Well today I started tearing down one of the P100 machines apart. First thing was checking the now 22 year old Macase PSU. Good thing I did! Every cap is a fuhgyuu. Oddly enough no bulged secondaries. But the two primaries are bulged to hell 😮

So if anyone wants a couple AT supplies to recap let me know! May end up replacing the primaries and keeping as emergency spares.

In any case, fixed the sticky front panel buttons with a spurt of WD-40, swapping in a 6.4gb Bigfoot, swapped a new Athena 300watt AT PSU in, and swapping the stock Mach64 out for a matching Diamond V1 and S3 Trio. Might try to get a P166 working in there as well.

Umm, what do the Athena PSUs have for caps? I'm guessing they're not Panasonic.

gdjacobs wrote:

Umm, what do the Athena PSUs have for caps? I'm guessing they're not Panasonic.

Cheap Chinese. Difference is a manufacture date of 2013 vs 1995

Hopefully they're not Fuhjyyu. Caps one tier up (like Teapo) usually don't fail in the packaging.

The caps are all "Theng" branded

Yeah, I have no idea. Never heard of "Theng".

Got a va-503+ in today and tested it, but couldn't get it to boot no matter what (blank screen and no boot, have to trust different speaker tomorrow) Couldn't finish testing everything but started out with:
- disconnected everything
- replaced PSU (knew it worked with other FIC but no effect)
- replaced vga card (agp and pci) no effect (both cards previously worked)
- different memory and slots (only tried DIMMS as of yet so SIMMS need testing)

So I ordered a POST card off the bat to save me the trouble in the future only a few euros including postal costs.

gdjacobs wrote:

Yeah, I have no idea. Never heard of "Theng".

Ya just to be safe I think I'm going to go with the DTK Technologies 250 watt that I just found in my PSU stack. Weighs 5x more and has a temp controlled fan. Also looks like it may be thengx in the Athena.

Richo wrote:

Got a va-503+ in today and tested it, but couldn't get it to boot no matter what (blank screen and no boot, have to trust differ […]
Show full quote

Got a va-503+ in today and tested it, but couldn't get it to boot no matter what (blank screen and no boot, have to trust different speaker tomorrow) Couldn't finish testing everything but started out with:
- disconnected everything
- replaced PSU (knew it worked with other FIC but no effect)
- replaced vga card (agp and pci) no effect (both cards previously worked)
- different memory and slots (only tried DIMMS as of yet so SIMMS need testing)

So I ordered a POST card off the bat to save me the trouble in the future only a few euros including postal costs.

Jumper settings manual for the FIC VA-503+ for ya: http://www.outfoxed.net/a4_2.pdf Hope it helps! I own one of these as well and have the manuals downloaded and stashed on my file server from back when the FIC FTP server was active (It's dead now). I also have one for the FIC VA-503A if anyone needs that. I have all the manuals for the 503A, bios settings too in different languages... just the one jumper settings for the 503+ though.

kithylin wrote:

Richo wrote:

Got a va-503+ in today and tested it, but couldn't get it to boot no matter what (blank screen and no boot, have to trust differ […]
Show full quote

Got a va-503+ in today and tested it, but couldn't get it to boot no matter what (blank screen and no boot, have to trust different speaker tomorrow) Couldn't finish testing everything but started out with:
- disconnected everything
- replaced PSU (knew it worked with other FIC but no effect)
- replaced vga card (agp and pci) no effect (both cards previously worked)
- different memory and slots (only tried DIMMS as of yet so SIMMS need testing)

So I ordered a POST card off the bat to save me the trouble in the future only a few euros including postal costs.

Jumper settings manual for the FIC VA-503+ for ya: http://www.outfoxed.net/a4_2.pdf Hope it helps! I own one of these as well and have the manuals downloaded and stashed on my file server from back when the FIC FTP server was active (It's dead now). I also have one for the FIC VA-503A if anyone needs that. I have all the manuals for the 503A, bios settings too in different languages... just the one jumper settings for the 503+ though.

Jumper settings was the first thing I checked and need to change them once I start using edo ram. The FIC ftp is still up, downloaded the manual and bios updates from there.
Also replaced cmos and reset de bios (forgot to mention). The only difference with my other broken va503+ (need to replace din 5 for keyboard) is the cache used otherwise the are the same(revision of this one is lower though as cache is lower and also has no ATX psu connector) Going to ponder about this in the afternoon (first up is replacing the speaker so I may discover what beep code is bugging me).

The POST card should come in handy anyway, never read about them here 😲

ODwilly wrote:

gdjacobs wrote:

Yeah, I have no idea. Never heard of "Theng".

Ya just to be safe I think I'm going to go with the DTK Technologies 250 watt that I just found in my PSU stack. Weighs 5x more and has a temp controlled fan. Also looks like it may be thengx in the Athena.

ChengX is a junk cap brand. Maybe that's it.

Finally I've put to work my HP Proliant ML350 G6, found time ago aside the street bin... It's running Debian 8 Testing, and currently it has 1x Xeon E5520, and 24GB DDR3 1066 ECC, after my upgrade. It missed the PSU, so I've found a new one on eBay for cheap. No server drives, just a common SATA hard-disk I had spare. It is working 24h/7d since a month, almost quiet and cool - I've managed to setup my personal dedicated game server of:

- Minecraft (Forge modded server) with MCMyAdmin web interface;
- Space Engineers (dedicated server running on VirtualBox Windows 7 VM);
- Urban Terror (Linux native);
- DOSBox IPX (to emulate serial and modem connections on DOS titles in DOSBox);
- More to come... (Half-Life, Project Zomboid, etc.).

Others:

- Mumble VOIP server (Murmur);
- My PHPBB3/Apache2 hosted forum and Webalizer for stats;
- Seti@Home (but to limit heat and consumption I've chosen to suspend for now).

Kadath wrote:

- Minecraft (Forge modded server) with MCMyAdmin web interface; - Space Engineers (dedicated server running on VirtualBox Window […]
Show full quote

- Minecraft (Forge modded server) with MCMyAdmin web interface;
- Space Engineers (dedicated server running on VirtualBox Windows 7 VM);
- Urban Terror (Linux native);
- DOSBox IPX (to emulate serial and modem connections on DOS titles in DOSBox);
- More to come... (Half-Life, Project Zomboid, etc.).

Others:

- Mumble VOIP server (Murmur);
- My PHPBB3/Apache2 hosted forum and Webalizer for stats;
- Seti@Home (but to limit heat and consumption I've chosen to suspend for now).

Tis a talented box, to be sure, and is fair begging for a second CPU. Makes me think I could put my dual Tualatin server to better use than just files.

brassicGamer wrote:

Kadath wrote:

- Minecraft (Forge modded server) with MCMyAdmin web interface; - Space Engineers (dedicated server running on VirtualBox Window […]
Show full quote

- Minecraft (Forge modded server) with MCMyAdmin web interface;
- Space Engineers (dedicated server running on VirtualBox Windows 7 VM);
- Urban Terror (Linux native);
- DOSBox IPX (to emulate serial and modem connections on DOS titles in DOSBox);
- More to come... (Half-Life, Project Zomboid, etc.).

Others:

- Mumble VOIP server (Murmur);
- My PHPBB3/Apache2 hosted forum and Webalizer for stats;
- Seti@Home (but to limit heat and consumption I've chosen to suspend for now).

Tis a talented box, to be sure, and is fair begging for a second CPU. Makes me think I could put my dual Tualatin server to better use than just files.

Thanks, I already have another spare Xeon E5520 CPU, but mounting it will rise consumption, generated heat and mostly I'll have to find the correct HP heatsink kit and baffle, pretty expensive... maybe I can try to use common heatsink/fans, but I don't think it is that easy. I want to find a good Xeon X5675 (3.06 GHz, 12MB L3 Cache, 95w, 6 cores), I think it is preferable to the dual-CPU solution. The E5520 already draws 80w, and it's a quad (8 th.).

If I'm right it's a machine from 2009-ish, pretty nice for dedicated gaming server and other misc servers - much happy to have found and saved it from the destruction. Is there anyone interested in these games?

I caressed Batman! He arrived in a box from Nevada.

It turns out Dells OEM version of the original Batman has the Dallas RTC package socketed so I do not even need to dig out my soldering iron! 😀

From what I can tell there isn't even a decent picture of the original Batman on the Internet! Almost all images of the Batman shows the "Batmans Revenge" motherboard. The best picture of the Batman I could find is the one used in this article about Intel motherboards and it's 640*418 pixels and not very sharp.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/146458- … it-of-computing

We used to have a link to the Batman manual here on Vogons in the Intel motherboard thread but the link is dead. If anyone has the manual I would be greateful if it could be uploaded somewhere.

Kadath wrote:

brassicGamer wrote:

Kadath wrote:

- Minecraft (Forge modded server) with MCMyAdmin web interface; - Space Engineers (dedicated server running on VirtualBox Window […]
Show full quote

- Minecraft (Forge modded server) with MCMyAdmin web interface;
- Space Engineers (dedicated server running on VirtualBox Windows 7 VM);
- Urban Terror (Linux native);
- DOSBox IPX (to emulate serial and modem connections on DOS titles in DOSBox);
- More to come... (Half-Life, Project Zomboid, etc.).

Others:

- Mumble VOIP server (Murmur);
- My PHPBB3/Apache2 hosted forum and Webalizer for stats;
- Seti@Home (but to limit heat and consumption I've chosen to suspend for now).

Tis a talented box, to be sure, and is fair begging for a second CPU. Makes me think I could put my dual Tualatin server to better use than just files.

Thanks, I already have another spare Xeon E5520 CPU, but mounting it will rise consumption, generated heat and mostly I'll have to find the correct HP heatsink kit and baffle, pretty expensive... maybe I can try to use common heatsink/fans, but I don't think it is that easy. I want to find a good Xeon X5675 (3.06 GHz, 12MB L3 Cache, 95w, 6 cores), I think it is preferable to the dual-CPU solution. The E5520 already draws 80w, and it's a quad (8 th.).

If I'm right it's a machine from 2009-ish, pretty nice for dedicated gaming server and other misc servers - much happy to have found and saved it from the destruction. Is there anyone interested in these games?

I think you will find that the E5520 does not really draw 80w, at least 95% of the time. The TDP is 80w. It will only approach that when running full tilt.

I may have a few slightly faster Quad E55xx CPUs if you want them for the price of shipping. I'll have to double check the exact model when I get home.I replaced them with X5675s in a couple of Dell dual CPU servers I have and have no use for the quads.

Fitted my Voodoo 3 with a spare 60mm fan (actually did this a while ago..)

And fitted my GF4 Ti 4200 with a 40mm fan (this one came with a big ass case fan bolted on it and a Ti 4400 firmware flashed onto it; the fan has been fixed, now I'll flash it back to the default Siluro Ti 4200 firmware)

Lately, I'm in love with using zip ties for mounting fans everywhere!

I decided to swap the "Busted" Hard Drive and the 30GB Western Digital I had in my iMac G3/600 Graphite, did some tests, and it turned out the partition was jacked up. So, I reformatted the HDD that originally was in the system, installed Mac OS X 10.3 Panther, and it's been running ever since.

Now it's time for me to replace the 320GB HDD that I have in my Athlon 64 machine since it got jacked up... again, and reformatting the hard drive didn't work out too well, or maybe when running the live version of Xubuntu uses the swap partition causing an error to appear when trying to install Linux onto the Hard Drive.

Also, I got my AMD K6-2 system a better Dell computer screen from late 2013 since the one I had installed stretched the picture, causing a big blur, and the screen I have installed has three different aspect ratios to choose from (4:3, 5:4, and 16:10), as well as VGA, DVI, and DisplayPort to hook up an Apple computer from 2006 or earlier (I could be wrong) and onward to the monitor.

I have the 16:10 used for another computer I'm going to be using, a Dell Dimension 4550 that I purchased a few months ago, which does work really well, and the 4:3 is used for my K6-2 computer, which the whole system is actually clearer than the other Dell monitor I have.

cyclone3d wrote:

I think you will find that the E5520 does not really draw 80w, at least 95% of the time. The TDP is 80w. It will only approach that when running full tilt.

I may have a few slightly faster Quad E55xx CPUs if you want them for the price of shipping. I'll have to double check the exact model when I get home.I replaced them with X5675s in a couple of Dell dual CPU servers I have and have no use for the quads.

You're really kind - please let me know about these models, thanks again! Maybe, waiting for those extra 6-cores models, I can do some little clock upgrade.

Richo wrote:

Jumper settings was the first thing I checked and need to change them once I start using edo ram. The FIC ftp is still up, downloaded the manual and bios updates from there.
Also replaced cmos and reset de bios (forgot to mention). The only difference with my other broken va503+ (need to replace din 5 for keyboard) is the cache used otherwise the are the same(revision of this one is lower though as cache is lower and also has no ATX psu connector) Going to ponder about this in the afternoon (first up is replacing the speaker so I may discover what beep code is bugging me).

The POST card should come in handy anyway, never read about them here 😲

If I remember right, these motherboards have a "dual" voltage regulator selectable by a jumper. One side for Intel, the other side for AMD. Make sure you get that one part more than anything. And AMD K6-III's have two voltages printed on top of em.. the lower one is the v-core, not the higher one. Both of these things used to trip me up configuring this board. Also it's really, -REALLY- picky about it's ram. I would say also try different ram if you can't get it to POST. At the bare minimum 1 x PC-133 CL2 SDRAM stick @ 128 MB. These boards were already really tight on their ram strappings via bios and like to only run at all with the fastest ram.