Re: ESD and you

Posted on 2022-04-14, 21:47

by

by shamino

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Something I find funny about ESD with eBay is how so many sellers pack items in those cheap pink antistatic bags, put an ESD warning sticker on the bag, and then wrap it all up in regular bubble wrap. Public service announcement: Plastic antistatic bags are not shielding bags. "Antistatic" only …

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Re: Quadro2 MXR overclocking the vram?

Posted on 2022-04-13, 12:39

by

by shamino

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

The Hercules "3D Prophet 2 MX" comes with 5.5ns 128bit SDRAM standard, they clocked it to 183MHz as a selling point. Clocking the GPU to MX400 speed should be easy but I was afraid to overclock back when I had one. They don't seem to be common though. I had a weird video refresh rate issue with mine …

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Re: PIII-s on a 694T: mysterious memory errors

Posted on 2022-04-10, 18:42

by

by shamino

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

You mentioned pulling and checking some caps. Did you put the old ones back in? I don't think MSI used good caps in this period. Don't know if that's the issue but it sure acts like the power circuitry is getting overwhelmed and losing stability when you use the most demanding CPUs. You may find …

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Re: PIII-s on a 694T: mysterious memory errors

Posted on 2022-04-10, 18:28

by

by shamino

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

In comparing the datasheets, it looks like the 512KB chips have much tighter tolerances for voltage. The tolerance for clock stability is also tighter, don't know what other differences there are. Surprisingly they don't show any appreciable difference in current draw. Bigger cache makes a huge …

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Re: PIII-s on a 694T: mysterious memory errors

Posted on 2022-04-10, 00:31

by

by shamino

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

The Shuttle AV18 (AV8? whatever it is) doesn't list support for the P3-S either. There's probably other boards with the same limitation. The reason is probably the onboard power circuitry not being able to handle the power draw of those CPUs.

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Re: ThinkPad A22m shuts off during Windows 98 install

Posted on 2022-04-10, 00:17

by

by shamino

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

What are the specs on your power adapters? I don't remember the correct spec but there's a weaker PSU for older Thinkpads that sometimes gets incorrectly used on these. There's also a ton of dodgy knockoffs, the ones I've seen say "For IBM" on them - real first party PSUs don't say "for".

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Re: Abit KT7A (KT133A/VIA686B), Athlon XP Mobile 2500+

Posted on 2022-04-08, 22:31

by

by shamino

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

Check any voltages you can and see if they're fluctuating under load. Check if the 3.3V supply to the AGP slot is powered directly from the ATX connector. If so, the PSU could be an important factor. I'm kind of curious about this myself now, but my board is buried somewhere. I also wonder if the …

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Re: Help in making a CR-2032 mod on EXP 8049 motherboard.

Posted on 2022-04-08, 21:16

by

by shamino

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Those pins above the battery provide a connection for a battery, but I don't know if the board would charge the battery through that connector. There might be a standard convention for that, I just don't know. You could try probing with a meter on those pins to see if voltage is present when power …

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Re: How often do you purchase retro hardware?

Posted on 2022-04-05, 21:05

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by shamino

in Milliways

in Milliways

Every once in a while I start digging into eBay, maybe just out of boredom, but if I keep it up I will inevitably find something that I want to buy. This leads to more searching and more buying. Then after I think I've spent too much I stop. It happens a few times a year.

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Re: What games to use as benchmarks for milestone memory capacities?

Posted on 2022-04-05, 08:04

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by shamino

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Depending on how it's used, I still see it as a useful technology. It allows assets to be loaded from disk into fast system memory and copied into even faster video memory as needed. The alternative would be to read from disk in demand. And, realistically, this was not actually a viable alternative …

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Re: Pc hangs up as soon gpu is accessed

Posted on 2022-04-04, 19:31

by

by shamino

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Do you have a multimeter? If so, check supply voltages. If they look good, then check if they stay stable when the system is put under stress. If you see them sagging much while Windows boots, for example, it's likely a problem. Failing that, at least look at the BIOS readings, but keep in mind …

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Re: BeOS

Posted on 2022-04-04, 04:20

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by shamino

in Milliways

in Milliways

^Which version? I can’t seem to get it to run. Anyone else running it on socket 7? What iso did you use? On my K6-3 I just remember it being version 5. It was a free version that could be launched from within Windows98. I don't seem to have anything left of it in my archived files so I can't …

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Re: BeOS

Posted on 2022-04-03, 01:35

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by shamino

in Milliways

in Milliways

I ran that "Personal Edition" version 5 of BeOS on my K6-3 back around 2000 or so. I was very impressed with it, but it's usefulness was of course limited by the fact that we were living in a Windows world. Up to that point I had not used the WinNT series yet so BeOS' stability felt like a …

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Re: I was offered some free "flat screen" monitors, but it was not what I had expected

Posted on 2022-04-02, 13:40

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by shamino

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

The usage of the term unfortunately got mangled later on, but that's exactly what "flat screen" actually means. :) I had a late flat-screened Sony Trinitron but it didn't last long due to some manufacturing defect. For a while it was beautiful though. A family member had a 17" NEC FE700+ or FE770 or …

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Re: What games to use as benchmarks for milestone memory capacities?

Posted on 2022-04-02, 02:08

by

by shamino

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

I think I ran into a texture memory issue in Fallout 3 several years ago. I was trying to benchmark the game on some late AGP cards by running around in a predetermined path. With a 7600GS AGP card with 256MB, the game would stutter and struggle for a while, and then either crash, or start running …

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Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

Posted on 2022-04-01, 23:58

by

by shamino

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

A Geforce4 MX420 GPU (NV17?) runs on 1.60V. Let it be known. I'm about to recap a card, so I was figuring out how each of the caps are connected. 2 of them are on the GPU Vcore output. I'm tempted to use polys for those caps, but since they come in lower voltage specs I needed to figure out what …

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Re: Who cares about ebay prices when you can do this!

Posted on 2022-03-31, 21:12

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by shamino

in Milliways

in Milliways

I watched somebody play that game on youtube 2-3 years ago. It looks kind of cool, but I could quickly tell I would get irritated at the assumptions the game makes about how it thinks you should go about troubleshooting and what "must" be wrong. I don't approach problems the same way the game's …

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Re: Any Unreal Tournament gamers here?

Posted on 2022-03-31, 08:53

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by shamino

in Milliways

in Milliways

I'm not much of an FPS guy, but I do like UT99, relatively speaking for the genre. I don't like playing much of anything online, but I can enjoy UT99 if I play against bots that I can beat. If I'm actually having a struggle, then I just get frustrated and don't enjoy it. That to me is a good sign …

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Re: Geforce 2 mx 400 woes

Posted on 2022-03-30, 23:50

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by shamino

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

I don't know about the booting issues, but -It won’t display in the bios from dvi but will from vga are you using a KVM? Cards with dual output sometimes don't realize which port is connected when a KVM is involved, so you're forced to use whichever it has defaulted to enabling. Something similar …

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Re: A graphics card I bought lasted only a few seconds before dying

Posted on 2022-03-30, 23:36

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by shamino

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

I've had lots of things arrive dead, but it's harder to think of things that legitimately worked for at least a few seconds and then quickly died. One that comes to mind was an MSI 440BX motherboard. I remember booting it up on the first try, and thinking it was interesting that it reported onboard …

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