Re: Iron Coils amateur coating

Posted on 2010-01-21, 22:18

by

by Old Thrashbarg

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

You may have caught a glimpse of these coils to have some plastic/rubber thing spinned around and over it, helping this to diminish the EMI... It doesn't do anything about EMI... what it does is help dampen physical vibrations. Heatshrink doesn't always work very well, though, since the movement is …

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Re: BX440 BIOS trouble

Posted on 2010-01-19, 00:00

by

by Old Thrashbarg

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Yeah, that's the thing a lot of people don't realize about the VRMs on newer boards, both for the CPU and for RAM. The capacitance and voltage ratings generally don't matter much, it's the ESR that's actually critical. It just so happens that physically larger capacitors naturally have lower ESR, …

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Re: BX440 BIOS trouble

Posted on 2010-01-18, 22:34

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by Old Thrashbarg

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

ventually you will end up having the cap body seperated from the legs and you can use the already soldered down legs to solder your new cap Do NOT do that on a modern motherboard. While that may be acceptable for old Amiga parts, the newer VRM designs are extremely sensitive to ESR, and hacking …

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Re: BX440 BIOS trouble

Posted on 2010-01-18, 02:52

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by Old Thrashbarg

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

One other thing that might be worth a shot, other than another 1ghz CPU, is if you have a 500 or 550mhz Katmai PIII you can try. One of those would put a lot more stress on the power section of the board than a Coppermine chip would, so it'd be more likely that any issues would show themselves …

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Re: BX440 BIOS trouble

Posted on 2010-01-17, 18:21

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by Old Thrashbarg

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

]Guys, please read my posts again and you'll see that I was running an OS and benchmarks fine with the 1ghz CPU Sorry, but you didn't make that point clear anywhere, and I have read through all the posts in this thread several times, specifically looking for it. At any rate, that still doesn't …

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Re: BX440 BIOS trouble

Posted on 2010-01-16, 21:52

by

by Old Thrashbarg

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Oh, yeah, you're definitely not going to get anything from the motherboard sensors. We're talking milliseconds here... you'd need to poke at the thing with an oscilloscope to actually see the fluctuations. But those quick little drops are definitely enough to throw everything off. BTW, if the hangup …

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Re: BX440 BIOS trouble

Posted on 2010-01-16, 21:14

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by Old Thrashbarg

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

There's something with this CPU that's causing this "bug" but it doesn't affect anything else as stability etc so it can't be bad caps... Just an analogy here... You have a baseball sitting on the floor, a terrified-looking kid with a catcher's mitt standing outside, and yet you still can't figure …

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Re: BX440 BIOS trouble

Posted on 2010-01-16, 17:42

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by Old Thrashbarg

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I think that you are either seeing instability from bad caps or from 90 MHz AGP. Try a PCI video card. The AGP is ruled out since it works with a 933mhz CPU, which also runs a 133mhz FSB... that would still give the same 89mhz AGP speed. The one upside of the capacitor problem is that it's usually …

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Re: BX440 BIOS trouble

Posted on 2010-01-16, 17:07

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by Old Thrashbarg

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

It might be a BIOS bug as Keropi says but it's weird that it exists on the latest BIOS version which is from mid 2001 The simplest explanation is usually the right one, and when you have obviously failed hardware components, which are well known for causing the exact problem you're seeing, that's …

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Re: BX440 BIOS trouble

Posted on 2010-01-16, 15:39

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by Old Thrashbarg

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Just wondering, but have you checked the board thoroughly for signs of bad capacitors? That BX133 was known to have problems with that, and I don't think they would always visibly bulge, so it might not be immediately obvious. It would make sense with the symptoms you're seeing... the 1ghz PIII …

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Re: Pinnacle ATI (Radeon) 8500 - any good?

Posted on 2010-01-13, 23:59

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by Old Thrashbarg

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I think the point being made is out the of the box the 4200 overclocks like mad, which everyone did, which means not pretty close when it came to practice I see the point being made. However, my point is being completely missed, apparently. I was attempting to give a simple, concise reference as to …

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Re: Pinnacle ATI (Radeon) 8500 - any good?

Posted on 2010-01-13, 23:26

by

by Old Thrashbarg

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Yes, the Ti4200 is a better card overall, I'm not arguing that, but... where did I ever say anything about overclocking? Out of the box, the two cards are pretty close.

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Re: Slot 1 mega-mania video!

Posted on 2010-01-13, 04:16

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by Old Thrashbarg

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous. IMO, if you want a fast disk system on a desktop PIII, just throw in a U2W SCSI card (Adaptec 2940U2W is the standard choice) and a 15K RPM drive, and be done with it. You're not gonna get much better than that on bulk transfer rates due to the PCI limitation, and the …

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Re: Slot 1 mega-mania video!

Posted on 2010-01-11, 21:33

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by Old Thrashbarg

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

My guess is not Windows 98, because he is using Sata controllers. You can use SATA controllers with 98. Hell, you can run plain DOS off a SATA drive if you really want to. In standard IDE mode, they work no differently from any other IDE drive. RAID might be a problem with some cards, but I believe …

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Re: ISA PCI AGP mobos showdown: Intel 440 BX versus AMD 751/756 versus VIA KT133A :-)

Posted on 2010-01-07, 04:51

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by Old Thrashbarg

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I've got an idea - why don't I try using some thermal paste?! Better idea: rather than 'trying' it, just start using it as a matter of course. You already have some, and it's easy to get more for cheap, so there's really no excuse for taking the risk without it. There's no need for tests about it …

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Re: got an old lap top today

Posted on 2010-01-06, 20:25

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by Old Thrashbarg

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

The two missing pin holes are curious and will prevent inserting anything that I know of. Well, no, you could physically insert a 486 in there... the socket is 18 wide and 17 tall, and a 486 is 17 x 17 (with 3 rows deep on all sides), so you could plug it in by leaving the rightmost row empty. …

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Re: ISA PCI AGP mobos showdown: Intel 440 BX versus AMD 751/756 versus VIA KT133A :-)

Posted on 2010-01-06, 20:15

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by Old Thrashbarg

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

The thing is, most heatsinks aren't nearly flat enough. Plus, a lot of the CPUs themselves had a little bit of a curve to the die surface. While that's all well and fine if there's paste there to take up the difference, you're asking for trouble when there isn't. Some Athlons can survive just fine …

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Re: got an old lap top today

Posted on 2010-01-06, 19:51

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by Old Thrashbarg

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

Are you even sure you can use a normal CPU in that thing? That doesn't look like a standard 486 socket to me, the pin configuration is quite different... And also, the CPU board appears to contain cache chips. Even if you can replace it with a regular CPU, you'd lose the cache, and that would make …

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Re: ISA PCI AGP mobos showdown: Intel 440 BX versus AMD 751/756 versus VIA KT133A :-)

Posted on 2010-01-06, 18:21

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by Old Thrashbarg

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Without any kind of thermal paste the heat transfer to the heatsink is very inefficient. If the base of your heatsink is just slightly uneven, this could be almost as bad as mounting no heatsink at all! This strikes me as a great understatement, so I'll emphasize it. Running an Athlon without …

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Re: Pinnacle ATI (Radeon) 8500 - any good?

Posted on 2010-01-05, 15:00

by

by Old Thrashbarg

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

The 8500 is roughly on par with the Ti4200... I think the Geforce has maybe a 5% advantage over the Radeon.

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