I got a "new" 386 motherboard today.
It's not part of the huge lot of hardware I'm in the process of moving from southernmost Sweden up to where I live but an untested board I bought earlier that have travelled here by snail.
The 386WB4A3 B1... Opti chipset something something 386 motherboard.
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The issue was that the motherboard diddn't work. The AT PSU got overloaded instantly and refused to turn on. The motherboard was listed as "used" eventhough the seller hardly knew what it was and hadn't tested it so I guess I could have made a big fuss about the board not working. It's not really my style to go after non professional sellers that don't really know what they are selling though.
After poking around with my multimeter a couple of minuts I found a dead short at capacitor C11.
This one is beeing naughty.
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Here there should be an image of a nicely done removal and replacement but my solder sucker decided that it was a good time to be afflicted by congestion. It failed to suck and instead puked solder all over the board... After cleaning up the excess solder with a desoldering braid and servicing the sucker the later worked a bit too good... Well in the end the cap got capped and recapped with another cap.
Much better!
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Do we know who bought this motherboard?
The seller was a Spanish dude who sells "untested" stuff on Ebay that rarly work out of the box but often can be saved with a bit of TLC. I was the other (non winning) bidder. I'm not going to spend much more money on hardware this year after buying the big lot otherwise I would probably have been willing to bid a bit more, the price ended up at 20£. I would like to know if the buyer is a Vogons member as a dump of the MR BIOS on this board would be useful.
The 386 motherboard I did not win.
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New PC: i9 12900K @5GHz all cores @1.2v. MSI PRO Z690-A. 32GB DDR4 3600 CL14. 3070Ti.
Old PC: Dual Xeon X5690@4.6GHz, EVGA SR-2, 48GB DDR3R@2000MHz, Intel X25-M. GTX 980ti.
Older PC: K6-3+ 400@600MHz, PC-Chips M577, 256MB SDRAM, AWE64, Voodoo Banshee.