Hehe, fun post to read there, Rich ;D

I've always been very careful with how I treat my hardware, so I can't tell if hardware has been mistreated before it ended up in my hands.
I do have a 386 board which had very bad battery corrosion and I had never expected it to work, but when I finally tried it, it worked just fine!

Of course I have made silly mistakes when testing hardware. More then once I was using my Socket A Athlon 900 to test motherboards (power on for a few seconds to see if I got a screen, then power off) and have accidentally overclocked it to 1200Mhz more then once (I wasn't even using any thermal paste, just a HSF with a copper base) and the Athlon survived all the ordeals just fine 😀

Thanks 🤣 I look after my stuff too but this at the time was just considered 'an old board' so wasn't packed away terribly carefully 😵 Found an ESS AudioDrive to go with it too 😜

Jeez, this thing is ridiculous. Put the AudioDrive in and an Intel 10mbps Network adapter, installed and old version of foobar2000 and it's happily playing a 256kbps AAC file! 😲

The audio quality from this AudioDrive is terrible though 🤣

EDIT: Even clocked down to 75MHz it's playing without a hitch 😳 And the CPU is barely warm (without a fan, just heatsink) 😎

RichB93 wrote:

I have an old PC Chips M530 430VX Socket 7 motherboard which has had a tough life. My brother used it in the late 90s and early […]
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I have an old PC Chips M530 430VX Socket 7 motherboard which has had a tough life. My brother used it in the late 90s and early 00s but since around 2003/4 it has been outside of a case and nestled in between a bunch of clothes, no doubt getting a ton of static damage you would have thought. Same goes for the 4 sticks of 16MB RAM which were scattered around the place! The board also has a COAST module installed.

So anyway, I plug the machine in and boot it up. It has an Intel Pentium 166 (non MMX) in there. I install Windows 95 without a hitch. Pretty cool, it appears to work, but I'm guessing as soon as I stress this machine it will probably crash. I switch the machine off, set the multiplier to 3.0 and power on. The machine POSTS at 200MHz, so a nice 33 MHz overclock over the stock speed. Again, Windows boots fine. The SiS 6326 graphics card I put in there isn't fantastic but at least it works under Windows 95, unlike the PowerVR Kyro card I try initially. I couldn't find one of my ISA sound cards so instead I put a generic C-Media 8738 in there (probably the widest supported card I know, it has drivers from Windows 95 all the way up to Windows 7 64-bit!!). I put 3DMark 99 MAX on there and load it up, fully expecting it to crash on this dusty old machine. I run the demo and....

It plays from start to finish without a single hitch. Of course the SiS card is terribly slow but nonetheless it plays fine. I run Memtest+86 to test the RAM. All 4 sticks are fine and do not have any problems either.

Maybe I'm just over-reacting a little but considering how poorly this hardware has been treated I'm astonished that it still works absolutely fine!! What do you guys think, do you have any hardware that still works like despite looking beat up? 😜

Intel Pentium 150/166 historically have been able to hit 200mhz easily and many can go higher than that. I had a machine I did it with to extend it's life a little until I could buy a new one. The 150 and 166 chips are actually the same chip just one is marked for use on a 60mhz motherboard and the other is marked for 66mhz fsb operation. I did my 200mhz overclock with a chip marked 150mhz with the stock cooling with no problems.

sliderider wrote:

Intel Pentium 150/166 historically have been able to hit 200mhz easily and many can go higher than that. I had a machine I did it with to extend it's life a little until I could buy a new one. The 150 and 166 chips are actually the same chip just one is marked for use on a 60mhz motherboard and the other is marked for 66mhz fsb operation. I did my 200mhz overclock with a chip marked 150mhz with the stock cooling with no problems.

Very true! The Intel Pentium chips were good overclockers 😉

The only thing to keep in mind though is that many had their higher multipliers disabled.

RichB93 wrote:

Jeez, this thing is ridiculous. Put the AudioDrive in and an Intel 10mbps Network adapter, installed and old version of foobar2000 and it's happily playing a 256kbps AAC file! 😲

The audio quality from this AudioDrive is terrible though 🤣

EDIT: Even clocked down to 75MHz it's playing without a hitch 😳 And the CPU is barely warm (without a fan, just heatsink) 😎

Good to read you're enjoying yourself hehe! 😁

Hmm well the components and traces are all much thicker. So this might play a role here. I also heard (no idea where though), that in the past they didn't hold back (didn't care about recycling) with using strong chemicals / mixtures. Whereas now they do consider the recycling process and design the boards with this in mind...

RichB93 wrote:

I have an old PC Chips

Yes, they are well known for their durability. 😦

I've replaced the noisy-as-hell AudioDrive with a Yamaha OPL3 SA-2 which is a ton better 😁

I tried playing MP3s on an Intel DX4-100 486 but it just couldn't cut it 😜

But yeah, mega impressed at the durability of this thing. If a newer board was treated like this it would probably just blow up immediately 🤣

Worst I have ever seen was a 386 from a local ocean biology lab. It had spent years as an unloved floor box, then relegated to the back corner where they tossed their gear after gutting dead mammals on the beach. I got it circa 2002. It was carpetted with 'dust' felt everywhere inside, and reeked. I only booted it out of simple curiosity, then pulled the drive and sealed the rest for disposal. It was nasty even using a two-can respirator and gloves.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Hmm well the components and traces are all much thicker. So this might play a role here. I also heard (no idea where though), that in the past they didn't hold back (didn't care about recycling) with using strong chemicals / mixtures. Whereas now they do consider the recycling process and design the boards with this in mind...

That and two more forces. One, the less material you can reliably use, the cheaper you can make things. Two, learning just how long 'reliably' needs to be for the majority.

I don't think the cheapening of things is bad. It makes them affordable. I've got an IBM 320H. The build quality is amazing, but there's no way you'd ever have ubiquitous cheap personal computers with that construction. To me one of the neater things about taking apart old gear is watching how things like floppy drive construction gets progressively much more 'flimsy' but manages the same job.

Oh nice - good flickr set of similar IBM:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/31231773@N02/set … 57623594074211/

I have an old P-III machine here, iirc, that when I found it I would power it up and after a about a minute it would immediately switch itself off. It wouldn't stay running for more than a few seconds after that until you waited a while then it would do it again. I opened it up and found out why. It was completely packed inside with dirt, dust and lint balls, so much that everything was blanketed in gunk and there was no room anywhere inside for air to circulate. I cleaned all the crap out of there and scrubbed all the parts on the motherboard and after I did that and powered it up it stayed running for as long as I wanted it to. I don't know how many years it took for all that crap to accumulate in there, but if that machine was overheating like that for any extended period time it would have had to been pretty sturdy not to burn anything out.

Yup, definitely stories about very durable computers! Nowdays computers produce a whole lot more heat and are thus more susceptible to overheating.

I tried playing MP3s on an Intel DX4-100 486 but it just couldn't cut it.

In a 486 system properly configured with the write-back version of the Intel DX4-100, you should be able to just barely play a 128 kbps, 44 kHz mp3 without any down-scaling in Winamp using wave-out output. No skipping.

I vaguely recall playing MP3s on an even slower 486, but I could be mistaken. Certainly, it was quite impossible to do anything else at the same time.

Then again, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mpxplay says that MPXPlay requires 100 MHz.

feipoa wrote:

I tried playing MP3s on an Intel DX4-100 486 but it just couldn't cut it.

In a 486 system properly configured with the write-back version of the Intel DX4-100, you should be able to just barely play a 128 kbps, 44 kHz mp3 without any down-scaling in Winamp using wave-out output. No skipping.

This is right, still as soon as you do something else it starts to skip.
According to NT4 Taskmanager (as some raw estimation) playback takes about 75% CPU on a Pentium 100 or 25% on a Pentium 166 MMX.

No skipping playing a 256kbps AAC @ 75MHz w/16MB RAM. Using foobar 2000 on Windows 95 OEM SR-2.

Have few working isa/pci card from local scrapyard with rusty backplates. Theyre outside there on wind, rain, snow, sun and still they working. Some of them must been laying there at last 6 months, maybe even more. Old HW is very durable.

vlask wrote:

Have few working isa/pci card from local scrapyard with rusty backplates. Theyre outside there on wind, rain, snow, sun and still they working. Some of them must been laying there at last 6 months, maybe even more. Old HW is very durable.

Now that is crazy! 😳

vlask wrote:

Have few working isa/pci card from local scrapyard with rusty backplates. Theyre outside there on wind, rain, snow, sun and still they working. Some of them must been laying there at last 6 months, maybe even more. Old HW is very durable.

They overbuilt everything in the old days cause it was so expensive. ALL the P1s, Pro, P2, P3 systems I have picked up from the roadside, scrapyard, bins, etc worked without any issue. They even cleaned up real good with some detergent and looked brand new!

I think that the old stuff from the '80s is just a display of how much companies didn't understand how temporary computer hardware is. You don't need to build a computer to last 50 years because it will be undesirable to most people in 5.

But then in the '90s we had the endless selection of complete garbage Socket 3,5 and 7 boards. The early '00s weren't much different. The first few years of Athlon mobos were ugly, for ex. This was a combo of new chipset makers who were not so great, and cheap mobos that made the chipsets even worse. And then there were the scams, and the capacitor plague, Highpoint chips, etc. 🤣

In the past 5 years I think quality has gone way up. We've got all of the manufacturers of motherboards trying to differentiate themselves based on quality factors like caps, board layers, VRM design, etc. How many decades do you need your mobo to last?

Did anyone else notice how PCIe had almost no teething problems, unlike AGP? VIA never did figure out how to make an AGP slot. 😉