Skyscraper wrote:

Well perhaps not in a system I will use, probably only for benching so I do not really know if I will bother to recap it.
For use other than benching I prefer the 8800 GTS 512, I do not really like crippled GPUs 😉

I would encourage you to recap. Running with bad or out of spec capacitors could lead to a short or leakage current affecting the motherboard or other components. If the testbed is worth safe-guarding, it'd be worth the effort to recap or get a better video card.

Testing a MIDI daughterboard... the hard way. This is actually more of a test of the MIDI box project I'm working on.

The output from the Turtle Beach daughterboard sounded great. I tested an SCB-55, too, and the +/-12V rails worked like a champ... no perceptible noise on outputs.

You can see the bench power supply. I was feeding it 9V, and it was drawing 203 milliAmps... which comes to 1.8 Watts. That makes me happy as it's WAY under the power requirements of an external MIDI module. It won't be hard to find a 9V AC adapter to power it when it's done.

After ten years of not booting, I got a floppy drive in here;

Battery seems to work ! 😳

EDIT: BATTERY C O N F I R M E D 🤣 😲

Note the charge indicator is out, showing that I am disconnected from the mains, I will upload video if you don't believe me. What an awesome battery.

Oh, btw, my Satellite Pro 410CDT - to whoever asked about the battery. That one works too.

Not really retro..

From some old parts i made a technical windows 10 preview computer.. Its nice to test it to see if i learn how to can understand it quickly.

Found some great info about early PCI sound cards, and how to use them in dos/linux.
I was actually trying to find any and anything regarding sb-link functionality as I stumbled onto this.
Great info anyway..... Someone might find it useful though.

http://www.flaterco.com/kb/audio/PCI/

Got this thing out of storage. Intel refrence I850, it uses Rdram.
Gonna mess with it not expecting anything but trouble with it .
A P4 northwood 2.4\533 is on it, all the caps look perfect, and its a board that uses the AUX power cable.
I have 4 128mb rdimms for it, only gonna try 9x if it fails that, then back to storage.

🤣 update guess this is now on backburner for a bit.
Went through my PSU's and don't have a working one not in a machine with both the 4-pin 12v + 3.3\5v aux connector.
Board won't start (it starts but it just beeps its beep error for no 12v aux) without it bleh will have to get an adapter. Just how I remember this dumb board, a royal pain to use.

Today I worked on my new Magnavox 486. Installed a HDD and ran some tests: works fine. The speaker appears dead and some parts are MIA (back screw, 5.25" slot caddy, HDD LED cable). These parts are interchangeable from the 286. The 486 is definitely a re-purposed 286 left over: all parts are dated 1991. They simply built a 486 DB and BIOS (that recognizes the 486 DX as a 487 and limits it to 20MHZ). Cool stuff. Runs pretty fast compared to the 286.

Pulled the heatsink from a Voodoo3 3500, to see if I could replace it with something better. Found this:

Look at that contact surface! The heatsink barely even touched the chip, only on the corners and those two bumps near the edge. No wonder these things run so hot.

Today I moved the IDE HDD from the Magnavox 486 to my IBM Personal Computer 350 (coincidentally it is an IBM HDD) and moved the Seagate IDE HDD from the IBM PC 350 to the Magnavox. The Seagate has a LED connection. I found a HDD IDE LED so that is taken care off now. I also moved the Magnavox 286 from upstairs (dining room) to the basement. My oldest son was taking paper out of the printer so I had to move the printer to the spot where the Magnavox was located. I will bring it up again in the spring.

I also got a box with stuff together to test equipment at the scrapper tomorrow. That should be a fun morning. I have the day off in honor of Presidents Day.

jwt27 wrote:

Pulled the heatsink from a Voodoo3 3500, to see if I could replace it with something better. Found this: […]
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Pulled the heatsink from a Voodoo3 3500, to see if I could replace it with something better. Found this:

Look at that contact surface! The heatsink barely even touched the chip, only on the corners and those two bumps near the edge. No wonder these things run so hot.

Even if the heatsink would have perfect contact, the V3 3000/3500 will run hot. These chips can handle a lot of heat 😀.

My recent retro activity is benchmarking 3dfx-cards with additional benchmarks. I also sorted my whole collection in boxes and found quite a lot of hardware that I acquired but didn't add in my database. Putting them into them into the database is not retro, but looking at them... a 1987 video adapter is retro!

Pulled apart my Thinkpad 370C + Dock 1 and put some resistors on the fan to quiet it down, it was really too loud.
I'm now on the 3rd SB16 SCSI (CT1770) in the dock, it's taken 3 to find one that's fully working. First one had broken FM, second had intermittent problems with the SCSI interface. The 3rd one is good and has the ASP chip installed so that's cool.

I straightened out the pins on 10 socket 478 CPUs I bought.
In the auction picture the pins were streight. I told the seller "pack the CPUs with care because socket 478 pins are fragile."
When I got the CPUs there were not a streight pin in sight. I managed to fix them all though but it took one and a half hour.

Hmm...

Have it set up to dual-boot Windows 3.11, but the network won't load on that OS anymore for some reason.

I had a dream last night where I was on holiday in Sicily (which is weird in itself, I've never been there before or ever felt the need to go there). My dad walked into a store to buy something and I followed after him. Turns out, it was a some kind of thrift store, filled with old PC hardware! I went kinda crazy there.

Which also reminds me, I had a similar dream once where I was locked inside a huge old warehouse after closing time. Fuel for nightmares, you might expect... But then I discovered the entire warehouse was, again, filled with old PC gear. Oh boy. The rest of the dream involved me swimming around in mainboards and ISA cards, Scrooge McDuck style.

Okay, I think I might be mildly obsessed.

I've had dreams a bit like that. Usually I find processors and stuff in skips or in huge trash piles... Problem is, 99% of my dreams look like the otherworld from the first Silent Hill game so the stuff usually doesn't work.

It gets better if you can teach yourself to control your dreams though. Happens in these ones a lot because I'll notice something is wrong, like a "486DX3-83" or an Award BIOS having an AMI WinBIOS interface; as soon as I start questioning it my mind tries to correct it but it's too late and I notice that as well at which point I think "I am asleep." and become able to manipulate things a little. Also notice clocks running unusually sometimes before my mind catches up with it's error and tries to fix it.

Ah yes, lucid dreaming is fun!
For me though, seeing something out of the ordinary never seems to make me realize I'm asleep. Whenever that happens, I just instantly "know" I'm dreaming and then proceed to fly instead of walk from there on like it's the most mundane thing in the world. 🤣

Today I spent 6 hours at the scrapper and processed a pallet of PCs/cards. Most 286/386/486s MOBOs were dead or heavily affected by leaking batteries. So those were scrapped except for one desktop case. RAM, CPUs and cache were salvaged. Some ISA cards also appeared dead. 3 CT1740s with ASP/CSP were fine and will be for sale. Lots of 3.5" DS/HD FDDs were dead. An IBM PS/2 Model 55 SX 8555 was dead. The Tandy CM-11 was fried. The AT&T PC6300 could not be tested. 3 generic AMD 80486 DX4 100MHZ desktops will be for sale. I could not test an IBM CGA card, AST SixPakPlus and some other cards but they will be for sale anyway.

For my labor I took an IBM Pentium 233 MMX (not 100% cosmetically), 4 IDE HDDs, a PAS (no idea whether it works), a 512KB ISA Trident VGA card, a CD-ROM card, 2 IDE CD-ROM drives and 1 5.25"'DS/HD FDD. I will go back in April / May to continue.

God doing that would absolutely kill me.

King_Corduroy wrote:

God doing that would absolutely kill me.

While I think that PeterLI is way too much of a "thrower-outer", if they are DEAD components, then saving them wouldn't be of that much use.
The only thing that I would be concerned of is saving any good cache or RAM

We already had the discussion about holding on to things. The scrapper needs to make a living so holding on to dead MOBOs with acjd eating through it is not an option. I do not have the time / space to hoard defective parts either or troubleshoot / repair them. Plus nobody would pay $100s in gas / postage to pick them up / have them sent. Anyway: there are still thousands of tons of retro equipment out there anyway. 🤣

At least the stuff that still works was saved. Most scrappers simpy process them to sell as bulk refining lots.