking led). Should be repairable, hopefully the platters and actuator are okay. The drive would be great for my Philips NMS9100.

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Edit: shorted capacitor replaced. Now to get some movement in that stepper... Hopefully a few drops of oil will do the trick.

i386 16 ⇒ i486 DX4 100 ⇒ Pentium MMX 200 ⇒ Athlon Orion 700 | TB 1000 ⇒ AthlonXP 1700+ ⇒ Opteron 165 ⇒ Dual Opteron 856

Reply 56729 of 56742, by Nunoalex

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Intel486dx33 wrote on 2025-05-07, 13:32:
appiah4 wrote on 2025-05-07, 13:12:

I don't buy much anymore, but when one of my regular junkyard guys rang me up with two miserable looking 386 boards and CPUs I said OK and paid up.

They took a bit of work to get working, both had battery damage and one had pretty terrible corrosion all over. They both work now, though.

Good buy.
Hard to find good 386 motherboards today.

Awesome little 386 motherboards

yes rare already these days...

Reply 56730 of 56742, by PcBytes

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Some more cards to finish this month's parts lot!

- Terratec ESS 1869F soundcard + Crystal wavetable (GOLD 16/96)
- ATI Radeon X1950 Pro AGP 256MB AGP8X (Powercolor)
- Quadro 4 750XGL (PNY)
- Geforce FX5900XT (MSI)

"Enter at your own peril, past the bolted door..."
Main PC: i5 3470, GB B75M-D3H, 16GB RAM, 2x1TB
98SE : P3 650, Soyo SY-6BA+IV, 384MB RAM, 80GB

Reply 56731 of 56742, by PcBytes

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Well, slowly becoming the Artex of recycler rescues:

- 2x ASUS P3B-F
- ABIT KA7-100
- 2 or 3 GA-7IXE
- BX2000+
- BX2000 standard
- 2x MSI 6167
- I think at least two GA-7IX
- Socket 8 Dell mobo
- Epox EP-MVP3G5
- ASUS P2B-DS Rev 1.05
- Tekram P5M3-A+ (686A!!!)
- another PCChips M577
- some Intel Desktop board that I suspect is dual Slot 1 + 440GX, and uses Cirrus Logic video

"Enter at your own peril, past the bolted door..."
Main PC: i5 3470, GB B75M-D3H, 16GB RAM, 2x1TB
98SE : P3 650, Soyo SY-6BA+IV, 384MB RAM, 80GB

Reply 56732 of 56742, by Trashbytes

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PcBytes wrote on Yesterday, 12:45:
Well, slowly becoming the Artex of recycler rescues: […]
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Well, slowly becoming the Artex of recycler rescues:

- 2x ASUS P3B-F
- ABIT KA7-100
- 2 or 3 GA-7IXE
- BX2000+
- BX2000 standard
- 2x MSI 6167
- I think at least two GA-7IX
- Socket 8 Dell mobo
- Epox EP-MVP3G5
- ASUS P2B-DS Rev 1.05
- Tekram P5M3-A+ (686A!!!)
- another PCChips M577
- some Intel Desktop board that I suspect is dual Slot 1 + 440GX, and uses Cirrus Logic video

Do you like own a warehouse or something ?

Where in hell do you store all these rescues 🤣

Reply 56733 of 56742, by PcBytes

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Trashbytes wrote on Yesterday, 12:46:
PcBytes wrote on Yesterday, 12:45:
Well, slowly becoming the Artex of recycler rescues: […]
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Well, slowly becoming the Artex of recycler rescues:

- 2x ASUS P3B-F
- ABIT KA7-100
- 2 or 3 GA-7IXE
- BX2000+
- BX2000 standard
- 2x MSI 6167
- I think at least two GA-7IX
- Socket 8 Dell mobo
- Epox EP-MVP3G5
- ASUS P2B-DS Rev 1.05
- Tekram P5M3-A+ (686A!!!)
- another PCChips M577
- some Intel Desktop board that I suspect is dual Slot 1 + 440GX, and uses Cirrus Logic video

Do you like own a warehouse or something ?

Where in hell do you store all these rescues 🤣

Me home, and whatever doesn't work after all operations done (now that I have a POST card) goes back to the local recyclers/gold scrappers

"Enter at your own peril, past the bolted door..."
Main PC: i5 3470, GB B75M-D3H, 16GB RAM, 2x1TB
98SE : P3 650, Soyo SY-6BA+IV, 384MB RAM, 80GB

Reply 56734 of 56742, by Susanin79

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Bought this laptop:
Chicony NB5625. Intel 386SX @25MHz CPU; 1MB RAM + expansion board; 9.5" Passive Grayscale (32 shades) LCD @640x480 (does not work from sellers description); no power adapter included.
Will try to return it back to life.

Reply 56735 of 56742, by Alexraptor

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Bought a set of three assorted AGP graphics cards. One of them was a Matrox Millenium G450 Dual Head, a pretty sweet upgrade from my Win 98 machines old G200.

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Reply 56736 of 56742, by riplin

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I still find it odd that the G450 has a grounded heat sink.

Reply 56737 of 56742, by Alexraptor

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riplin wrote on Yesterday, 20:19:

I still find it odd that the G450 has a grounded heat sink.

You know, I was actually wondering what that wire was for!

Reply 56738 of 56742, by Thermalwrong

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Susanin79 wrote on Yesterday, 14:08:

Bought this laptop:
Chicony NB5625. Intel 386SX @25MHz CPU; 1MB RAM + expansion board; 9.5" Passive Grayscale (32 shades) LCD @640x480 (does not work from sellers description); no power adapter included.
Will try to return it back to life.

Ooh, that looks really cool - I like the detail on the lid. It's got that same grey-brown plastic coating that my Veridata laptop has: Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today
Hopefully you can get the LCD working with recapping it potentially? Hopefully it's fixable since I feel that the mono screens give the laptops from this era a lot of their character.

Yesterday I received this Compaq LTE Elite 4/40CX laptop - it was being sold untested and I thought that for £30 in total it was worth a go:

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And it was, it had the memory expansion and the HDD caddy along with a working hard drive. Wow! Untested Vintage laptops are my favourite lootboxes 😀

But oh the list of things wrong with it:

  1. Does not turn on - this was the easy part to resolve
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  2. LCD has 'vinegar syndrome' where the front polariser is starting to break down. There's a 45 degree line on the LCD where it's starting to go and there are air bubbles forming. That wasn't visible in the auction pictures but oh well, it comes with the territory of working with 30 year old computers
  3. Two missing keys, I'm planning to 3d print them but haven't got as far as CAD / measurements yet
  4. Missing trackball and the clip that would hold it in place. Don't know if I'll bother trying to fix that, a regular mouse is better
  5. Completely destroyed hinges

That last one has been the major problem, the geometry of these hinges is such that they can only fit the original cast metal parts in the space of the mountings and hinge covers. As far as I can tell, there is no source of replacement hinges so if a Compaq LTE Elite has busted hinges, that's that.
These hinges are broken in 3 ways:
A. Broken metal that connects the LCD section to the friction hinge through the use of a splined shaft. This means that the mounting of the LCD to the hinge is completely loose, floppy screen. It just clicks where the splines are just clicking from one position to the next, so the lcd can't make use of the friction hinge part.

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How I fixed the loose splined shaft

This round section was splitting and broken into multiple pieces where the material strength was overcome by corrosion, overtight friction hinge or bad angles caused by loose screws and the damaged segment of the solid section of the hinge visible above.

This round segment connects the splined metal shaft of the friction hinge to the LCD screen.
Because it was broken, the LCD screen section of the hinge could not apply meaningful force to the shaft and would instead 'click' as the round section rotated on the splines of the shaft instead of keying to it.
To resolve this, tape was put around the round section to give a circular shape, then epoxy was dripped into the hole for the flange. Once enough epoxy had been dripped in, the flanged shaft was placed inside, escaped epoxy was cleaned up and it was left to harden.
While it was hardening, the part was checked to ensure that the epoxy was not stopping the shaft of the friction hinge from turning and some excess epoxy resin was cleaned off.

The full force of the hinge was not tested again until the glue had been allowed to harden for 8 hours.

B. Broken mount on one side of the LCD housing part of the hinge - this was fixed by using a metal plate and some clear tape that was cut and folded on itself to make an 'epoxy bucket' to make a structure for the epoxy that won't interfere with the screw mounting points or LCD front bezel plastic.
I got a lot of my ideas for this from this page detailing how to fix Compaq Contura hinges: https://www.dreamcast.nu/en/compaq-contura-42 … p-hinge-repair/
See the text on this image for more details on how the epoxy was given shape without messing up screwthreads or plastics:

The attachment hinge repair - epoxy bucket.jpg is no longer available

C. The hinges on both sides have broken mounts that hold the hinges to the chassis - this was fixed by using blutack to make an 'epoxy cup' structure to pour resin into the only space available in the hinge mounting area. See the text on this image for full details:

The attachment hinge repair - epoxy cup.jpg is no longer available

3 separate stages to the overall repair but the hinges are now working pretty well! Oh also, although this laptop says LTE ELITE 4/40CX on the lid, you may have noticed the heatsink on the CPU card? That's because it's really a 486 DX4 75MHz, making this an LTE ELITE 4/75CX with a cute little 8.4" VGA LCD panel

Reply 56739 of 56742, by dominusprog

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Alexraptor wrote on Yesterday, 21:59:
riplin wrote on Yesterday, 20:19:

I still find it odd that the G450 has a grounded heat sink.

You know, I was actually wondering what that wire was for!

Grounding the heatsink done for eliminating the internal current of the chip. The output quality is excellent, but unfortunately the memory bus is 64 bits.

https://incompliancemag.com/proper-heatsink-grounding/

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