My lot of 13 PCI sound cards came in. It turned out to be 14 cards.

In the lot were:

2x Yamaha YMF-724
1x Vortex 2
1x Vortex 1
1x ForteMedia FM801
1x S3 Sonic Vibes
3x Advance Logic ALS4000

And some Creative cards
1x CT5806
1x CT5801
2x CT5803
1x CT4810

That's a nice collection.

Cyrix200+ wrote:

man-x86 wrote:

Cyrix200+ wrote:

<snip>

I used the same motherboard for some tests, and it has everything one needs for tinkering with an old machine.
It is also possible to easily modify the BIOS (I got the same motherboard with a NEC BIOS, upgraded to a MSI bios, Coreboot and a tuned MSI bios at the end). Upgrading the BIOS makes it a great motherboard, although keeping the original bios on a separate chip might be helpful against Murphy's law.

Thanks, I might try that! This board is quite unstable unfortunately, and the onboard video flickers (on two LCD screens I tried it on). I put it aside right next to the recycle bin, but maybe I will need to give it another chance 😀

Just a thought, but perhaps the onboard Rage is defective and that was why it had that pic sis card in it. Kind of like when an onboard nic goes out and you see a pci one in a machine.

Socket 4 Pentium Overdrive. Now I need help finding a Socket 4 motherboard (or if anyone lives in the PDX area that would let me put this in their socket 4 system).

Cyrix200+ wrote:

Thanks, I might try that! This board is quite unstable unfortunately, and the onboard video flickers (on two LCD screens I tried it on). I put it aside right next to the recycle bin, but maybe I will need to give it another chance 😀

You may wanna check for bad solder joints or bad capacitors, I had plenty of boards from that era with such issues, but depending on the usefulness of the board, it's probably not worth fixing (unfortunately).

Bought a Roland SC-55 and a pile of assorted ISA sound cards. The SC-55 should arrive on Tuesday. 😀

Going to get this bad boy tomorrow:

VIKTOR VPC IIe

I hope it was worth $86

tabm0de wrote:

Going to get this bad boy tomorrow:

VIKTOR VPC IIe

I hope it was worth $86

The screen alone is worth at least as much if it works. 😀

Got 3 motherboards locally for 15 €, were sold as untested, but i tested and all 3 mobos works, two of them needs cap replacement though

Left: QDI Advance 10B/F with Pentium 3 1 GHz
Middle: Gigabyte GA-5AX rev 5.2 with AMD K6-2 500
Right: GIgabyte GA-6VXE7+ with Pentium 3 800EB

Nice, I'm still looking for a 5AX. Those are nice boards!

Carlos S. M. wrote:

Got 3 motherboards locally for 15 €, were sold as untested, but i tested and all 3 mobos works, two of them needs cap replacemen […]
Show full quote

Got 3 motherboards locally for 15 €, were sold as untested, but i tested and all 3 mobos works, two of them needs cap replacement though

Left: QDI Advance 10B/F with Pentium 3 1 GHz
Middle: Gigabyte GA-5AX rev 5.2 with AMD K6-2 500
Right: GIgabyte GA-6VXE7+ with Pentium 3 800EB

Gigabyte GA-5AX, great piece of hardware. Thanks for remind me to recap my CUSL2-C

Been looking forever for a GA-5AX.

What is so special about the GA-5AX?

appiah4 wrote:

What is so special about the GA-5AX?

One of best SS7 ATX motherboards.

Gamecollector wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

What is so special about the GA-5AX?

One of best SS7 ATX motherboards.

I would argue the Asus P5A & P5A-B are better. Honestly they are practically equal.

Depends on the revision. Generally speaking, P5A and GA-5AX are both in the top 5. Maby even in the top 3. I have both P5A rev 1.06 and GA-5AX rev 4.something (4.1?).

I cant tell the difference when running a K6-II-500 or K6-III-400. Never had a plus model to test with.

I just bought a new in box Asus PC-DL dual Socket 604 Xeon i875P motherboard.

The price was reasonable considering that used boards are costing 200 euros and up on Ebay because this is considered to be the top motherboard for running dual Gallatin Xeons... So yea only an arm, a leg, a kidney and part of the liver... I also got a mail fordwarder in the UK and bought a couple of 3.2 GHz 2MB L3 Gallatins to see how they compare with my 3.2 GHz 1MB and 3.0 GHz 4MB ones. Other than a few much cheaper motherboards in my watch list, Xeon cooling and perhaps a couple of cheap CPUs I'm done with spending money on retro hardware for the next half a year or so.

The Asus PC-DL (picture from the Internet).

Seems I wasn't so lucky today.

I tried hard to search for a better GPU than my old FX5200 64MB (that ABiT Siluro I was talking about having 64MB RAM) and I somehow ended with something worse than that - a Radeon 9600SE 128MB V/D/VO. Not only it's 64-bit - I can't even BIOS mod it (9600s and 9550s were supposedly able to be BIOS-modded into 9700s or 9800s - something around that) and to top that, it can't display a color image over my home-made S-Video cable. ( out of PS/2 keyboard cable - methinks one of the main signals - either Luma or Chroma - is on the unused pins that I snapped off - in which case I'll try and find a way to build another one from a old HP cable - it has more wires which may mean it is fully wired for each PS/2 signal, which in turn might provide me a full colour image regardless of what GPU I use).

And the $64 question is: is the 128MB 9600SE in any way better than the 64MB FX5200, performance wise?

Got it home today and it works great 😀

But damn it was slower the expected haha

PcBytes wrote:

And the $64 question is: is the 128MB 9600SE in any way better than the 64MB FX5200, performance wise?

A quick google search, indecates that the 9600se is a lot faster than the fx5200.
I could be wrong though.