Tiido wrote on 2023-08-08, 10:39:

Speaking of explosions, I had that happen too to the 486 : IMG_4543.jpg I replaced all these little blue drops with something el […]
Show full quote

Speaking of explosions, I had that happen too to the 486 :
IMG_4543.jpg
I replaced all these little blue drops with something else, and hopefully the ones on the motherboard itself will not start going out like this anytime soon 🤣
The PSU immediately went into protection so that probably saved me from having a whole lot more fallout to deal with...

Can you define "something else"?
Did you replace them with new tantalums or really "something else"?

Tiido wrote on 2023-08-08, 10:39:

Speaking of explosions, I had that happen too to the 486 : IMG_4543.jpg I replaced all these little blue drops with something el […]
Show full quote

Speaking of explosions, I had that happen too to the 486 :
IMG_4543.jpg
I replaced all these little blue drops with something else, and hopefully the ones on the motherboard itself will not start going out like this anytime soon 🤣
The PSU immediately went into protection so that probably saved me from having a whole lot more fallout to deal with...

I just preemptively replace all power filtering tantalums with electrolytics.. I've also had quite a few go BOOM! lately. Really stressful.

appiah4 wrote on 2023-08-08, 10:55:

Tiido wrote on 2023-08-08, 10:39:

Speaking of explosions, I had that happen too to the 486 : IMG_4543.jpg I replaced all these little blue drops with something el […]
Show full quote

Speaking of explosions, I had that happen too to the 486 :
IMG_4543.jpg
I replaced all these little blue drops with something else, and hopefully the ones on the motherboard itself will not start going out like this anytime soon 🤣
The PSU immediately went into protection so that probably saved me from having a whole lot more fallout to deal with...

I just preemptively replace all power filtering tantalums with electrolytics.. I've also had quite a few go BOOM! lately. Really stressful.

Nothing like the smell of burnt electronics with the morning cuppa.

ChrisK wrote on 2023-08-08, 10:54:

Can you define "something else"?
Did you replace them with new tantalums or really "something else"?

"Something else" in this case are a bunch of 50V 10µF e-caps, so there won't be explosions anymore, only possible leaking in hopefully distant future/never 🤣

I attempted and failed to install a socket a cooler. no matter what I can only get one side latched.I have the heatsink facing the right direction.

This was the one I bought: https://www.ebay.com/itm/234811713962

So you're going to need a kind of stab and lever motion, get a flathead that fits the slot, push down and when it's just touching the board, push the handle outwards away from the sink, until you feel it touch the socket, then keeping the angle, let the spring take the tension up until screwdriver comes free.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-08-08, 14:52:

So you're going to need a kind of stab and lever motion, get a flathead that fits the slot, push down and when it's just touching the board, push the handle outwards away from the sink, until you feel it touch the socket, then keeping the angle, let the spring take the tension up until screwdriver comes free.

Thanks, it was pain but I got it. I love retro tech, but man I'm glad cpu cooler installation is much easier on more modern platforms.

Spent a few hours installing Win7 Pro onto a Dell Poweredge T30 that I intend to use as a Windows Media Center PC and general media server.
Managed to get 4x 3Tb 3.5" (RAID5) and 2x 4Tb 3.5" (RAID0) SAS disks in there. Im using a Dell PERC 5iR SAS RAID controller.

The case is such an odd design. There is a 5.25" and 3.5" external bays but neither can be used as external drives because the front panel has no provision for anything above its slim optical drive. Which Ive replaced with a slot loading BD-RW drive.
4 pieces of machano allowed me to suspend two of the 3Tb disks from the bay that would be a 3.5" floppy bay if it wasnt for the useless case design. which gives it two extra 3.5" drive spaces, the other 2 3Tb disks are in the 3.5" bays above while the 2x 4Tb disks are in the lower two bays.

Im seriously considering swapping out the board to a T3620 board. Its basically the same board but without the deliberately nerfed BIOS. So it supports the Thunderbolt header and its M.2 NVMe slot properly. Ive got it on an old BIOS right now which kills stability in favour of a working M.2 slot.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-08-08, 02:10:

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-08-07, 02:23:

Update... a 3rd different RAM stick tried and I have the POST screen w00t. This was after 2 different CPUs and 2 PSUs lol ... we […]
Show full quote

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-08-06, 04:11:

Been screwing around with a crappy socket A board, KM133 MSI OEM maybe was in a Packard Hell. Got to where it starts "picking me lottery numbers" on the POST card, i.e. different error every boot. I wasted an hour and a half digging out my old posts here to see if I mentioned how I cured similar symptom on a CUV4X the other year.... and I guess I didn't, thought that one might have been a scrambled/bad BIOS. It might have to go on the pile of "When I get chips and/or a programmer" for now. Could need caps but they look great, any other MSI I pulled the KZEs on of same age, they checked out fine.

Update... a 3rd different RAM stick tried and I have the POST screen w00t. This was after 2 different CPUs and 2 PSUs 🤣 ... weirdly it was giving "total deadness" vibes when no RAM inserted, then after CPU change was doing the "lottery numbers" picking, but no RAM codes, it should have been giving me RAM codes dammit... unless it didn't support the refresh type on those DRAMs or something super esoteric. Though I noticed I may have missed a clue, because although it was giving me a lot of crap it did report it could not initialise the display adapter 2 or 3 times in there. Now, I was just trying the onboard cyber fleem delta sheen or whatever, and I guess it could not initialise because it couldn't allocate RAM. Not having the penny drop yet, I stuck an AGP card in there and got more randomness.

I thought that RAM I was using at first was good though. Sometimes I wonder if it's sheer force of will that brings boards up, or dotting all the "i"s crossing all the "t"s or some variation of just showing the board you're not a n00b lightweight to be messed around with. Pre-threatening them with the giant soldering iron used to put the fear of .... me .. into them, maybe should start doing that again.

Anyway, that's an extra gotcha to note with onboard graphics boards, if complain about display adapter, think about where or if it's getting it's display buffer.

Though the board has been "kicking around" for years, it's possible it took enough CPU and RAM changes to scrape the oxide off the sockets.

So, back to a bit more fiddling with the dumb thing...

Well now I feel like a shrub on a flat-top... premature declaration of victory... it's still flaky as hell. Seems more likely to get to POST screen when off for a while... went sniping with freezer spray and thought I'd narrowed it down... but then it became not repeatable.... and I'm getting too much condensation today to keep at it. Might whack a couple of capacitors on it if I have any matches in the stash. I was thinking earlier that I might replace the one between AGP and Northbridge (MS-6340) as the pic on RetroWeb and a few others for sale used on a search are showing it bulged and leaky. Mine looks fine, but it looks like that one is usually the first to go, the most hammered, so I'll play the odds. Would make sense of the randomness if the northbridge is getting glitched.

This thing is trying to drive me nuts. Last night, last few attempts, couldn't get a POST screen, this morning jiggled a couple of things, now I can't get a fault, even rejiggling and lifting and dropping the board half an inch to jar it. I mean it's POST screen to the max now, down to complaining about CMOS settings wiped (Not sure that was on the bottom of the earlier POSTs) ... hmmmmm... had it left there a few minutes to heat soak some, still turns off and restarts fine... lifting suspicion off the caps??? I guess. Damn I wish I had an inspection scope. Will eyeball for obvious solder probs. Still could be down to oxidation probs. Might have to get the "real good" contact cleaner out to it, but it feels like you can count the dollars flowing out by the second when you squirt that stuff. First it'll get the old q-tip and IPA two step (Not the beer)

I bet you are asking "BitWrangler, why are you screwing around with this worthless piece of crap?" well, because it's a worthless piece of crap and I need to hone my techniques for a couple of boards that are rarer and more interesting.

edit: thorough alcohol clean of the slots and now it's taking the RAM it rejected first time around. Man, why couldn't it just give me sensible RAM errors. I guess this is because I didn't just do a proper alcohol clean FIRST... I kinda suckered myself into this rabbit hole from a "just see if it's got enough life to bother with" POV

Also applied toothpaste to a heatsink for a test.... worked fairly well.... heh gotcha.. the test was to see if it got the gummy remains of a thermal pad off it, where it was just kinda smearing with solvents. So now have a heatsink with minty fresh breath.

EditII: Now it's working with one of the CPUs I wanted to use in the first place, I say one of, one of my 900s has been bridge modded and it didn't like it, but possibly it's a 133 or mobile mod it didn't like so not sure if that one is working or died sometime, will have to try it in a less stupid board. Confusing matters was that first release BIOS didn't support 900Mhz, but first time I got the POST screen it showed it had a few revisions newer one to which it had support added. No Packard Hell branding in evidence so far, maybe this is a retail board, or had retail BIOS put on it.

EditIII: Noodling around in it's CMOS setup, kind of an early stability test too, there's some boards will lock up while you're doing this if something ain't right... anyway, for it's time/market positioning it's fairly decent, some settings to play with, a smidge of overclocking, boot off zip or LS, no boot off USB tho, USB keyboard legacy support but not mouse, Legacy audio support, set SB settings I5 D220 etc. Think I'm about done messing around with it, time to throw something together.

Robin4 wrote on 2023-08-08, 00:52:

GigAHerZ wrote on 2023-08-03, 18:08:

First time converted 4x1MB 30pin SIMMs into SIPPs. […]
Show full quote

First time converted 4x1MB 30pin SIMMs into SIPPs.

I have this beautiful 286 board: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/cdtek-286-turbo
And it requires either chips or SIPPs. It did have 1MB in chips. But now, it is upgraded into 4MB. Crazy amount for 286!

I also have 287 @ 6MHz with it.

There's something weird going on with this board. FDD and everything else works, but it is unable to boot from my 512MB CF card. With floppy boot, i can browse through directories, but if i try to execute any program from "HDD", it's going to fail.
I wonder, if the CF card is somehow incompatible with this board? (Would be first time for this solution)
I tried multiple Super-IO controllers, i tried even XT-IDE - nothing is capable of booting from HDD. 🙁

How do they call this pinheaders?

"Round" and "Needle" should be the keywords.
I got those headers from a selling with title: "5pcs 40 Pin Connector Header Round Needle 1x40 Golden Pin Single Row Male 2.54mm Breakable Pin Connector Strip Free shipping"

Ran some AGP graphics card benchmarks. Was surprised by how much of a difference it makes whether the card's memory bus is 64 bits or 128 bits wide; I thought the effect was exaggerated in discussions I've seen previously.

Also, in light the numbers I'm witnessing, I'm slowly beginning to realize why everybody hates the poor old GeForce FX 5200... 😄

Made a fresh Windows 98SE install and got the nvidia 45.23 driver from the driver library installed along with the sound card drivers. With the "hard drive"being a cf card, copying the win98 setup files and drivers was easy.

Boy, did I get a thrill this morning! I recently recapped my Soyo Dragon motherboard, and I've been enjoying setting it up and benchmarking it. I tried my Chaintech GeForce 4 Ti 4600 in it this morning, and when I hit the power switch I heard a pop and saw a flash! Uh oh, what did I do? I pulled the video card and I realized that one of the four Sanyo sixteen volt 470 microfarad caps on the card had blown! I swapped in another video card, but when I turned on the power supply the green power LED on the motherboard lit up but nothing else happened when I hit the power switch (not so much as a twitch out of any of the fans).

I tried another power supply, no change. I pulled the board and tried it that way, no change. With the board out, I saw that there was fluid from the blown capacitor on the board. Thinking that it might be conductive enough to cause a ground fault, I cleaned it off. I also tried another CPU, and cleared CMOS. That finally got it to POST, so I then put the 2000+ back in, and it was fine. No more trouble with the motherboard from this point. I put it back together with another video card and it POSTed and booted into Windows.

I happened to have four new capacitors left over from recapping another video card, so I replaced them and the Ti 4600 lives again. Everything came out just fine, but it looked pretty grim for a while.

Tiido wrote on 2023-08-08, 10:39:

Speaking of explosions, I had that happen too to the 486 : IMG_4543.jpg I replaced all these little blue drops with something el […]
Show full quote

Speaking of explosions, I had that happen too to the 486 :
IMG_4543.jpg
I replaced all these little blue drops with something else, and hopefully the ones on the motherboard itself will not start going out like this anytime soon 🤣
The PSU immediately went into protection so that probably saved me from having a whole lot more fallout to deal with...

Maybe because they are blue? (more explosive)

Those socket 462 coolers go on hard, from what I remember. When I built my AthlonXP system in 2002, I still remember asking my dad to come in and help me because it took so much pressure to get it clipped.

Today received a new 486 system, with an identical case, like the one i already had.. The one thats in my possession is a desktop variant.. And now i got an mini tower..

Tested it few hours ago.. Reflashed the bios with the latest.. Also stripped the system, because i have other plans with it. (came with a cyrix DX2 66 processor) But going to replace al the parts inside for a VLB system with probably DX2 80Mhz. For the 3D and faster games, iam beeing busy to build an Pentium 133 class machine.

Luckly xcopy worked fine for me.. But later on the day, see if the `new hdd` will boot.

1) I tried to reflow a DDR2 chip, pushing on it made Memtest work flawlessly.
I failed, as I was checking it I actually pushed it too hard and now I have to reball it.
Just more exercise. I don't need a 400mhz 1GB stick 😀

2) I replaced a couple of DDR chips on a 9250. It artifacts and I want to replace all chips to see if it was some damaged ram chips or the core. As of now no change but I might have found the culprit.
It's, again, just exercise. No point in saving this old 256MB DDR1 card.
I took the replacements from a standard DDR ram stick.

I got this Asus p3b-f a while ago with 3 inductors were chopped off :

I found 3 ferrite rings with the same color as original ones in my parts stash and rewind them:

I was excited to see how these inductors will perform just to find out board will not power on.

standby 3.3v was present on power button pin then I checked the RTC crystal, there was 3.3v on one leg and nothing on the other leg which is not right,
when crystal is oscillating there should be around 1v on each leg, also touching the crystal leg with the probe turned on the motherboard and 3.3v shifted from one leg of crystal to the other one.
I brought my other working bx motherboards and measured the crystal legs on diode mode, with the black probe on the ground there's no voltage drop and with red probe on the ground there's 0.4v voltage drop on each leg.
back to the asus board, I got the 0.4v voltage drop on each leg but with the black probe on the ground, one leg has 1v voltage drop.
so I guess it's safe to assume RTC part of south bridge chipset is faulty. that should be the reason why this board was throw away.

Karbist wrote on 2023-08-09, 12:59:

Did you try with a different 32KHz?

In my short (3 boards) experience, when you have a crystal behaving like this the SB is damaged or the Xstal is about to die. One case I have a xstal going from 0 to 5MHz (obviously wrong and impossible), needless to say, I need a new SB.
Another case it would start as you described, by the touch of a probe, and then it stopped after a while. Replaced the xstal and no go. I have another SB to replace but it's just economically wrong, both $ and time.

Unless you want to do some exercise in solder/desolder/resolder.
Did that in the last few days and it will help you acquire new skills knowing you "can't do no wronger" 😀

Nexxen wrote on 2023-08-09, 14:21:

Did you try with a different 32KHz?

Yeah that was the first thing I did and then I found out one leg of crystal is leaking to the ground, so that was game over for me.