First post, by 440bx
Hi Vogons,
Building and repairing PCs is my hobby from my childhood for approximately 25 years. In this time, I got a lot of memories and experiences. I like returning to that time (and even before) and revealing new facts I didn’t knew (or ignored) before. I also have a lot of old hardware.
What is the biggest problem is the state and reliability of motherboards – capacitors especially. I think I also don’t have any AT PSU. I don’t have much free time so I cannot spend days on reviving great socket 7 / slot 1 board to make them work for some time and then to have stability issues after few months/weeks. This happened to me few times (ATX Socket 7 Asus and Slot 1 MSI) and now this is show-stopper for me.
Is there any way to get long-term stable, reliable hardware for slot 1 / socket 7 or even older builds? Not nearly-death board for booting and shutting it down...
The best way I discovered for retro digging is Cedar Mill/Conroe board with AGP slot to run W98 with all available drivers.
I have these 4 builds:
865G, Celeron 420, 2x128MB DDR 400, IEG2/S3/G400 for DOS
865G, Pentium E5800/E6800, 2x1GB DDR 400 CL2.5, GF 6200, 120GB SSD for W98/XP (capable of running W10)
H61, i5 3470, 4-16GB DDR3, IGP/whatever in PCI-E for Windows XP (x64)
915GM, 2GHz Pentium-M, 2GB RAM, GMA 900 for XP (Fujitsu laptop)
VGAs in box: some S3, Voodoo 2, Voodoo 3 3000 AGP, Voodoo 4 4500 PCI, G400MAX DH, G550, FX5200 AGP, 2x GF6200 AGP
These boards/builds are relatively new, so I hope it will be running for few years without any stability/capacitors issues and without any special care.
Is there safe way to get stable and reliable 386/486/socket7/slot1/socket370 boards? I would love to spend some time with 486 or 440bx, but I’m not aware of way to get board in good condition… Any tips? What about AT PSU?