ODwilly wrote:

Picked up a free Dell Inspiron 6000. 1.83ghz Pentium M 750, 128mb Radeon x300 graphics and a whopping 512mb of DDR2 533mhz. Luckily I have a pair of 512's handy to bump it up to 1gb. Heck may even have some 1gb chips laying around. Came with no HDD but otherwise complete and in great shape, and the battery even still holds a charge! Should make a pretty good XP machine. It was getting tossed out so couldn't say no of course.

Those are some of my favorite laptops as everything is serviceable and the cooling aside from the gpu is good as it gets. Modern laptops are shitty that everything is designed for casual users who don't really use laptops other than as an accessory. Apple's influence on laptop deisng these past years has really cluster fucked the whole industry so proper gaming and workstation laptops are increasingly rare especially those that are upgradable and have decent cooling.

Predator99 wrote:

The prices for this stuff at Ebay are "interesting" - how much Gold might be in it?! I think most bidders are collectors - gold recovery cannot be worth that prices.

Not at all, you need a lot and I mean a lot of high gold yielding parts to even brake even. You make money in the industrially scale. Although some do melt down anything that looks like gold and sell the ingots on eBay for a lot, but that's not real gold, it has a lot of copper, brass, tin, lead, silver, and aluminum mixed in with it.

Discovered a Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition 3.4 GHz in that pile 😎 😎 😎

This one is faster than the CPU in my current "main" PC I am using (Athlon X2 7750 Black Edition) and I think it should run in my Asrock A790GXH.

Crazy...other people are scraping what is more than fast enough for my daily use. Hope this is not retro already 🤣

Cannot test the PPro as I dont have a board anyway. Payd 160€ incl. shipment for all, think was a good price if most is working...but it seems to.

Found a guy from a recycling plant today, got a fairly epic haul. First, some motherboards:

AOpen vi15g. Finally got a proper VLB motherboard. SIS471 chipset, 5x86 support, CR2032 battery and 4xSIMM72 slots. Bonus points for Windows-style AMIBIOS! I've been looking for a board like this for more than half a year. Now I can finally go back to my VLB build.

FIC VA-503+. Super Socket 7, MVP3-based. I already have a Lucky Star 5MVP3 in my build, but I've heard a lot of good things about this board, so for 3 bucks I thought "why not"

An unidentified 386 board. I always wanted an older 386 board (as opposed to later highly integrated 386DX40 ones), but I think this one might be a bit too old. It has SIPP RAM (and only three sticks at that) and is in pretty bad shape, so I don't have any high hopes that it will work. However, it comes with 386DX-25 and 387-16, which is why I got it.

A couple of 5.25 drives. I just never had those, and I thought I might need them some day if I ever want to mess around with XT stuff.

Which apparently I have now! This is a Videoton VT160 made in Hungary. It comes with a matching EGA monitor but sadly no keyboard (and I don't have any XT keyboards yet).

It runs some sort of 286 and actually has an HDD (I'm guessing, MFM?). I'll have to source a keyboard and some 5.25 floppies. Anyway, once I'm done with VLB board, I'll definitely spend a lot of time with this one — I've never used any EGA/XT stuff in my life, so it's fairly fascinating to me.

The VA-503+ board has 1MB L2 cache, twice as much as 5MVP3. It might not make much difference for a K6-3+ build.

jheronimus wrote:

Found a guy from a recycling plant today, got a fairly epic haul. First, some motherboards: […]
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Found a guy from a recycling plant today, got a fairly epic haul. First, some motherboards:

Which apparently I have now! This is a Videoton VT160 made in Hungary. It comes with a matching EGA monitor but sadly no keyboard (and I don't have any XT keyboards yet).

It runs some sort of 286 and actually has an HDD (I'm guessing, MFM?). I'll have to source a keyboard and some 5.25 floppies. Anyway, once I'm done with VLB board, I'll definitely spend a lot of time with this one — I've never used any EGA/XT stuff in my life, so it's fairly fascinating to me.

Not an XT..its an AT and any DIN keyboard will run 😉 Nice SUNTAC Mainboard 😉
Re: Suntac 80286 Mainboards

Can you post a picture of the EGA card please?

Predator99 wrote:

jheronimus wrote:

Not an XT..its an AT and any DIN keyboard will run 😉 Nice SUNTAC Mainboard 😉
Re: Suntac 80286 Mainboards

Can you post a picture of the EGA card please?

Ah, yes, you're right. I just assumed that any system with a power switch in the rear is XT, frankly 😀 But now I can see that the motherboard definitely has an AT PSU connector... and a leaking barrel battery. Also, the drive is MFM, but the controller card is 16-bit ISA, which is a bit of a bummer, since I have an 8086 board and a bunch of 8-bit cards for it, but no disk controllers.

Here's the photo of the EGA card.

OK, thanks! Seems also to be some super-EGA card. Very nice system, take care of it 😉 You should remove the barrel and clean the corrosion before trying to turn it on.

Your 386 board seems to be missing both BIOS chips? But you should be able to replace them and give it a try.

Got a bunch of towers today, the eMachines came from a thrift store for $25 and the three bottom towers came from a computer shop that sells me old systems they get for recycling, $10 a piece. They've taken up my afternoon and are pretty fun.

Top:
eMachines eTower w/ socket 370 Celeron 667, 64mb SDRAM, 10.2 GB HDD, Intel 810 video and sound. Has a broken install of WinXP that requires online activation to log in. Replaced original "kamikaze" power supply with a brand new StarTech 145 watt unit.

Bottom left:
P4 2.8ghz, 2 GB DDR400, no HDD (removed by computer shop), Intel 865 motherboard, GeForce 6800GT OC (!!). Yet to install an OS on it.

Middle:
Athlon XP 2000+, 256 MB DDR, no HDD (removed by computer shop), MSi MS-6738 motherboard, onboard video. Yet to install an OS on it.

Right:
Slot 1 P2-350 mhz, 256 MB RAM (?), Maxtor 20 GB & Quantum Bigfoot 8 GB HDDs, A-Trend ATC-6220, no video card (added S3 Trio 3D/2X), Ensoniq AudioPCI sound card. Currently broken, the motherboard was very unstable during testing and a capacitor started audibly hissing as it stopped POSTing.

Not all too retro, ok maybe to some. But i got some CCFL light for my c2 build. Not sure what color to go with so i got a few.

Not really retro but will probably be used with my retro stuff at somepoint.

Mitsubishi X....D211U 2300 DLP Lumens XGA projector.

Has anyone here tried playing 90s PC games on a projector? I tried some TR:L on it just as my initial image quality test and it definitely beat out my laptops display (and some of my CRTs) in color reproduction. I may try Unreal Tournament 99 tomorrow. DM_Candyland should make a good color potency test.

It starts to have brightness flicking after being on for a minute though so I think the bulb that came with it needs replaced. I had anticipated this though so I bought a new one when I bought the projector. This was sold as having FLAWLESS image quality with a big emphasis on it. The smallest defect on this machine and I'm back charging via PayPal unless they pay shipping for me to return it and have it replaced with another unit. The bulb I'm qualified to replace, the rest I'm not.

BTW apparently you can't type the letters X and D near each other in.the same word on the forums without getting 🤣 instead of the actual ASCII characters.

martin939 wrote:

ODwilly wrote:

Picked up a free Dell Inspiron 6000. 1.83ghz Pentium M 750, 128mb Radeon x300 graphics and a whopping 512mb of DDR2 533mhz. Luckily I have a pair of 512's handy to bump it up to 1gb. Heck may even have some 1gb chips laying around. Came with no HDD but otherwise complete and in great shape, and the battery even still holds a charge! Should make a pretty good XP machine. It was getting tossed out so couldn't say no of course.

Ha, I was playing around with the Inspiron 6000 a couple of weeks ago! The first thing I did was disasembly, cleaning the cooling and changing the thermal paste. I also did the pin mod and my Pentium M jumped to 2.13GHz 😊 It ran Prime95 rock stable and didn't even go above 65*C under maximum load, where is that time gone? Now we have tiny coolers and 90-100*C throttling CPU's. 😕
Shame it didn't have an ATI card, only the built in Intel HD Graphics.

ooh nice! Ya the x300 was a pleasant surprise. Unfortunately it's the version with only 32mb of dedicated ram and the rest is shared

ODwilly wrote:

martin939 wrote:

ODwilly wrote:

Picked up a free Dell Inspiron 6000. 1.83ghz Pentium M 750, 128mb Radeon x300 graphics and a whopping 512mb of DDR2 533mhz. Luckily I have a pair of 512's handy to bump it up to 1gb. Heck may even have some 1gb chips laying around. Came with no HDD but otherwise complete and in great shape, and the battery even still holds a charge! Should make a pretty good XP machine. It was getting tossed out so couldn't say no of course.

Ha, I was playing around with the Inspiron 6000 a couple of weeks ago! The first thing I did was disasembly, cleaning the cooling and changing the thermal paste. I also did the pin mod and my Pentium M jumped to 2.13GHz 😊 It ran Prime95 rock stable and didn't even go above 65*C under maximum load, where is that time gone? Now we have tiny coolers and 90-100*C throttling CPU's. 😕
Shame it didn't have an ATI card, only the built in Intel HD Graphics.

ooh nice! Ya the x300 was a pleasant surprise. Unfortunately it's the version with only 32mb of dedicated ram and the rest is shared

Mobility X300 and Mobility 9600 are basically the same right?

Just asked Google and yes indeed. This should do anything a fast P3 could do and more thanks to SSE2

tikoellner wrote:

Some stuff I got today: […]
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Some stuff I got today:

- Cool (IMO) AST RAMPAGE 286 EMS card with full 2mb of RAM;
- Creative Sound Blaster PRO 2 CT1600. Already have one, but this card I can't resist buying.
- Cardex VLB card (TSENG ET4000/w32p with no memory. Also have one already, but TSENG VLB stuff is what I must get once I spot it.

Paid 25 USD for the lot. Reasonable?

I would love to see a picture of the nature there by you, looks like you have a nice view!

4x 8MB EDO Ram Toshiba for my soon to be resurrected pentium based rig.
Also bought a Pentium-S 90, a SD to ATA adaptor and a Matrox Mistique 220. The bid on the AWE64 is still going strong. 😎

cj_reha wrote:

Top:
eMachines eTower w/ socket 370 Celeron 667, 64mb SDRAM, 10.2 GB HDD, Intel 810 video and sound. Has a broken install of WinXP that requires online activation to log in. Replaced original "kamikaze" power supply with a brand new StarTech 145 watt unit.

Never obsolete 🤣

Predator99 wrote:

The prices for this stuff at Ebay are "interesting" - how much Gold might be in it?! I think most bidders are collectors - gold […]
Show full quote

The prices for this stuff at Ebay are "interesting" - how much Gold might be in it?! I think most bidders are collectors - gold recovery cannot be worth that prices.

I received a lot of...

i386 - 16
Cyrix 586-100
6 x 486 DX2
6 x Pentium
8 x Pentium MMX 233
4 x K6-2 up to 500
2 x Pentium Pro
Many Athlon / Sempron etc

Pins are bent but recoverable. Unfortunately one PPro Pin is missing. Already tested the DX2s and they are working 😀

Cool...tested the 3 fastest Athlons/Phenom - and they work 😎 😎 😎 😎 😎

Fastest CPUs I ever owned...in a pile sold for Gold recovery I bought to get some 486/586 CPUs...unbelivable 🤣

Actualy Phenom is is quite obsolete for todays standards - no AVX, SSE4, not even SSSE3 support. It is 8 years old after all.

havli wrote:

Actualy Phenom is is quite obsolete for todays standards - no AVX, SSE4, not even SSSE3 support. It is 8 years old after all.

And what do you need all this for when not playing games? 😉 Most demanding application for me is watching a BD and this was also possible on my old Athlon...would be waste of money for me to buy something newer. Therefore I am glad to get a cheap upgrade 😎