It is amazing that with how hazardous using garbage caps in a PC PSU could be, that they were ever used at all by anyone. At any rate, the Delta is installed and the PC is reassembled, and I am back to formatting this pile of floppies. So far, every 5.25 has been a success, with zero bad sectors (including the the one that had bad sectors right before the PSU crashed.) I find that to be amazing. I hope to find a similar deal on 3.5 floppies. The only other issue, floppy-wise, is that the label adhesive is practically nonexistent due to age, so I bought double sided scotch tape.

I bought an adapter with one end having male pins to connect to the front panel usb, and the other end has two usb jacks, with the idea that I can reroute the motherboard USB1/1.1 (not sure what this revision of the P2B has, exactly,) so that once this PC is put where it is going to be, I won't have to deal with pulling it out to attach Sidewinder controllers and other USB peripherals.

Of course I also have to acquire the 2nd Voodoo2, and replace the AWE32 with the AWE64 Legacy, when it is possible to do so.

The only other thing I want to try is rloew's TBPlus package to see if I can put a 1TB in this box, but so far, I can't make heads or tales of rloew's manual and I haven't been able to properly format and set up a drive, hence the slave CF/IDE 3.5 bay drive for swapping 128GB SD cards inside CF/SD adapters. I will try rloew's TRIM program as well, since the master is an SSD on Windows 98.

I want to thank everyone who has posted and offered help, education, and advise. I will eventually make a post about this build - with pics, and will include the desk and the entire set up, as it is a blast from the past and other than the stress - has been a fun project. Of course, I may also ask questions about any other issues that crop up or if I try any esoteric/exotic things with this particular build. I am also getting ready to fire up my Athlon XP build (same idea as the P3 build, including period desk and parts,) which will be connected together with a serial cable with null modem adapter for some fun DOS multiplayer gaming. The P3 desk will also house either a P60 desktop or a 4DPS Tomato 486 (if the board ever arrives from Russia!) and will utilize a KVM.

darry wrote on 2021-05-11, 02:35:

I wonder how good/bad current chinese caps are . Are we still in capacitor plague territory or has the bar been raised somewhat ?

I mean, there are probably decent chinese caps on the market and would imagine that Delta (and likely other reputable manufacturers) have a selection/testing process that weeds out the most shady crap.

My question is more along the lines of has the bottom of the barrel improved much since the capacitor plague peak or have more reputable electronics manufacturers simply gotten more selective regarding caps and now avoid the worst caps ?

IMO, some are fine, some are okay in certain applications, and some are still pure trash.