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What retro activity did you get up to today?

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Reply 24560 of 28625, by Nexxen

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Trashbytes wrote on 2023-06-27, 01:34:
Im in a slightly similar spot with a Gigabyte GA-8I875 P4 Titan board I got in the mail today, at least 6 caps need to be replac […]
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PD2JK wrote on 2023-06-26, 19:42:

Inspecting this MS-6168 board, it does post but the caps... Same old story so time to replace them all.

Im in a slightly similar spot with a Gigabyte GA-8I875 P4 Titan board I got in the mail today, at least 6 caps need to be replaced due to bloating but what I didnt notice till it arrived was that some animal has somehow torn the ATX connector off the board leaving the posts there. (The seller did take a pretty clear picture of the ATX connector missing ...doh)

https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-8I875-rev-21#ov

Example.jpg

Il have to replace that too, thankfully a closer inspection didnt reveal anything else missing or needing to be replaced, the caps are not super bloated so I will just replace the ATX connector and see if the old girl is still alive before going further.

Other than that its a nice looking board with a P4 HT 550 3.4Ghz in it.

I have this board, same rev.
All the capacitors died, leaked or exploded while in use. In the end I replaced them all and no more surprises.
I was startled many time with popping caps 😀 it's always a show! 🤣

PC#1 Pentium 233 MMX - 98SE
PC#2 PIII-1Ghz - 98SE/W2K

Reply 24561 of 28625, by Trashbytes

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Nexxen wrote on 2023-06-27, 12:40:
I have this board, same rev. All the capacitors died, leaked or exploded while in use. In the end I replaced them all and no mor […]
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Trashbytes wrote on 2023-06-27, 01:34:
Im in a slightly similar spot with a Gigabyte GA-8I875 P4 Titan board I got in the mail today, at least 6 caps need to be replac […]
Show full quote
PD2JK wrote on 2023-06-26, 19:42:

Inspecting this MS-6168 board, it does post but the caps... Same old story so time to replace them all.

Im in a slightly similar spot with a Gigabyte GA-8I875 P4 Titan board I got in the mail today, at least 6 caps need to be replaced due to bloating but what I didnt notice till it arrived was that some animal has somehow torn the ATX connector off the board leaving the posts there. (The seller did take a pretty clear picture of the ATX connector missing ...doh)

https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-8I875-rev-21#ov

Example.jpg

Il have to replace that too, thankfully a closer inspection didnt reveal anything else missing or needing to be replaced, the caps are not super bloated so I will just replace the ATX connector and see if the old girl is still alive before going further.

Other than that its a nice looking board with a P4 HT 550 3.4Ghz in it.

I have this board, same rev.
All the capacitors died, leaked or exploded while in use. In the end I replaced them all and no more surprises.
I was startled many time with popping caps 😀 it's always a show! 🤣

With that in mind .. I shall recap it before powering it on 🤣 or .. ill turn it into a parts board and get another identical to it, not sure which will be cheaper since getting the right caps can be a game in itself.

Reply 24562 of 28625, by PD2JK

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Ah yes, diameter, raster size, capitance, voltage, low ESR or whatever, make, series, tolerance. Did I miss something? 😁

i386 16 ⇒ i486 DX4 100 ⇒ Pentium MMX 200 ⇒ Athlon Orion 700 | TB 1000 ⇒ AthlonXP 1700+ ⇒ Opteron 165 ⇒ Dual Opteron 856

Reply 24563 of 28625, by pentiumspeed

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I don't like any cases that have ports angled at a angle upwards even straight out horizontal at top. Easy to get knocked against and break in the process when reaching to the front drives or moving across front of computer.

Cheers,

Great Northern aka Canada.

Reply 24564 of 28625, by Merovign

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I accidentally added to my XPS collection today, in addition to the 450, the M2010, and the 8700, I now have a 720 (with a GT 730 in it, which is actually a downgrade from stock). It was practically foisted on me at the recycler (that had previously been very strict about not "swapping" stuff) when I took in some parts. I may make a post for the mini-haul when I take some pictures, unusual number of ISA cards as well, untested (mostly IO cards). It's weird, I was literally trying to clear some darned space! I 've been so tired I'm a week late going to the scrapyard, and I'm still trying to catalog stuff for people to buy/take and not making much progress. Kind of wiped out, but the guy at the yard helped move the printer, which was pretty heavy.

I pulled a horrible decaying battery off a 386 mobo (which weirdly had a soldered *and* plugged-in BIOS battery). I probably won't be testing any of it for a while, except maybe the XPS (missing some parts but still heavy as heck!).

But there was this:

The attachment SB - CT1600.jpg is no longer available

Holy noodle why does the XPS 720 have a 1000W PSU? I'm sure it's overrated, but holy noodle. I can't imagine it as sold drawing more than 500-600 watts peak with dual video cards. And, yeah, the C19 power cord it needs and doesn't have, would be funny if that's why it was discarded.

Last edited by Merovign on 2023-06-28, 05:06. Edited 1 time in total.

*Too* *many* *things*!

Reply 24565 of 28625, by PD2JK

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Those are the parts that make you stay hooked on this hobby. Very nice.
On the way is a XPS T450 as well, it was only for an hour on the local craigslist and I made a deal. Hopefully there's a V3 in there...

i386 16 ⇒ i486 DX4 100 ⇒ Pentium MMX 200 ⇒ Athlon Orion 700 | TB 1000 ⇒ AthlonXP 1700+ ⇒ Opteron 165 ⇒ Dual Opteron 856

Reply 24566 of 28625, by Merovign

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PD2JK wrote on 2023-06-28, 05:03:

Those are the parts that make you stay hooked on this hobby. Very nice.
On the way is a XPS T450 as well, it was only for an hour on the local craigslist and I made a deal. Hopefully there's a V3 in there...

I hope it does, my R450 came with a janky generic STB TNT. I mean, it's not a bad TNT, but it was kind of dated when the computer came out.

I almost got a V3 a couple of years ago right after the prices doubled, but they've doubled again now, so I probably won't get one except by sheer luck.

*Too* *many* *things*!

Reply 24567 of 28625, by BitWrangler

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Merovign wrote on 2023-06-28, 03:37:

Holy noodle why does the XPS 720 have a 1000W PSU? I'm sure it's overrated, but holy noodle. I can't imagine it as sold drawing more than 500-600 watts peak with dual video cards. And, yeah, the C19 power cord it needs and doesn't have, would be funny if that's why it was discarded.

In the noughts there were a couple of things going on with PSU numbers. Firstly at the beginning, PSUs had about a third of their watts on 12V and 2/3 on 3.3/5V and motherboards were mostly pulling off the 5V... then that changed a couple of years in, but there was a lag in the PSU market, so to get a couple of hundred watts on 12V the advice was to buy 600W. Scaling this to hundred watt CPUs and GPUs in the same system with 80% efficiency, this quickly ballooned to advised and desired 1000W units.... but still 600W of it was unnecessary if it was on the 3.3/5 ... but things were swinging in 12V favor. "Experts" would still be advising to get 1000W though.

Secondly... the 2nd and 3rd tier of PSU manufacturers were quoting their power figures like lower tier stereo manufacturers quote PMPO, they were wildly optimistic, so to get a middle of the road socket A and MX440 to boot off a cheap PSU, it needed to say 500 or 600W on it, to guarantee it did as well as like an Enermax or Fortron 300W (Quality/longevity another matter.) ... as we got to the middle of the noughts, there were some of the "better" 2nd tier outfits doing the same thing, but with the justification that if they had 30A on the 12V rail, 360W, then that at least ought to be as good as an older 750W, even if there was only 150 max now on the 5V. Then that of course reinforced "needing" 750W, where it was really a 500W unit.

Eventually everyone wised up enough to start adding the watts of the outputs together and asking why they didn't and there was enough power demanding things around for liars to get a flood of RMAs if they pushed it too far. There was a tendency to overbuy the PSU "for the future" so things would be way out of warranty by the time the user found out. But when a few hundred watts was needed from the get-go with powerful CPU and GPU, they were getting found out quick. So into the 2010s PSU watt ratings actually began to make some sort of sense again....

But of course we have the opposite problem for older hardware now, powerful early noughts systems need a couple of hundred watts on the 3.3/5V and it's a third down to a fifth of a modern PSUs output, so again stupid large watt ratings needed to get the power on the rails you need it on.

Anyhoo, Dell didn't want systems sitting on the shelf with "experts" muttering about how weak their PSUs were, so for marketing reasons maybe, overspecced the PSU.

Edit: Oh I forgot... third factor... Overclockers.... this was becoming more of an influence on the performance and gaming mainstream. Late 90s it was a quiet little subgroup just doing their thing, early noughts, boom, fame, kinda, a new market at least, products appearing. Anyway, as a PSU goes over 70 or 80 percent of it's rating on a given rail, due to capacitors using up their capacitance, semiconductors starting to lose efficiency, the electrical noise goes up a bit. Now this would be inside limits at up to 100% on a quality supply... It should still be fine on a totally in spec device receiving that power. However, on a totally out of spec device receiving that power, it makes a difference between it crashing and running smooth. Therefore overclockers would want a PSU that's only at 70% load at what they are going to perceive as their maximum power demand, probably some 50% over stock. So, overclockers want darn near double real watts that anybody else wants for the same hardware, because they are going to run it at the limit. Because however, they were having more influence on gaming and performance computing at this point, gamers and performance computing ppl would also want what the overclockers want.

editII: y tho? So in conclusion to my thesis ... 🤣 ... just thought I'd drop a note about why I think overclocking suddenly popped into mainstream consciousness. IMO it was that Scientists found the FDIV bug, overclockers found the 1Ghz bug on the PIII ... HardOCP and Tom's hardware pooled resources to document it... and I think more quickly than the FDIV bug... anyway, online news about that put a lot of eyeballs on their sites.

Last edited by BitWrangler on 2023-06-28, 14:53. Edited 2 times in total.

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.

Reply 24568 of 28625, by Trashbytes

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PD2JK wrote on 2023-06-27, 16:26:

Ah yes, diameter, raster size, capitance, voltage, low ESR or whatever, make, series, tolerance. Did I miss something? 😁

Supply, Stock, EOL and ETA

Reply 24569 of 28625, by luckybob

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PD2JK wrote on 2023-06-27, 16:26:

Ah yes, diameter, raster size, capitance, voltage, low ESR or whatever, make, series, tolerance. Did I miss something? 😁

Phase of the moon? Is Mercury in Gatorade? Has the local eldritch horror been appeased recently?

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

Reply 24570 of 28625, by PD2JK

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luckybob wrote on 2023-06-28, 19:19:
PD2JK wrote on 2023-06-27, 16:26:

Ah yes, diameter, raster size, capitance, voltage, low ESR or whatever, make, series, tolerance. Did I miss something? 😁

Phase of the moon? Is Mercury in Gatorade? Has the local eldritch horror been appeased recently?

Phase of the moon is a good one, you don't want them electrolytes be attracted to only one side of the capacitor.

i386 16 ⇒ i486 DX4 100 ⇒ Pentium MMX 200 ⇒ Athlon Orion 700 | TB 1000 ⇒ AthlonXP 1700+ ⇒ Opteron 165 ⇒ Dual Opteron 856

Reply 24571 of 28625, by Merovign

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BitWrangler wrote on 2023-06-28, 13:57:

In the noughts there were a couple of things going on with PSU numbers.

Well, the second version (this one) of the 720 had overclocking in the BIOS, so that's probably one reason. It does list 950 Watts max on the five 12V rails (18A each), so the vast majority on 12V... not clear if that's really five separate rails - but the PSU is big and heavy enough. The weight alone suggests (but doesn't prove) it's just over-engineered. Also the advertising angle.

I have an X3370 in another system that will probably work here (the late 775 Dells had unusually good CPU support).

The dual ATX connectors (sort of) did give me another idea, however it would be a lot of work - I have two PPro boards and I'd wanted to put them in the same case as a mini-ASCI Red (PPro-based supercomputer). The problem is I never did get hold of the two OSes involved, though I read they were public domain (one was called Cougar and the other Teraflops OS).

There is so much room in the (BTX) case you could probably rig both ATX boards facing each other and extend the I/O without hacking up the case like most ATX conversions.

It would still be a lot of work. It will likely be function-checked when I get a C19 cord and go on the shelf.

*Too* *many* *things*!

Reply 24572 of 28625, by PD2JK

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Fresh caps. Doing a test run, Noctua noise killers added. Working as planned.

i386 16 ⇒ i486 DX4 100 ⇒ Pentium MMX 200 ⇒ Athlon Orion 700 | TB 1000 ⇒ AthlonXP 1700+ ⇒ Opteron 165 ⇒ Dual Opteron 856

Reply 24573 of 28625, by PD2JK

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Merovign wrote on 2023-06-28, 05:33:
PD2JK wrote on 2023-06-28, 05:03:

Those are the parts that make you stay hooked on this hobby. Very nice.
On the way is a XPS T450 as well, it was only for an hour on the local craigslist and I made a deal. Hopefully there's a V3 in there...

I hope it does, my R450 came with a janky generic STB TNT. I mean, it's not a bad TNT, but it was kind of dated when the computer came out.

I almost got a V3 a couple of years ago right after the prices doubled, but they've doubled again now, so I probably won't get one except by sheer luck.

Well... too bad, I received it today and there was a Viper V550 in it. But nice and stable machine nonetheless.

i386 16 ⇒ i486 DX4 100 ⇒ Pentium MMX 200 ⇒ Athlon Orion 700 | TB 1000 ⇒ AthlonXP 1700+ ⇒ Opteron 165 ⇒ Dual Opteron 856

Reply 24574 of 28625, by ediflorianUS

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Trashbytes wrote on 2023-06-27, 01:34:
Im in a slightly similar spot with a Gigabyte GA-8I875 P4 Titan board I got in the mail today, at least 6 caps need to be replac […]
Show full quote
PD2JK wrote on 2023-06-26, 19:42:

Inspecting this MS-6168 board, it does post but the caps... Same old story so time to replace them all.

Im in a slightly similar spot with a Gigabyte GA-8I875 P4 Titan board I got in the mail today, at least 6 caps need to be replaced due to bloating but what I didnt notice till it arrived was that some animal has somehow torn the ATX connector off the board leaving the posts there. (The seller did take a pretty clear picture of the ATX connector missing ...doh)

https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-8I875-rev-21#ov

Example.jpg

Il have to replace that too, thankfully a closer inspection didnt reveal anything else missing or needing to be replaced, the caps are not super bloated so I will just replace the ATX connector and see if the old girl is still alive before going further.

Other than that its a nice looking board with a P4 HT 550 3.4Ghz in it.

with 6 slots how much ram it supports? ECC?

My 80486-S i66 Project

Reply 24575 of 28625, by Trashbytes

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ediflorianUS wrote on 2023-06-30, 19:13:
Trashbytes wrote on 2023-06-27, 01:34:
Im in a slightly similar spot with a Gigabyte GA-8I875 P4 Titan board I got in the mail today, at least 6 caps need to be replac […]
Show full quote
PD2JK wrote on 2023-06-26, 19:42:

Inspecting this MS-6168 board, it does post but the caps... Same old story so time to replace them all.

Im in a slightly similar spot with a Gigabyte GA-8I875 P4 Titan board I got in the mail today, at least 6 caps need to be replaced due to bloating but what I didnt notice till it arrived was that some animal has somehow torn the ATX connector off the board leaving the posts there. (The seller did take a pretty clear picture of the ATX connector missing ...doh)

https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-8I875-rev-21#ov

Example.jpg

Il have to replace that too, thankfully a closer inspection didnt reveal anything else missing or needing to be replaced, the caps are not super bloated so I will just replace the ATX connector and see if the old girl is still alive before going further.

Other than that its a nice looking board with a P4 HT 550 3.4Ghz in it.

with 6 slots how much ram it supports? ECC?

According to the manual it supports ECC unbuffered upto 4Gb max.

Reply 24576 of 28625, by TheAbandonwareGuy

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I finally pulled the motherboard out of the test rig after I smoked it up after somehow creating an AGP card of death trying to reflow the VGA port on a GeForce2 MX.

Found a trace burnt charcoal black going from from appears to be pin B1 of the AGP port (OVRCNT# which I assume stands for overcurrent) to the B10 or B11 pin of the first PCI slot which are listed as "--" and "Reserved" on a pinout, so I'm guessing they are a common ground here.

Assuming this is the extent of the damage I could probably bypass the trace with a wire, but I have two of these boards and I wouldn't trust a board with such a repair with any hardware of real value ever again.

EDIT: Now restoring my two ECS P4VXASD2+ boards for use. I've had these two dirty as hell boards for a couple of years, but I've never needed them. One of them assuming either works will become the new board in the test rig. Has universal AGP, which is something I had been wanting to add.

Cyb3rst0rms Retro Hardware Warzone: https://discord.gg/jK8uvR4c
I used to own over 160 graphics card, I've since recovered from graphics card addiction

Reply 24577 of 28625, by XCVG

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I finally upgraded my main retro rig (Pentium III 1GHz, Win98SE) from a GeForce 2 MX to a GeForce 3. I've had this card for over a year now but just hadn't got around to installing it (and to be honest, for what I play on that machine the old card was fine). To my surprise it's a Ti500, though only the 64MB version, I thought it was an early plain GeForce3 (it had very few markings to identify it by). It was given to me by a friend who pulled it from a random computer destined for recycling. I think the fan is not original but it seems to work fine. I played a bit of Quake III and I'll try to give it more of a workout in the future.

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I thought about swapping the USB card for a USB/Firewire combo card while I was at it, but I don't want to risk running into driver issues or resource conflicts and I don't really need Firewire on this machine, so I left it.

Reply 24578 of 28625, by kaputnik

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Recapped my Athlon DOS monster. It's a Chaintech 7AJA2 KT133A mobo with an Athlon XP 2600+ CPU, probably as fast as it goes if you want ISA without resorting to obscure industrial mobos for later platforms. Didn't look too good, luckily noticed it before any disaster:

The attachment imagex0001.jpg is no longer available

Back in business. Still some cable management to do:

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There were also real retro activities. Got this 17th century cannon, one of the first iron casted ones from Sweden. Don't ask me why I have it, the story is way too long. Did the finishing bore cleanout tonight. Left to do is building a period correct carriage, got some blackened oak and ash wood I salvaged from an old ship wreck a couple of years ago that has slowly dried and is ready for use now. Once that's done, it's time to fire the cannon the first time in over 400 years 😁

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Last edited by kaputnik on 2023-07-01, 21:32. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 24579 of 28625, by luckybob

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Don't ask me why I have it, the story is way too long.

I feel like we should? In fact, I will.

What's the story behind the cannon?

^.^

( I like stories)

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.