http://www.ebay.com/itm/GAMING-DELL-XPS-DESKT … ST/122652566774

Woohoo!!! Been wanting one of these for a while now. I think i've already mentioned before, but I have big plans for this system.

I bought a pretty beaten up Gigabyte GA-7DXE (AMD761/VIA 686B) Socket A motherboard. It seems the chipset took a little damage since the heatsink is missing and a few traces are broken - hence why one RAM slot doesn't work. Other than that - broken caps on the board (literally, they weren't bulging, they were simply broken off the board) and to top that they were counterfeit OST RLX. Seriously, I don't get why would somebody make fake OST RLX caps.

Another buy was a Pixelview PV-TV304P+ TV Tuner. It's PCI and it has a CX23880 chipset. It has quite a lot of features, such as RF, S-Video (labeled S-VHS, heh), Audio Output and Input and a Composite input. Other than that I'm pretty sure the video quality is atrocious compared to a Phillips SAA713x TV Tuner, but that's to be expected from Conexant cards.

Bought a pair of Microsoft Sidewinder Gamepads (digital ones for DB15 gameport) for my Windows 95 machine. It will be my first experience with digital gamepads...

Today was a good day!

I saw an add for a job lot of old hardware for a measly 5 of our British pounds (equivalent to about one and a half Costa coffees) with a low quality picture of 'stuff' on a bed, but it included a picture of a motherboard with what looked like an AGP slot, so I gave it a go as it was only 10 minutes up the road. This is what I came back with.

Bag 1 contained a blue tray of stuff. In reverse order of interesting-ness:

7 uninteresting networking cards such including a modem, ethernet, 'G' wifi and a firewire cards.

A TV tuner card - not sure what use this has these days?

A couple of basic CMI soundcards

A PCI controller card for SATA and IDE

4 cooling fans; Left to right a Zalman 370/A cooler which I am excited about
A giant cooler for not sure what socket?
A surprisingly heavy Coolermaster Socket A/370 cooler
A naff lightweight socket A/370 cooler

A lifetime supply of DDR memory, mostly 256MB DDR333MHz, and a single stick of SDR RAM

A 9500PRO 128MB

A Geforce MX200 32MB

A GeForce FX5500 256MB

A mystery graphics card - any ideas? I'm nervous about taking off the heatsink as it is not held in place by screws or pins, it is just... glued on? Around the back it has "V32316" but I also see a tiny 3DFX logo so now I am very interested!A vooodoo 3 as it only has one output?

Bag 2 contained an MSI Socket A motherboard with even more bloody DDR memory and a dirty Athlon 2600

Bag 3 contained a lifetime supply of yellowed IDE cables which doesn't need a picture.

I also got an Philips PC case as well.

I still need to test it all but otherwise very pleased for £5!

Almoststew1990 wrote:

Today was a good day!
A mystery graphics card - any ideas? I'm nervous about taking off the heatsink as it is not held in place by screws or pins, it is just... glued on? Around the back it has "V32316" but I also see a tiny 3DFX logo so now I am very interested!A vooodoo 3 as it only has one output?

Judging from the heatsink it's most likely a Voodoo3 2000

Almoststew1990 wrote:

Bag 2 contained an MSI Socket A motherboard with even more bloody DDR memory and a dirty Athlon 2600

I see a 4pin power connector on there. You might have one of those rare 12V powered S462 motherboards!

PcBytes wrote:

I bought a pretty beaten up Gigabyte GA-7DXE (AMD761/VIA 686B) Socket A motherboard. It seems the chipset took a little damage since the heatsink is missing and a few traces are broken - hence why one RAM slot doesn't work. Other than that - broken caps on the board (literally, they weren't bulging, they were simply broken off the board) and to top that they were counterfeit OST RLX. Seriously, I don't get why would somebody make fake OST RLX caps.

Another buy was a Pixelview PV-TV304P+ TV Tuner. It's PCI and it has a CX23880 chipset. It has quite a lot of features, such as RF, S-Video (labeled S-VHS, heh), Audio Output and Input and a Composite input. Other than that I'm pretty sure the video quality is atrocious compared to a Phillips SAA713x TV Tuner, but that's to be expected from Conexant cards.

Believe it or not but there are some sleezy manufacturers that make fake OST caps to sell to mostly noob distributors worldwide. OST caps rarely bulge or vent at the tops but mostly go bad by internal shorting through broken down electrolyte solution with impurities in the aluminum. The bungs usually just swell, rot or get pushed out from the pressure of gas build up. That means these caps can look good for ever but be bad in just a few months.

I tried a few things out now.The PC Speaker mount works nicely 😉

The motherboard and Athlon POST fine. It is an MSI K7N2 (MS-6570). It does indeed have a 12v input! I take it this is good for a power hungry Athlon?
The zalman fan has a HUGE clip, so no idea what socket that was for!
The Coolermaster cooler is very quiet and will be my day-to-day cooler, but it looked like this before I washed it out:

It is indeed a voodoo 3 2000, and it loads up into the bios without issue.
The 9500 Pro is artifacting so may well be dead? Or is it salvageable?

The FX 5500 is fine
The MX200 is fine

It's very annoying that I don't have a usable ATX case to cobble something together to try out a few things on the Voodoo (it is my first voodoo card!)

Munx wrote:

Judging from the heatsink it's most likely a Voodoo3 2000 […]
Show full quote

Almoststew1990 wrote:

Today was a good day!
A mystery graphics card - any ideas? I'm nervous about taking off the heatsink as it is not held in place by screws or pins, it is just... glued on? Around the back it has "V32316" but I also see a tiny 3DFX logo so now I am very interested!A vooodoo 3 as it only has one output?

Judging from the heatsink it's most likely a Voodoo3 2000

Almoststew1990 wrote:

Bag 2 contained an MSI Socket A motherboard with even more bloody DDR memory and a dirty Athlon 2600

I see a 4pin power connector on there. You might have one of those rare 12V powered S462 motherboards!

I have that same model of MSI socket A motherboard. It is a good one but you will need to change out the electrolytic caps around the CPU. If I remember right it has either Nichicon KZG or KZJ. That was a series known to be bad. Just a few of them on board I think.

These are some of my recent pickups:

The card with the green heatsinks is the GeForce 2 Ultra 64 MB, made by Creative. The other card looks like a GeForce 3 Ti200? (It says model P50, so I assume so.) Sadly, I can't test either of these cards, as I currently do not own any motherboard with an AGP slot.

What worries me however, is this:

It looks like a missing capacitor... how are the chances of this thing running despite that? I am really happy to own a GF2 Ultra (my planned card for my build) and it would be a shame to be left with nothing but a nice keyring.

Anyways, other pickups are these two Thinkpads: T40 and T40p, as well as Windows NT 4.0 + Service Pack 6A (2 discs, Danish version).

Both laptops. in great (and working) condition, except the ruined USB port on the T40p that caused a short circuit. I took care of it but the port will never work again.

Specs of the T40: Pentium M 1,5 Ghz, 512MB RAM, Radeon Mobility 7500.
Specs of the T40p: Pentium M 1,6 Ghz, 1 GB RAM, Radeon FireGL 9000, and comes with a high resolution screen (1400x1150) as well as the original Hitachi Deskstar 40 GB with recovery partition intact. The hard drive will be replaced ASAP, its slow and unbearably loud. I will do some part switching and I think that I will build a nice Windows 9x machine out of it.

XTac wrote:

These are some of my recent pickups:

It looks like a missing capacitor... how are the chances of this thing running despite that? I am really happy to own a GF2 Ultra (my planned card for my build) and it would be a shame to be left with nothing but a nice keyring.

I wouldn't power on the card without replacing that. You can check pics of other cards so you know what capacitor you need and the correct polarity. Please don't turn it into a keyring or hoard it away if you can't fix it. There are a lot of people who could easily fix that.

Almoststew1990 wrote:

A TV tuner card - not sure what use this has these days? https://i.imgur.com/CWgCMCth.jpg […]
Show full quote

A TV tuner card - not sure what use this has these days?

I see that's a Conexant based card, so maybe just to see how bad their composite output is 🤣

No really, I have the Pixelview I bought today - the composite output is unbelieveably crappy compared to a Phillips.

TOBOR wrote:

Believe it or not but there are some sleezy manufacturers that make fake OST caps to sell to mostly noob distributors worldwide. OST caps rarely bulge or vent at the tops but mostly go bad by internal shorting through broken down electrolyte solution with impurities in the aluminum. The bungs usually just swell, rot or get pushed out from the pressure of gas build up. That means these caps can look good for ever but be bad in just a few months.

I actually replaced most of these with whatever I had on hand that was miles better than that - Nichicon HD,Rubycon MBZ, UCC KZE and two cherry-picked Teapos that won't go bad. There's only one fake OST cap left that will go as soon as I find some replacement cap to put in.

As for fake OSTs, believe it or not it wasn't just Gigabyte that did them. Soyo and possibly Jetway as well LOVED to rebrand Sacon FZ caps as OST RLX. The easiest way to tell this is that they're silver. Genuine OST RLX usually were either pink or green with white lettering or dark blue with gold lettering.

Fake caps aside, I sometimes recap boards with bottom of the barrel caps (like GSC,UCC KZG and the crappiest brands) with OST RLX. I do know which ones to use though.

45$ later, my first lot. Only collected one at a time up until an hour ago. 😎

Matrox Mistique 220 (wanted one for years)
Pinacle ATI Radeon 8500 (128Bit, 64MB)
SB Live CT4760
P3 500 Slot 1
Athlon 64
WD Caviar 80GB
Seagate Medalist 1.2GB (really like this one)
Teac DVD (2003)
Alps Floppy drive
Realtek BNC/RJ45 nic

PcBytes wrote:

I see that's a Conexant based card, so maybe just to see how bad their composite output is :lol: […]
Show full quote

Almoststew1990 wrote:

A TV tuner card - not sure what use this has these days? https://i.imgur.com/CWgCMCth.jpg […]
Show full quote

A TV tuner card - not sure what use this has these days?

I see that's a Conexant based card, so maybe just to see how bad their composite output is 🤣

No really, I have the Pixelview I bought today - the composite output is unbelieveably crappy compared to a Phillips.

TOBOR wrote:

Believe it or not but there are some sleezy manufacturers that make fake OST caps to sell to mostly noob distributors worldwide. OST caps rarely bulge or vent at the tops but mostly go bad by internal shorting through broken down electrolyte solution with impurities in the aluminum. The bungs usually just swell, rot or get pushed out from the pressure of gas build up. That means these caps can look good for ever but be bad in just a few months.

I actually replaced most of these with whatever I had on hand that was miles better than that - Nichicon HD,Rubycon MBZ, UCC KZE and two cherry-picked Teapos that won't go bad. There's only one fake OST cap left that will go as soon as I find some replacement cap to put in.

As for fake OSTs, believe it or not it wasn't just Gigabyte that did them. Soyo and possibly Jetway as well LOVED to rebrand Sacon FZ caps as OST RLX. The easiest way to tell this is that they're silver. Genuine OST RLX usually were either pink or green with white lettering or dark blue with gold lettering.

Fake caps aside, I sometimes recap boards with bottom of the barrel caps (like GSC,UCC KZG and the crappiest brands) with OST RLX. I do know which ones to use though.

With fake OST caps once the Chinese manufactures sell these into the supply chain thru lesser known distributors it becomes near impossible to weed them out. ANY motherboard company that either builds or contracts to build using OST caps will get screwed IF they do not first require Qualified Samples from the builder. Even the best board makers can be fooled with good looking fakes once they enter the supply chain unless strict testing is done on the batches of caps. Remind me NOT to buy any motherboards from you if you are repopulating them with CRAP caps!

Almoststew1990 wrote:

Today was a good day! […]
Show full quote

Today was a good day!

I saw an add for a job lot of old hardware for a measly 5 of our British pounds (equivalent to about one and a half Costa coffees) with a low quality picture of 'stuff' on a bed, but it included a picture of a motherboard with what looked like an AGO slot, so I gave it a go as it was only 10 minutes up the road. This is what I came back with.

Bag 1 contained a blue tray of stuff. In reverse order of interesting-ness:

7 uninteresting networking cards such including a modem, ethernet, 'G' wifi and a firewire cards.

A TV tuner card - not sure what use this has these days?

A couple of basic CMI soundcards

A PCI controller card for SATA and IDE

4 cooling fans; Left to right a Zalman 370/A cooler which I am excited about
A giant cooler for not sure what socket?
A surprisingly heavy Coolermaster Socket A/370 cooler
A naff lightweight socket A/370 cooler

A lifetime supply of DDR memory, mostly 256MB DDR333MHz, and a single stick of SDR RAM

A 9500PRO 128MB

A Geforce MX200 32MB

A GeForce FX5500 256MB

A mystery graphics card - any ideas? I'm nervous about taking off the heatsink as it is not held in place by screws or pins, it is just... glued on? Around the back it has "V32316" but I also see a tiny 3DFX logo so now I am very interested!A vooodoo 3 as it only has one output?

Bag 2 contained an MSI Socket A motherboard with even more bloody DDR memory and a dirty Athlon 2600

Bag 3 contained a lifetime supply of yellowed IDE cables which doesn't need a picture.

I also got an Philips PC case as well.

I still need to test it all but otherwise very pleased for £5!

Zalman CFNS-9000 (I think the model number is that.). I own one. It's an LGA775/1151 cooler. They have after market brackets for a bunch of sockets though i suspect you have the 1151 brackets or AM2 brackets. It's a good solid cooler.

Almoststew1990 wrote:

4 cooling fans; Left to right a Zalman 370/A cooler which I am excited about A giant cooler for not sure what socket? A surprisi […]
Show full quote

4 cooling fans; Left to right a Zalman 370/A cooler which I am excited about
A giant cooler for not sure what socket?
A surprisingly heavy Coolermaster Socket A/370 cooler
A naff lightweight socket A/370 cooler

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Zalman CFNS-9000 (I think the model number is that.). I own one. It's an LGA775/1151 cooler. They have after market brackets for a bunch of sockets though i suspect you have the 1151 brackets or AM2 brackets. It's a good solid cooler.

It's a CNPS9500. They came with a variety of mounts over several releases, but yours looks like it has the AMD clip, for S939 and AM2. A decent little cooler, as long as the proprietary fan doesn't go out.

I really like the V3 2000 PCI cards -- fast enough and more affordable than the 3000. Some of the have 5.5ns SGRAM, some have 6ns SDRAM, and some have 7ns SDRAM. I can't tell by looking at your photo. The ones with faster memory can oc to 3000 speeds.

TOBOR wrote:

With fake OST caps once the Chinese manufactures sell these into the supply chain thru lesser known distributors it becomes near impossible to weed them out. ANY motherboard company that either builds or contracts to build using OST caps will get screwed IF they do not first require Qualified Samples from the builder. Even the best board makers can be fooled with good looking fakes once they enter the supply chain unless strict testing is done on the batches of caps. Remind me NOT to buy any motherboards from you if you are repopulating them with CRAP caps!

I usually check the caps and the fakes get thrown in the trash. I have lots of genuine OST caps on my hands that I know inside out how they look and what are the genuine bungs on them.

Thing is, I only repopulate boards with OSTs - only the ones that aren't really worth - like lower end VIA P4M266 boards and crappy KT266 boards.

Believe me, anything worth it (notable examples being VIA KX133, i845E, AMD761, i865PE and i865G) gets recapped with Sanyo and Rubycon usually. I did have exceptions like a GF6100 board that got Panasonics on both VRM high and low.

It's usually the VRM that I stick to recapping. Very rarely I would need to recap the entire board, usually only if it's very old (2000-2001/2). 2003 boards and newer I only recap the VRM high and low, as the smaller filtering caps are usually OSTs that aren't stressed much, or whatever the manufacturer chooses. Most of the time it's been OST RLX, Rubycon MBZ and Nichicon HM though.

That, and I don't sell any motherboards. 😁 I keep most of them so I can make more builds 😀

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Zalman CFNS-9000 (I think the model number is that.). I own one. It's an LGA775/1151 cooler. They have after market brackets for a bunch of sockets though i suspect you have the 1151 brackets or AM2 brackets. It's a good solid cooler.

Wow... really? A full quote for this short answer!?

blurks wrote:

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Zalman CFNS-9000 (I think the model number is that.). I own one. It's an LGA775/1151 cooler. They have after market brackets for a bunch of sockets though i suspect you have the 1151 brackets or AM2 brackets. It's a good solid cooler.

Wow... really? A full quote for this short answer!?

If you have a problem feel free to report me for it.

That's not my style. I am sure you're able to learn without the help of Moderators.