I usually look for damaged cards to recover them and those with a proprietary form for spare parts.

How proprietary is "proprietary"?

The only proprietary board in that pic is the big one at the back. The rest are either LPX (single I/O row, riser in middle) or NLX (dual I/O row, riser on edge) standard boards. Neither were popular in retail (although I found a generic LPX desktop case a few years back), but you can generally mix&match boards between OEM systems, so long as the risers (which are generally NOT interchangeable between cases) match the boards - and most within the same generation will be similar, so most Pentium 1 LPX boards will have a PISA slot for the riser. So you can replace dead boards in OEM systems, or up/downgrade them.

I'm always interested by HP Vectra parts, especially Socket 7 and Slot 1 motherboards. That would have interested me, but from the USA to Europe, shipping is expensive and importation taxes recently increased making such a transaction not really interesting. That's sad 🙁

dionb wrote on 2021-11-15, 13:39:

How proprietary is "proprietary"?

Proprietary PSU plug only for this machines, custom size and no holes (the motherboards slide in rails and are then locked by a lever making them very easy to plug in and plug out). And the riser connectors are proprietary too, some are the full length of the board, some are just the half working like an expansion card, and some are with a series of pins like IDE but a lot bigger. So no LPX or NLX for the HP ones here.

Edit: Looking more closely at the shot, the three staked boards seems not made for HP Vectra computers, maybe they are not HP at all. They have holes for hooks and look like NLX motherboard indeed. I'm reading NZM-6120 on the one on top and HP motherboards from the era have a part numbers following one of the pattern: XXXX-XXXX or YXXXXY with X being a digit and Y a letter.

You can probably sell them on eBay. I wouldn't just bin them.

Thanks for the suggestions, I will probably get them listed on eBay when I get the time and see of they sell. I have plenty of other boards to play with, so I don't really need these.

The stack in the middle are labeled with KZM-6120, which is apparently made by FIC and used in some HP Vectra systems. The ones on the right have HP logos in the solder mask, the one on the left has Compaq branding, and the big one in the back is the DEC board.

While I am aware that LPX is a "standard," it is very loosely specified. Additionally, from what I understand, the HP boards here would be NLX, which is a little better defined than LPX, but that doesn't change the fact that I don't have any cases for them.

I do have two Packard Bell LPX cases, but the Compaq board here is too tall for either of them - In fact there were two Packard Bell LPX boards in the lot of parts that I am going to try to play with. One fits in one of the cases, but the other is missing its riser. I am going to hang on to it for now to see if I can get my hands on a riser for it that fits my second PB case. Both of my PB computers were 486's, but the boards were to far gone from battery leakage to salvage. One of the PB boards I got last weekend has a 486 DX2-66 in it (no voltage regulator, unfortunately), and the other is a Socket 5 board with a Pentium 133 in it. Neither have Varta batteries, so there is lots of promise that they will be usable. (The Socket 5 board is the one missing the riser.)

OtakuN3rd wrote on 2021-11-15, 20:13:

The ones on the right have HP logos in the solder mask

Definitely! They are HP Vectra VE or VL motherboard I think. I'm a collector of this machines, that is why this two boards interested me at first. I have some similar motherboards as replacement parts, but because there is a lot of different models, having more is still good 😉

OtakuN3rd wrote on 2021-11-15, 20:13:

The stack in the middle are labeled with KZM-6120, which is apparently made by FIC and used in some HP Vectra systems.

That's strange. But the Vectra line continued a few years after the acquisition of Compaq and cost reduction where made, these machines were nothing compared to the original Vectra/Kayak so it is possible that is a P3 motherboard from a late Vectra. I don't have any and I don't want any.

Put them on ebay for people trying to fix their old computers

I like using them for testing dodgy hardware that has the potential of killing other parts. I'd cry if I busted my Asus P5A board, but an unknown compaq board? thats fine.

Post a good pic https://www.ultimateretro.net/en/ need continuous update
if u can dump bios is the best

they will have been useful for something.

Yes, dump the bios!

I have a Compaq 425 thats limited to 1gb hard drives, but I know there exists an updated bios that bumps it to 4.8Gb

Is there a poty in that bernum?

dataino.it wrote on 2021-11-15, 22:36:

Post a good pic https://www.ultimateretro.net/en/ need continuous update
if u can dump bios is the best

they will have been useful for something.

I'll see what I can do. I don't think I have the equipment to dump the BIOSes unless they're DIP chips. (I have a mini pro, but no socket adapters)

OtakuN3rd wrote on 2021-11-15, 23:27:

dataino.it wrote on 2021-11-15, 22:36:

Post a good pic https://www.ultimateretro.net/en/ need continuous update
if u can dump bios is the best

they will have been useful for something.

I'll see what I can do. I don't think I have the equipment to dump the BIOSes unless they're DIP chips. (I have a mini pro, but no socket adapters)

Many flash utilities can read the bios.

Chip programmers are easier though, pop it out, type in the chip and read and save. But if you have good dos floppy you can get it that way also. Though I hate having a glitchy floppy in the chain of custody

I almost forgot about all the utilities that come on Hiren's / Falcon Four. I guess I can give that a shot when I test out the boards that I am able to test, some of the boards have what looks to be proprietary power connectors.

I recently had to flash a board without a chip programmer and no floppy drive and no windows flashing support. I booted to hirens and used whatever version of awdflash or some flash utility that was included with the bios on jan’s website. Worked great!

but for saving bios, just boot to hirens mini xp and use cpu-z I believe it has a bios save option

Sphere478 wrote on 2021-11-18, 20:09:

I recently had to flash a board without a chip programmer and no floppy drive and no windows flashing support. I booted to hirens and used whatever version of awdflash or some flash utility that was included with the bios on jan’s website. Worked great!

but for saving bios, just boot to hirens mini xp and use cpu-z I believe it has a bios save option

That will probably work for the Slot 1 boards, but I don't know if I want to try Mini XP on a Pentium... That's where the Dos utilities will come in, my plan was to rip them out and make a custom boot disk. I have a Dos 6.22 machine up and running and I can make a minimal boot disk with just the BIOS utility on it.

Hopefully I'll have some extra time to tinker with this stuff over the holidays. For the moment, I am posting this during downtime at work...

Here's a small update....

I had a chance to play with the KZM-6120 boards for a brief moment this evening. They are from an HP Vectra Vli 8SF machine. BIOS files, drivers, and documentation are already available over here.

Of the three boards, I found one that seems happy in POST, one that seems to have a dead PS/2 mouse port, and one that is completely dead to the world.

I guess I shouldn't be too surprised at the faults. I also sorted through 22 different 3Com EtherLink III NICs that I got in the same lot of hardware and found that all but three of them were broken. (I'm told this stuff was from an ISP that went out of business years ago.)

I am going to call it a night for now. We'll see what other trouble I can get in to over the holiday weekend. Happy Thanksgiving!