VOGONS


First post, by furan

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What are some boards you can't bear to throw away, that also don't work? Also interested in your best "I have this but it doesn't work" story for things like wavetable boards, sound cards, video cards, motherboards, etc. If you have something to share please note whether you'd be ok to part with it if someone else could fix and use it themselves (for money or not, but keep that private), or if you would want to hold onto it. Also feel free to ask about how to repair something, or volunteer repair, or show off your own repairs!

Last edited by furan on 2017-12-08, 02:20. Edited 3 times in total.

Reply 1 of 16, by ODwilly

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Soyo kt880 dragon board. Universal agp pro and loaded with features. Green led, everything gets warm but no display or beeps.

Main pc: Asus ROG 17. R9 5900HX, RTX 3070m, 16gb ddr4 3200, 1tb NVME.
Retro PC: Soyo P4S Dragon, 3gb ddr 266, 120gb Maxtor, Geforce Fx 5950 Ultra, SB Live! 5.1

Reply 2 of 16, by SSTV2

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Two 486 AST Bravo LP/Premmia motherboards mentioned in my 1st post here Help needed reviving AST 486 motherboards (SOLVED) + benchmark results, made Bravo LP to POST, but I think it has video DAC problem as colors gets messed up most of the time by inverting or dimming themselves (huh?). The Premmia doesn't post to this day, nor I got its missing wiring schematics nor missing full BIOS image, because there is no source for it. BIOS consists of two parts: "Flash Loader" and actual BIOS image, which can be extracted from downloadable BIOS upgrade floppy images, but the most important "Flash Loader" is not there 😖

Reply 3 of 16, by brostenen

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I have a Voodoo3-3500, the model that Compaq ordered from 3dFX back in the days.
It is one of those 3500's with a regulair VGA output instead of output for the normal dongle.
Not dead, only semi dead.

The problem is bad caps, resulting in the card sometimes working, sometimes not.
A shame. To my luck, I have a second and working card of the same model.

Cards that I do have, wich are 100% dead, is my AWE32 CT-2760.
Boards that are dead, are one Unisys 486 board and one IBM 486 board.
I have a Slot1 compaq 440BX board, also dead and a couple of dead ISA SCSI controllers.
Last but not least, I have an Asus FX5200, wich are unstable.

Lots of defect and dead SCSI and IDE cdrom drives as well, and one 40gb Maxtor IDE HDD.

Don't eat stuff off a 15 year old never cleaned cpu cooler.
Those cakes make you sick....

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Reply 4 of 16, by Unknown_K

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I have a few boards that won't post but are interesting enough I won't junk them. An early 486 EISA board full of chips, 486 gateway 2000 slim desktop, dual Opteron with AGP Pro board (Master2-FAR I think).

Collector of old computers, hardware, and software

Reply 6 of 16, by dogchainx

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Two 3DFX cards that have bent pins on the chips. Probably easy to fix for someone here, so I haven't junked them.

386DX-40MHz-8MB-540MB+428MB+Speedstar64@2MB+SoundBlaster Pro+MT-32/MKII
486DX2-66Mhz-16MB-4.3GB+SpeedStar64 VLB DRAM 2MB+AWE32/SB16+SCB-55
MY BLOG RETRO PC BLOG: https://bitbyted.wordpress.com/

Reply 7 of 16, by KCompRoom2000

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I have two non-functional BFG brand nVidia cards: a Geforce FX5200 and a Geforce 7800GS OC. The FX5200 has some blown capacitors so it might be fixable once recapped, and the 7800GS OC just stopped working randomly, not sure if there's any hope of bringing that one back to life since it was among the first cards to be affected by bumpgate, I'd try to reflow and recap it if I had enough spare time to work on a revival project. The 7800GS OC was one of the parts I've held onto for 6 years now so the nostalgia factor is what holds me back on disposing it.

Reply 8 of 16, by xjas

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I have an AWE64 Gold and a PAS16 that are dead - would very much love for either of those to work. One 8MB Voodoo2 with some texture memory corruption and my Banshee seems a bit flakey although it does generally work.

The power supply "board" in my G4 Cube needs re-capping because of course it needs re-capping. I got rid of all my other pre-Intel Mac stuff a while ago because none of it worked.

Other than that surprisingly little of my hardware is bad.

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Reply 10 of 16, by JidaiGeki

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I've got a few motherboards that don't work - socket 5 VLB, P4 478 ISA, dual 370 with SCSI and a battery damaged 386 spring to mind, but I have a box of other broken or flaky stuff to attempt to fix.

Reply 11 of 16, by PcBytes

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KCompRoom2000 wrote:

I have two non-functional BFG brand nVidia cards: a Geforce FX5200 and a Geforce 7800GS OC. The FX5200 has some blown capacitors so it might be fixable once recapped, and the 7800GS OC just stopped working randomly, not sure if there's any hope of bringing that one back to life since it was among the first cards to be affected by bumpgate, I'd try to reflow and recap it if I had enough spare time to work on a revival project. The 7800GS OC was one of the parts I've held onto for 6 years now so the nostalgia factor is what holds me back on disposing it.

The FX5200 might be fine after a recap, but the 7800GS OC looks like it has full polymer caps, so probably a reflow is in order rather than recap on that one.

Speaking of which, my ASUS P4P800-E Deluxe might need a recap. For some reason, it would not POST with a known good CPU and won't beep with or without RAM. I tested all the components on a Gigabyte GA-8IPE1000 and they POST'd fine. Would be a great shame to throw away (I hate myself enough for throwing away a MSI 865PE Neo2-L on which I removed the BIOS chip when I could simply have soldered another one in its place) since it has a lot of features and I was planning on improving it so I could overclock a 2.8GHz Prescott on it.

"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 12 of 16, by LHN91

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Number 1 thing I've held onto that doesn't work is a Macintosh LC with a 12" monochrome screen.

Pretty sure that the screen works, but the LC just makes a faint clicking sound. Pretty sure it just needs a PSU recap but I just haven't gotten around to it. That said, I have several other 90's Macs, including 2 other 680xx machines (An LC630 and a Quadra 950) so it's also kind of redundant.

Also have a nice Asus Socket 3 ISA/VLB/PCI board that currently won't POST. Things get warm, no error beeps, no display.

Reply 13 of 16, by c0keb0ttle

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Voodoo 3 3000 that just gives error beeps during POST. Voodoo 2 that installs fine, but just locks up when you try to use it. Gravis Ultrasound Classic that just lock up the computer when searching for resources during install. 🙁

Reply 14 of 16, by CkRtech

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Man. You guys are making me want to open up a repair shop.

Displaced Gamers (YouTube) - DOS Gaming Aspect Ratio - 320x200 || The History of 240p || Dithering on the Sega Genesis with Composite Video

Reply 15 of 16, by psychz

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A Yamaha SW60XG ISA, whose chips get hot. Its output is full of static and a crackly resemblance of what should it have been. 😢
And some Creative 3D Blaster Banshees. Have around five of them, only one actually works. 😕

Stojke wrote:

Its not like components found in trash after 20 years in rain dont still work flawlessly.

:: chemical reaction :: athens in love || reality is absent || spectrality || meteoron || the lie you believe

Reply 16 of 16, by kixs

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I still keep around:

- 2x Voodoo1 - nothing visualy wrong but simply doesn't work
- S3 864 2MB VLB - had two pins on the main chip stuck together. I only discovered it when it didn't work. Straightening the pins didn't solve it.
- Octek Fox II Rev 3.2 motherboard - must have a short somewhere as even the PSU won't power on
- Alaris 486SLC2 VLB motherboard - NiCD battery leak made some damage to the traces. Won't POST. I haven't had the time yet to do continuity tests. Maybe an easy fix.
- Hercules Dynamite Tseng ET4000/w32i 2MB ISA - beeps and no picture. Visually in good shape.
- 2x ATI Radeon 9800 PRO 128MB - one only beeps, other corrupt graphics
- Creative Voodoo2 12MB - color corruption in games
- Logitech SoundMan Wave - not detected, visually in good shape.

🙁

Requests are also possible... /msg kixs