chrismes wrote on 2022-02-10, 07:56:

This thing arrived this week, brand new Asus / Elan Vital T-5AB. A great seller offered these for a few bucks and I am very happy to have found it. It was made in 2000. I'm still not sure about the system it will house.

Nice! I had it my watch list but just couldn't convince myself to buy one. Simply running out of storage space 😀
I like its slightly more compact form with the PSU in front of the board and the overall design.

Yesterday was a good day !

I (finally) received my Matrox Parhelia. I have a thing for that card. I can't explain.
I love these "dead ends" relics. Intel i740, Parhelia, P4 EE/3.8Ghz, RDRAM, WD Raptor.

The card came with the box and (i think), all the accessories and documents. Even the plastic caps on the VGA/DVI connectors.

I'm trying to buy that specific card for like 6 month.
The previous owner was really suspicious about selling something over internet.
He wanted **ONLY** in person transaction at his place with cash.
Of course he lives 6h from where i live.
Then he started to lower the price to sell it more easily/quickly.

So...
... without any other solutions...
... i hired a personal shopper on TaskRabbit to meet the guy, pay him and ship the card.
Quite an adventure !

And the same day i also received two nice little big cards.
The Radeon HD 3870 X2 is probably dead. But for 5€ it still looks good for the collection.
I know that some will not consider these cards "retro". But my own favourite and 100% subjective "retro" period is 1995->2010.

On the fun side, i tested the Parhelia this night.
And that was a priceless experience 😁
On Windows XP (No Win 9x/me drivers. Only NT4 and up).
The original CD installed a broken version of the Matrox control panel (could not start. Driver itself was OK).
What a big first impression !

With the installer from the website, it finally ran OK
Their website's FTP (!!) is full of Matrox goodies (just in case you want a nice looking screensaver)
The reef demo is honestly quite impressive for a DX8 card.
But if you move around the camera (you can, controls are explained in the readme). You can go "behind" the walls and mess up the display.
HL2 is quite playable (20-30fps) with medium settings 1024x768. Which is surprising. UT2004 runs well too.
So not that bad after all !

I think everyone was disappointed with Matrox not because of the Parhelia specifically, but at how far behind it was compared to the competition. They had such a reputation and a lot of people were expecting to see some competition in the gamer space like there was between ATI and NVIDIA.

I believe this was a mistake as Matrox was already in the process of shifting towards the professional market, but there was still some hope that it would put up a fight for gamers.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/matrox-parhelia/

Matrox has held a dominant position in the graphics card business since the beginning of the 1990s, but up to now the Canadian company has not seriously addressed one important segment of the market. When it comes to 3D graphics acceleration, Matrox’s products have remained well behind the leading edge. The consequence: the dominant market position in this sector has been lost to the competition. nVidia and, more recently, ATI, have dominated the 3D graphics market -- Matrox’s graphics cards are more likely to be found business PCs.
...

With the introduction of the new Parhelia-512 chip, this should now change, and Matrox should make inroads into the 3D market. Even so, this product is not just aimed at hardcore gamers.

I remember reading articles like this at the time, but from news sites. I don't think Matrox themselves marketed it for games or intended that it compete with the GeForce and Radeon.

Matrox's main focus was always the professional market.

That is really obvious just looking at the Driver Control panel.
I took some screenshots with all the options provided.
I' don't have them now, still on the PC hdd, but i will probably post them for illustration.
There are a lot of professional features. Really good features.
You can for example use one screen normally and have a second screen zoomed that follow your mouse.
That is a really good feature !
You can add some rules to manage windows aligned on a grid. Memorize their positions, etc...
That is a good feature too (and i actually use a similar feature a lot on Linux for my terminals)
There are 10+ screens of options for productivity, CAD, etc...
... And there is only one menu with games options. Just one.
The box itself only show a small picture of a triple-head setup with UT2003 along with a lot of business related pictures.
It is really a card for professional users, but that happens to be able to run some games as well.

Matrox has released many interesting products. Just bought one of them, G450 MMS PCI which includes 4 "graphic cards" on a single board with 4 monitor outputs. That's a pure professional card that doesn't add performance in gaming comparing to normal G450. But how about simulators? In theory, MMS could be utilized in multi screen flight simulator, just for an example. I haven't really searched MMS related applications yet.

RandomStranger wrote on 2022-02-10, 16:13:

Matrox's main focus was always the professional market.

The gamer focused cards were the Mystique series and the G400. Matrox was never a serious contender in the 3d race except for the G400max.

Bought a junk box of 25kg. Asked the seller to pack some items I was interested in seperately and after paying an additional 10€ he agreed. Think it was a good investment as the 25kg box didnt arrive in a good condition. So I got:

ISA backplane

286 SBC by NCR with 287 installed, MFM controller

Wangetek SCSI controller (?) and 16-bit XMS card

EIZO MD-B10 ET 3000 and Philips CD-ROM controller (?)

AND........Amiga 2000 Rev 6.2 Mainboard in good condition 😀

Predator99 wrote on 2022-02-10, 18:15:

Bought a junk box of 25kg. Asked the seller to pack some items I was interested in seperately and after paying an additional 10€ he agreed. Think it was a good investment as the 25kg box didnt arrive in a good condition.

Nice! Where do we find seller like this 😁

Parcel arrived today:

Philips Gus PnP clone.

Urgently needs some RAM, and coincidentally a colleague bragged to me today about his new hot-air soldering iron that I really needed to try out. Think I'll be doing just that 😉

You want to put a chip or a socket on that thing? For a chip you can do that much easier with standard soldering iron (preferably soldering station). Socket will require hot air, and a a word of advice, buy a few. These things easily melt if you cook them a bit too much, and I really mean just a bit is enough. Maybe consider lower temperature solder paste, and capton tape.

I would have to disagree. Soldering the chip straight on is much easier with solder paste and hot air. It can also be easily touched up with an iron if you're not confident with the connection. With a socket you must solder each pin by hand which is best done with a microscope, a fine tip iron, and a very thin diameter solder. If you use hot air on a socket the plastic will melt well before the solder paste.

I experimented with this recently while soldering a PLCC socket. While it may be possible to do this will hot air, I don't believe it can be done without causing some kind of damage to the socket in the process.

Soldered BIOS chip replaced with PLCC socket

Idea; There are solder pastes that melt at 180 degrees C (even lower?), I don't believe a socket would meltdown at this temp, please correct me if I'm mistaken.

I was intending to use a low-temp paste indeed. But yes, I'll get a pile of the sockets while I'm at it, if I mess up plan B, C etc will be available. Worst-case I'll give up and solder the SoJ directly after testing in some other fairly demanding card (have a Virge DX that should do the trick).

Maybe there are suitable pastes. Mine certainly was not.

I found using paste to be very awkward but with practice maybe it would work. It's a very difficult part to get attached regardless.

The best advice I can give is to use your multimeter to test which adjacent pins may already have continuity. After soldering the socket you'll want to check for any shorts but it's possible that some pins may naturally be connected. If you don't test this ahead of time you can't be sure if it's a problem.

These plastic components on the board was soldered in soldering oven and professional hot air methods. I have done this all the time. What really works well is pre-heat the board to 150C on thin ones or with light copper content up to 190C for large board and also if have heavy copper planes in it. For hot air, I used 300C to 360C to solder these plastic components. No melting.

Choice of soldering alloy do matter. Do not use low temp solder, they are brittle and is only for releasing lead-free soldered components or removing SMD chips. The lowest you can get is around 158C which will not be brittle and 60/40 lead solder melts at 188C.

no-lead solder is a pain in the butt to work with as they will not melt readily due to board conducting heat away, hence the plastic get melted.

Cheers,

I think there's an option with these type of sockets of cutting the bottom out and soldering with a thin tip internally, but I could be wrong.

Bismuth alloys offer lower soldering temperature and shouldn't really be that brittle, these are meant for very heat-sensitive components like some IR sensors. And it's certainly possible to use lead-free paste to solder these sockets, but the temperature must be very carefuly controlled - that's what I was trying to say. Frankly you can't do it with hot air (or IR lamp) alone and standard temperature paste, the socket will melt. But with a preheater and experience it can be done outside a professional profile-controlled oven. Pyrometer ("gun" / infrared thermometer) can also be handy to get the PCB to somewhere around 150C. Replace the nearby electrolytic caps afterwards, or even remove them before the job.

BTW not all lead-free alloys are higher temperature than the old PbSn. The cheap, mostly tin with some 1% copper sure are, but some more expensive ones with a few % silver in them can melt below 190C or so. Also, flux. Do not skip flux.

Canopus Pure3DII LX Voodoo2 SLI

Also bought a PCI Voodoo3 3000 for cheap, but it was too good to be true. No video out. Seller refunded.

Meatball wrote on 2022-02-11, 00:02:

Canopus Pure3DII LX Voodoo2 SLI

Also bought a PCI Voodoo3 3000 for cheap, but it was too good to be true. No video out. Seller refunded.

Bummer²