enaiel wrote on 2020-10-12, 02:37:
Returned the motherboard. Project is on hold till I can find another Socket 370 mATX with ISA slot and VIA chipset.
Wish there was a place where folks from Vogons could trade parts, as at least you will know what you are getting. Parts from eBay are not only over priced, but also quite often not working 🙁
Not specifically what you are asking for, but, as I have previously mentioned elsewhere on vogons, I have had good success and good prices with East European (Russian, Poland, Hungary, Ukraine) sellers on Ebay .
Some points to consider about these sellers :
For some reason, the prices even including shipping to Canada, have always been reasonable .
I have only bought from sellers with 100% ratings (pretty much all the sellers I considered buying from had such a rating, so it's not as if I was being picky ).
The sellers that I have bought from seems to specialize in re-selling old hardware, do a lots of it (as demonstrated by their sales history) and seem to know what they are doing (I have never gotten a DOA).
They often seem to have hardware that I want when closer alternatives do not exist (i.e. no North American sellers for a given item).
The main (and essentially only) disadvantage of dealing with sellers in Eastern Europe, from a Canadian perspective at leats, especially in these COVID-19 times, is the extreme shipping time (3 months is not unusual) . You really need to be patient .
Maybe the East is Europe's retro hardware recselling hub, I really do not know, but there is a lot of nice stuff to be found there .
That said, I have almost always had good experiences on Ebay, with sellers all over the world.
If the seller you are considering buying from does not seem to dabble much in retro hardware sales, but says the part was tested, I recommend you ask the seller some specific questions about how the testing was done . If you do not get a reasonable answer, I would skip that "opportunity" or at least re-considering it . I would not bother asking such things from a seller that does retro volume and has a good reputation .
On a semi-final note, especially (but not exclusively) concerning motherboards, video cards and PSUs (anything that heats up) from the very late 90s of to 2007ish (there were crappy caps before that too, but they were not as common), consider that whatever hardware you receive, even reasonably seller tested, may be on it's last legs (at least temporarily) because of the "capacitor plague" . Re-capping may be in required to regain full functionality, stability or to revive the part if it dies quickly . You may already know this, but it was worth mentioning, just in case.
On a final note, higher end Asus boards, VIA based or otherwise, from the early 2000s tended to have decent capacitors . An Asus CUV4X variant with an ISA slot (not all of them have one) should be a good options (mine have quality caps on them and still work fine).
Sorry for the long winded post.
