From all motherboards I bought usually the little known brands/value quality ones were in best condition as they were never overclocked and used by older people as internet PCs, not for gaming. My strategy was to buy multiple cheap boards and great majority of them were in very good shape. While CPU …

You want two Socket A boards probably anyway the 2nd being a backup. But given the poor benchmark results for SiS 746FX I doubt the Pc Chips board would be a good choice. AGP 8x may be useful for the top end AGP graphics cards and games which can utilize lot of memory and need frequent data …

I was a player with a DX2 66 then with the RTS of the first generation (Pentium1 / mmx / 2) up to Red Alert or a little further, I have perhaps played lite with a mendocino 300A at 450. I thought that the ss7 with the K6 at 500Mhz could enough for my personal needs… no? Possibly if you can buy such …

People sometimes give away their stashed CRT monitors for free or token price. Just be patient and watch out for advertisements. If you're not happy with the image quality you can always resell it. I grabbed mine basically for token price as well. CRTs from 2002 onward are quite good. 17" models …

With Socket A you have to make a compromise with resolution in later games as geforce 7xxx won't be able to handle them. If you're not happy with the performance then you're better off with playing the demanding games on a modern system as you noticed. Socket A boards and CPUs are very cheap now and …

My choice would be Biostar M7NCDU due to: having both PATA (for boot disk) and SATA (for storage), dual channel memory (for slight performance boost), AGP 8x support. It's a late board so you can plug any Athlon XP into it. Try to pair it with Nvidia 7xxx graphics card or at least 6xxx. I personally …

A Pentium MMX 166 can go down to 386DX-25 speed with both caches disabled. I've tested mine with the original Wing Commander and 3DBench2 and it's working as expected. I think capability of some CPUs to downclock is overhyped. On these old boards it means changing jumper settings which is not that …

What a pity to smash these rare CRTs in transport. This should serve as a cautionary tale to anyone who sells or buys CRTs.

My board isn't stable with 256MB sticks, I would try 128MB in your place. I run with 3x128MB, it's more than enough. According to the manual I'm supposed to use 256MB only if they are registered ECC and they are right. Decreasing FSB to 66Mhz will lower CPU frequency and it could work if your …

Socket 754 Athlon 64 CPUs are very rare, while Semprons are quite common (and not that desirable). That's the main downside of socket 754. Other than that its perfect - AGP 8x, PATA and SATA and its faster than Athlon XP. Single memory channel and slower HT shouldn't be an issue for old Windows XP …

I would definitely keep it. I'm keeping one 2.4Ghz P4 on 865G myself. If you don't want to mess with boot loaders just install two hard drives, they are very cheap now. And you get SATA for storage if you need it.

When I tried to put 2GB RAM into my Epox 8K5A2+ motherboard I ended up in situation when nothing worked and there was always a memory error on diagnostic lcd, no matter how many or what memory modules I tried (I have various memory sizes). I thought I cracked the board somewhere, it made no sense. I …

Can i say: where super socket 7 finish, socketA start? with two system cover every retro need, PIII become not essential... In my opinion Super Socket 7 and Pentium III (450-700) fall into the same category - a fast Pentium processor for early 3d games (glide with Voodoo2 + very fast AGP graphics …

I removed the plastic clips with two Philips screwdrivers. You need to put the heat sink on a table, pin holes facing up. You can loosen the clips by pushing PH2 screw driver with the whole body weight while holding the plastic cover firmly. Once they are loosened use a fine screwdriver (smaller …

About buying another board: all boards from this era have potentially defective capacitors. Again even capacitors that look visually fine can be defective, I've encountered this situation more than once. A full recapping is the only way to be completely safe; it is dangerous to power the board …

I have P III 600E with an unusual heat sink depicted here - https://i.pinimg.com/originals/12/35/e6/1235e6f8b0151e1d7a8724c92a7521a8.jpg (not my item). No fan can be attached to it as a result. My plan is to modify sheet metal from 5.25 bay to act as a fan holder (for 6 cm fan) attached to case …

I have an USB 2.0 card with chip NEC D720100AGM. It has 2 USB 2.0 ports. I managed to find a driver for Windows 98SE, but unfortunately the card requires 3 ! IRQs to be fully operational. One IRQ is used by the controller itself and then further 2 are needed (it seems one for each port). It also …