Thermalwrong wrote on 2023-08-22, 15:38:

They're from probably early in the lead-free soldering era with a high pin count, lots of electronics from ~2003 broke because o […]
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TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2023-08-22, 12:53:

Well the 3rd 9700 Pro arrived, same story as the others, massive artifacting. Refunded.

I give up, I actually don't think there are any working 9700 Pro cards left in the wild. Unless I find a fellow enthusiast selling one, this is clearly a waste of time.

They're from probably early in the lead-free soldering era with a high pin count, lots of electronics from ~2003 broke because of that. They'll maybe work with the GPU & RAM reballed. 😀
But then again, it was a decent enough graphics card that people would've used it til the day it stopped working, so who knows. I do think it's solder + hot components though. Probably 100% of them will eventually need re-work.

I was testing out my ISA VGA card collection which I didn't realise had so many items in it at this point! The Oak OTI087 result really surprised me, I thought it was a really slow card and had it paired with my 386SX-40 computer, but that's a waste of it. Tempted to try putting the extra 512KB of RAM on it now.
QuakeBenchmarks-ISA-VGA.png

Good thing I did this too, I found a load of corrosion on the Trident 8900CL-B card's RAMDAC that caused the display to go all crazy. It turns out this is also a fast ISA card once the 0-wait states setting is enabled, pretty good for a VGA card that can do 8-bit too.
IMG_1750 (Custom).JPG

Hello, could you please specify the jumper you changed to enable 0-wait states on the card? I have a Trident Quadtel TVGA8900CL 1MB 16-bit ISA but didn't find a jumper for that option in the manual. Thanks!

andre_6 wrote on 2023-08-23, 15:32:

Hello, could you please specify the jumper you changed to enable 0-wait states on the card? I have a Trident Quadtel TVGA8900CL 1MB 16-bit ISA but didn't find a jumper for that option in the manual. Thanks!

Maybe here?

Ydee wrote on 2023-08-23, 16:10:

andre_6 wrote on 2023-08-23, 15:32:

Hello, could you please specify the jumper you changed to enable 0-wait states on the card? I have a Trident Quadtel TVGA8900CL 1MB 16-bit ISA but didn't find a jumper for that option in the manual. Thanks!

Maybe here?

Oh wow never actually managed to find that manual, thank you! I only got the 8900-C one and it didn't show anything related to that, I assumed they were practically the same. Seems like 0-wait state is enabled by default, but nice to have confirmation

I picked up a couple of Radeon X1950 XTs - one as a backup and the other for an XP machine. It seems even a Dual Core E8600 isn't enough CPU for this card. When I switched the card over into a 3700K machine, I got another 14000 points on 3DMark 2001 and 5000 more points on 3DMark 2003 at default settings. Both machines were DDR3 - while the E8600 was limited to a bit over 1200MHz, the 3700K is a touch over 2500MHz.

I took a quick look over my NuXT PC build with a view to selling it. I've got a floppy drive to replace as it reads its own disks OK but no one else's. I think alignment of the heads is probably at fault and that's not a job I'm going to do on a HD 3.5" drive! 🤣

I also tested the AT to PS2 PCB I created (it's in the Open Source PC Hardware thread) on a few different boards with 100% results so that was nice too.

andre_6 wrote on 2023-08-23, 16:44:

Oh wow never actually managed to find that manual, thank you! I only got the 8900-C one and it didn't show anything related to that, I assumed they were practically the same. Seems like 0-wait state is enabled by default, but nice to have confirmation

Glad to help.

Meatball wrote on 2023-08-23, 16:54:

I picked up a couple of Radeon X1950 XTs - one as a backup and the other for an XP machine. It seems even a Dual Core E8600 isn't enough CPU for this card. When I switched the card over into a 3700K machine, I got another 14000 points on 3DMark 2001 and 5000 more points on 2DMark 2003 at default settings. Both machines were DDR3 - while the E8600 was limited to a bit over 1200MHz, the 3700K is a touch over 2500MHz.

These fans were my nightmare, you couldn't stand it on the X800GTO, how noisy they were!

Ydee wrote on 2023-08-23, 17:06:

These fans were my nightmare, you couldn't stand it on the X800GTO, how noisy they were!

The cooler is quite"er" (according to the reviews of the time), but I haven't heard it get nuts outside of initial startup since the card has been playing older games rather than more demanding ones of the period.

https://www.hardwarezone.com.sg/review-powerc … -x1950-xt-256mb

I transferred a Kaimei MB with a p166MMX to a cleaner case. Man, those baby-AT cases can be tight 😀
Hitachi 4x CD-rom, Teac 5.25" floppy and a Mitsumi 3,5" floppy. All should work... I've heard that before though.
I will have to pull some RAM to get a "smart amount". Now it's at 96MB, consisting of 4xSIMM + 2xDIMM. I guess 64MB would be more than enough for this.
DOS6,22 + Windows 95 is what I had in mind. No clue about the sound card yet. I've got some Sound blasters.
For GPU I think it'll be an S3 or similar with a Voodoo1.

Test fit of a half dozen sound cards as part of my current 486 build-in-progress.

oh2ftu wrote on 2023-08-23, 18:07:

I transferred a Kaimei MB with a p166MMX to a cleaner case. Man, those baby-AT cases can be tight :-) Hitachi 4x CD-rom, Teac 5. […]
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I transferred a Kaimei MB with a p166MMX to a cleaner case. Man, those baby-AT cases can be tight 😀
Hitachi 4x CD-rom, Teac 5.25" floppy and a Mitsumi 3,5" floppy. All should work... I've heard that before though.
I will have to pull some RAM to get a "smart amount". Now it's at 96MB, consisting of 4xSIMM + 2xDIMM. I guess 64MB would be more than enough for this.
DOS6,22 + Windows 95 is what I had in mind. No clue about the sound card yet. I've got some Sound blasters.
For GPU I think it'll be an S3 or similar with a Voodoo1.

Shit. I just realised that this particular motherboard does NOT have a decent picture OR bios upload on the retroweb. I guess I'll be pulling that MB out again some evening.
Same goes for some other mobos:
- Abit KU8, not listed at all
- Epox/Pronix EP-P55-VP3 (picture missing)
- Trigon 5114Vu Compaq bios-image.

I will need to look into how I'll be able to publish this information

andre_6 wrote on 2023-08-23, 15:32:

Thermalwrong wrote on 2023-08-22, 15:38:

They're from probably early in the lead-free soldering era with a high pin count, lots of electronics from ~2003 broke because o […]
Show full quote

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2023-08-22, 12:53:

Well the 3rd 9700 Pro arrived, same story as the others, massive artifacting. Refunded.

I give up, I actually don't think there are any working 9700 Pro cards left in the wild. Unless I find a fellow enthusiast selling one, this is clearly a waste of time.

They're from probably early in the lead-free soldering era with a high pin count, lots of electronics from ~2003 broke because of that. They'll maybe work with the GPU & RAM reballed. 😀
But then again, it was a decent enough graphics card that people would've used it til the day it stopped working, so who knows. I do think it's solder + hot components though. Probably 100% of them will eventually need re-work.

I was testing out my ISA VGA card collection which I didn't realise had so many items in it at this point! The Oak OTI087 result really surprised me, I thought it was a really slow card and had it paired with my 386SX-40 computer, but that's a waste of it. Tempted to try putting the extra 512KB of RAM on it now.
QuakeBenchmarks-ISA-VGA.png

Good thing I did this too, I found a load of corrosion on the Trident 8900CL-B card's RAMDAC that caused the display to go all crazy. It turns out this is also a fast ISA card once the 0-wait states setting is enabled, pretty good for a VGA card that can do 8-bit too.
IMG_1750 (Custom).JPG

Hello, could you please specify the jumper you changed to enable 0-wait states on the card? I have a Trident Quadtel TVGA8900CL 1MB 16-bit ISA but didn't find a jumper for that option in the manual. Thanks!

This is the page I'm using for reference, it's mostly accurate in that all the 8900CL cards seem to use the same jumper numbers to do the same things although they're moved about in most designs: https://arvutimuuseum.ee/th99/v/U-Z/50105.htm

The card as I tested at 32.8fps is set up just as the first picture, J1 open and J2 closed.
It's a bit different from the rest of the info I could find online in that J1 is in the same jumper block as J7/J8. Otherwise it's the same as most other cards - I think your card might just need J1 removed to be in 0-wait-state mode. Something I notice today is that there were some pixel glitches in the quake timedemo so it probably requires good quality DRAM on the card.

Regarding benchmarking Doom with this rather than quake, the results were around 4000 realtics with this K6-2 which is weird so I just tested Quake instead.

Testing all these cards just demonstrated its cost to me today - I was having trouble getting a PCI video card to work and swapped it for a spare, but then the system stopped booting altogether, no useful information on the POST card with a post code of F8 or --. Turned out to be a pin in the PCI slot got bent and was touching the opposing pin, breaking the PCI bus and the system. The computer still has 2 good PCI slots so I've put tape on the bad one and maybe I'll fix it in the far future.

Played Command and Conquer GDI missions.
Its been about 20 years since I last played that and it was awesome to see it again.

I have started a very ambitious test with the plotter today. Bought, emptied, washed, then refilled 8 Pentel RSVP pen tubes with 12% and 50% saturation ink in cmyk (with india ink as k).

By my calculations, this gives me 8 shades per channel plus white. (Evenly distributed over the space, created by re-inking where needed.)

That should give me 4096 colors plus white for my color space.

I have created 'split cmyk channels', 'simplified' them to my allowed gamut, and created pen paths for all 8 pens, for an image of this morning's sunrise.

It's twiddling the 12% cyan pen now. Wont be done for a long while... this test is going to take several days.

Tried a CF-IDE adapter on the good old Aptiva 2168 (P75), couldn't get it to work reliably, nor could the system boot using it. Will probably try again with another adapter and/or card later.

amigopi wrote on 2023-08-23, 21:22:

Tried a CF-IDE adapter on the good old Aptiva 2168 (P75), couldn't get it to work reliably, nor could the system boot using it. Will probably try again with another adapter and/or card later.

Could you post a pic? Today I was handling one of mine and a component wasn't soldered well and it came loose.
Also, some forget smds.
Just a guess.

wierd_w wrote on 2023-08-23, 20:38:

I have started a very ambitious test with the plotter today. Bought, emptied, washed, then refilled 8 Pentel RSVP pen tubes wit […]
Show full quote

I have started a very ambitious test with the plotter today. Bought, emptied, washed, then refilled 8 Pentel RSVP pen tubes with 12% and 50% saturation ink in cmyk (with india ink as k).

By my calculations, this gives me 8 shades per channel plus white. (Evenly distributed over the space, created by re-inking where needed.)

That should give me 4096 colors plus white for my color space.

I have created 'split cmyk channels', 'simplified' them to my allowed gamut, and created pen paths for all 8 pens, for an image of this morning's sunrise.

It's twiddling the 12% cyan pen now. Wont be done for a long while... this test is going to take several days.

Very interested to see the results of this! The first sample you posted was quite cool, so hope you post more. 😁

Updated the BIOS on my T40 to 3.23 then replaced the old 1.5GHz with a Dothan 1.7GHz. Replaced the BIOS battery and added a mini-PCI wireless card (BCM943224). Unfortunately, it's whitelisted so will have to dig up after a workaround. Any suggestions, much appreciated.

Windows XP got wind of my CPU shenanigans so now is asking for activation within 3 days. I might reinstall it, a SP3 this time around.
I already have an ATA44-SATA adapter and a 120GB SSD on standby for this but was thinking an ATA 160GB Seagate Momentus 5400.3 might bring more flavor. What do you think?

Cheers.

Meatball wrote on 2023-08-23, 16:54:

I picked up a couple of Radeon X1950 XTs - one as a backup and the other for an XP machine. It seems even a Dual Core E8600 isn't enough CPU for this card. When I switched the card over into a 3700K machine, I got another 14000 points on 3DMark 2001 and 5000 more points on 3DMark 2003 at default settings. Both machines were DDR3 - while the E8600 was limited to a bit over 1200MHz, the 3700K is a touch over 2500MHz.

I feel like these cards would have sold a lot better had NVIDIA not immediately obliterated them with the GOAT 8800 series. The X1000s were a serious improvement from the flawed X800 series.

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-08-23, 19:19:

Played Command and Conquer GDI missions.
Its been about 20 years since I last played that and it was awesome to see it again.

GDI > NOD. 😀

Nexxen wrote on 2023-08-23, 21:54:

Could you post a pic? Today I was handling one of mine and a component wasn't soldered well and it came loose. Also, some forget […]
Show full quote

amigopi wrote on 2023-08-23, 21:22:

Tried a CF-IDE adapter on the good old Aptiva 2168 (P75), couldn't get it to work reliably, nor could the system boot using it. Will probably try again with another adapter and/or card later.

Could you post a pic? Today I was handling one of mine and a component wasn't soldered well and it came loose.
Also, some forget smds.
Just a guess.

You want a photo of my CF-IDE adapter? Sure, here you go, just dug it out of the Aptiva.