I got a package with some motherboards from Ebay today.

The motherboards were sold as untested "with a few bent pins" but the seller claimed he had removed them from working systems a few years ago. Pretty much every board have the sort of damage that makes me doubt the truth in his claim. The cost for the 6 boards were ~50 euro including shipping and as there are CPUs, memory, cache, flash chips, sockets and other useful things on the boards I guess I cant be too upset if I cant get any boards going.

The seller can relax, Im not the one to make a fuss about the item description as the images of the boards were decent and many of the defects visible and noted by me before buying. The defects I could not spot were scratches on the backside of the boards (not visible in the sellers pics) but with luck most of them arent deep enough to actually cut any traces. The motherboards were shipped in loosely wrapped bubble wrap so the boards could move around and create a static heaven. 😜 If I buy more motherboards from this seller I will ask that he uses fancy newspaper paper the next time.

FIC 486-GIO-VP with a damaged keyboard port, bridged traces and scratches on the back.
Biostar MB-8500TAC with lots of scratches, this board looks OKish as long as the scratches arent deep.

ECS Elite UM8810PAIO with a nasty scratch at the UMC I/O chip near the top of the PCI slots, could be OK as no traces looks fully severed.
Gigabyte GA-486ATV with nasty scratches and two thirds of the major caps had the leads pulled half way out, I pushed the leads back in again.

Biostar MB-8500TVX-A with scratches and dirt.
QDI US491P3, this board looks mostly OK but it has bridged traces like the one pictured below.

The most shoddy looking fix on the QDI US491P3.

Still a bit stunned by this find, but 22 sound cards $60 USD. A couple gems in there too. See list below:
Also a couple MB's but those are in testing phase for the moment. Pics to come later.

COMPAQ ES1868 ISA
COMPAQ ES1868 ISA
CREATIVE CT1300B ISA
CREATIVE CT1350B ISA
CREATIVE CT1350B ISA
CREATIVE CT1350B REV 2 ISA
CREATIVE CT1600 ISA
CREATIVE CT1750 ISA
CREATIVE CT1770 ISA
CREATIVE CT1950 24MB ISA
CREATIVE CT3600 ISA
CREATIVE CT3600 ISA
CREATIVE CT4390 ISA
CREATIVE CT4500 ISA
CREATIVE CT4520 ISA
CREATIVE CT4780 PCI
CREATIVE CT4780 PCI
CREATIVE SB0100 PCI
CREATIVE SB0100 PCI
MAGIC S23A ISA
TURTLE BEACH TB400-2541-02 PCI
TURTLE BEACH TBS400-3355-01 PCI
YAMAHA A301-G50 PCI

Holy shit, what a haul.

Formulator wrote:

Still a bit stunned by this find, but 22 sound cards $60 USD. A couple gems in there too. See list below:
Also a couple MB's but those are in testing phase for the moment. Pics to come later.

Very nice indeed!

Is that a billiards table they're laid out on?!

That Gameblaster takes the cake! For 60$ impressive haul!!

Wow 😁

Formulator wrote:

Still a bit stunned by this find, but 22 sound cards $60 USD. A couple gems in there too. See list below: Also a couple MB's b […]
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Still a bit stunned by this find, but 22 sound cards $60 USD. A couple gems in there too. See list below:
Also a couple MB's but those are in testing phase for the moment. Pics to come later.

CREATIVE CT1300B ISA
CREATIVE CT1350B ISA
CREATIVE CT1350B ISA
CREATIVE CT1350B REV 2 ISA
CREATIVE CT1600 ISA
CREATIVE CT1750 ISA
CREATIVE CT1770 ISA
CREATIVE CT1950 24MB ISA
CREATIVE CT4390 ISA
TURTLE BEACH TB400-2541-02 PCI
TURTLE BEACH TBS400-3355-01 PCI

What a steal! Definetly worth a lot lot more... These cards are awesome and a Creative Gameblaster!!! Lucky you.

These arrived in the mail today, Epox EP-MVP3G5, Guillemot 3d Prophet Geforce 256, and K6-3 400.
After some reconfiguring of Jumpers for cpu voltage, which was set incorrectly, as You can see, it all
fired up ok, which is a big relief as the lot was sold as-is. The 3D Prophet I only got to fire up once
so am hoping just the electrolytic caps need replacing. The one time it worked there was some slight
streaking in the image. I have a K62+ as well as K63+ and standard k6-2 500, also Pentium MMX to play
with in this. It wasn''t cheap, at $100 AUD with postage, but these are rare boards to find, especially
this one with the 2MB cache.

Formulator wrote:

Still a bit stunned by this find, but 22 sound cards $60 USD.
CREATIVE CT1300B ISA

Very nice find, for impressive price.

Was it local?

Seems this week good for treasure hunting,gj all,nice finds! 😈

Beegle wrote:

Formulator wrote:

Still a bit stunned by this find, but 22 sound cards $60 USD.
CREATIVE CT1300B ISA

Very nice find, for impressive price.

Was it local?

Yes, just a few miles from me, it was a moving sale. The seller originally sold me a Tyan Turbo AT-2 board, and then showed me a copy paper box full of the sound cards. He almost sold it another buyer wanting them for the gold teeth on the edge connectors. Glad he sold them to me. I didn't even notice the Game Blaster until I got the box home. That card will likely go in my Compuadd XT or Wavemate XT 286. The rest will be tested over the coming weeks.

Yes, I also use the billiards table for bigger projects plus there is hardwood floor, lots of windows. I also have a large mat to protect the felt.

pnp book showed up in the mail today to add to my collection of ISA books. These bookend old and new editions of the pink shirt book (yay pink shirts) and other old dos books

These little gems - Pentium 120 (I've got the 75 also) // AMD 486DX4-100 // Texas Instruments 486DX2-80:

Asus P2L-B. Not that common board - Slot 1 in AT format. Using i440LX chipset. Official CPU support states PII 333 or Celeron 433 as maximum, however 533 MHz Celeron Mendocino seems to be working fine.

This one can't be considered retro... until you realize what performance it delivers. 🤣

found this stuff in the past week at thrifts, swap meet

the 486 motherboard doesn't post but I figured for $5 the ST dx2-80 was worth it. the 286 board posts but doesn't detect over 640kb of RAM. do I need a special driver or something with a 286?

lastly a PAS16 which I've wanted one for awhile but never stumbled upon one until last Sunday.

Cool to see more 90's hardware here in this thread again. 😀

brostenen wrote:

Cool to see more 90's hardware here in this thread again. 😀

I think it's my favourite kind! Anything with VLB gets me a bit excited 🤣

soviet conscript wrote:

http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e385/0blivi0n1/20160227_133758_zpsjfff0r7i.jpg […]
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found this stuff in the past week at thrifts, swap meet

the 486 motherboard doesn't post but I figured for $5 the ST dx2-80 was worth it. the 286 board posts but doesn't detect over 640kb of RAM. do I need a special driver or something with a 286?

lastly a PAS16 which I've wanted one for awhile but never stumbled upon one until last Sunday.

Many 286 boards need a special driver to be able to use the upper 384K memory of the first megabyte, some boards will not do it at all.

If your board has 4x256KB memory the board is probably acting as it should but if the board has 4x1MB you should see 3712KB.

It seems the 486 boards previous owner needs to learn how to install memory.

Skyscraper wrote:

Many 286 boards need a special driver to be able to use the upper 384K memory of the first megabyte, some boards will not do it […]
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soviet conscript wrote:

http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e385/0blivi0n1/20160227_133758_zpsjfff0r7i.jpg […]
Show full quote

found this stuff in the past week at thrifts, swap meet

the 486 motherboard doesn't post but I figured for $5 the ST dx2-80 was worth it. the 286 board posts but doesn't detect over 640kb of RAM. do I need a special driver or something with a 286?

lastly a PAS16 which I've wanted one for awhile but never stumbled upon one until last Sunday.

Many 286 boards need a special driver to be able to use the upper 384K memory of the first megabyte, some boards will not do it at all.

If your board has 4x256KB memory the board is probably acting as it should but if the board has 4x1MB you should see 3712KB.

It seems the 486 boards previous owner needs to learn how to install memory.

the 3 RAM sticks in the 286 are all labled 512kb. and yhea, I notices that burn mark on the 72 pin ram socket, that's why I wasn't surprised when it didn't post.

When it comes to the 486 board, did you try it with 30 pin SIMMS, 72 pin SIMMS, or both?