First post, by TheMobRules
So, a few weeks ago I got an old PC that was discarded from an office. I mainly got it for the case (a nice AT case with MHz display and turbo button, in pretty good condition), but when I was disassembling it to clean it I found it had one of those awful PCChips "TX Pro-II" motherboards, with a K6-2 300 and 64 MB of PC133 SDRAM.
I haven't had the time to test it yet, but according to the guy who gave me the machine, it was still working well when they last used it. And other than a couple of dubious capacitors everything looks fine on visual inspection. This is the board:
However, when I looked at the back of the motherboard I noticed something unusual. It seems two of the pins in the CPU socket are bridged together by a small piece of metal:
Now, I don't know if this is some kind of factory "fix" or someone did some kind of mod to the board after purchase, but maybe someone who is well-versed on this could know if this was a common thing back then? I don't have anything like this in my other Socket 7 boards, so I was wondering what bridging those two pins could accomplish. 😕