found these 3 cards at the thrift store, a cirrus logic gd-5434, a s3 trio64v+, and a hauppauge wintv 38101 rev b226

For several years I've had this memory. As a early teen with my hand-me-down XT. I bought for myself a mouse for the system. I had $20 and the the local mom&pop computer shop had these serial mice:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/382879506757

Well, it should be obvious by now, that I bought it. And just in time for my birthday next week! However, all that said, I can't scratch this itch. I remember it having NEON internals. Just like this radio: http://i.imgur.com/qNfmmhW.jpg

I just can't get rid of that feeling and I *MUST* find one of these mice for the XT I have now. So if any of you here spy one (serial), would you let me know? I don't feel its worth a lot of money, and I'm 99.999% sure i'm the only one who ever owned one of these, but it would scratch an itch thats been nagging me for years. ( I also kinda want that radio now too)

Another hit item added to my collection.

Bige4u wrote:

Another hit item added to my collection.

Nice! One of my all time favorite purchases was an EVGA 6800 Ultra Extreme Edition. That was back when factory OC'd cards were kind of a new thing so it seemed really special. Hard to find one of those now. Probably a lot of them got tossed over the years.

https://www.evga.com/articles/188.asp

A big box arrived by courier today:

Containing a lot of scrap I got off ebay, here's one of the listing's photos with most of the stuff visible:

At 120€ plus shipping it wasn't cheap, but I saw a couple things in there that I was really excited about. Still a risk, because the lot was sold as for parts only, but I figured some of it should work and some of it should be repairable. I've been sorting through the lot and doing some preliminary testing (just to see what boots up and what doesn't, without any additional troubleshooting what might be wrong). Here's the couple things I was most excited to try out:

Asus P3B-F, rev 1.01. I've wanted one of these for a while, but usual ebay prices are pretty crazy, when one even bothers to show up at all. This was one of the main reasons I went after this lot, so I was really hoping it would work, or at least be repairable. Turns out, it does work, it booted right up without issues 😀. Came with what turned out to be a Katmai Pentium III 450 and 3 sticks of memory, though one of them has one chip ripped off so it only recognises half of its 256 MB total capacity.

Next up, Gigabyte GA-586TX3. This was another one that caught my eye when deciding to bid on the lot. I have several socket 7 boards already, but all the ones I have with Intel chipsets are very basic. So a nice socket 7 board like this was high on my wishlist 😀. As luck would have it, this one too booted right up, after checking the jumpers were configured properly. Also, it turned out to come with a Pentium 233 MMX, which I have been missing in my collection and have been on the lookout to find as well. So double win.

Then I came upon this one. Not exactly retro and I must admit I didn't even notice it in the listing as anything noteworthy. Turns out it's a Fujitsu socket 1151 board with the C236 chipset, meaning it also supports Xeon CPUs. Unfortunately it didn't come with a CPU and I don't have any socket 1151 CPUs to test it with, so I don't know yet if it works.

Next up, crappy pic of what is the Asus A8N SLI. I've had the worst luck trying to find a working nForce4 board. I already have this board's sisters - an A8N SLI Deluxe and an A8N SLI Premium, neither of which works. Recently I picked up an ECS AM2 board with nForce4 for a couple €, which also turned out not to work. Maybe it's a curse or maybe nForce4 was a really unreliable chip. Either way, I really wanted to get a working one and finally I did, as this one booted up just fine 😀. Came with an Athlon 64 3200+, but I already have a couple 4000+ chips, so one will find its home in this board. It does need to be recapped though, before I use it again, as a couple caps are in really bad shape.

Again a board that's not exactly retro, but I also don't have any socket 1155 boards or CPUs, so getting one would be a nice bonus. This one also ended up booting without issues; and the CPU on it turned out to be an i5 2300, which was way better than I had expected. So another nice win. And as an extra bonus, it also came with two 2 GB DDR3 sticks.

Another not really retro board, Asus H81M2 for socket 1150, and another platform I didn't have any boards for, up until now. And again it turned out to work, though it was being a bit stubborn at first. Initially it kept complaining about USB device over current status detected, which caused it to keep shutting down and refusing to boot. Luckily I remembered dealing with this issue on another Asus board in the past, checked the manual and found the USB device wake-up jumper was missing. After fixing that, the board boots up just fine, with no complaining. And again the CPU on it turned out to be better than I had expected, an i5 5440.

I already have one of these boards, Asus P5Q, as well as its close cousin, the P5Q-E. All nice boards, P45-based, supporting all socket 775 based CPUs, with good overclocking support. Unfortunately this one doesn't boot up. Instead, it shuts itself off immediately after turning on, so I'm guessing there's a short somewhere. Doesn't exhibit that behaviour without the CPU installed, but that's as much troubleshooting as I was willing to put in at this point. Might be fixable, depending where exactly the fault turns out to be. Still, the awesome giant CPU cooler it came with actually makes up for the board not working. I only have one other decent cooler that fits on 775, so this one will find plenty of use.

Here's a bunch of various cards that were also in the box. Much more mixed success with these, than with the motherboards so far. The 550 Ti boots, but displays some artifacts in DOS mode, so will probably be the same in Windows and under 3D. Might be fixable though. The Matrox Millenium II doesn't get detected, so no boot. I have another identical one, so I'll try if at least the add-on memory board works with that one. The Mercury P64 is also no go, my test board wouldn't even turn on with it installed. Of the three ATI cards on the right, the top one (9200 LE) boots, but doesn't output anything on either DVI or VGA. The middle one, 9200 SE, works ok. The bottom one is a 9600 Pro, which I haven't tested yet. The passive card left of it is a useless Geforce 7300, but it does boot up fine so I can at least use it for testing PCIE based motherboards. The Audigy 2 ZS was a nice surprise, since I didn't even notice it in the listing, but I haven't tested it yet. And the pair of Adaptec SCSI controllers I have no way of testing, since I don't have any devices to connect to them. There's also a couple other cards still to try, a couple older ATI cards (Rage II, that sort of thing) and a few network cards.

Besides these pictured, I've already tried a few other motherboards. So far, all but the P5Q and one other board have booted up. There's two others that clearly have no chance of working, since one has suffered some catastrophic failure that left really bad burn marks on it and the other is missing the CPU socket. But so far, the success rate has been way better than I'd hoped for.

Ozzuneoj wrote:

Whenever I get a computer item that smells like smoke I usually end up junking it because the smell never comes out. Unless it's something rare... 🤣

Scrub Free with Bleach.

I've recovered systems (including a laptop) that smelled like the inside of a smoker's lung.

Just don't do it over a carpet or in clothes you don't want to ruin, they aren't kidding about the bleach.

+1 on the smoke.

https://www.amazon.com/Clorox-Clean-Up-Cleane … B0009P68MK?th=1 + a stiff bristle brush and (depending on size) a trip through the dishwasher.

Smoker stuff is indeed nasty.
This is how the monitor that I paid 10 euros for recently looked when it arrived:

After the restoration it looked way better. There is still a very faint smoker smell, but this will dissipate with time.

This was just bad luck that this one was that dirty. Does not happen very often.
Next week I get another, this time a higher model, and allegedly from non-smoker household.
I am already curious how it looks inside 😀

Hopefully you took some precautions before poking around inside that monitor... 😐

frudi wrote:

And the pair of Adaptec SCSI controllers I have no way of testing, since I don't have any devices to connect to them.

If they have a SCSI BIOS, you should be able to test them partially - the controller itself is part of the SCSI chain, and so you should be able to determine whether at least the basic functionality works.

frudi wrote:

Next up, crappy pic of what is the Asus A8N SLI.

What issues have you had with your Nforce4 boards? My original non-sli purchase from 2005 seems to work okay, I haven't really done anything with it since 2012. I just picked up an a8n sli premium and all I have done is make sure it posts and poked around in the bios.

yawetaG wrote:

If they have a SCSI BIOS, you should be able to test them partially - the controller itself is part of the SCSI chain, and so you should be able to determine whether at least the basic functionality works.

Good idea, thanks, I'll give it a try.

I'm not likely to make use of them in any of my builds, even if I do manage to find some SCSI drive to eventually fully test them with. But it would be nice to know if they at least work properly, so I'll be keeping an eye out at my local flea market for any SCSI drives from now on.

Zero_sugar wrote:

What issues have you had with your Nforce4 boards? My original non-sli purchase from 2005 seems to work okay, I haven't really done anything with it since 2012. I just picked up an a8n sli premium and all I have done is make sure it posts and poked around in the bios.

I used to own a DFI Lanparty NF4 Ultra-D board back in the day and, aside for some BIOS and driver issues, that one worked fine back then. I've sold it over 10 years ago though. The ones I have now are ones I've picked up randomly over the past year or so. The problems with them are all different, but they all come down to not booting up.

One of them powers up but is stuck with the RESET signal constantly on, which prevents it from booting. The reset header itself isn't shorted, so that's not the cause. From my own experience and what I've read about it online, this particular issue is notoriously hard to correctly identify and fix, so I'm not holding out much hope for it. The next board also powers up, but doesn't even begin the POST, my debug card just keeps showing -- --, while the main voltages are all present and there's no RESET signal. All the main VRMs (for CPU, memory and chipset) seem to be okay and are producing their proper output voltages. I couldn't find any physical damage to the board, no suspicious caps or damaged traces, no burn marks, nothing. I've reflashed different BIOS versions and even tried another BIOS chip, none of it helped. At this point I'm not sure what else to check or try with this one. And then the third one doesn't power up at all. The power header is getting its proper voltage, but shorting it does absolutely nothing, not even a hint of life. I'm guessing the issue is with power delivery, but I haven't yet taken the time to take a multimeter to it. This one I'm thinking probably has the best chance of being fixable, once I get around to it.

frudi wrote:

A big box arrived by courier today: […]
Show full quote

A big box arrived by courier today:

Containing a lot of scrap I got off ebay, here's one of the listing's photos with most of the stuff visible:

At 120€ plus shipping it wasn't cheap, but I saw a couple things in there that I was really excited about. Still a risk, because the lot was sold as for parts only, but I figured some of it should work and some of it should be repairable. I've been sorting through the lot and doing some preliminary testing (just to see what boots up and what doesn't, without any additional troubleshooting what might be wrong). Here's the couple things I was most excited to try out:

Asus P3B-F, rev 1.01. I've wanted one of these for a while, but usual ebay prices are pretty crazy, when one even bothers to show up at all. This was one of the main reasons I went after this lot, so I was really hoping it would work, or at least be repairable. Turns out, it does work, it booted right up without issues 😀. Came with what turned out to be a Katmai Pentium III 450 and 3 sticks of memory, though one of them has one chip ripped off so it only recognises half of its 256 MB total capacity.

Next up, Gigabyte GA-586TX3. This was another one that caught my eye when deciding to bid on the lot. I have several socket 7 boards already, but all the ones I have with Intel chipsets are very basic. So a nice socket 7 board like this was high on my wishlist 😀. As luck would have it, this one too booted right up, after checking the jumpers were configured properly. Also, it turned out to come with a Pentium 233 MMX, which I have been missing in my collection and have been on the lookout to find as well. So double win.

Then I came upon this one. Not exactly retro and I must admit I didn't even notice it in the listing as anything noteworthy. Turns out it's a Fujitsu socket 1151 board with the C236 chipset, meaning it also supports Xeon CPUs. Unfortunately it didn't come with a CPU and I don't have any socket 1151 CPUs to test it with, so I don't know yet if it works.

Next up, crappy pic of what is the Asus A8N SLI. I've had the worst luck trying to find a working nForce4 board. I already have this board's sisters - an A8N SLI Deluxe and an A8N SLI Premium, neither of which works. Recently I picked up an ECS AM2 board with nForce4 for a couple €, which also turned out not to work. Maybe it's a curse or maybe nForce4 was a really unreliable chip. Either way, I really wanted to get a working one and finally I did, as this one booted up just fine 😀. Came with an Athlon 64 3200+, but I already have a couple 4000+ chips, so one will find its home in this board. It does need to be recapped though, before I use it again, as a couple caps are in really bad shape.

Again a board that's not exactly retro, but I also don't have any socket 1155 boards or CPUs, so getting one would be a nice bonus. This one also ended up booting without issues; and the CPU on it turned out to be an i5 2300, which was way better than I had expected. So another nice win. And as an extra bonus, it also came with two 2 GB DDR3 sticks.

Another not really retro board, Asus H81M2 for socket 1150, and another platform I didn't have any boards for, up until now. And again it turned out to work, though it was being a bit stubborn at first. Initially it kept complaining about USB device over current status detected, which caused it to keep shutting down and refusing to boot. Luckily I remembered dealing with this issue on another Asus board in the past, checked the manual and found the USB device wake-up jumper was missing. After fixing that, the board boots up just fine, with no complaining. And again the CPU on it turned out to be better than I had expected, an i5 5440.

I already have one of these boards, Asus P5Q, as well as its close cousin, the P5Q-E. All nice boards, P45-based, supporting all socket 775 based CPUs, with good overclocking support. Unfortunately this one doesn't boot up. Instead, it shuts itself off immediately after turning on, so I'm guessing there's a short somewhere. Doesn't exhibit that behaviour without the CPU installed, but that's as much troubleshooting as I was willing to put in at this point. Might be fixable, depending where exactly the fault turns out to be. Still, the awesome giant CPU cooler it came with actually makes up for the board not working. I only have one other decent cooler that fits on 775, so this one will find plenty of use.

Here's a bunch of various cards that were also in the box. Much more mixed success with these, than with the motherboards so far. The 550 Ti boots, but displays some artifacts in DOS mode, so will probably be the same in Windows and under 3D. Might be fixable though. The Matrox Millenium II doesn't get detected, so no boot. I have another identical one, so I'll try if at least the add-on memory board works with that one. The Mercury P64 is also no go, my test board wouldn't even turn on with it installed. Of the three ATI cards on the right, the top one (9200 LE) boots, but doesn't output anything on either DVI or VGA. The middle one, 9200 SE, works ok. The bottom one is a 9600 Pro, which I haven't tested yet. The passive card left of it is a useless Geforce 7300, but it does boot up fine so I can at least use it for testing PCIE based motherboards. The Audigy 2 ZS was a nice surprise, since I didn't even notice it in the listing, but I haven't tested it yet. And the pair of Adaptec SCSI controllers I have no way of testing, since I don't have any devices to connect to them. There's also a couple other cards still to try, a couple older ATI cards (Rage II, that sort of thing) and a few network cards.

Besides these pictured, I've already tried a few other motherboards. So far, all but the P5Q and one other board have booted up. There's two others that clearly have no chance of working, since one has suffered some catastrophic failure that left really bad burn marks on it and the other is missing the CPU socket. But so far, the success rate has been way better than I'd hoped for.

The P5Q sounds like it has a short on either the low side of the VRM or the 12v (high) side of the VRM. You should be able to find out which with a simple DMM by putting the black probe on Drain tab and then using the red probe, first on Gate then on Source - repeat this for each MOSFET in the CPU VRM section - you should find out if one is bad if it beeps on both Gain and Source. A good (working) FET should show infinite on Gate and beep on Source.

Hi, I acquired these sound cards recently, could someone help me identify the ESS 1868, it seems to have an internal wavetable:

The CT2290 is in a pretty bad shape, it is covered with mud, but the good thing is that it still works and costed 3 EUR. One component is reportedly missing from the lower right part of the board, maybe someone in possession of this card could help me find out what the missing component is?Thanks!

PcBytes wrote:

The P5Q sounds like it has a short on either the low side of the VRM or the 12v (high) side of the VRM. You should be able to find out which with a simple DMM by putting the black probe on Drain tab and then using the red probe, first on Gate then on Source - repeat this for each MOSFET in the CPU VRM section - you should find out if one is bad if it beeps on both Gain and Source. A good (working) FET should show infinite on Gate and beep on Source.

That's also what I'm hoping, that it's just a short on one of the mosfets. I've identified and replaced shorted ones successfully before, so if it's that, then I'm confident I can fix it. But I'm honestly still very much a total noob about electronics, learning things as I go. The way I found the shorted mosfets last time was basically by measuring them all and seeing which behaved differently from the others 😀. So I really appreciate the detailed description how to test them, that will be a big help, thanks.

Did they put the pin protector on the wrong side of the socket lid on the Fujitsu socket 1151 board? All the ones I've seen snap onto the outside. If so, you've got a lot of bent/broken pins.

I don't think they did. I checked the socket and the pins looked perfect. Removing and then re-seating the lid, it also fit perfectly, so I guess it's just the way it was designed to be placed.

Interesting. It must be another type of design.

stalk3r wrote:

<snip> […]
Show full quote

<snip>

The CT2290 is in a pretty bad shape, it is covered with mud, but the good thing is that it still works and costed 3 EUR. One component is reportedly missing from the lower right part of the board, maybe someone in possession of this card could help me find out what the missing component is?Thanks!

I have one of those, if I remember I will check it for you.

EDIT: found an older picture of mine, not good enough for identification I'm afraid.

Cyrix200+ wrote:

EDIT: found an older picture of mine, not good enough for identification I'm afraid.

It is good enough to see that there is no ID on the component whatsoever. 😀 Must be a resistor of some sort. Thanks for the photo.

stalk3r wrote:

Cyrix200+ wrote:

EDIT: found an older picture of mine, not good enough for identification I'm afraid.

It is good enough to see that there is no ID on the component whatsoever. 😀 Must be a resistor of some sort. Thanks for the photo.

Of course there is also this scan I just found. No markings on the component: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/common … CT2290_Scan.jpg

https://www.google.com/search?q=ct2290&tbm=isch

EDIT: good lord http://yehar.com/blog/?p=1748