juglenaut wrote:

I had a nvidia 5700fx ultra that started a computer on fire and the heat sink and fan disappeared.

And the gpu tried to dock with the sound blaster audigy gold and squealed like a stuck pig.

I still remember the gut wrenching ear burning yell for help it made.

Sooo...got any pics? 😁

Played around with an IBM XT 5160 motherboard. Couldn't really do much with it, as I've misplaced or lost my only XT keyboard and I'm not sure if the Floppy Controller I have even works with it either. 1 of my PS/2 keyboards would allow me to get into BASIC, but then the keys would just do random things from that point on. Another 2 AT keyboards had markings on the back where an AT/XT switch should be, but now isn't (probably earlier model hardware, just reusing the casing). 😠 This one is a work in progress.

Other retro activity today - I found a 104MB IDE Hard Drive in a box. Tested it out and amazingly it's still working, giving 191MB with DriveSpace compression. No idea what I'll do with such a small hard drive, but it may find a use eventually, possibly on a DOS based system.

Also ordered a 5 1/4" floppy drive off eBay. I have loads of disks, but no longer had a working drive to read any of them, so this should come in handy.

Tetrium »
Unfortunately this happened way back 2004 and didn't have a cell phone or camera.

Nvidia refused warranty needless to say though it was the card that went.

I still have the sound card and it still works after I repaired it.

Made some GM recordings with my Dreamblaster S2, I will post them on sound cloud and write up a detailed review, maybe even post a captioned Youtube video later.

Got my P4 rig hooked up. Been playing Elite Force and FarCry.

Deanodized some case parts today. Once I finish up cleaning the metal ill re anodize it silver.

The kandalf logo on the one pice was a real bic* to remove. It was several layers or paint and different colors of anodizing. I ended up taking 60 grit paper to it.

Been testing a few P3 slot-1 boards I got from Goodwill. All were marked 'as-is'.

Asus P2B-LS, works fine, limited to Katmai. Not a fan of the E-ATX form factor.
Asus P2B-DS, works fine. Holy hell those retention brackets suck. Literally spent 15min trying to pry my P3-450 out of it.

Asus P3C-D (HP Kayak KM600). I cannot get this working. Plugged in ATX power and the Aux 5V. CPU fan will spin up. GPU fan will spin up. But no video signal. I have the DIP switches set to default. I cleared the CMOS via battery removal. Using 3x PC800-45 256MB RDRAM (that are good). Any ideas?

As part of the restoration project for my AMD64 XP rig, I've replaced the thermal paste on its BFG nVidia Geforce 7800GS OC AGP video card as an effort to prolong its lifespan considering the GF7000 and 8000 series were affected by bumpgate. I do plan on buying an AGP ATI Radeon card of a similar vintage for the day this gives up the ghost so I'm prepared.

Before re-greasing - holy hell that (white) thermal paste has really dried up.

The backside of the card - moar memory chips!

The chips after removing the old thermal compound.

Here's the heatsink after removing the old compound.

^^^ Chapter 2 - split because of the 5 attachments per post limitation. ^^^

Re-greasing the top chips.

Re-greasing the bottom chips. (Yes, I may have put a little too much on the top-left chip, but I've tried to even it as much as I could after the picture was taken.)

And here's the card itself with the final result!

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On a semi-related note, I took a picture of the edge of the GPU chip here:

How long until I have to reflow this?

Formatted a '98 Quantum Fireball SE in FAT32 on my Athlon XP pc for a customer. Man that thing is noisy compared to any modern HDD 🤣

so many artifacts on vgas make me wonder

IF i change the cooler, and give heatsinks with arctic alumina to the ram
will it keep it safe?

I have seen MANY radeons 9800 pro that died, or gave artifacts. just wondering what to do if i find one healthy

Created a capacitor map for a slot 1 A-Trend board I got today that doesn't work. Gonna visit an electronics shop near me and see if they can get me the caps. This is my first attempt at recapping and/or capacitor mapping 😊

mouser.com is where i get mine. reasonable prices, huge selection, fast shipping. i omly buy nichicon caps.

Yesterday evening I tried to get the Magic Music Midia Sound 2000 SB soundcard working in my Packard Bell legend 610 but no dice so far 😒

The card doesn't have it's Original backplate anymore so I had to guess which is the speaker plug which makes it a bit harder.
Will try again Friday and if I cannot figure it out I will make a topic to get this card going, even if it is partly that I have some sound.

Planning a Pentium 2 @ 450MHz build on an Abit BH-6 for DirectX games... Would a 10k rpm SCSI drive on the Adaptec 2940UW speed up loading times or congest the PCI bus, making performance worse?

Oh I'm going to do a similar build (same mobo and same cpu) !

The SCSI would probably be faster than the UDMA 33 controller. But I don't know if the difference will be really noticeable. Access time should be better though since it's a 10K rpm drive

Nice, let's see! The plan ATM is BH6/PII SL2WB/Creative Riva TNT2 Ultra/STB V2/Aureal Vortex 1... Have to find a nice case and then see how this turns out. Just thought I could use a spare 18gb server HDD in there.

I have flashed the BIOS of my "Ferrari Coppermine" with a custom version that supports the Tualatin microcode, coming from the famous South Korean seller on Ebay. I've also ordered a Cooler Master Jet 7 heatsink, that should keep the CPU cool enough, hopefully. Soon it will become a Ferrari Tualatin! 😉

Got a 5 1/4" floppy drive for my work-in-progress XT build. Was able to boot into MS-DOS 3.21, so far so good. Can't do much else at the moment, as I still haven't tracked down an XT keyboard (without resorting to eBay's extortionate pricing). Once I've tracked down a keyboard, I'll move on to the next issue - looking at Hard Drive options. I have an MFM drive + controller card, but no idea if the card has it's own BIOS.

Also played around with 1 of my Slot 1 systems with the same floppy drive as above, where it was behaving erractically. Sometimes it would read disks and others it wouldn't. To top it off, both my 98 & XP installs got corrupted. I noticed a bulging capacitor on the board near to the IDE & Floppy connectors, so I'm guessing there may be a link with the weird behaviour I'm seeing, or could just be a coincidence.

cj_reha wrote:

Created a capacitor map for a slot 1 A-Trend board I got today that doesn't work. Gonna visit an electronics shop near me and see if they can get me the caps. This is my first attempt at recapping and/or capacitor mapping 😊

The picture is not very clear but they look like SANYO capacitor that usual are very good, I wouldn't change them
without some other test to the board!
Try connecting a speaker and just the CPU with no RAM if it boots you should hear some beeps.