kikenovic wrote:

A Sidewinder Precision Pro and an intellimouse for my "97 rig". After installing the drivers, the joystick seems to be working great under the control panel test but it's not working on Flight Sim 98. Will have to research more on that. Back in the day I played FS98 using a generic 4 button gamepad, then a Gravis gamepad pro and keyboard.

I do not know about the joystick, as I have allways been a Logitech user when it comes to joystick's.
Though the mouse is sort of a legend. Sturdy and good. Build like a tank.
That is what I experience whenever I use my MS mouse. And it fits great in the hand. A good ball mouse.
Even an optical Intellimouse 3.0a are a good mouse, though I have worn out two of them in 10 years.
The old white ball mouse just keep's on going for some kind of reason.

Just recieved new clone for my GUS collection.
STB Soundrage 32.

Allright....
Recieved my 486-VLB bundle and now it is my turn to recieve hardware that were packed unsafe.
He did pack it inside bubble wrap, though he forgot to put it all inside antistatic bags.
Something wich I explicitly asked him about, and he ensured me that he always do it.
The memory were all just shipped inside a standard plastic bag. I hope it still works.

Now. For the gory details. This is so unacceptable, and I will raise hell if it is non functional.

The board was promised to have no corrosion, yet there are some after a battery leak.
Looks like it was cought just in the right time, so the damage is minimal.
Only the solder pads have a slight greenish colour to them, so I will clean it all up.
Now the hardware is sequrely packed in real antistatic bags.

brostenen wrote:

Allright.... Recieved my 486-VLB bundle and now it is my turn to recieve hardware that were packed unsafe. He did pack it inside […]
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Allright....
Recieved my 486-VLB bundle and now it is my turn to recieve hardware that were packed unsafe.
He did pack it inside bubble wrap, though he forgot to put it all inside antistatic bags.
Something wich I explicitly asked him about, and he ensured me that he always do it.
The memory were all just shipped inside a standard plastic bag. I hope it still works.

Now. For the gory details. This is so unacceptable, and I will raise hell if it is non functional.

The board was promised to have no corrosion, yet there are some after a battery leak.
Looks like it was cought just in the right time, so the damage is minimal.
Only the solder pads have a slight greenish colour to them, so I will clean it all up.
Now the hardware is sequrely packed in real antistatic bags.

I have started to ask sellers to wrap cards, memory modules and motherboards in newspaper paper as most sellers actually knows what a newspaper is... ESD bag = bubblewrap to your avarage Ebay seller.

Skyscraper wrote:

I have started to ask sellers to wrap cards, memory modules and motherboards in newspaper paper as most sellers actually knows what a newspaper is... ESD bag = bubblewrap to your avarage Ebay seller.

I wrote this message to the seller, right after I purchsed it.

Hi...
I bought that ABIT bundle, and I just want to make shure that you will be packing it securely in antistatic bags and some bubble wrap around each items. I am going to use it in a computer, and I do not want to risk broken items. It is part of my hobby, or project if you can put it that way. 😀 Hope you understand.

Thanks in advance, and thanks for the purchase.

So I guess that "securely in antistatic bags and some bubble wrap around each items" just means bubble wrap.
Hmmmmm....

EDIT:
Tested the board and the cards. It is worḱing with the 486dx33 that came with the board.
And I have tested a 486dx2-66 as well. No problems, working like a charm. 😀

Well, the most interesting piece of hardware I bought in the last few months has arrived, finally.

Compaq MX 11800

Finally, I have a keyboard that can seriously injure my hands, wrists or knee. Yes, it's mechanical. Them cherry brown switches, mmm.... Now I need to watch videos about cleaning retro mechanical keyboards.

Not quite retro, more so post modern, but I always wanted one. An asus ROG 8600gts silent.

brostenen wrote:

I wrote this message to the seller, right after I purchsed it. […]
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Skyscraper wrote:

I have started to ask sellers to wrap cards, memory modules and motherboards in newspaper paper as most sellers actually knows what a newspaper is... ESD bag = bubblewrap to your avarage Ebay seller.

I wrote this message to the seller, right after I purchsed it.

Hi...
I bought that ABIT bundle, and I just want to make shure that you will be packing it securely in antistatic bags and some bubble wrap around each items. I am going to use it in a computer, and I do not want to risk broken items. It is part of my hobby, or project if you can put it that way. 😀 Hope you understand.

Thanks in advance, and thanks for the purchase.

So I guess that "securely in antistatic bags and some bubble wrap around each items" just means bubble wrap.
Hmmmmm....

It's funny you mention that. I've become less and less fearful of ESD. Especially after getting this in working condition.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/ASUS-CUV4X-C-Socket-3 … iUAAOSwIgNXqOn1

FSP Power supply with a proper 30A rail 😎

Which contains a ton of dust and a single bulging cap in the worst place possible...

Re poorly packed motherboards-I just received a pair of baby-AT 486 PCI motherboards from Ukraine yesterday...they weren't even in a real box! The two boards were basically wadded up in bubble wrap with a chunk of cardboard covering about 60% of the package, then taped up into a semi-ball of some strange orange packaging tape. A loosely taped piece of graph paper for the shipping label was the ultimate cherry on top! And the real kicker is this cost me $40 shipping...

Amazingly neither board sustained any shipping damage.

One of the boards is an LS486e rev C1 with SIS 496/497 B5 stepping chipset (functioning EDO support), and the other is an SMT "Terminator" with the ALI 1487/1489 chipset. Both boards came populated with 256K L2 cache, and the SMC Terminator even included a "mystery CPU" with a heatsink/fan glued on. Carefully removing the heatsink revealed an AMD 5x86-133 which was a nice bonus.

Unfortunately even though listed as "tested", neither of them worked at first. The LS486e had an open TIP127 PNP pass transistor for the CPU VRM circuit which was an easy fix. Physically the board is flawless and basically looks and works like new now.

The SMT Terminator was missing the BIOS ROM (I somehow overlooked that in the listing picture) and a shorted TIP127 which was powering the included AMD 5x86 directly from the 5-volt rail. It also had some chewed up traces on the back side of the board from undoubtedly being tossed around in a pile of boards. After replacing the shorted TIP127, programming an EPROM with a copy of the BIOS I found online, and doctoring up a few traces--amazingly it seems to work perfectly now...even the over-volted AMD 5x86. In fact, the ALI chipset is throwing down some really impressive benchmarks...

FesterBlatz wrote:

Re poorly packed motherboards-I just received a pair of baby-AT 486 PCI motherboards from Ukraine yesterday...they weren't even […]
Show full quote

Re poorly packed motherboards-I just received a pair of baby-AT 486 PCI motherboards from Ukraine yesterday...they weren't even in a real box! The two boards were basically wadded up in bubble wrap with a chunk of cardboard covering about 60% of the package, then taped up into a semi-ball of some strange orange packaging tape. A loosely taped piece of graph paper for the shipping label was the ultimate cherry on top! And the real kicker is this cost me $40 shipping...

Amazingly neither board sustained any shipping damage.

One of the boards is an LS486e rev C1 with SIS 496/497 B5 stepping chipset (functioning EDO support), and the other is an SMC Terminator with the ALI 1487/1489 chipset. The SMC Terminator included a "mystery CPU" with a heatsink/fan glued on, after carefully removing the heatsink reviled an AMD 5x86-133 which was a nice bonus.

Unfortunately even though listed as "tested", neither of them worked at first. The LS486e had an open TIP127 PNP pass transistor for the CPU VRM circuit which was an easy fix. Physically the board is flawless and basically looks and like new now.

The SMC Terminator was missing the BIOS ROM (I somehow overlooked that in the listing picture) and a shorted TIP127 which was powering the included AMD 5x86 directly from the 5-volt rail. It also had some chewed up traces on the back side of the board from undoubtedly being tossed around in a pile of boards. After replacing the shorted TIP127, programming an EPROM with a copy of the BIOS I found online, and doctoring up a few traces--amazingly it seems to work perfectly now...even the over-volted AMD 5x86. In fact, the ALI chipset is throwing down some really impressive benchmarks...

You will be happy with the Lucky Star LS486E, it's a very solid motherboard. Many members here on Vogons has recieved these Lucky Star 486 motherboards in shoddy packages from Ukraine. 😁

AMDs 3.3V 486 CPUs unlike the Intel DX4 normally has no issues with surviving 5V, not that I would run them at 5V.

FesterBlatz wrote:

Re poorly packed motherboards-I just received a pair of baby-AT 486 PCI motherboards from Ukraine yesterday...they weren't even […]
Show full quote

Re poorly packed motherboards-I just received a pair of baby-AT 486 PCI motherboards from Ukraine yesterday...they weren't even in a real box! The two boards were basically wadded up in bubble wrap with a chunk of cardboard covering about 60% of the package, then taped up into a semi-ball of some strange orange packaging tape. A loosely taped piece of graph paper for the shipping label was the ultimate cherry on top! And the real kicker is this cost me $40 shipping...

Amazingly neither board sustained any shipping damage.

One of the boards is an LS486e rev C1 with SIS 496/497 B5 stepping chipset (functioning EDO support), and the other is an SMT "Terminator" with the ALI 1487/1489 chipset. Both boards came populated with 256K L2 cache, and the SMC Terminator even included a "mystery CPU" with a heatsink/fan glued on. Carefully removing the heatsink reviled an AMD 5x86-133 which was a nice bonus.

Unfortunately even though listed as "tested", neither of them worked at first. The LS486e had an open TIP127 PNP pass transistor for the CPU VRM circuit which was an easy fix. Physically the board is flawless and basically looks and like new now.

The SMT Terminator was missing the BIOS ROM (I somehow overlooked that in the listing picture) and a shorted TIP127 which was powering the included AMD 5x86 directly from the 5-volt rail. It also had some chewed up traces on the back side of the board from undoubtedly being tossed around in a pile of boards. After replacing the shorted TIP127, programming an EPROM with a copy of the BIOS I found online, and doctoring up a few traces--amazingly it seems to work perfectly now...even the over-volted AMD 5x86. In fact, the ALI chipset is throwing down some really impressive benchmarks...

IMG_1670.JPG

IMG_1671.JPG

Congrats on finding and flashing that BIOS. I thought I was good at finding stuff on the net, but i'd never imagine being able to dig up a 20+ year old BIOS.

Skyscraper wrote:

You will be happy with the Lucky Star LS486E, it's a very solid motherboard. Many members here on Vogons has recieved these Lucky Star 486 motherboards in shoddy packages from Ukraine. 😁
AMDs 3.3V 486 CPUs unlike the Intel DX4 normally has no issues with surviving 5V, not that I would run them at 5V.

So far I like it a lot, the jumpers are pretty straight forward the the board seems to be of decent quality. My benchmarks aren't very impressive though, even with maxed out RAM and cache timings the ALI chipset of the SMT Terminator crushes it. I compared both boards with an IBM 5x86C CPU @120MHz (40MHz x 3) and the ALI chipset seems to have significantly better memory performance...

I'll take some screenshots and start a thread about my benchmark comparison of these boards...

xplus93 wrote:

Congrats on finding and flashing that BIOS. I thought I was good at finding stuff on the net, but i'd never imagine being able to dig up a 20+ year old BIOS.

Thanks! I actually lucked out and found the exact SMT Terminator BIOS right on mbarron.org...it was linked on the page for an almost identical board called the TS-486. http://motherboards.mbarron.net/models/486pci/ts486.htm The BIOS string matches the SMT Terminator and it's even a late 1996 BIOS.

FesterBlatz wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

You will be happy with the Lucky Star LS486E, it's a very solid motherboard. Many members here on Vogons has recieved these Lucky Star 486 motherboards in shoddy packages from Ukraine. 😁
AMDs 3.3V 486 CPUs unlike the Intel DX4 normally has no issues with surviving 5V, not that I would run them at 5V.

So far I like it a lot, the jumpers are pretty straight forward the the board seems to be of decent quality. My benchmarks aren't very impressive though, even with maxed out RAM and cache timings the ALI chipset of the SMT Terminator crushes it. I compared both boards with an IBM 5x86C CPU @120MHz (40MHz x 3) and the ALI chipset seems to have much higher memory performance...

I'll take some screenshots and start a thread about my benchmark comparison of these boards...

I think I got decent memory performance numbers with the Lucky Star LS486E, or at least decent for beeing a SIS 496/497 chipset motherboard. The thing I really like about the LS486E is that it can operate at 60 and 66 MHz FSB if the CPU, memory and cache chips can handle it. Dont't forget to move the PCI divider jumper before trying those FSB settings, the Cyrix 586 should be really fast at 2x60 MHz.

#FesterBlatz

Nice that you have made it run again. The packing material are just insane. Why do they charge that much for something that shitty?
Anyway... Congrats on the boards. Those Lucky star's are good boards. My board is running with a 5x86-133 as well.

FesterBlatz wrote:

Re poorly packed motherboards-I just received a pair of baby-AT 486 PCI motherboards from Ukraine yesterday...they weren't even […]
Show full quote

Re poorly packed motherboards-I just received a pair of baby-AT 486 PCI motherboards from Ukraine yesterday...they weren't even in a real box! The two boards were basically wadded up in bubble wrap with a chunk of cardboard covering about 60% of the package, then taped up into a semi-ball of some strange orange packaging tape. A loosely taped piece of graph paper for the shipping label was the ultimate cherry on top! And the real kicker is this cost me $40 shipping...

Amazingly neither board sustained any shipping damage.

One of the boards is an LS486e rev C1 with SIS 496/497 B5 stepping chipset (functioning EDO support), and the other is an SMT "Terminator" with the ALI 1487/1489 chipset. Both boards came populated with 256K L2 cache, and the SMC Terminator even included a "mystery CPU" with a heatsink/fan glued on. Carefully removing the heatsink reviled an AMD 5x86-133 which was a nice bonus.

Unfortunately even though listed as "tested", neither of them worked at first. The LS486e had an open TIP127 PNP pass transistor for the CPU VRM circuit which was an easy fix. Physically the board is flawless and basically looks and like new now.

The SMT Terminator was missing the BIOS ROM (I somehow overlooked that in the listing picture) and a shorted TIP127 which was powering the included AMD 5x86 directly from the 5-volt rail. It also had some chewed up traces on the back side of the board from undoubtedly being tossed around in a pile of boards. After replacing the shorted TIP127, programming an EPROM with a copy of the BIOS I found online, and doctoring up a few traces--amazingly it seems to work perfectly now...even the over-volted AMD 5x86. In fact, the ALI chipset is throwing down some really impressive benchmarks...

IMG_1670.JPG

IMG_1671.JPG

I recognize that address. I bought A Socket 7 motherboard from this same seller for the system in my signature. You're lucky yours came in bubble wrap and some cardboard - mine just got wrapped up in a couple of players of newspapers and taped up.
It arrived bent. Not sure if it was that way from being handled in the mail or from the tape being so damn tight.

Munx wrote:

I recognize that address. I bought A Socket 7 motherboard from this same seller for the system in my signature. You're lucky yours came in bubble wrap and some cardboard - mine just got wrapped up in a couple of players of newspapers and taped up.
It arrived bent. Not sure if it was that way from being handled in the mail or from the tape being so damn tight.

Yikes, that's pretty ridiculous! And amazing it survived that...

I considered getting one more board from this seller, but I'm thinking I'd better not push my luck. I managed to get these two boards functional, it's probably best I quit while I'm ahead...

Compaq Presario 7220 for $30 inc shippment.

Pentium 100mhz whit 16mb ram.

Owner was going to throw it out since he couldnt install os on it, it was way to clean to pass that out 😀

Munx wrote:

FSP Power supply with a proper 30A rail :cool: […]
Show full quote

FSP Power supply with a proper 30A rail 😎

P_20170307_174445.jpg

Which contains a ton of dust and a single bulging cap in the worst place possible...

P_20170307_174215.jpg

This is an opportunity to make it better than new.

Today i recieved an Asus pci/i 486sp3g complete with original box, manual and brackets, including ps/2 ! In the box are 3 extra bios chips with different versions, they are labeled (never had this happen before, very nice).
It also came with an intel dx2 66mhz and an amd dx4 120mhz.

Since it doesn't support 40mhz fsb (as far as i know) i put in an intel dx4-100. The board works fine.

Finally i found an Asus 486 pci for my Asus collection!