First post, by retro games 100
- Rank
- l33t
I am testing an MSI Geforce FX5950 AGP graphics card, alongside my "new" Enermax Noisemaker 😉 PSU. The seller's photo for the 5950 didn't fire me up with too much confidence regarding it's working status. And it was sent to me in a padded bag. The cap closest to the power socket was not flat. Tapping it produced a kind of bad "tinny/hollow" sound, as if something wasn't right with it. I decided to push the capacitor flat down on to the PCB.
Power on, and on the BIOS POST screen I see one "odd" character on the screen, amongst the other valid BIOS POST message text lines. Then, when the autoexec.bat lines appear, I see some more "odd" characters. When the Windows 98 splash screen appears, I see a very small cluster of "odd" pixels which should not be there. However, I was pleasantly surprised to see the "VGA / no driver" desktop appear without corruption. I was even more surprised to see the nVidia "56.something driver" installation succeed, with no corruption on the desktop.
I briefly ran a few benchies, and they seemed to work OK! No scores yet, because I'm using a slow Duron 600, and I want to swap it out for an Athlon XP CPU. (I'm using a KT7A board.)
Also, I decided to order some retro bits n pieces from the USA, such as some old CD-ROM drives. The individual shipping costs (which were correct and not "inflated" by the sellers) were understandably expensive.
Edit: I noticed on the Enermax noisetaker PSU, the power plug has no "snap off" section, where you can reduce the 24 pin plug down to a 20 pin plug. Consequently, the 24 pin plug did not fit on to my Soltek 75 KAV board because there were some caps in the way, and I had to dig out my Abit board instead. The 24 pin power plug does fit on to this board (because there's nothing in the way, such as caps etc), but obviously the extra 4 pins "hang over the edge" of the Abit's 20 pin socket.