VOGONS


First post, by Elia1995

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Hello, today a professor of mine called me and asked me if I wanted to pick up some working retro hardware his father was going to trash and I obviously accepted and I got a lot of new old stuff, some of which I never had before, such as a Pentium II SLOT 1 (but it's without CPU and I don't have that processor, never had a Slot 1 before) and finally 2 Socket 7 motherboards for my Intel Pentium 100 (remember those ? I posted them last year on I don't remember which thread precisely).

Here are some quick pictures of the "loot", tomorrow I'll take some pictures of the inside of them and I'll start testing them, hopefully I get a better DOS PC than my current best one, which relies on an Intel Celeron which isn't good at all for DOS since it's 1 GHz and games such Jazz Jackrabbit don't even work.

I'll also list which hardware I've recognized so far.

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This is a brand I've never actually heard before, "AST", the model written there is an AST Bravo 486/25, I don't yet know if it's a DX or a SX.
It's currently the only horizontal PC that he gave me (he still has a lot more stuff that will eventually give me away in the next weeks).

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Here are some of the other tower computers

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Here are the two Socket 7 motherboards, one of which is in its own box, the other one is in the box of a motherboard which has both DDR and SDRAM and is in one of those tower computers.
The one that came in its box I can already tell is a "ICA Pro Mainboard" (you can read it on the side of the box in that picture).

Now for the other hardware (hopefully more pictures tomorrow):

- A bunch of floppy (both 3" and 5"), CD and DVD drives
- A HUGE AT PSU which will come useful to test the Socket 7 motherboards
- A bunch of SDRAMs and those small RAMs that usually go into 386 and 486 computers
- A brand new (never used before) gameport gamepad
- A sealed box of 3" floppies !!!
- A bag full with 5" floppies

and more stuff I now can't remember.

I guess that today was the day that I finally got a lot of new retro stuff (unfortunately he didn't find any DDR1 rams, so I can't test the computers that use only DDR1... but if he told me that whenever he does, he'll let me know) to experiment, make new videos of, benchmark and test and, of course, even enjoy playing with when working.

I'm particularly excited for all those towers PCs with AGP slots !!! I can finally test all my AGP graphics cards I found last year and I could never try out, everyone knows that AGP is the best for Windows 98, so I can't wait to make an awesome Windows 98 PC among them.

Unfortunately all computers are without hard drives and without ram, except one which has RAM and everything (not 100% sure about hard drives though, but I hope those rams are DDR1).
So finally I can contribute to this community with new material and make new videos after a while 😁

Good thing I always tell everyone that if they have old computers and other retro stuff and want to trash them, they can give them to me instead, totally worth it (when the stuff works, obviously...)

Last edited by Elia1995 on 2017-07-29, 19:50. Edited 1 time in total.

Currently assembled vintage computers I own: 11

Most important ones:
A "modded" Olivetti M4 434 S (currently broken).
An Epson El Plus 386DX running MS-DOS 6.22 (currently broken).
Celeron Coppermine 1.10GHz on an M754LMRTP motherboard

Reply 1 of 103, by Tetrium

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Looks like a good haul! 😁
So you had zero AGP motherboards? How did you manage? And which AGP cards do you have for testing?
Finding out what RAM you have is easy. You could even upload a pic with readable markings. But you could probably see it from the pin count, but most will have a sticker with details on the memory stick anyway (yours doesn't?).

For the older SIMMs, there's 30p and 72p modules. But I'd say, just pic anything you don't know anything about. There's probably someone here who knows what you have 😀

Whats missing in your collections?
My retro rigs (old topic)
Interesting Vogons threads (links to Vogonswiki)
Report spammers here!

Reply 2 of 103, by Elia1995

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I have plenty of AGP graphics cards, most of them were just "one the upgrade of another" throughout the years, most of them were only been used by my father, while I used some of them in the past, especially during my childhood.
For example one of my childhood favourite AGP graphics cards is my nVidia GeForce 7300, on which I managed to play The Sims 2 for the first time ever !!! It's a damn pretty good AGP card and that could be the key for a respectful Windows 98 machine.
I even have a 3v AGP card which needs a "reversed" AGP socket, it's an S3 something I think,I already made a thread out of it last year: Reversed AGP slots ? Is this even possible ?! .
Good thing among those computers there are some with that 3v "reversed" AGP slot and I maybe even saw one with an universal one (no dividers in the slot, just a single hole), most of them are "normal" AGP ones, though, so perhaps I will be able to try any AGP card I have 😁
I ran out of AGP motherboards because most of them either got lost, or died and I then only had PCI-express motherboards or some motherboards without even a GPU slot, such as the one that fuels my Intel Celeron Windows/DOS machine. (good thing it has a built in TNT2 which makes a good work under Windows for some 3D games).
As for RAM, I usually recognize them by the socket and the pins, the 72p DIMMs I think are the ones that my AWE32 sound blaster uses, I wish I could have more than 2 MB for soundfonts...
I got a bunch of DIMMs (of which I already had a lot lying around... but only 30 pins, for motherboards and none for my AWE32) and SDRAMs among that treasure, at least I can test right away all the motherboards that use SDRAMs.

Currently assembled vintage computers I own: 11

Most important ones:
A "modded" Olivetti M4 434 S (currently broken).
An Epson El Plus 386DX running MS-DOS 6.22 (currently broken).
Celeron Coppermine 1.10GHz on an M754LMRTP motherboard

Reply 3 of 103, by oeuvre

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Slick haul. AST made nice machines in the 80s and 90s then they went out of business. 🙁

They were quality!

HP Z420 Workstation Intel Xeon E5-1620, 32GB, RADEON HD7850 2GB, SSD + HD, XP/7
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Reply 4 of 103, by Elia1995

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Ok, as I promised, today I'm posting all the photos of everything I got yesterday.
PCs apart, it was a total of a big box, two bags and a big leather purse worth of stuff of which I spent all this morning to unbox and take a photo of.
But enough talking, let's see the photos, shall we ? Be warned: the pictures are a lot and I really mean it, a lot, an entire photobook worth of photos at least.

I'll add a brief description of the items under each photo, as much as I can.

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Let's start with these 3 CPUs I forgot to mention yesterday.
They are an AMD 486 DX2 66MHz, a TI 486 DX2 80MHz and an Intel Pentium (not sure if 100MHz or lower yet)

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Unfortunately, the TI 486 DX2-80's and the Pentium's pins are a bit bent, so I'll have to work to straight them up first, on other hand, the AMD 486 DX2-66's pins are perfect (or at least it seems to me).
I wonder if those two 486 will work on the Socket 7 motherboards ? I can't find any info on Google, so until I won't get the Pentium fixed I'd like to try the motherboard with those, they do fit, however I don't know if the voltage is fine for these 3.4v CPUs.

Now let's talk about RAM, I got A LOT of SDRAM, some of which didn't seem to work (I'll retry them after cleaning the contacts with isopropyl alcohol and an eraser), while the others that worked I then subdivided them into 32MB, 64MB, 128MB and even 256MB.
I also found some 72p and 30p (I was wrong, I think that my AWE32 uses 30 pins DIMMs, I want to try them and see if I can get over 2MB...)
I also found only 3 DDR1 RAMs, two of which seem to work and one doesn't (but again, I'll retry it after the "treatment").
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Here's a picture of all the RAMs I found.
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After trying each one, one by one on one of those PCs, I then divided them into their respective memory amount.
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And these are the ones that made the computers beep and never start, I'll retry them after the treatment.
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These are the only DDR1 RAMs I found... maybe one day I'll finally get more of these... luckily most of those computers use SDRAM.

1st Goodies Box

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Let's get a closer look of all the stuff I found in that first goodies box.

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VORTEX-don't-know-yet-which-model PCI sound card
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Creative Sound Blaster CT4810 PCI sound card
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PCI SCSI controller
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Avance Logic PCI graphics card which misses the same kind of chips as my S3 Virge
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These two PCI mysterious cards, I have no idea what kind of card that is... an hybrid network and sound card ??
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3 old school PCI network cards
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An ISA card with a parallel port and an unknown port which is not a serial port (it has more pins than a serial port)
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4 486-Pentium era CPU coolers, 3 with the heatsink and 1 with just the fan
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A vintage USB webcam, I have no idea what model or brand it is, so it'll be hard to find the drivers to test it, but it would be funny to do, I still have the very first webcam I had as a kid... this one: webcm.jpg

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USB hubs, one of them it seems to come with some PS/2 ports as well for some reason 😁
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I also found another (I guess) Intel Pentium, but I can't check if it is a Pentium because the heatsink is like glued on it, the thermal paste must have become concrete after 20 years...
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Unfortunately, this one has some bent pins aswell... so I got a total of 4 ceramic CPUs yesterday
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A handful of mouses, on the left they are serial and on the right they are PS/2.
The bottom serial one has an extra side button, never thought I'd see one of those extra buttons in a 20 years old mouse, I thought they were modern stuff... however it doesn't have a scroll wheel nor a middle mouse button, so that side button is actually a middle mouse button...
And yes, they are ALL with the tracking ball which I deeply hate, none of those (especially PS/2 is optical...), guess I'll try them all and then I'll recluse them along with all my other tracking ball vintage mouses I got over the years -_-
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I also got 4 floppy drives, one of which has the front I/O broken, I'll test them all one by one and see which works and which doesn't.
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An "I don't know how much really useful" Sitecom modem
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These optical drives, again I'll test them and see what works and what doesn't
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The biggest PC speaker I've ever seen... but with broken cables
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and apparently with also the special super power of magnetical attracting small coins...

I then also found 2 mysterious things:
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This mysterious cable with the car electrical plug

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and this mysterious Logitech box, I really have no idea what it is, it has two PS/2 connectors only, one green and one... orange ?! WTF I've never seen a PS/2 orange connector before, only green, purple and white...

Goodies part 2: the bags
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The black bag contained all of these 5" floppy disks, some more ram (which is included in the first picture in which I showed all the RAM I found) and pretty much just this.
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I didn't spend much time on counting those 5" floppies, but I think they might be just 100 or less, not sure.

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A nice 235W ATX PSU, enough powerful for maybe Windows 98 computers or to just test the motherboards.

Goodies part 3: The big leather purse
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My professor's father also gave me this huge leather purse which he doesn't even want back (well, looks pretty neat anyway)
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Inside of which there were these.

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A PCI-Express ATI Radeon X800 GTO, maybe could have Windows 98 drivers like my X300SE, this one has even more VRAM (256MB), so it might be even better for my Project 98: My finally working "Project 98" computer !!!

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2 5" floppy drives, one of which has the plastic switch stuck... the bottom one, not sure if there's a way to fix it.

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A very useful AT PSU

And that's it with the "goodies".

Now let's see the inside of the computers !!!

Don't worry about the dust, I've took a photo of each computer in the state it was as he gave me them, I'll then disassembly and clean each part accurately and rebuild them. (these photos also will help me to get the same components exactly as they were before !!!)

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This is the AST Bravo 486/25, now it's my third horizontal PC of that kind, I tried to insert an ISA sound card in there but it's extremely painful and hard, even though the metallic edge of the sound card enters perfectly between the motherboard and the case.
It has a 486DX 25MHz CPU and is also the only computer of that loot with an hardisk, it has a 212 MB Western Digital hardisk Type 6 with Windows 95 already installed (although I can't boot right in, I think I need a Windows 95 boot floppy or something), I entered into the hardisk with my MS-DOS 6.0 1st floppy and I saw that there is a Windows folder in the hardisk, I went there and did winver.exe and it says it's Windows 95.
Also the battery is dead, it uses a rectangular bulky big lithium (I think) battery, I forgot to take a photo of it, maybe next time.
Not sure how much RAM there is, I forgot to do mem

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This tower PC is branded Fujitsu Siemens, I have no idea which model it is, although I believe it was a pre-assembled computer once.
It has a very unique case featuring a sliding PSU, I've never had nor seen anything like that before and I even needed a bit of time to figure out how to remove the PSU which was covering the whole motherboard.
It uses DDR1 RAM and it sports a AMD Athlon 2500 CPU

Ah yes, all these computers were given to me without any hardisk and without CD/DVD drives, so I'll have some problems to fully test them, as I don't have any good IDE hardisk anymore... I found a lot of IDE hardrives last year, but most of them were broken, doing strange sounds, not spinning and not working.
For those computers who will allow me to boot from USB, I can try something with Hiren's Boot CD, mostly hardware tests to see every hardware spec and then be able to look for the drivers.
But the ones that don't allow me to boot from USB, for now, I can only enjoy the boot and the BIOS, I'm afraid.

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This one has an AOpen MX59 Pro II, a Socket 7 (yes, Socket 7) motherboard which uses ATX instead of AT, sports 4 PCI slots and an ISA slot and requires 2 SDRAMs to work.
I couldn't get this one to turn on, I plugged it in, there are no leds on the motherboard, I then pressed the button and nothing happened.
I'll have to try jumpstarting it somehow else, but I'll first try to remove the CPU from there and put it in those other two Socket 7 motherboards to see if it's the CPU dead, I don't know which CPU it is, might be a Pentium, but also any other Socket 7 compatible one...
(forgot to take a picture of the front of the case 🤣 )

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This one has an ASRock motherboard (I don't know what model it is yet) with an AGP graphics card slot and 5 PCI lanes.
It requires 3 DDR rams and it didn't have the PSU already in.
I first tried with the ATX PSU I got yesterday and then I tried with another ATX PSU I had lying around, none of them worked.
Again I don't see any LEDs on the motherboard, there aren't any at all and it doesn't do anything at all when I press the power button.

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This one requires a Pentium SLOT CPU, which I don't have so until I won't get one, I won't be able to ever test it.
The chip in the middle between the CPU Slot and the rams isn't a processor, but the chipset, so it really needs the Pentium SLOT.
However, it has a 3v AGP graphics card socket and some PCI and ISA slots.

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This one has an AMD Duron CPU, uses SDRAMs and has an universal AGP slot, along with 5 PCI lanes.

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This is another one that doesn't turn on, it uses DDR1 rams and, according to the sticker on the front of the case, it has an AMD Sempron, we'll obviously know the truth once I'll remove it from the motherboard and clean it.
It has an AGP graphics card slot and 3 PCI lanes only.

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Here we have a computer with a motherboard that can use both DDR1 and SDRAM RAMs !!!
I've never had or seen one of these before, I only thought it was possible with DIMMs and SDRAMs with the Socket 7 mobos.
This one is probably custom built, because of the motherboard's box (which inside has one of those Socket 7 motherboards I showed you yesterday)
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However, this one has an AMD processor (not sure which one because I couldn't see the boot on my TV and it shows nowhere in the BIOS), an AGP graphics card slow and 5 PCI lanes.
This was the computer I tested the most of the SDRAM with, along with the AMD Duron one.

And now... something very special for me, a sincere, UNEXPECTED, HUGE surprise, which I reserved for last, this computer:

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(well, obviously needs a lot of cleaning, especially that graphics card...)

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Do you guys recognize that motherboard ?! Well, probably not by that dark photo...
here's another photo:

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I switched the dusty ATI Rage graphics card with my nVidia GeForce 7300, because...

... here's yet another photo of this motherboard... but which I took... last year and posted right here, in this thread: Are the CPUs dead or are the motherboards ?

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Remember it now ?! It's exactly HER !!! It's the ABit NF7, it's the motherboard of my Windows XP age, it's the motherboard on which I could play The Sims 2 for the first time, on which I first used Internet and I registered on YouTube.
Oh my god, guys, I honestly NEVER would expect to see this motherboard among those computers, when I today recognized her, I was happier than ever before.
Especially because IT WORKS !!!
It's also the exact same model, exact same chipset and exact same CPU (AMD Athlon XP) as the one who got a bulge in a condenser. The small fan that should cool the chipset doesn't spin at all, but it's a minor problem, it might be all that dust, once I clean it deeply, it might spin again or if it doesn't, I'll just replace it with the one of my ABit NF7, after all it's the same exact model and the one in mine spins perfectly, I'll also probably (if I feel to go through the hassle) try the CPU cooler of mine which has 3 fans instead of a big one like that and see which one cools better.
The only difference between this and my ABit NF7 is just the colour of the RAM slots, it has purple ram slots in mine and black in this one, but it's the actual exact same model, I even plugged in my 2006 hardisk (which I used with that motherboard, so it has all drivers installed and it's like "plug and play") and it worked fine, Windows XP booted up, everything worked except audio, because:
1) I didn't have any speakers to try it
2) I didn't insert my CT4750 sound card

So, guys... that concludes this first part, I guess.
In the next days I'll clean the computers and double check them, especially the ones that don't turn on and I'll keep you updated.
And if you have any questions, feel free to ask 😁

Whew, this took at least 2 hours to write... seriously...

Last edited by Elia1995 on 2017-07-29, 19:10. Edited 1 time in total.

Currently assembled vintage computers I own: 11

Most important ones:
A "modded" Olivetti M4 434 S (currently broken).
An Epson El Plus 386DX running MS-DOS 6.22 (currently broken).
Celeron Coppermine 1.10GHz on an M754LMRTP motherboard

Reply 6 of 103, by kixs

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The 1st Pentium cpu looks to be 120MHz part.

Othewise a lot of different stuff... surely you'll be busy testing and playing around 😉

Requests are also possible... /msg kixs

Reply 7 of 103, by gdjacobs

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Elia1995 wrote:

USB hubs, one of them it seems to come with some PS/2 ports as well for some reason 😁

ASUS had matching headers for these on their motherboards. Some of the daughtercards had just USB, some had PS/2 and IR as well.

Elia1995 wrote:

and this mysterious Logitech box, I really have no idea what it is, it has two PS/2 connectors only, one green and one... orange ?! WTF I've never seen a PS/2 orange connector before, only green, purple and white...

I've never seen an orange PS/2 connector, either. It seems Logitech used that color on keyboards for a short time. Wireless keyboard/mouse receiver?

Elia1995 wrote:

2 5" floppy drives, one of which has the plastic switch stuck... the bottom one, not sure if there's a way to fix it.

Those will be neat if they're HD rather than DD. Is the door still stuck with a floppy drive inserted?

Elia1995 wrote:

This is another one that doesn't turn on, it uses DDR1 rams and, according to the sticker on the front of the case, it has an AMD Sempron, we'll obviously know the truth once I'll remove it from the motherboard and clean it.
It has an AGP graphics card slot and 3 PCI lanes only.

Check the caps on this, etc, etc, but it appears to be a Socket 754 VIA board. Despite the low PCI slot count, these can be monsters as Win98 rigs and can be software downclocked for titles that have issues with running too fast.

All hail the Great Capacitor Brand Finder

Reply 8 of 103, by Tetrium

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Elia1995 wrote:

-snip-

The Pentium in the first pic is a Pentium 120Mhz, judging from what I can see (A80502120 denotes a 120Mhz Pentium non-MMX).
I'll edit this reply as I'm still reading it, hold on 😜

Last edited by Tetrium on 2017-07-30, 13:30. Edited 1 time in total.

Whats missing in your collections?
My retro rigs (old topic)
Interesting Vogons threads (links to Vogonswiki)
Report spammers here!

Reply 9 of 103, by Tetrium

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The 2 mystery cards look like internal modems. Not very useful imo.
Concerning the memory modules...my suggestion would be to get a bottle of rubbing alcohol and paper towels (these you can just throw away after use) and clean all the contact areas of all memory modules. I've resurrected a significant amount of memory modules just by cleaning the contacts.
There are other people who used a pencil eraser but I have no experience with this personally, and I know the paper towels+rubbing alcohol works so that's what my suggestion will be 😀
But do NOT toss out those memory modules yet, I've even made it a habit to test memory modules on 3 different motherboards (preferably using different chipsets as some chipsets have problems with some memory modules) before designating the memory modules as defective.

My gut feeling tells me you should keep the Advance Logic PCI graphics card.

The ISA card has both internal HDD and FDD connectors. The external ones are probably parallel and serial connectors. It's basically a harddrive controller. Keep it.
That USB webcam looks a VERY nice design imo! (the purple+gray globe-shaped webcam)
Is it by chance a logitech?

About the unknown s7 CPU with glued-on HSF, can't tell what it is exactly, except that Intel s7 chips would usually at least have SOME markings on the bottom.

The mouses...the right one with a scroll wheel, you could check with an adapter if it also supports serial protocol. If it does, you'll have a nice serial mouse + scroll wheel, worth keeping!

About the 3.5in FDDs, google the part numbers. Most will probably be 1.44MB drives, but some may be other designs. Some may also support odd stuff of may have jumpers somewhere on the PCB (this is something modern and cheaply made drives lack).

The sitecom modem (and any other modem which has LAN ports)...just use those as routers/hubs. I've used a cheap modem with 4 LAN ports as a router for my home network for YEARS, very cheap and effective. The modem part I simply NEVER used! 😁

The left optical drive is missing part of the drawer-face-plate-thingy. I don't know for sure (google the part number to see if its anything exotic), but I don't trust an old unknown device with a laser that could cause retinal damage and with a faceplate missing.

Keep those speaker-magnets away from any of your other parts!

The 2nd bag...lots of 5.25in floppies. I'd suggest keeping those.

The 3rd bag...the bag actually looks pretty nice.
Keep ALL 5.25in floppy drives! 😁

The cases you picced:
The FS stuff I think is actually very nice to use. These Gigabyte motherboards seem solid and on top of that these can make use of a Fujitsu-Siemens Windows XP install disk (ALL FS recovery disks were basically nothing but full-fledged Windows XP install media, with auto-activation for anything Fujitsu-Siemens) with auto-activation, so you won't ever need to activate these legally over the net and these do not need cracks to activate.

The board is worth keeping (the case seems very retro also, very nice ATX system of the period), I keep ALL FS boards I come across!

I think you already recognize the potential of your AOpen s7 board.

The Asrock board unfortunately has several leaking caps, but that's to expected of boards of that era. Asrock was I think very susceptible to this in those days.

This one has an AMD Duron CPU, uses SDRAMs and has an universal AGP slot, along with 5 PCI lanes.

This board looks SO familiar! Resembled the ASUS A7V/A7V133 a LOT!
Very nice boards to pain yourself with! I liked these a LOT, despite their shortcomings. No ISA and difficult to setup, but there actually used to be an entire FORUM dedicated to this motherboard!
It's kinda a legendary board, if you ask me, very popular and quite tweakable.
The interesting part is that the case that your ASUS A7V(133) came in, is THE EXACT SAME CASE our A7V133 and A7V boards came in! These contained mostly 250W Highscreen or Sparkle PSU's which often turned out to have leaking caps. My suggestion would be to test using another known-good (and at least 30A 5v) PSU.

These cases were quite solid and I ended up with several of those cases, but cooling was a bit poor due to the case exhaust area having few of those tiny holes. My recommendation would be to use a hacksaw to remove the area that blocks good airflow and add a fan grill (I salvaged many out of dead or crappy PSUs_.

The board with the Sempron, it has SATA ports. You really should check out hat kind of CPU socket it has. It may end up being a nice board to have for a late AGP rig.
IF it's a Socket A motherboard, chances are good it's either a KT600 or a KT880 board.
It's a shame that case is missing 3 of the front bezel cover thingies. If it were missing just 2, that would be no problem except maybe for aesthetics.

The system that uses a board with DDR and SDRAm seems to have a FSP PSU, but these may develop bulging/leaking caps. Stop using PSUs that have bulging caps, it's a very easy way to prevent damaging lots of hardware stuff!!!
Just I'd suggest opening up that PSU (and all other PSUs you gotten) to check if the PSU is still in ok condition.

And this was 2 hours well spend. I've at times even took several DAYS to write a good reply...🤣! 😵

Whats missing in your collections?
My retro rigs (old topic)
Interesting Vogons threads (links to Vogonswiki)
Report spammers here!

Reply 10 of 103, by tizzdizz

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Thank you for such a detailed post about your haul. To me, my favorite part of all this is finding out what you ended up with. The part where you actually fix them and get them to work is still fun, too though. Good luck with all this stuff. I saw some other people had started a spreadsheet inventory of all their parts and cases, etc. So that's what I did last week. You might consider that so you can keep track of it all!

Reply 11 of 103, by Elia1995

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Thanks for all of your replies, guys.
I'm currently working on that AOpen Socket 7 board.
I tried using my trusty PSU but it still doesn't turn on, nothing happens and nothing enlights.
Now I removed it from the case and I removed the CPU, which is a Cyrix 686MX 6x86MX-PR233 2.9V
It obviously fits well in the other Socket 7 boards, but I plugged the AT psu and now I have no idea how to turn it on... I can't find where the POWER SW goes...
I never ever built an AT PC ever before.

Basically I want to test if it's the CPU toasted or the AOpen is dead, there are no leaking caps and no bulging ones either, so if not even these two turn on, it might be the CPU and I could try a Pentium in the AOpen once I fix the pins...

As the the Sempron one, it still doesn't turn on at all, tomorrow if I have time, I'll take that CPU off there and I'll clean it, and we'll also discover which socket it is and if it's actually a Sempron or if that sticker is from some previous build.

I want to make sure the computers work before making videos, or else it'll come out like a 2 hours video about me trying to figure out why it doesn't work and half hour of actual operating system, benchmarks and game performance.

Currently assembled vintage computers I own: 11

Most important ones:
A "modded" Olivetti M4 434 S (currently broken).
An Epson El Plus 386DX running MS-DOS 6.22 (currently broken).
Celeron Coppermine 1.10GHz on an M754LMRTP motherboard

Reply 12 of 103, by KCompRoom2000

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gdjacobs wrote:
Elia1995 wrote:

and this mysterious Logitech box, I really have no idea what it is, it has two PS/2 connectors only, one green and one... orange ?! WTF I've never seen a PS/2 orange connector before, only green, purple and white...

I've never seen an orange PS/2 connector, either. It seems Logitech used that color on keyboards for a short time. Wireless keyboard/mouse receiver?

I believe Gateway used Orange on the PS/2 keyboard connector back then since my Gateway PS/2 keyboard has an orange plug, I imagine that Logitech receiver may be Gateway OEM?

Nice finds there, You've hit quite a jackpot, I like the design on that Fujitsu-Siemens case.

Reply 13 of 103, by tizzdizz

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Can you post a picture of your test setup? Also one of the whole motherboard would be helpful too. I had a similar issue with an AT machine recently, and not all AT power supplies and motherboards are created equal! Ask me how I know... POOF...

Reply 15 of 103, by 95DosBox

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hyoenmadan wrote:

Heh... Nice blanket :-3.

I was going to say put down some flat cardboard instead of on the blanket... but then I changed my mind I liked the Rabbits...

But the other comments of the mysterious cards is correct those are internal modems. The PCI modems were usually Winmodems so they are useless in DOS.

The AST was probably the best of the lot for the case. I'm not sure if you took the screws off but the floppy drive wasn't flush to the front. AST was above Compaq and I definitely saw a few of these sold over the years when a cheaper clone was still an option.

Reply 16 of 103, by Andy1979

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That's a nice haul! Should keep you busy for a while.

I have the same TANS I/O card in my 386. The strange connector is a game/joystick port. Jumper settings are printed on the back of my card. Very useful if you are building an XT/AT/286/386/486 (without PCI/VLB) system.

My Retro systems:
1. Pentium 200, 64mb EDO RAM, Matrox Millennium 2mb, 3DFX Voodoo 4mb, DOS6.22 / Win95 / Win98SE
2. Compaq Armada M700 laptop, PIII-450, Win98SE
3. Core2Duo E6600, ATI Radeon 4850, Win XP

Reply 17 of 103, by MMaximus

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Guys it's a very picture heavy thread so please try not to quote the whole original post with all the pictures as the page then becomes crazy long 😵

Hard Disk Sounds

Reply 18 of 103, by Tetrium

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MMaximus wrote:

Guys it's a very picture heavy thread so please try not to quote the whole original post with all the pictures as the page then becomes crazy long 😵

I made an edit, should be less picture heavy now and it was kinda redundant anyway 😀

Whats missing in your collections?
My retro rigs (old topic)
Interesting Vogons threads (links to Vogonswiki)
Report spammers here!