Created my Windows 3.11 WFW 8x floppies set 🤟

Comparison between mine and official one :

Recapped an Spire Jewel 380W PSU I bought for peanuts because I needed something that had the -5v rail as well a powerful 5v rail (and boy, it did not disappoint.).

Picture is before the recap. Wanna point out that the 2 main caps aren't original to it when I got it, they're 680uF 200v Panasonic CE caps. For those who know PSU OEMs, it's Sun Pro who did it. Surprisingly good though my OCD kinda gets triggered knowing the 3.3v and 5v rails are a wee bit high (5.3v and 3.4v) despite recapping it.

Been doing a lot of organizing this past week. Plastic bins and label makers are the unsung heroes of retro hardware collecting.

NyLan wrote on 2022-04-27, 20:03:

Created my Windows 3.11 WFW 8x floppies set :love_you_gesture: […]
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Created my Windows 3.11 WFW 8x floppies set 🤟

2022-04-27 20.04.27.jpg

Comparison between mine and official one :
2022-04-27 20.05.24.jpgmedia-disk01.jpg

That's quite good! What are you using for labels?

Shponglefan wrote on 2022-04-28, 23:50:

NyLan wrote on 2022-04-27, 20:03:

Created my Windows 3.11 WFW 8x floppies set :love_you_gesture: […]
Show full quote

Created my Windows 3.11 WFW 8x floppies set 🤟

2022-04-27 20.04.27.jpg

Comparison between mine and official one :
2022-04-27 20.05.24.jpgmedia-disk01.jpg

That's quite good! What are you using for labels?

I was about to ask, "why" are you using labels, since the containers are transparent... 😀

Tested a bunch of Athlon Thunderbirds CPUs over the past week. 4 out of the 8 are dead. 2 of those 4 worked at first, but then 1 began to smell like it was cooked/ozone at boot up (and never recovered), and the other just plain gave up the ghost and died a few reboots later. 1 of them I can see it had a corner cracked off, and the final dead one never worked to begin with.

What was nice about all 8 was each of the L1 bridges weren't factory cut, so there was no need to pencil them in for overclocking. (I didn't get a chance to overclock the dead ones, of course...)
I never owned these in their heyday. Is it business as usual to run into so many dead or soon to be dead Thunderbird Athlons?

They are easy to kill with excessive heatsink force or displacement while trying to assemble.

edit: oh and if you try a super weak spring clamp and it's not sitting exact they'll cook themselves as soon as you apply power... no finger testing, they're done by the time you go ouch.

Looking back, the design is ridiculously fragile.

Not to take away from their achievements. Awesome, awesome processors, it was a very exciting time.

I saw Zilog Z280 CPUs in PLCC-68 for sale on auction site, and then found a blog post about people using them for small homebrew boards. I was starting to feel the urge to design my own board. Then I looked through the Z280 manual and changed my mind... The banking/paging scheme they used to extend the address space would not be very good at handling larger programs. So in the end it's not that different than a plain Z80, and I already have Z80-based systems to play with. I also looked through the Z380 manuals, and I like the instruction set for that better, but Z380s are not obtainable (and the only physical package I saw mentioned was QFP). Time to escape this rabbit hole 😀

Look at this real interesting hole though, the eZ80! 🤣

Meatball wrote on 2022-04-29, 01:38:

Tested a bunch of Athlon Thunderbirds CPUs over the past week. 4 out of the 8 are dead. 2 of those 4 worked at first, but then 1 began to smell like it was cooked/ozone at boot up (and never recovered), and the other just plain gave up the ghost and died a few reboots later. 1 of them I can see it had a corner cracked off, and the final dead one never worked to begin with.

What was nice about all 8 was each of the L1 bridges weren't factory cut, so there was no need to pencil them in for overclocking. (I didn't get a chance to overclock the dead ones, of course...)
I never owned these in their heyday. Is it business as usual to run into so many dead or soon to be dead Thunderbird Athlons?

I have quite a few dead Athlons and Durons.
The reason of dead CPUs is simple - either no thermal paste applied (found this out the hard way with an Applebred Duron that started smelling of napalm, but the ceramics fail the same way. That thing failed so hard it burnt a Raidmax fan I had on the case...) or heatsink not installed properly (this was so common that I can't even count the times I've seen it done.)
That's why I love Pentium 3s - they can take much more abuse than an Athlon or Duron, and they don't go up in smoke if the HSF ain't installed properly.

Oh, and there's cracked cores. I lost two CPUs from both sides that way - an 1.1GHz T-Bird Athlon and a 1.1GHZ Coppermine P3 SL5QW. The former had severe chipping at the sides and the latter's core was literally cracked in half.

What processor is in the Tatung?

I got a Socket 462 system up and running with Win98SE today after hours of trying other things, trouble shooting issues, etc. It was very rewarding to see that "Welcome to Windows 98 Second Edition" box materialize on the screen for the very first time! 😊

Tried the Goldmine demo which comes on the Audigy driver CD. It's a pretty neat showcase of EAX Advanced HD (aka EAX3).

I like that the demo shows you how everything sounds with EAX3 on and off for comparison. The Environmental Morphing and Exclusion examples were pretty impressive, especially when used with a 5.1 speaker system. I could have gone without the annoying crow sounds though. Terrible choice for sound demonstration.

@Alistar1776

Can you talk about this? I had more or less immediate success triple booting a foxconn based socket a system (win2kpro,winxp,rhel3), despite frequent no starts and occasional lockups. The mobo and ram were presumed new, as was the dookie p4/amd ready p/s. Hard drive was used, but probably not a lot. Others have had issues with socket 462 and it makes me curious. Would like to learn more details.

The 3300uF 6.3V caps on my Biostar P4M890-M2 had bulged and leaked so I cleaned and recapped them with new 3300uF 16V low ESR caps. Hopefully my S775 Win98 PC will POST once I put the board back in 🤣.

Thanks people. I was too lazy to put thermal paste earlier on on the testing, but after the 2 died, I moved to a bigger heatsink with paste, which could also clamp onto three 3 socket pegs.

I’m exchanging the 2 which never worked, but taking the fall for the other 2 I probably crispied.

I also bought up as many “cheap” “C” models as I could find as insurance for the future.

Despite this attractiveness, this is why I've tried very hard to stay away from collecting these platforms. I don't want to get into collecting vintage parts that are so delicate. I enjoy having the luxury of being and to make mistakes and not have things go up in smoke.

Between Coppermine and the Pentium 4, I'm satisfied with this era.

On a similar note, has anyone ever tried using a thermal pad with these processors instead of paste? I use these regularly when my Pentium 3 processors and it works just fine.

Cleaning a 7950GT and repasting. Put Kryonaut and the thing still idles at 50c.. idiots at nVidia made the reference cooler a 1-slot blower solution, and Foxconn kept that solution. It actually doesn't get that much hotter when playing Portal, but the fan always sounds loud and terrible.

Had to recap my ABIT BE6-II again. Have you guys ever encountered failed, dried out Panasonic FL caps? 8 buggers total.

The ones that were good were 3 Rubycons on the EC12, 15 and 16 spots since those were pulls from a mainboard I had that I knew had good caps (GB 8IG1000-G, dead northbridge).

I ended up installing 8 "new" Panasonic FL caps 6.3v 1500uF from an discarded ASUS M2NPV-MX and now the board POSTs all times, unlike before when replacing an ethernet card rendered the machine unable to POST. Still couldn't get it to detect a RTL8169SC card I had, but a standard RTL8139C dated 2001 (just like the BIOS that's on the ABIT) worked fine. Also tested a Intel PRO/100 card and it got recognized and didn't render the mobo unable to boot.

brian105 wrote on 2022-04-30, 05:35:

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/424000117717073920/968325125667688538/20220425_213806.jpg?width=503&height=671 […]
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Cleaning a 7950GT and repasting. Put Kryonaut and the thing still idles at 50c.. idiots at nVidia made the reference cooler a 1-slot blower solution, and Foxconn kept that solution. It actually doesn't get that much hotter when playing Portal, but the fan always sounds loud and terrible.

AFAIK ASUS did that too. It's the prime reason why the card sits dead in my closet. Even though mine is a 7900GS, it isn't much far off in design.