Today I replaced FW82439TX chip to Gigabyte GA-586T2 motherboard. Old chip had a lifted corner what occured as memory fault. Fortunately 3 pads were torn off from the BGA - not from the motherboard.
NOS chip from AliExpress. Baked it for couple of hours @80-100°C. Table stove as bottom heater. Slowly increased temperature on heating gun until chip temperature was about 200(ish).
I had absolutely no clue wheter it was soldered or not. Under microscope it looked OK and it does POST! Next - beer.
Today I received the MSI GeForce 4 Ti 4600 that I recently bought.
When it came out of the package, it was the most disgusting piece of hardware that I have ever seen. Previous owner must have been a heavy smoker, the smell was unbearable. The heatsink and fan were full of dirt. So before even inspecting the card further, I gave it a good wash in the kitchen sink.
Now it has dried, the smell has fortunately disappeared, so it was time for closer inspection. Turns out: It has a total of 13 SMD components missing on the back side. Mostly caps, but some others too (labelled with U, Q and D). Most of the solder pads are gone, too - so this will be challenging to repair.
On the front side, "only" two of the bigger caps are missing and should be easy to replace.
Here's my "inventory" of missing parts (not a photo of my acutal card, obviously):
Edit: Weird. On my card the solder pads for U820, U825 and Q214 look like they have never been populated in the first place. But all photos that I can find of the backside of the 4600 PCB online do show these components populated. On my card it looks like they had forgotten the cutouts in the solder mask, there's not even solder on them (like there is on most other unpopulated pads). Just the oxidized copper.
Last edited by gex85 on 2021-01-23, 19:57. Edited 1 time in total.
Replaced the broken off cap on this FX-5200, cleaned the cooler, added new thermal paste and checked if it posts.
Set up an W98SE AGP test bench to check some graphics cards for Retromonkey, and chose the games and the cards I'll be testing.
If I already have a W98 test bench, tested my new Audigy 2 ZS. Also started the graphics card test.
Not strictly but the could apply to older notebook/laptops.
My HP/Compaq CQ62 desktop set up was over heating in the warmer weather here. I suspect part of the reason for the over heating was trying to charge a completely dead battery pack. Because this system doesn't need battery pack I pulled the dead one out and dissected it, remove the cells and the small circuit board and sensors.
Once I had it apart I decide to make a fan holder out of it with a pentium 1 era SOYO 12 volt cpu fan. This fits into the battery pack nicely after some cutting if the plastic. I drilled holes in the bottom cover for the fan to draw fresh air in. I attached stainless steel mesh from an old Honda motorcycle , which I stripped many many years ago, air box with black silicon sealant. This will stop insects and other items from being sucked in. Drill holes in the top half of the battery pack were I knew they meet up the latch openings in the CQ62 where the battery pack will attach and lock in to place.
Searched through my wall wart box for a suitable 12v DC power supply. Used a bit of 32 thou lock wire bent in two and soldered to the black cpu fan lead and inserted it into the center of the psu connector with some insulation around it so there is no direct short with the other connector. Grabbed a eyelet connect from my electrical connector box which was a bit smaller than the outside of the psus outer contact. Cut most of the eyelet part off leaving a 5mm x 3mm tap I could solder the Red lead from the cpu fan.Also spread out the circular bit so it fitted on the outside of thge psu connector nice and tight. Got a piece of soft rubber clear tubing and fitted this around the outside of this.
Connected the psu to the cpu fan connector I'd just made to see if it functioned correctly. It did. Applied black silicon sealant to keep the fan in place, made a cut out for the psu connector in the bottom half of the battery pack and then seal the two halves together with black silicon sealant. Wrapped masking tap around the battery pack halves to keep them nice and tight against each other then left the unit out in the sun on the fence railing for a few hours. Removed the masking tape then retested the unit. Fan is working fine-Good. Now I can fit the unit to my CQ62 desktop set up, plug the psu into a spare electricle socket, turn it on and have extra cooling of I need it.
Edit 25--2021: Tested the unit today and there is quite a reduction in on my CQ62 desktop setup.
Last edited by Caluser2000 on 2021-01-24, 19:45. Edited 2 times in total.
There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s. Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉
Today I upgraded the CPU in my Socket AM2+ Hackintosh. Replaced the installed AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ with an AMD Phenom X4 9650.
Also swapped the graphics card, replacing a Radeon HD 5450 with a recently purchased Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT 512MB. The card seems to be working great, passes 3DMark in Windows etc, but a few issues in Mac OS X 10.6 with weird occasional graphics glitches & occasional slight freezes. I think I have an idea what may be causing that, so should be an easy fix once I work on it some more this week.
The new CPU is being cooled by a cheap Chinese-made cooler, the cheapest I could find in it's form factor when I bought it about a year or so ago. I bought this cooler as a novelty just to see how bad it could be - the fan connector only has 3 pins, thus it runs at full speed constantly. The heatsink is extremely flimsy, built out of layers of thin flexible metal, of which the top layer fell off! You think this is going to suck right? Well so did I and noise aside, it actually does a decent job. At load I was only reaching temps of about 54 degrees, quite impressive.
After buying some midi couplers, I managed to get my RPi 4B to act like an MT-32 using MT-32Pi. I don’t have a DAC or some kind of MIDI input, so I’m not going to be doing things simply, but this let me spend $8 to use my UM-ONE-MKII. Some day I will grab a mixer to get everything working with no real issue.
After buying some midi couplers, I managed to get my RPi 4B to act like an MT-32 using MT-32Pi. I don’t have a DAC or some kind of MIDI input, so I’m not going to be doing things simply, but this let me spend $8 to use my UM-ONE-MKII. Some day I will grab a mixer to get everything working with no real issue.
I was not aware of this, going to look into it now.
Cheers.
After buying some midi couplers, I managed to get my RPi 4B to act like an MT-32 using MT-32Pi. I don’t have a DAC or some kind of MIDI input, so I’m not going to be doing things simply, but this let me spend $8 to use my UM-ONE-MKII. Some day I will grab a mixer to get everything working with no real issue.
I was not aware of this, going to look into it now.
Cheers.
It’s legitimately cool, I just need to eventually get a screen for full effect, and the aforementioned DAC
Cleaned the Jetway 386/486 hybrid board that had corrosion from the leaking battery and hit a snag or three: the IC socket for the EPROM is totally gone on one end, the SN74F245N IC is rusted and probably won't work, and the first 8-bit ISA slot has missing coating from after scrubbing the corrosion off.
Not a big loss since I'm getting a new IC socket for the EPROM, a 512Kb (64Kx8) EPROM for the MR BIOS and the regular AMI BIOS, new 8 bit ISA slots, and will order the SN74F245N chip along with the IC socket.
Today I replaced FW82439TX chip to Gigabyte GA-586T2 motherboard. Old chip had a lifted corner what occured as memory fault. Fortunately 3 pads were torn off from the BGA - not from the motherboard.
NOS chip from AliExpress. Baked it for couple of hours @80-100°C. Table stove as bottom heater. Slowly increased temperature on heating gun until chip temperature was about 200(ish).
I had absolutely no clue wheter it was soldered or not. Under microscope it looked OK and it does POST! Next - beer.
That's impressive, good work! Was the chip actually NOS or was it reclaimed and reballed? Not that it matters as long as it works.
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As for me, I'm currently attempting a SelfScan on a old (yayy, no F3 rubbish) 5400.4 Seagate laptop drive that has a few reallocated sectors but is otherwise healthy.
Played Quake on HP Infinium oscilloscope. It is built for that, what else?
It was tempting to install a Voodoo I but I could hold myself. (In that case I would have to use external monitor.)
Played Quake on HP Infinium oscilloscope. It is built for that, what else?
It was tempting to install a Voodoo I but I could hold myself. (In that case I would have to use external monitor.)
🤣. That's genius 😀
See my graphics card database at www.gpuzoo.com
Constantly being worked on. Feel free to message me with any corrections or details of cards you would like me to research and add.
I didn't look but it's good. It was the first game I could find on that occasion.
That thing has AMD K6/200 + CHIPS video (T65550?) + 32MB RAM. I replaced mainboard (standard babyAT) because the original had a flat Dallas RTC.
Write performance on the lot of them sucks, as a ratio of read performance, apart from an older Sandisk Extreme IV card which almost has equal write performance as it does read.
Have been setting up a couple of CF cards for my 286 benchmark shootout, as well as a recently rebuilt 486 PVI-SP3, and I wanted to go CF for both of them. Copying several dozen gigabytes (of relatively small DOS game files) onto flash media sucks, even with some of those later cards.
I'll probably go with one of the later Kingston 266x or Sandisk Ultra CF cards from the right side of the chart for the 286 (both are 16GB), and get a 64GB Sandisk Extreme for the 486. Not for the performance in their intended systems, but my own sanity when setting them up or restoring them.
I didn't look but it's good. It was the first game I could find on that occasion.
That thing has AMD K6/200 + CHIPS video (T65550?) + 32MB RAM. I replaced mainboard (standard babyAT) because the original had a flat Dallas RTC.
That's really cool. It's also fun that HP used standard pc components for making that line of oscilloscopes.
Cleaned the Jetway 386/486 hybrid board that had corrosion from the leaking battery and hit a snag or three: the IC socket for the EPROM is totally gone on one end, the SN74F245N IC is rusted and probably won't work, and the first 8-bit ISA slot has missing coating from after scrubbing the corrosion off.
Not a big loss since I'm getting a new IC socket for the EPROM, a 512Kb (64Kx8) EPROM for the MR BIOS and the regular AMI BIOS, new 8 bit ISA slots, and will order the SN74F245N chip along with the IC socket.
