USA

What I noticed is that many auctions don't go as high if they ship only to their country. Unfortunately I live in The Netherlands and see a lot of good stuff selling for peanuts on Ebay UK and DE.

Once I took a gamble and bought a whole tray of K6-III+ for mucho cheapos 😁
He shipped only to Germany but decided to ship it to me anyway, LoL!

lucky sod!

Yea Germany is awesome for cheap computer parts.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Yea Germany is awesome for cheap computer parts.

Unfortunately not for Voodoo's. Was watching a couple Voodoo 2 sales. 2 went for like €12 and the 2 others for €18, WTH??

Tetrium wrote:

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Yea Germany is awesome for cheap computer parts.

Unfortunately not for Voodoo's. Was watching a couple Voodoo 2 sales. 2 went for like €12 and the 2 others for €18, WTH??

Voodoos aren't usually cheap in USA anymore, either. Finding any Voodoo card for less than $30 USD is the exception rather than the rule.

Just for laughs I changed out my FireGL 8800 for an FX5200 64mb 64bit- basically the worst of the worst. Yes, I have the dubious honour of owning this card.

To tell the truth, 2D video output is pretty clear, but by god, 3d is really slow. Tried playing NWN on it, and its like 3spf (seconds per frame) 😜

I just got an FX5950. I got it from ebay. It doesn't work. No surprises there then.

When I power on the system, the first thing I notice is that the whining noise of the fan can't be heard, and that's because it isn't spinning. When the Windows 98 desktop appears, a pop up message box from nVidia informs me that:

"Problem report: The NVIDIA System Sentinel is reporting that the NVIDIA-powered graphics card is not receiving sufficient power. To protect your hardware from potential damage or causing a potential system lockup, the graphics processor has lowered its performance to a level that allows continued safe operations."

Why don't people throw out their broken crap, instead of selling it on ebay? It's not just the money that's wasted, it's also a waste of time and a disappointment too. I can still use it, but it won't operate at its intended speed. I can set the AA to 4 and run 3DMark 2001 s.e., and it completes this test but with a poor score. The score I get is about a quarter of what it should be. The one fractionally positive piece of news is that the alarming hissing sound cannot be heard from the FX card's voltage components. Maybe they're not being used? BTW, the molex power connector is plugged in just fine.

Could be a problem with your PSU, try another one.

F2bnp wrote:

Could be a problem with your PSU, try another one.

Unfortunately, the PSU is OK. I know that for a fact, because I'm testing 2 identical FX5950s. One works, while the other doesn't. I've tried them both a couple of times, and the same symptoms appear for the defective one.

Are there any missing surface mount thingies? Little caps and whatnot. Or maybe even a broken solder joint in the power plug.

retro games 100 wrote:

F2bnp wrote:

Could be a problem with your PSU, try another one.

Unfortunately, the PSU is OK. I know that for a fact, because I'm testing 2 identical FX5950s. One works, while the other doesn't. I've tried them both a couple of times, and the same symptoms appear for the defective one.

Have you tried google for anyone with similar issues?

swaaye wrote:

Are there any missing surface mount thingies? Little caps and whatnot. Or maybe even a broken solder joint in the power plug.

I've just had a look at the power plug area. You know if you look at the power socket from the 4 pins direction, and you can see the 4 pins inside the plastic power socket? Well, if you look at this power socket from the completely opposite direction, kind of looking "over" the card itself, one of the "power pins" looks like it's "burst through" the back of the plastic power socket area. It's quite bizarre actually, I wonder how that happened?! Anyway, I've kind of wiggled it about a bit, and I'll try it again ASAP...

Just finishing testing some other stuff ATM, but will get back to this as soon as poss.

swaaye wrote:

... Or maybe even a broken solder joint in the power plug.

Solved! By examining the power socket area and locating the fault, my heavy handed pliers squashing skillz has fixed this problem. I squashed the "burst power pin" back in to position, and now the card's fan spins at boot up, I get no error message, and the card works correctly! Thanks a lot! 😀

omg I was useful!!! 😁 I feel particularly special having helped resurrect a GeForce FX space heater super card.

I continue to test the resurrected GeForce FX 5950 ultra space heater super card, and noticed something a bit odd in 3DMark 2001 s.e. It's in the dragothic test, when you can see the sky. Not the thin clouds at the beginning, but a little bit later on, when the sky is clearer. I can see very subtle "interference" on the top part of the screen. It looks like faint grey "banding".

Perhaps it's just interference with my testing equipment? I'm using a Leadtek A380 card. I've tried it using 3 different mobos, and a couple of different nVidia drivers. I've also tried a backup A380. They all show this interference. Anyone else noticed this issue, when testing an FX 5950 or similar, with this benchmark program?

Monitor maybe?

swaaye wrote:

Monitor maybe?

Could be. However, it seems OK when I use other video cards. I think the cable is well shielded. I'll do some more related tests with this card some other day...

Maybe it is EMI. The FX59x0 squeal when loaded with 3D certainly tells me that the cards could be built better.

Yeah, there's something bad about these "top of the range" FX cards. They don't appear to be as well designed as say the Radeon 9800 cards.