Re: Test Bench vs Cardboard Box

Posted on 2014-11-06, 04:28

by

by shamino

in Milliways

in Milliways

I just put a sheet of cardboard on the desk and lay the motherboard on that, with the expansion cards hanging off the side. 2 power supplies are sandwiched next to each other with outputs facing opposite directions, optical and floppy drives on top, and a KVM hanging there somewhere. It's a big …

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Re: Gateway Socket 423 motherboard

Posted on 2014-11-05, 13:17

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by shamino

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I think that board perfectly represents a well known, short lived and infamous moment in Intel's history. The socket-423 P4 and RAMBUS combo is kind of iconic of Intel's direction at that moment, and this particular setup really puts it in the best possible light. If it was SDRAM or the later 478 …

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Re: CPU Fan Voltage?

Posted on 2014-11-05, 08:53

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by shamino

in Milliways

in Milliways

I don't think it's really a safety thing - without a thermistor the fan would run full speed all the time, unless the motherboard supports slowing it down. If the motherboard didn't support fan control, then the hardware would be safe, it would just be louder than it needed to be. The ironic thing …

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Re: CPU Fan Voltage?

Posted on 2014-11-04, 05:58

by

by shamino

in Milliways

in Milliways

I think you almost definitely have a thermistor inside the fan which is interfering. It's a dumb feature of AMDs stock fans that shouldn't be there, but it is, at least in the K8 and K10 fans I've seen. The thermistor is adding a variable resistance to the 12v supply, so when the motherboard calls …

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Re: Tips for storing CPUs

Posted on 2014-11-04, 02:05

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by shamino

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I have a bunch of those blue CPU trays mentioned above. They fit socket-7, 370, 462 (I don't know what else, but that's what I use them with). I really like those trays. I have some other black trays that are designed for mPGA478. I don't like them as well. The pins hang through an opening and the …

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Re: some ram i bought for cheap.

Posted on 2014-11-01, 10:17

by

by shamino

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

ECC normally isn't a problem, it shouldn't break anything unless the BIOS actively refuses to let it work. It just adds another 8 bits that don't have to be used. The only (desktop) machines I've run into that care about this are Dells. I have no idea how picky laptops are, I haven't messed with …

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Re: Asus K7M (Slot A)

Posted on 2014-10-30, 01:01

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by shamino

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Interesting info. I acquired one of these a few months ago but haven't done much with it. At least the AGP 1X mode sounds like it works reliably enough, so that's good. It looks like NVidia figured something out eventually, because from your list, they were having 2X problems from Geforce1-4 but …

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Re: Video Cards for Windows 9x benched on a very fast Windows 98SE system.

Posted on 2014-10-30, 00:34

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by shamino

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Interesting, I've wondered about the gaming performance difference between the 980XGL and the Ti4600. There was basically no difference at all in 3DMark 2000 and 2001. In Q3 1280x1024x32 the 980XGL falls closer to the Ti4200 score, but the scores are so high it might not mean much between them. …

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Re: What is the memory "sweet spot" for a Pentium III Windows 98 SE retro-gaming system?

Posted on 2014-10-28, 14:46

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by shamino

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Sweet spot implies there's a downside to having more. I'd just install as much RAM as can be cheaply acquired and doesn't strain stability or force you to slow down timings. But in the case of Win98, there's normally a 512MB limit. If a game has a memory leak, it will crash less often if you have …

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Re: HP DC7900 SFF as an XP Gaming Box

Posted on 2014-10-28, 14:20

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by shamino

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_processing_units (I have misplaced a much better Nvidia GPU reference, if you know it please post a link) the GTX 460 768MB uses about 3 times the power of a GTX 750 but should almost equal its performance. Bandwidth and fill rates …

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Re: Best AGP graphics card for Windows 98?

Posted on 2014-10-28, 06:47

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by shamino

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Based on google, it looks like the Dimension 8200 is a Pentium 4 machine. I think most likely that motherboard uses a standard ATX power supply. Dell used a nonstandard PSU pinout in most, possibly all of their Pentium 2 machines, but only *some* Pentium 3s. All the Dell P4s I've seen used a …

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Re: Your favorite retro apps?

Posted on 2014-10-26, 15:53

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by shamino

in Milliways

in Milliways

It's hard for me to think of any applications that are broken on XP that I wish I could still run. I'll go with the AWE32 SoundFont configuration utility. I'll also mention the *HP* published version of the WinNT/2k Laserjet 5 printer driver. Microsoft provides a driver with XP but it's had some …

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Re: Least lagfest Flash player

Posted on 2014-10-26, 15:18

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by shamino

in Milliways

in Milliways

You can set the buffer size with YouTubeCenter . It might help. Wow... I had no idea this existed. Thanks for mentioning it. Youtube is so broken for me nowadays that I think at least half the time I try to play a video, I have to reload. First I'll get some distorted garbage at the bottom of the …

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Re: Universal AGP slot of ECS P4S5A motherboard?

Posted on 2014-10-25, 07:28

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by shamino

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

It seems to work fine. I tried 2 cards, first a Matrox G2+ (disposable) and then a 3DLabs Permedia (why not - I was already convinced by this point. :) ). I thought the latter card was a Permedia2, but the POST just says Permedia... anyway the copyright is 1997, whatever it is. Both are AGP cards …

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Re: Universal AGP slot of ECS P4S5A motherboard?

Posted on 2014-10-25, 00:48

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by shamino

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I have a P4S5A packed away somewhere. I don't have any Voodoo cards, but I do have some old ATI Rage cards that I guess require 3.3v. Do you just need to find out if it will POST without blowing up? Or is it more involved than that?

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Re: Humour Thread: Outrageously priced retro gear for sale online

Posted on 2014-10-23, 04:01

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by shamino

in Milliways

in Milliways

Hahahaha, who needs a GTX 980, 128GB DDR4, and a 5960X when you can this baby girl. http://www.ebay.com/itm/INTEL-E8600-CORE-2-DUO-2x9800GT-6GB-1TB-MULTI-VIEW-PC-/170267177958?pt=Desktop_PCs&hash=item27a4b6f3e6 Honestly, it's probably a really old listing that's been up for like, I don't know, 6 or …

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Re: New_Pentium2_i440BX_dumpster_find

Posted on 2014-10-23, 03:51

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by shamino

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

The coppermine support is probably the same situation as with many of the older revision P2B and P3B boards. Up until a certain point, Asus didn't guarantee what VRM the board would have installed. Yours apparently has a coppermine capable voltage regulator. If it were an older VRM, it wouldn't …

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Re: What resolution did you use in your games and desktop back in 2001?

Posted on 2014-10-17, 07:15

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by shamino

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Early 2001, I had some cheap 15" CRT at 1024x768. It was very fuzzy doing that, but I did it anyway. In the 90's that seemed really high resolution, but by 2001 I think it was probably the most common. Late 2001, but possibly early 2002 (not sure), I splurged on a 19" Trinitron G400. I ran that at …

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Re: Voodoo 2 tests?

Posted on 2014-10-11, 16:31

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by shamino

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I thought the GA-6BXC sounded familiar, so I looked in my notes. Turns out I had one of those at one point, but sold it off. It has an unusual pair of jumpers I haven't seen on other boards. From old notes: Revision 2.0 board has a pair of jumpers JP12 and JP13 at north end of board. Manual says to …

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Re: Problems with my Pentium 4 rig (warning, big images)

Posted on 2014-10-09, 06:00

by

by shamino

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Those are Sacon FZ capacitors, which are terrible I'm afraid. That said, it doesn't look like any have visibly failed yet. Sometimes caps fail without being visible, but it's likely this isn't your problem. If you do the oven trick, those caps will probably be a write off. You can remove and …

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