I'm trying to organize a bit better. How do you guys store your motherboards and cards? Just antistatic bags or boxes or ??

Mine are a disaster waiting to happen, sitting stacked tightly inside a cardboard box.

Veeb0rg wrote on 2023-08-04, 06:47:

I'm trying to organize a bit better. How do you guys store your motherboards and cards? Just antistatic bags or boxes or ??

I have a tier list.
For rarer/higher value cards, and those with huge coolers get an anti-static bag and a box. I picked up some Eaton expansion card box which works perfectly fine for dual slot cards that aren't too long. Otherwise random expansion card boxes turned inside-out.

The more common/less valuable cards are in anti-static bag sharing bigger boxes.

And those that have their own box go into their own box.

Meatball wrote on 2023-08-04, 03:18:

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2023-08-04, 03:12:

Someone who owns thousands would be collecting duplicates at that point.

Yes. Even at 204, I have plenty of duplicates. Don't forget, there are all kinds of variants of the same card. The Voodoo2 is one of the best examples. Throw in SLI, and I wouldn't be surprised if someone around here has 204 Voodoo2s, alone. (I don't)

Some low-end graphics cards were very common when on-board or on-CPU graphics were either uncommon, too weak, or not providing desired port(s). At a time point I had three GeForce 210, all bundled with different systems; sold one and recycled a faulty one. Right now I've got three S3 Trio64 V2/DX (86C775) from different vendors: the 1MB card was bought together with a computer back in 1997, while the other two 2MB cards were salvaged from e-waste.

Veeb0rg wrote on 2023-08-04, 06:47:

I'm trying to organize a bit better. How do you guys store your motherboards and cards? Just antistatic bags or boxes or ??

That's a solution i worked out for myself a bit ago.
It's the most compact way that i could reasonably identify a card (ports are visible) and take out any one of them.

I received my new old stock Akasa GPU coooler today, so I have replaced the double sided Zalman cooler with this one, very quiet and keeps the card extremly cool under load - I may get another to replace the stock cooler on my 5900XT.

Also installed Windows 98 and XP, dual-booted on a 240GB SSD, the first time I've ever doen a 98 isnall on SSD. Aligned, everything working great!

Veeb0rg wrote on 2023-08-04, 06:47:

I'm trying to organize a bit better. How do you guys store your motherboards and cards? Just antistatic bags or boxes or ??

I use labeled clear plastic bins. And I generally store items in individual anti-static bags within.

Today I could successfully install a 486DX2-66 on my 4386-VC-HD motherboard, disabling the onboard 386DX-40. I had tried last week but the PC wouldn't post. Did the same procedure today - set jumpers, swapped resistors, replaced the quartz oscillator with a 33MHz one, removed the FPU and placed the 486 into the socket. Only this time I used more force and I could feel it sliding into place, which I didn't last time. Lo and behold, I was greeted with a glorious post screen

An AMD and Intel CPU together on the same board - could this be love?

Speedsys made a massive jump from 6.49 to 24.93, cache throughput also increased by 2MByte/s

Cache performance seems to be influenced by faster latencies - went down from 37.6ns/byte to 22.8ns/byte

All in all I'm very pleased with the upgrade, I even tinkered with the LED display to show 33/66Mhz depending on turbo state which was an hour of trial and error thanks to all the jumpers, but I got it to work in the end.

Well the "pulled from a working enviroment" FX5700 showed up... with obvious damage to the card in the form of a missing capacitor. It doesn't work, and I finally snapped and sent the seller a scathing message with my demand for a refund. I don't care if this pisses him off and it takes me longer to get my money back, I'm also leaving negative feedback as soon as possible. There is zero way this card could have been working when they tested it unless they mishandled it badly enough to rip an SMD cap off. I could probably fix this quite easily, hell I think I have the right caps in stock right now, but now I'm taking a principled stand and I'm going to start holding sellers feet to the flames for lying about the condition of an item to make a sale:

That felt good to type. I suggest everyone else do the same, its time to get militant about obvious unethical behavior on eBay. Literally more items don't work than do now.

I wish I did this last year. I ordered a part that was "like new" that was the most broken thing I've EVER gotten on eBay and I just ate the $100 loss. In hindsight, letting them get away with it just encourages more.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2023-08-04, 22:23:

Well the "pulled from a working enviroment" FX5700 showed up... with obvious damage to the card in the form of a missing capacit […]
Show full quote

Well the "pulled from a working enviroment" FX5700 showed up... with obvious damage to the card in the form of a missing capacitor. It doesn't work, and I finally snapped and sent the seller a scathing message with my demand for a refund. I don't care if this pisses him off and it takes me longer to get my money back, I'm also leaving negative feedback as soon as possible. There is zero way this card could have been working when they tested it unless they mishandled it badly enough to rip an SMD cap off. I could probably fix this quite easily, hell I think I have the right caps in stock right now, but now I'm taking a principled stand and I'm going to start holding sellers feet to the flames for lying about the condition of an item to make a sale:

That felt good to type. I suggest everyone else do the same, its time to get militant about obvious unethical behavior on eBay. Literally more items don't work than do now.

The early eBay days also sucked because the sellers could leave you a negative review in retaliation. I got scammed on an Intellivision on my first purchase. The description said it was working, but it was broken. I complained and the seller just said that I shouldn't expect something that old to work. I didn't want to ruin my reputation with a retaliatory review, so I didn't leave him one. Soured me on eBay for awhile. I rarely use eBay these days, unless it's for something small and cheap like an adapter. The prices have become too high for me and I'm nervous about shipping old tech. It seems like eBay had a golden period where things were better.

ODwilly wrote on 2023-08-02, 03:59:

Repo Man11 wrote on 2023-08-01, 17:47:

ODwilly wrote on 2023-08-01, 07:26:

I'm curious because my P4S Dragon looks close enough to your board that it wasn't until I saw the VIA chips I realized it was 462, does the C-Media chip cause cursor stuttering if you use a PS2 mouse with it? On my board the PS2 mouse port shares an IRq with the onboard audio. Disabling the integrated audio fixes it. Not a big issue now days, but was mildly annoying when I was using a PS2 mouse years ago.

I've not yet built a system with this board; I can't get excited about doing so with only a 700 MHz Morgan Duron, so I'm now shopping for a Palomino 2100+. When I do set it up, I'll try and see. Was OS were you using when this happened?

XP, and would also do the same in 2K Pro.

I decided to assemble it while waiting for the XP2000+ Palomino I ordered - 700 MHz Morgan Duron, two gigabytes of DDR, a Quadro4 700, and an SSD with an adapter. With Windows XP I've noticed no issues with the PS/2 mouse while using the onboard sound.

smtkr wrote on 2023-08-04, 22:46:

I wish I did this last year. I ordered a part that was "like new" that was the most broken thing I've EVER gotten on eBay and I just ate the $100 loss. In hindsight, letting them get away with it just encourages more.

I used to do that too.
But then in the last couple of weeks Ive recieved some SCSI disks that were sold as tested.
One didnt pass initialisation on the controller and the other couldnt take an NTFS format.
I was thinking about just taking it on the chin, but then when I thought about it I thought well I wouldnt have bought it if it had been sold as untested or unsure etc so no.
One has already refunded me the other wants to drive back which im in the process of sending.
The money back will get me a replacement for my now dead i5-3470 XP system.

So it is worth doing.

Well crap, I'm obviously gonna have to be a lot more careful buying GPUs on eBay now if you guys are done with vacuuming off all the bad ones 🤣

Though if we are crusading, start recording yourself checking the large caps on stuff for charge when things come in, if they are sold as "untested" or whatever, and then don't work you can say they deliberately sold you one known not to work because they applied power to it recently.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-08-05, 01:22:

Well crap, I'm obviously gonna have to be a lot more careful buying GPUs on eBay now if you guys are done with vacuuming off all the bad ones 🤣

Though if we are crusading, start recording yourself checking the large caps on stuff for charge when things come in, if they are sold as "untested" or whatever, and then don't work you can say they deliberately sold you one known not to work because they applied power to it recently.

Shit this isn't a half bad idea....

Also out of curiosity I threw a cap on the card, which did improve things to where it would post but it locks down into 640x480@8bit whenever the drivers are loaded, so either there are other issues as of yet ascertained or the missing cap caused some other permanent damage.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-08-05, 01:22:

Well crap, I'm obviously gonna have to be a lot more careful buying GPUs on eBay now if you guys are done with vacuuming off all the bad ones 🤣

Though if we are crusading, start recording yourself checking the large caps on stuff for charge when things come in, if they are sold as "untested" or whatever, and then don't work you can say they deliberately sold you one known not to work because they applied power to it recently.

I'm a bit of a pessimistic, but I just assume that untested means broken. I could see how untested is likely to be an honest description if that applies to the majority of their listings (I've seen this for recycling centres) or if it's something hard to test, like a monitor with a weird connection. Otherwise, I'm assuming the worst.

That being said, I never buy untested stuff, so I'm not speaking from experience. Maybe I'm too pessimistic for my own good.

I've had great success buying untested hardware. I find it works more often than not.

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-08-05, 03:15:

I've had great success buying untested hardware. I find it works more often than not.

That's good. Would you buy something untested if you'd have no use for it being broken or would you stick to stuff that could at least be used for parts?

I guess part of my caution is that I try to stick to budget systems. If I grab a bad sound card, it could double the cost of my build for nothing. That's probably less of a big deal for someone who spent a lot on the rest of the system.

Ensign Nemo wrote on 2023-08-05, 03:10:

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-08-05, 01:22:

Well crap, I'm obviously gonna have to be a lot more careful buying GPUs on eBay now if you guys are done with vacuuming off all the bad ones 🤣

Though if we are crusading, start recording yourself checking the large caps on stuff for charge when things come in, if they are sold as "untested" or whatever, and then don't work you can say they deliberately sold you one known not to work because they applied power to it recently.

I'm a bit of a pessimistic, but I just assume that untested means broken. I could see how untested is likely to be an honest description if that applies to the majority of their listings (I've seen this for recycling centres) or if it's something hard to test, like a monitor with a weird connection. Otherwise, I'm assuming the worst.

That being said, I never buy untested stuff, so I'm not speaking from experience. Maybe I'm too pessimistic for my own good.

For me that depends.
There are some sellers who are just getting rid of their old junk or stuff they've got hold of and are moving it on. I dont mind taking a chance on that stuff as most of the time they dont know either.
But others who are clearly IT resellers and reclaimers who could test it if they wanted to...
Ive known some people in the past who would test it find its dead and move it on as untested no returns anyway.
Untested with returns Ill take a chance depending on what it is.
But tested working and then it arrives dead I draw the line.

RandomStranger wrote on 2023-07-02, 14:31:

As for the Ti4200, at first it didn't post on DVI so I tried the VGA output and yeah... it seems to be faulty. It's a little prettier in Windows, with only 5 vertical lines of corruption, about 2cm thick, so maybe salvageable?

IMG_20230702_160140.jpg

Today I tried to make the chaos a bit more manageable and got the Ti4200 I got last month in my hand. Before dropping it into my "repair later... maybe" bin, I took a closer look and noticed something that confirmed my suspicion about a RAM related issue.

I'll take it to work because there is better equipment there than what I have at home.

Any idea about the values of the missing components?