I've been trying to play a bunch of my GOG XP games with EAX. I'm not feeling fussy so that's basically any XP build but with my Audigy 2 ZS installed, and yet I've somehow managed to make this a million times more complicated than it needs to be, with my normal FM1, 775 and 1156 boards not posting or not displaying video. It seems that the weekend about 3 of my boards and my most useful graphics card (GTX 645) has died.

On the plus side I picked up a local "here are a bunch of old parts for £25" collection, mainly because it had a 939 board in it and I need a new one. Most of the stuff turned out to be dead but there was a GeForce ti 4600 in there which does work and cleaned up nicely so that is a result! It also came with a Sonic Tower passive heatsink with a whole bunch of mounting brackets which I am desperate to put on a Socket 478 PC.

pentiumspeed wrote on 2021-10-10, 16:21:

Do you have picture of the heat sink? Buff the whole area of the heat sink with 800 or 1000 grit sandpaper will make surface more smoother for better thermal contact.

Are you using MX-4 or MX-5 even Arctic Silver 5? Not the old fashioned white paste. Not sufficient mW/k.

Cheers,

I don't have a pic of either heatsink at the moment, but the surface of both looks ok. I'm actually going to try the sandpaper option on 1 of the 2 stock AMD coolers that I have, as it's surface is a little scratched up. I might even try the original stock cooler and see if it makes a difference.

The paste I'm using is Arctic Silver Ceramique 2, as it's simply what I had to hand. I keep meaning to purchase something different, though in this case I don't think it will help too much as I think the main issue is the PC's case itself, a cheap case from circa 2004 that allows for very little airflow. With the side of the case off, the CPU is running a whole 10 degrees cooler and appears to be Prime95 stable.

I've got a 72Watt 1400MHZ Thunderbird build and I never needed to use fancy top-end paste or sanding. Just make sure to use a decent cooler (larger fan, copper slug, etc.)

Working on my “Home Theater Media Center NAS” computers.
I have two 5,1 Mac Pro’s I have loaded with large hard drives and SSDs
I added Wifi cards and upgraded the CPU’s to Dual Six-core Xeon x5675’s @ 3.0-to-3.4ghz
For a total of 12-cores and 24-threads each.
It only costs $50 for a pair of x5675 Xeon CPU’s
They perform very good now.
Very snappy and responsive. I definitely notice the difference going from dual quad core xeon’s to dual hex core xeon’s.
I did not think the difference was going to be that drastic but it is.
But these where a pain to upgrade. Apple design is NOT very friendly for upgrades.
It’s definitely NOT a tool less design case.
I had to de-lid the CPU’s too.
Working on a PC is much easier.

But NO home theater is complete with out a Mac in it.

Eventually, I will replace these with M1 Mac Mini and a Disk array.
They use less electricity.
The Mac Pro’s use about $40 of electric per year in power saving mode.
The Mac Mini with disk array should use about $25 per year in electricity
But the large disks are too expensive right now. Maybe upgrade later when supply and prices
Are more realistic. I would like to use a Disk array with large capacity SSD’s.

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2021-10-11, 14:05:

Working on my “Home Theater Media Center NAS” computers. I have two 5,1 Mac Pro’s I have loaded with large hard drives and SSDs […]
Show full quote

Working on my “Home Theater Media Center NAS” computers.
I have two 5,1 Mac Pro’s I have loaded with large hard drives and SSDs
I added Wifi cards and upgraded the CPU’s to Dual Six-core Xeon x5675’s @ 3.0-to-3.4ghz
For a total of 12-cores and 24-threads each.
It only costs $50 for a pair of x5675 Xeon CPU’s
They perform very good now.
Very snappy and responsive. I definitely notice the difference going from dual quad core xeon’s to dual hex core xeon’s.
I did not think the difference was going to be that drastic but it is.
But these where a pain to upgrade. Apple design is NOT very friendly for upgrades.
It’s definitely NOT a tool less design case.
I had to de-lid the CPU’s too.
Working on a PC is much easier.

But NO home theater is complete with out a Mac in it.

Eventually, I will replace these with M1 Mac Mini and a Disk array.
They use less electricity.
The Mac Pro’s use about $40 of electric per year in power saving mode.
The Mac Mini with disk array should use about $25 per year in electricity
But the large disks are too expensive right now. Maybe upgrade later when supply and prices
Are more realistic. I would like to use a Disk array with large capacity SSD’s.

But by god, those are such beautiful beasts inside and out. I still have my 10-year old Mac Pro 5,1 chugging away running Mojave in my studio as my office mainstay. It may be time to do a fresh install and try getting Big Sur running on it but it runs really well as is. Specs are:

- Dual X5680 (3.33Ghz, 6-core)
- 64GB RAM
- 480GB Kingston HyperX PCIe SSD
- 8TB WD Gold
- MSI Radeon RX560 4GB
- Sonnet Allegro 2-port USB Type-C 3.2

I love how these are still going strong after such a long time. I don't think I've ever had a hardware failure - touch wood!

pixelatedscraps wrote on 2021-10-11, 15:01:

But by god, those are such beautiful beasts inside and out. I still have my 10-year old Mac Pro 5,1 chugging away running Mojave […]
Show full quote

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2021-10-11, 14:05:

Working on my “Home Theater Media Center NAS” computers. I have two 5,1 Mac Pro’s I have loaded with large hard drives and SSDs […]
Show full quote

Working on my “Home Theater Media Center NAS” computers.
I have two 5,1 Mac Pro’s I have loaded with large hard drives and SSDs
I added Wifi cards and upgraded the CPU’s to Dual Six-core Xeon x5675’s @ 3.0-to-3.4ghz
For a total of 12-cores and 24-threads each.
It only costs $50 for a pair of x5675 Xeon CPU’s
They perform very good now.
Very snappy and responsive. I definitely notice the difference going from dual quad core xeon’s to dual hex core xeon’s.
I did not think the difference was going to be that drastic but it is.
But these where a pain to upgrade. Apple design is NOT very friendly for upgrades.
It’s definitely NOT a tool less design case.
I had to de-lid the CPU’s too.
Working on a PC is much easier.

But NO home theater is complete with out a Mac in it.

Eventually, I will replace these with M1 Mac Mini and a Disk array.
They use less electricity.
The Mac Pro’s use about $40 of electric per year in power saving mode.
The Mac Mini with disk array should use about $25 per year in electricity
But the large disks are too expensive right now. Maybe upgrade later when supply and prices
Are more realistic. I would like to use a Disk array with large capacity SSD’s.

But by god, those are such beautiful beasts inside and out. I still have my 10-year old Mac Pro 5,1 chugging away running Mojave in my studio as my office mainstay. It may be time to do a fresh install and try getting Big Sur running on it but it runs really well as is. Specs are:

- Dual X5680 (3.33Ghz, 6-core)
- 64GB RAM
- 480GB Kingston HyperX PCIe SSD
- 8TB WD Gold
- MSI Radeon RX560 4GB
- Sonnet Allegro 2-port USB Type-C 3.2

I love how these are still going strong after such a long time. I don't think I've ever had a hardware failure - touch wood!

That’s why these were so popular with the Mac community. They are designed some what like an IBM Open Architecture PC.
These were actually made to be repairable and upgradeable unlike most Macs.
But these are still NOT as nice as an HP Z-Class Workstation which are in a tool less case.

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2021-10-11, 15:29:

That’s why these were so popular with the Mac community. They are designed some what like an IBM Open Architecture PC. These we […]
Show full quote

pixelatedscraps wrote on 2021-10-11, 15:01:

But by god, those are such beautiful beasts inside and out. I still have my 10-year old Mac Pro 5,1 chugging away running Mojave […]
Show full quote

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2021-10-11, 14:05:

Working on my “Home Theater Media Center NAS” computers. I have two 5,1 Mac Pro’s I have loaded with large hard drives and SSDs […]
Show full quote

Working on my “Home Theater Media Center NAS” computers.
I have two 5,1 Mac Pro’s I have loaded with large hard drives and SSDs
I added Wifi cards and upgraded the CPU’s to Dual Six-core Xeon x5675’s @ 3.0-to-3.4ghz
For a total of 12-cores and 24-threads each.
It only costs $50 for a pair of x5675 Xeon CPU’s
They perform very good now.
Very snappy and responsive. I definitely notice the difference going from dual quad core xeon’s to dual hex core xeon’s.
I did not think the difference was going to be that drastic but it is.
But these where a pain to upgrade. Apple design is NOT very friendly for upgrades.
It’s definitely NOT a tool less design case.
I had to de-lid the CPU’s too.
Working on a PC is much easier.

But NO home theater is complete with out a Mac in it.

Eventually, I will replace these with M1 Mac Mini and a Disk array.
They use less electricity.
The Mac Pro’s use about $40 of electric per year in power saving mode.
The Mac Mini with disk array should use about $25 per year in electricity
But the large disks are too expensive right now. Maybe upgrade later when supply and prices
Are more realistic. I would like to use a Disk array with large capacity SSD’s.

But by god, those are such beautiful beasts inside and out. I still have my 10-year old Mac Pro 5,1 chugging away running Mojave in my studio as my office mainstay. It may be time to do a fresh install and try getting Big Sur running on it but it runs really well as is. Specs are:

- Dual X5680 (3.33Ghz, 6-core)
- 64GB RAM
- 480GB Kingston HyperX PCIe SSD
- 8TB WD Gold
- MSI Radeon RX560 4GB
- Sonnet Allegro 2-port USB Type-C 3.2

I love how these are still going strong after such a long time. I don't think I've ever had a hardware failure - touch wood!

That’s why these were so popular with the Mac community. They are designed some what like an IBM Open Architecture PC.
These were actually made to be repairable and upgradeable unlike most Macs.
But these are still NOT as nice as an HP Z-Class Workstation which are in a tool less case.

I like the Z-class but that photo only confirms the theory that Apple continues to design computers that look as good on the inside as they do on the outside. Not a fan boy here but I value good product design. Apple are superlative in this regard.

Completely off topic here but one example is my assistant’s Mac Mini from 2018 taken apart to upgrade it to 64GB RAM. You can do this with almost any Apple computer from the last 25 years and always have something to appreciate about the way it’s been assembled and individual components refined over their PC brethren.

Have been fighting with a cheap old tower case to fit my Am5x86-P75 build.
I am still not sure how to make sure that the disk controller chip does not get hot.
Have tried to strap a 12V 1A fan onto the floppy mounting frame (
It does the job, the controller chip and the GPU stays cool.
But I am not sure yet about the durability, in particular that the fan stays where it is, and does not move.

(from top to bottom)
ASC-39320
Pro 1000GT
Spea Mercury P64V
Soundblaster CT3600
Hercules Plus

Furthermore, the HDD LED doesn't light up. Not sure yet why. Looks like I need to measure what there is at the disk controller LED post.
Maybe I need to replace the 39320 with a 19160, which would reduce the Frankenstein factor.
And I am still considering to replace the 2MB Spea card with a 64MB Quadro NVS 280; the latter would allow for Truecolor FHD in Windows.
But I still need to do the compatibility tests, as both cards are not listed in the DOS graphics card compatibility matrix.

PTherapist wrote on 2021-10-11, 12:31:

pentiumspeed wrote on 2021-10-10, 16:21:

Do you have picture of the heat sink? Buff the whole area of the heat sink with 800 or 1000 grit sandpaper will make surface more smoother for better thermal contact.

Are you using MX-4 or MX-5 even Arctic Silver 5? Not the old fashioned white paste. Not sufficient mW/k.

Cheers,

I don't have a pic of either heatsink at the moment, but the surface of both looks ok. I'm actually going to try the sandpaper option on 1 of the 2 stock AMD coolers that I have, as it's surface is a little scratched up. I might even try the original stock cooler and see if it makes a difference.

The paste I'm using is Arctic Silver Ceramique 2, as it's simply what I had to hand. I keep meaning to purchase something different, though in this case I don't think it will help too much as I think the main issue is the PC's case itself, a cheap case from circa 2004 that allows for very little airflow. With the side of the case off, the CPU is running a whole 10 degrees cooler and appears to be Prime95 stable.

I knew better than that, you will be surprised if you do the sandpaper scrubbing on all of your heatsinks with 800 or 1000 grit sandpaper. This helped lot.

Even machined surface is too rough. Scrubbing knocks off the peaks and give you much more surface contact with the die or IHS.

Cheers,

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2021-10-11, 14:05:

Working on my “Home Theater Media Center NAS” computers. I have two 5,1 Mac Pro’s I have loaded with large hard drives and SSDs […]
Show full quote

Working on my “Home Theater Media Center NAS” computers.
I have two 5,1 Mac Pro’s I have loaded with large hard drives and SSDs
I added Wifi cards and upgraded the CPU’s to Dual Six-core Xeon x5675’s @ 3.0-to-3.4ghz
For a total of 12-cores and 24-threads each.
It only costs $50 for a pair of x5675 Xeon CPU’s
They perform very good now.
Very snappy and responsive. I definitely notice the difference going from dual quad core xeon’s to dual hex core xeon’s.
I did not think the difference was going to be that drastic but it is.
But these where a pain to upgrade. Apple design is NOT very friendly for upgrades.
It’s definitely NOT a tool less design case.
I had to de-lid the CPU’s too.
Working on a PC is much easier.

But NO home theater is complete with out a Mac in it.

Eventually, I will replace these with M1 Mac Mini and a Disk array.
They use less electricity.
The Mac Pro’s use about $40 of electric per year in power saving mode.
The Mac Mini with disk array should use about $25 per year in electricity
But the large disks are too expensive right now. Maybe upgrade later when supply and prices
Are more realistic. I would like to use a Disk array with large capacity SSD’s.

Very nice machines indeed, superb build quality and design. I used to own a 4,1 which I flashed to a 5,1 and upgraded with dual hexacore Xeons, 48GB of RAM, PCIe SSD, USB 3.0 and a Mac-flashed HD7970.
I also de-lidded the CPUs with the vise method. Kind of scary, but it worked surprisingly well.
But since I have always been more of a Windows guy and used the Mac rarely, I decided to sell it while it still fetched good money.

Get HP Z series workstation! Especially Z4xx series and will take unbuffered standard ram, unbuffered ECC or registered ECC.

For light workstation or affordable segment get Z2xx series. This can take typical i5, i7 or E3-xxxx xeon series, if using xeon, you can using unbuffered ECC ram.

Cheers,

pentiumspeed wrote on 2021-10-11, 19:02:

Get HP Z series workstation! Especially Z4xx series and will take unbuffered standard ram, unbuffered ECC or registered ECC.

Can the Z400 really take registered RAM?
I always thought it can take only unbuffered PC3-xxxxE RAMs.
In the specs HP says it can take up to 4GB PC3-10600E modules, but 8GB modules appear to work as well (maybe it depends on board rev and bios date, too?)

retardware wrote on 2021-10-11, 19:09:

pentiumspeed wrote on 2021-10-11, 19:02:

Get HP Z series workstation! Especially Z4xx series and will take unbuffered standard ram, unbuffered ECC or registered ECC.

Can the Z400 really take registered RAM?

just tested... sadly the Z400 does not seem to accept registered RAM 😿
Which is a pity, as the GB price is 1/4th of unbuffered RAM.
Personally I like these of the HP Z series which accept ECC RAMs, as I do not feel well with RAM without parity checking.
The Z800 officially can take 48GB (using 4GB modules), but in reality they support up to 384GB (using 32GB modules). RAM monsters 😁

Z420 confirmed can take registered ECC.

Cheers,

I continue to make progress with retro-PCs, right now I have created 3.5 "boot disks, containing an old version of DOS 3.30, which I have transferred to the 8MB CF, before I had ver. 4.01 but Windows 1.03 did not work, while under DOS 3.30 it does.
In Windows 1.03 I have Write not working, but I remember that it never worked, I'll see if I find a working file but it will be difficult because I should find it in Italian (like windows).
On the 128MB CF, instead I have already put DOS 4.01 and Windows 3.0, maybe you could put a version 2 but I don't have it, I just have to finish configuring by adding some drivers, for the moment I'm using the 386DX PC, but i think i will pass it on the 386SX so i should look for the drivers for that pc's sound card (Aztech AT V.5.0)

gex85 wrote on 2021-10-11, 18:59:

Very nice machines indeed, superb build quality and design. I used to own a 4,1 which I flashed to a 5,1 and upgraded with dual […]
Show full quote

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2021-10-11, 14:05:

Working on my “Home Theater Media Center NAS” computers. I have two 5,1 Mac Pro’s I have loaded with large hard drives and SSDs […]
Show full quote

Working on my “Home Theater Media Center NAS” computers.
I have two 5,1 Mac Pro’s I have loaded with large hard drives and SSDs
I added Wifi cards and upgraded the CPU’s to Dual Six-core Xeon x5675’s @ 3.0-to-3.4ghz
For a total of 12-cores and 24-threads each.
It only costs $50 for a pair of x5675 Xeon CPU’s
They perform very good now.
Very snappy and responsive. I definitely notice the difference going from dual quad core xeon’s to dual hex core xeon’s.
I did not think the difference was going to be that drastic but it is.
But these where a pain to upgrade. Apple design is NOT very friendly for upgrades.
It’s definitely NOT a tool less design case.
I had to de-lid the CPU’s too.
Working on a PC is much easier.

But NO home theater is complete with out a Mac in it.

Eventually, I will replace these with M1 Mac Mini and a Disk array.
They use less electricity.
The Mac Pro’s use about $40 of electric per year in power saving mode.
The Mac Mini with disk array should use about $25 per year in electricity
But the large disks are too expensive right now. Maybe upgrade later when supply and prices
Are more realistic. I would like to use a Disk array with large capacity SSD’s.

Very nice machines indeed, superb build quality and design. I used to own a 4,1 which I flashed to a 5,1 and upgraded with dual hexacore Xeons, 48GB of RAM, PCIe SSD, USB 3.0 and a Mac-flashed HD7970.
I also de-lidded the CPUs with the vise method. Kind of scary, but it worked surprisingly well.
But since I have always been more of a Windows guy and used the Mac rarely, I decided to sell it while it still fetched good money.

Yeah, It looks difficult to do but it is actually very safe and easy. These Xeon CPU’s are built very tough, So they don’t bend or warp very easy.
Just stick the CPU in a Vise, Clap on to the LID on one end of the vise and gently squeeze on one end of the CPU then turn the CPU the other way and gently squeeze on that end and the LID falls right off. Surprisingly It takes very little pressure in a vise to remove the CPU LID.

I was going to buy the de-lid tool but I was not sure which one would fit this Xeon CPU.
So I know the Vise method would fit the CPU so I decided to use the Vise method.
Its basically the same principle of squeezing on the edge of the CPU LID to loosen it so it falls off.
And I only had this one set of CPU’s to de-lid.
I don’t plan on doing this again. I hope.

I don’t know what the material is that Intel used to adhere the LID to the CPU but it gently scarps right off with a razor blade.
It only took me about 15 minutes to remove the LIDS and clean off the CPU’s.

I installed Microsoft Plus! 98 on my Compaq Windows 98 box, swapped in a Radeon 9600 Pro, found a copy of Norton Ghost 2003 on archive.org (must be abandonware?) and took an image of the OS partition to test. As soon as my Audigy card arrives I'll install it, install drivers then take a real base image and I can chalk this system up to being ready for the fun phase, installing and playing games. Before that, I have a couple more towers to finish up however...

Brawndo wrote on 2021-10-12, 04:55:

can chalk this system up to being ready for the fun phase, installing and playing games. Before that, I have a couple more towers to finish up however...

you mean:

can chalk this system up to being ready for the fun phase, installing and playing games. Before that, I have a couple never ending series of more towers to finish up however...

😀

Is a first gen 16KB TRS80 Color Computer worth owning for any practical reason? Someone has one near me for $100, comes with 7 program titles on cartridge and color basic. Also has all original packaging and paperwork.
Like is there any way to load software on it from a cassette or tape drive? I was thinking it might be neat for playing Zork or Ultima I or other very primitive games.

Today 3.5 "floppy marathon, I have recovered more than twenty, three are now irrecoverable, another 8 have some defective sectors (minimum 1), and fifteen are perfect.
I used eight of them to recreate the Word 2.0 floppies, and then install it in the 386DX with 128MB CF (SanDisk), in the past few days I had created a pair of 720KB floppies for DOS 3.30.
I used a WinImage program, to format and copy the files to the disks.
For others I have tried to format floppies from XP, but it doesn't seem to work well, many have been damaged or broken.
Currently on the 386DX (the one being signed is another) I have installed DOS4.01IT, Windows3.0IT, Word2.0IT, plus other DOS programs such as Norton, a PCTOOLS, and others for bench and diagnostics.
I noticed that at startup the 128KB of cache are detected, but the QuicktechPRO diagnostic program does not detect them, maybe there is some program that can detect if the chips are real, or are they fake (like in some MB 486 PCChips)?