Shponglefan wrote on 2023-11-03, 00:41:

Been testing a bunch of motherboards and various hardware configurations. […]
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Been testing a bunch of motherboards and various hardware configurations.

Motherboard Testing.jpg

Specifically testing my Pentium II 300 build having obtained a new (and hopefully working properly) Riva 128 video card.

Pentium II-300 ATX setup.jpg

It's ok to admit you wanted to show off your bench, because damn... 😎👍

ubiq wrote on 2023-11-03, 00:47:

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-11-03, 00:41:

Been testing a bunch of motherboards and various hardware configurations.

Specifically testing my Pentium II 300 build having obtained a new (and hopefully working properly) Riva 128 video card.

It's ok to admit you wanted to show off your bench, because damn... 😎👍

I really like the Noctua fan zip tied to the CPU heatsink. It's not a bad idea at all, and probably has plenty of clearance in a case.

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-11-03, 01:30:

ubiq wrote on 2023-11-03, 00:47:

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-11-03, 00:41:

Been testing a bunch of motherboards and various hardware configurations.

Specifically testing my Pentium II 300 build having obtained a new (and hopefully working properly) Riva 128 video card.

It's ok to admit you wanted to show off your bench, because damn... 😎👍

I really like the Noctua fan zip tied to the CPU heatsink. It's not a bad idea at all, and probably has plenty of clearance in a case.

Yah those "passive" sinks get ouchy hot. A setup I've done with them before is an 80mm end on, standing vertical on the edge of the board, wind tunneling the slotty hottie and the RAM, which gets kinda toasty too in low density high speed.

@Shponglefan
Bench is da top. Great work environment 😀. Hope to have something similar one day.

Updated bios on GA-6BXC and tested some VIA C3 CPUs.

L2 cache not counted. Still waiting 1GHz Ezra-T to arrive.

Received an 8-bit ISA riser from Tindie yesterday:

Did an initial test with a spare MDA card on a throwaway Socket 7 mobo tonight to make sure nothing blows up, all looks good! I decided to pull out my ABit-VH6T and go to town:

The generational gap is certainly something, but pleasantly surprised to see it working. Here's a quick RGB2HDMI capture:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsaNzpQannM

One annoying thing is that neither the IBM CGA or my Hercules GB102 card want to co-operate that well with this mobo specifically, my ASUS CUBX-L is far more forgiving even though it's not as fast on raw performance. Getting an error-free boot into FreeDOS with a CT2290 Sound Blaster 16 also plugged in to the riser took a solid 10 minutes of constant power cycling which can be detected before FDCONFIG.SYS loads any device drivers as the countdown for choosing the default option never ticks down, which will lead to issues like trying to load sound cards resulting in freezes and benchmarking FastDoom will end in an error dump rather than displaying the framerate.

Obligatory timedemo results (FPS) with supported FastDoom 0.9.8 modes using DEMO1 of the shareware IWAD:

FDOOMT1: 252.020
FDOOMT12: 108.990
FDOOMT25: 56.544 (the -snow parameter doesn't seem to work)
FDOOMBWC: 137.860
FDOOMCGA: 108.555
FDOOMC16: 186.939 (47.944 with -snow)
FDOOMCAH: 100.520 (29.649 with -snow)
FDOOMCVB: 111.265
FDOOM512: 31.885

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-11-03, 00:41:

Been testing a bunch of motherboards and various hardware configurations. […]
Show full quote

Been testing a bunch of motherboards and various hardware configurations.

Motherboard Testing.jpg

Specifically testing my Pentium II 300 build having obtained a new (and hopefully working properly) Riva 128 video card.

Pentium II-300 ATX setup.jpg

Testing for anything in particular or just to see if they work?

DEAT wrote on 2023-11-03, 14:33:

Getting an error-free boot into FreeDOS with a CT2290 Sound Blaster 16 also plugged in to the riser took a solid 10 minutes of constant power cycling which can be detected before FDCONFIG.SYS loads any device drivers as the countdown for choosing the default option never ticks down, which will lead to issues like trying to load sound cards resulting in freezes and benchmarking FastDoom will end in an error dump rather than displaying the framerate.

I wonder why. Is there too much of a voltage drop across the riser?

I moved the shelf up in my retro pc unit today to accommodate the new case for my retro PC. Looks pretty good with all the midi modules and the games, all neatly contained.

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-11-03, 18:16:

DEAT wrote on 2023-11-03, 14:33:

Getting an error-free boot into FreeDOS with a CT2290 Sound Blaster 16 also plugged in to the riser took a solid 10 minutes of constant power cycling which can be detected before FDCONFIG.SYS loads any device drivers as the countdown for choosing the default option never ticks down, which will lead to issues like trying to load sound cards resulting in freezes and benchmarking FastDoom will end in an error dump rather than displaying the framerate.

I wonder why. Is there too much of a voltage drop across the riser?

Maybe the riser acts as an antenna.
I recently had a lot of trouble with the ISA bus when PWM was near to the traces.

DerBaum wrote on 2023-10-29, 03:17:

OH. I have found a small problem with my construction... The lights work great, BUT they cause weird things. […]
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DerBaum wrote on 2023-10-25, 21:17:

First tests. I think i will make my own led controller instead of using a pre made one. Maybe an Arduino set up to take serial c […]
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DerBaum wrote on 2023-10-23, 18:05:

The lack of individual addressable RGB LEDs and orange car wrapping film in modded early 2000s industrial PCs is not accaptable!

2023-10-23 19.09.01.jpg

I cant wait to see how it will turn out. I try to just use the leds in placec where you cant see them directly (below the backplane, behind fans ...) .

First tests.
I think i will make my own led controller instead of using a pre made one.
Maybe an Arduino set up to take serial commands to control the leds. Then i could write small dos and windows programs to control the leds... that would be awesome.

2023-10-25 23.10.38.jpg

OH. I have found a small problem with my construction...
The lights work great, BUT they cause weird things.

I have mounted 24 LEDs on the backside of the case so they light up the mainboard/backplane from behind.
If the LEDs are on (seperate external power supply) the Processor of the SBC is recognised as 800MHZ instead of 1GHZ, and the system crashes from the slightest activity.
I am 100 percent sure nothing unisolated is touching the case or any components... so it must be electrical interference.

Very interesting.

Bancho wrote on 2023-11-03, 18:28:

I moved the shelf up in my retro pc unit today to accommodate the new case for my retro PC. Looks pretty good with all the midi […]
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I moved the shelf up in my retro pc unit today to accommodate the new case for my retro PC. Looks pretty good with all the midi modules and the games, all neatly contained.

It's looks good, but you might want to get a rack for the CDs, so that it's easier to pull one from the bottom out.

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-11-03, 01:30:

I really like the Noctua fan zip tied to the CPU heatsink. It's not a bad idea at all, and probably has plenty of clearance in a case.

Yup, there's plenty of clearance for the fan.

I figure it also helps keep the 82443LX chip cool, since it blows directly onto it as well . Some motherboards have heatsinks on that chip, but this particular one does not.

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-11-03, 15:12:

Testing for anything in particular or just to see if they work?

Partially to see if they are functional and stable, but also testing different processor combos.

One of the Socket 7 boards (GA-586ATV Rev 3B) has turbo switch capability, so I'm experimenting with it to see how throttleable it is in conjunction with SETMUL.

ubiq wrote on 2023-11-03, 00:47:

It's ok to admit you wanted to show off your bench, because damn... 😎👍

stef80 wrote on 2023-11-03, 07:38:

@Shponglefan
Bench is da top. Great work environment 😀. Hope to have something similar one day.

Thank you both, I appreciate it. 😁

That bench has evolved a lot over the past decade.

stef80 wrote on 2023-11-03, 07:38:

Updated bios on GA-6BXC and tested some VIA C3 CPUs.

What revision is your particular board?

I've got the same board (and a GA-6BXE), and have been planning to do similar tests and set up a Via C3 system too.

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-11-03, 21:37:

Thank you both, I appreciate it. :D […]
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ubiq wrote on 2023-11-03, 00:47:

It's ok to admit you wanted to show off your bench, because damn... 😎👍

stef80 wrote on 2023-11-03, 07:38:

@Shponglefan
Bench is da top. Great work environment 😀. Hope to have something similar one day.

Thank you both, I appreciate it. 😁

That bench has evolved a lot over the past decade.

Nice, something to aspire to. 🙂 I decided "retro computing" was a serious hobby of mine only earlier this year, so there have been a few growing pains with respect to how much room I need for it, etc. I knew it was serious when I finally bought a table to be my bench. Actually, I guess the fact that I was using my dinner table for computer repair instead of eating might have also been a clue...

Anyway, last night I managed to cram a hard drive in my Pentium 90 in a mini-ITX case build:

Posted about my (mis)adventures in the thread I have going in System Specs.

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-11-03, 18:16:

I wonder why. Is there too much of a voltage drop across the riser?

I don't believe so, I've seen this happen with certain PCI video cards (going from memory, I believe it was my PNY Geforce FX 5200 and Trident ProVidia 9685 cards that have this similar issue) and my CF cards where it takes several attempts for a successful boot. I'm thinking it's an issue with the southbridge and the CF adapter. Running the CF card through a Promise Ultra100 TX2 shows greater stability than using the onboard IDE.

The Hercules card doesn't need a riser to fit in 16-bit slots, so I'm ruling out the riser for now. It did take a few boots and having to insert things from the bottom slot of the riser up to the top to get good stability, as if the caps still needed some burn-in. More importantly, the riser card works fine on my Protech PM286 so now I can finally use my IBM CGA card without cutting up ISA slots.

DEAT wrote on 2023-11-04, 03:00:

and my CF cards where it takes several attempts for a successful boot. I'm thinking it's an issue with the southbridge and the CF adapter. Running the CF card through a Promise Ultra100 TX2 shows greater stability than using the onboard IDE.

I don't know if you've ever come across the thing where an IDE drive resets too slow, like an old Seagate tictictic hurr durr durr tictictic, when the POST IDE initialization happens, such that some boards need the HDD delay setting if available. Well this might be the complete opposite of that. Like a CF card resets so damn quick that the board starts waiting for it's reply/signal after it has already done it. Not sure if there's anything you can do to slow it down that won't interfere with normal operation.

Picked up a new case which I've moved my Core 2 Win XP system into, overall I'm really happy with it and it's nice to have another desktop case 😀

System specs are as follows

CPU - Intel Core 2 Extreme - QX6850 @ 3.6Ghz (9 x 400 FSB)
Motherboard - Asus P5Q Deluxe Socket 775
RAM - 4GB Corsair DDR2 1066Mhz (CAS 5)
GPU - 1024MB Gainward GTX 285
Soundcard - Creative Sound Blaster XFI Titanium
HDD - 480GB Crucial BX500 SSD
Case - Silverstone GDO9B
Cooler - Zalman CNPS9500AT
PSU - Corsair RM650W
OS - Windows XP Pro SP3

Chris

I know that's a modern desktop case, but that still looks like a lot more heat than I'd trust a desktop format to deal with. I'd be gutfeel limiting it at 65W CPU and up to 130W GPU

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-11-04, 14:05:

I know that's a modern desktop case, but that still looks like a lot more heat than I'd trust a desktop format to deal with. I'd be gutfeel limiting it at 65W CPU and up to 130W GPU

Hi BitWrangler

Yes I was a bit concerned about heat as well but after doing multiple benchmark runs and playing a few games, temps seem to be hovering around the 35c idle and 65c under load on both the CPU & GFX Card which is pretty good. It does have 2 x 120mm Noctua fans blowing over the CPU cooler as well which I think is helping