Artex wrote on 2022-05-09, 02:34:

Appreciate your words TrashPanda.

Like you, I'm clearly over the moon for anything 3Dfx-related and have amassed quite a collection of boxed and bare cards, lots of 3Dfx shwag and the mighty V5-6000. My first 3Dfx card - the Orchid Righteous 3D with those magical clicky relays - forever changed me during my techie 'formative years' and the nostalgia has never stopped. To answer your question, it's a beast of a card when (8x) AA is applied and those extra chips are put to use. So yeah, definitely a special place in my heart for this lovely card and storied company. But then again, you look at the Quantum3D Mercury Brick (also in my collection) with 4 x 200 SBis connected up and the Antialiasing is pure madness.

Very nice to see you again 🙂

My PC had died so I was err.... was busy ehm.. something with moving parts of an older yet still capable HP in a tiny and crummy (and obnoxiously loud) case to a different much better case and only halfway figuring out the mounting holes don't match up but in the end I got it in anyway without anything shorting 😂

I didn't buy any hardware parts directly, but I did get a lot of miscellaneous items like postit stickers (because my old rolls of stickers had completely dried up) for use of labeling boxes, glues, new large screwdriver, masking tape, tape with which I can electrically isolate stuff, all kinds of tidbits needed for my attic mostly since I got a loooot of stuff to do there.

PC@LIVE wrote on 2022-05-10, 19:47:

In recent days, I found a case for sale at an attractive price, I perfected the purchase and used it to put inside one of the ma […]
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In recent days, I found a case for sale at an attractive price, I perfected the purchase and used it to put inside one of the many PCs that I fixed (long ago).
In addition to the case there is the floppy reader, currently it is not yet connected, it is there to fill the hole, but I should have a floppy drive cable (34PIN) aside, obviously I will connect it later, for the moment I have no need to transfer files via floppy, I don't think I will need it in the future either, so if I need it for other older PCs I could replace it with something else more useful.
The case is a CoolerMasater, model if I'm not mistaken Centurion 5 or S ?, inside I mounted a Core2 Duo E6750 PC, Asus P5N-E SLI motherboard with 4GB of DDR2 RAM, XFX GF9800GT video card, if I remember correctly from 512MB of RAM, 120GB Kingston HD SSD in which I installed a WIN8 (can't remember which one).
On the case there are two USB ports on the front, one 1394 and a couple of audio ports, in the video card instead there is a DVI port and one to connect an HDMI cable, no VGA ports, but for the old monitors I solved it by connecting an adapter VGA-DVI.
At the moment due to busy schedules, I don't have time to bench, but I hope in the future to find the time necessary to do some tests.

That does look like a Cooler Master Centurion 5 🙂
It's basically the most modern case that I really like, I got at least 4 of them in various states (some I bought new and the latest is kinda badly scratched up but was cheap).

Cuttoon wrote on 2022-05-13, 13:52:

Interesting, thanks. I'd wonder why they don't just discard defective ones right away instead of marking them, but I don't have […]
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dormcat wrote on 2022-05-13, 13:21:

Cuttoon wrote on 2022-05-13, 13:02:

It appears that the chips had markings. Then they put two horizontal bars over those. Like the counterfeits production was forced to unmark their chips in court, or whatever.
And, even without any lense distortion, those lines are at an angle, not parallel, from chip to chip.

IIRC those horizontal bars are marks of defective chips. Not to mention those oxidized contacts.

Interesting, thanks. I'd wonder why they don't just discard defective ones right away instead of marking them, but I don't have any better explanation. Maybe they mislabeled them legitimately at first, crossed that out and sold them at a discount then?
Oxidized contacts, or the gold plating simply fell off and then the copper started to oxidize. Also, the designation on the package is in quotes. It's a Gesamtkunstwerk.

dormcat wrote on 2022-05-13, 13:21:

SDRAM from e-waste are often in better shape than this one.

I've accumulated dozens of RAM modules over the years, some of them from dubious sources and treated with little respect. All of those are in better shape.

So my memory is a bit cloudy on this (no pun intended), but in the years before these Hama modules (I never heard of them before btw) there were actually companies that acquired defective memory, retested it at (for instance) lower densities and/or lower speeds (so testing 64MB chips tested defective as 16MB and if it worked as a 16MB chip they'd sell it as such (numbers are hypothetical btw, it's just to illustrate)) because memory was expensive back then.
I wouldn't have been surprised if these modules were basically made in this same spirit or by some similar company.
Though, it wouldn't really explain why the DIMM itself (especially the contacts) seem to badly damaged. It's almost as if the module is an old worn out one or something.

I have a hard time believing the module inside that package is really newly produced 😜

Interesting, though not very practical except perhaps as a curiosity of some sort? I mean would such a module even work?

Radical Vision wrote on 2022-05-14, 19:57:

Interesting.. Some times dog brand such as EliteGroup, ASSrock, PcChips, QDI, Acorp ect just tend to die way less, and most of t […]
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Gmlb256 wrote on 2022-05-14, 17:21:

Radical Vision wrote on 2022-05-14, 15:34:

Well tell that to ppl that think Compaq, Dimond, Elsa, Creative, Number 9, MatroX and others high quality cards, are same like UNDERdog garbage ones such as Super, Axle and whatever NOname you can think of, as they are not clearly...

At least I respect the opinion of others if they enjoyed it and telling this to them on this thread is a very futile attempt.

BTW, I have a noname S3 Trio3D/2X 8MB PCI card that has very good image quality (aside from the brightness bug which can be easily dealt with) and it can handle PCI bus clocks that are out of spec unlike my Compaq S3 ViRGE/GX (which suffers from occasional palette corruption if the PCI bus clock is above 33 MHz). Currently using it on my Socket 7 computer along with a single Voodoo2 12MB card from InnoVision.

Interesting.. Some times dog brand such as EliteGroup, ASSrock, PcChips, QDI, Acorp ect just tend to die way less, and most of the time they just work, meanwhile good brands such as ABIT, ASUS (dont cosider ASUS premium, but they usually use expensive Rubycon caps) . But normally premium brands work better from what i saw. I think is not good to use overall parts that need to be on less clock speed (for example PCI bus, sometimes from OC the bus rises, better to have a way of not rising the bus in the first place), not on more, and you may end up with some broken parts, usually HDD may get affected and other problems. Some cheaper parts dont have even CPU protection, that does not mean, when an quality board hard shut down to prevent damage, the cheap one wont care, and then ur system my fry, or die from overvolting for example..

HanSolo wrote on 2022-05-14, 17:32:

Radical Vision wrote on 2022-05-14, 15:34:

Well tell that to ppl that think Compaq, Dimond, Elsa, Creative, Number 9, MatroX and others high quality cards, are same like UNDERdog garbage ones such as Super, Axle and whatever NOname you can think of, as they are not clearly...

I still don't get how you define 'high quality'. What are your objective criteria?

If you have Diamond cards compare them, to no name cards, just by putting them next to eatch other, you will see the Diamond card is better build.
Even the parts on the quality brand and PCB look and even feel better when you touch it with hand..

There was also in the past from the "good" brands as ppl claim they are fine, like PChips that used fake cache modules on their 386/ 486 boards. Ypu see the board have cache on it, BUT there are no traces there LMAO.. Brands such as AOpen, Gigabyte (depends on the model) , ASUS (they use most of the time the best brand Rubycon) use high quality caps, specially most AOpen and ASUS boards use mostly Rubycon caps, AOpen uses most of the time mix between ruby and crap ones, other times only Rubycon. Gigabyte boards even in Slot 1 (the more high end only) have DUAL BIOS and better caps and even CPU overvoltage protection.. Wonder why ATi and MatroX cards are one of the very best to par with 3Dfx Voodoo I and II, simple as their cards are of very high build quality and the chipset as well provide better 2D quality, but the components on the PCB will help even further for the image quality.

For you and others that claim about quality and stuff.. Take for example 3.5 inch Floppy drives, normally brands aside from TEAC and panasonic are garbage, SONY also have fine drives, but rest brands are just bad and dont read anyhing.

So you and the rest that claim, there is no difference.. The Hercules Terminator S3 card, is clear it have better PCB, better caps that last way longer, and does not show crap image quality.. While the NOname S3 is clear the PCB is cheap and nasty, and there are caps that are dry AF, and normally on so old cards these electrolytic caps are very dead, and will produce very bad image quality. It is clear they did even cheap out on memory size, you need to find memory chips now, while on the more premium card with the way more premium PCB that is not the case..
I bet every single component aside from the main chipset, is WAY more cheaper on the UNDERdog "branded" S3 card, compared to the Hercules Terminator.
Also there appears to be feature connectors on both cards, but the Terminator card have x2 more connectors on it and an jumper to set something...

IMG_20181224_110751.jpg
IMG_20181224_123546.jpg

Now these
The Gigabyte have superior quality to this garbage Gainward board. Allbig caps are Sanyo quality caps, no need to mention the Dual BIOS that the other board and many lacks, CPU overvoltage protection, speaker and 4 slots of memory supporting max of 1GB SDram total, compared to 700MB on the green board. The Gigabyte have also way more capacitors, more mosfets (keep in mind this board is mostly for Pentium II, while the gainward supports up to 700MHz vs like 450MHz means Gigabyte did overbuild their board)..

IMG_20171015_164135.jpg
IMG_20160325_134909.jpg

Brawndo wrote on 2022-05-14, 17:45:

Radical Vision wrote on 2022-05-14, 16:53:

Sadly it lacks the ISA slot.. I hate when they have printed the f**king ISA on the PCBm but yet no one bothered to install one... Not sure if someone try, can solder ISA slot there...

I could be wrong, but it's possible the BIOS wouldn't support ISA even if you did solder a connector on, in which case you'd need a modified BIOS for it to work.

It is still an option prob, sadly they did not bother to solder an ISA slot..

You keep talking about brands. "shit" companies such as ECS and PCChips have made some great quality boards over the years, despite the fact that they generally make garbage. The ECS KV2 Extreme is one such board, and another is the K7VTA3 (certain revisions at least). PCChips makes the M519? or something, a pretty speedy and fairly reliable socket 3 motherboard - despite some boards using fake L2 cache.

On the other hand Asus, a company lots of collectors and enthusiasts keep parsing, made and sold as many poor quality boards as good quality ones. Am I to take it a brand is considered good if most of their products are better then average? Well then we're in trouble.. By that logic Asus is a "meh" brand - at least when it comes to motherboards. When it comes to video cards, they're a disaster. Dead ROG Strix RX Vega 64. Dead HD 280x. 3x Dead Geforce 4 Ti 4600s. Dead DirectCU II TOP GTX 680. Dead 8800GTX. All these cards were working when I got them. The Vega64, 680 and 280x were bought when they were new. The vega lasted 11 months. Then RMA. The replacement card died after a little over a year. No overclocking - very well ventilated case (cooler master HAF XB). The 280x started to show artifacts. Had to replace the BIOS with an updated one that dropped the clocks. It lasted 4 years in a living room PC that was used for movies and netflix 99% of the time. The 680 lasted the warranty period then died - blown mosfet - took traces with it. And so on. The P5B (ooooh I'm gonna get so much flack for this) is a dumpster fire from start to finish. 5 or 6 revisions, all quite different. Some can't feed faster video cards like a Voodoo 3. Others can't run the more power hungry CPUs (Early cyrix, fast K6-3's, etc) and compared to it's Acorp counterpart with the same chipset, they keep dying. I have 5 P5B boards, only one works and I'm afraid to use it in a build. All their socket 7 era boards are rubbish. The P55T2P4 is a mediocre board - it's extremely picky about SDRAM modules (runs OK with most SIMMs tho), it can't deliver enough power to the PCI slots for a Voodoo 3 3000 PCI and is unstable with a PCI Banshee... VRMs get phenomenally hot even with a 166mHz pentium 1 MMX... and I have 3 dead ones in a box. Found quite a few of these, built systems with them, then traded them off. This model was pretty common in my neck of the woods and I found quite a few of them - most in working order. Asus socket A era stuff is complete trash. The only board that stands out is the A7V8X-X but some of these loose a memory channel and are affected by capacitor plague. The P4P800-X/Deluxe/VM series has issues writing or reading from EEPROM using the stock winbond chips they come with and sometimes corrupt BIOS. Replacing the stock EEPROM with Amtel chips I got on ebay fixed my boards as they started dying one by one. They do make exceptional boards as well, but only later generations.

Now the good - the P5K-WS is amazing, and so is the P6T Deluxe. Most of their mid-high end boards from that generation on are very good, but the lower end stuff is horrendous and overpriced. The Asus Crosshair series are some of the most feature ritch boards I've ever used. Their gaming laptops are also very good and rather well priced - even the cheaper ones are at least decent - despite inadequate cooling. Hell, my old TUG Gaming FA506IV frequently got to 95C during gaming, and despite that it's still around - my kid is using it now - and I roasted that sucker for over 2 years. The battery on it is incredible as well. 2.5 years of usage and battery health is 80%. I also had a couple of G751 laptops a few years ago - a G751JT and a G751JY - and I loved those machines. My current daily driver is a G713QY and I love it. I tried Lenovo, MSI and Acer laptops but something's always missing. For lenovo it's performance and driver support. I bought a 15" model (can't remember model number) with a GTX 1060 and an I5 CPU and although I was impressed with the cooling and build quality, performance and driver support was a joke. The 1060 performed like a 1050ti... MSI's laptops feel cheap - at least the one I had witch was a mid-high end model with a GTX 1070 and a 17" screen. Cheap feeling plastic, horrible trackpad with integrated buttons, bendy keyboard... performance was great, and so was cooling. The screen wasn't great either. Some TN panel that looked really washed out compared to other laptops and some desktop monitors. Acer's Preadator line I did like a lot, but they don't seem to include large capacity batteries in their gaming laptops, so after only a few months I traded my predator 17 for... an Asus TUF with similar specs. Acer only provided a 50wh battery witch was good for 3-4 hours of work. The little TUF gaming came with a 90wh battery witch lasted for over 7 hours of work. Hell my current ROG G713QY has 7 to 9 hours of battery life - tough to find a 17" laptop with a better battery or nicer build.

Abit is generally considered a great brand - and is in fact one of my favorites. Their motherboards are some of the most feature ritch and capable of their time - but they used rubbish components. Cheap caps and no-name VRMs and FETs on some models you can't even find equivalents for.

No idea what you have against asrock - they make some of the most robust motherboards of any manufacturer - and that spans across many platforms and generations. All the asrock boards in my collection work flawlessly. Build quality and layout is better then even on their budget models like the K7S41GX. Asrock Z68 and Z77 boards are amazing. Asus level features, incredible reliability and low price. I have a H55 Asrock mATX motherboard that I got like 4 or 5 years ago witch I beat the SHIT out of... i5 750 overclocked to 4.1GHz witch crazy voltage.... I used 1833 and 2133Mhz ddr3 in the thing.... i7 860 overclocked to 4.316Ghz - an all on a puny budget Asrock H55M witch is still going! My mon is using it, together with said i7 860 (stock clocks this time), 8Gb of 2133MHz DDR3 running at 1600MHz and a GTX 460. Had some great fun with my Z77 Extreme 3 back in the day. I remember pushing a 2500k to 4.4Ghz on that board...

Biostar is another brand that makes very good quality mainboards. The MB8433UUD-A is already legendary. They have some amazing socket 7 (8500TUD-A), socket A and AM3 motherboards as well. Sure, their current models look cheap and extremely chinese - "racing"? Really? Are they marketing them to 10 year olds? Some of the best Biostar motherboards I've ever used are the A780L3, TA790GX and a X370GTN. The A780L3 was used as a test board for many years, intensively while I still had my shop open. It still works great. It's on a shelf with a Phenom II X3 installed in the socket.

MSI build pretty dodgy boards back in the day. Their early 90's stuff is pretty good. In fact one of my favorite socket 3 motherboards is the MSI MS-4144 - I have two of these - one purchased from a recycling center, the other came in a complete build with a POD83 - they both work flawlessly. Hell, the one from the recycling center was sitting outside in dirt and rain in a pile of other boards for god knows how long. I also liked their Z77 boards - used to own a z77a-g45 back in the day and I was pretty happy with it. My favorite MSI board has to be the p35 platinum - boy was this baby overbuilt. I had loads of fun overclocking my Q6600 then my Q9550. But their socket a to early LGA775 boards are horrendous. Poor features on most, crappy design, crappy components.

Gigabyte is... OK? For the most part? Don't have much to say about their motherboards - I'd characterize them as unremarkable. I've had good experience with them from a reliability point of view, and they always seem to be well priced, but they are not exciting. My oldest Gigabyte board is a (no surprise here) socket 3 GA486AM/S. Good little board - fast, compatible, stable, hell, even the soldered DALLAS RTC chip it came with is still holding a charge believe it or not! I'm a fan of their newer boards - they seem very well built and have great layout and features. Great pricing too. Right now my media center PC is using a Gigabyte B550M Aorus Elite and man do I like this thing. Built like a tank, It took my 5700G to 4.7GHz without complaints or complications, it could even drive the iGPU easily to 2.4Ghz. I did have some minor issues with a GA-X79-UD5 back in the day - it liked to corrupt cmos settings for some reason. If I left my PC off for more then 48 hours it would often corrupt cmos and I had to go into bios and load the OC profile I made. My brother in law had similar CMOS related issues with a GA-Z77X-UD5H.

Gainward and Palit... you were trashing gainward back there but I have a sizeable collection of Gainward / Palit / PC Partner boards and they all work flawlessly. Palit cards in particular are incredibly well built although their 2000's stuff looks a bit dodgy - AND Palit is an OEM for other brands as well. If I'm not mistaking Galaxy's Hall of Fame GTX 980 was in fact manufactured by palit. I have palit video cards from the '80's - I think my oldest palit card is a WDC Paradise with 256k of ram. I also have an ET4000AX made by them, as well as a couple of Geforce 3 Ti200, several FX series cards and so on - all working. Hell, I have some cheap Geforce 2 MX palit cards that have been thrown around my shop, used for testing when AGP was still relevant, overclocked for poops and giggles, and they still work. As for Gainward I have a Voodoo 2 card made by them and a Voodoo 4.

My point is most manufacturers have good and bad products, calling a brand good or bad is irrelevant. But what do I know, there's people on this forum who swear by the P5B and here I am sitting on four dead P5B's.

Cuttoon wrote on 2022-05-14, 14:27:

That may have been the very mother of all AT tower cases with PSU, MHz display and all other bells and whistles and including transport, it's still a good deal.

It was the case I presented in this threads around 2 or 3 weeks ago... It was very nice, but nothing special. And friend picked it up himself.

Radical Vision wrote on 2022-05-14, 15:34:

Uuuu oke... So you think i did fly to some rich arabian country to get all stuff i have in here, or i did get them from ebay or […]
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Tetrium wrote on 2022-05-07, 11:35:

And do you even realize that basically the entire reason Vogons is what it is today is because people like us were basically tra […]
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Radical Vision wrote on 2022-05-07, 10:55:

Well i call working scrap stuff like most ASSrock boards, ECS boards, PChips, Super part, all 478 board aside from the exotic ones (sush as MSI Platinum, ABIT ect), low parts Celerons, Sempron, cards like TNT 2 M64 (jesus i hate this card) GEforce II MX200/400, GEforce 4 MX, GEforce FX5200, Radeon 9200, about most ATi Rage cards and others. These are part that are working but they are just scrap to me, die to them being just low end, not high end or something special. Ofc i dont trow working parts to scrappers, i just sell them to ppl that are not like me collection only the best, and with to money buy cool stuff.

BTW to be PC HW hoarder is hard for most men, die to them having a wife or gf, many did divorse, as they cant collect parts die to their wifes trowing stuff on the garbage, and not accepting the hobby of the men. Got cool parts from ppl that did have no choice but to trow the parts on the garbage or sell them, die to their wifes being females, they will never understand us..

And do you even realize that basically the entire reason Vogons is what it is today is because people like us were basically trashpicking these old boxed games, picked up those sidecurbed PCs, revisited thrift stores and fleamarkets and bought those mass-dumpsaled obsolete junk parts? Do you think we all went to Dubai to get these items? Do you know that the wealth of knowledge and knowhow is accumulated by tinkering with any actual parts or do you think we only started out using ultra this and Collector Edition game that and it all just worked out of the box with no effort put into it and this forum is just one big dick measuring contest or something?

We started out with the what you would call junk parts and build it up from there my dude. Back then others called it all junk and nobody wanted those ultras, could get Voodoo 3 3000 for a can of beer and I mean literally. Elitists didn't really want those cards back then, people like us did.

But anyway, I digress for a bit here.

You also said something about collectors but frankly most of those collectors don't actually use the hardware they purchase. Some may end up using it very briefly for some youtube benchmark footage but some people here buy actual parts with the intent of actually using it. And I mean probably for months or even years on end.

Nobody really cares if the PCB is 'the wrong color' or if it's not the ultra version of your favorite board. What mattes is that people are having fun with what they do and that it works xD

You're just coming across as vain here especially if you trash someone else simply because you think their purchase (with which they also state are perfectly happy and works in every regard they wanted from it) is too smol. or the wrong color,lol. Especially if it's something highly sought after like something 3dfx and is genuinely making somebody happy.
It's fine that you don't like it, but no need to be such a dick about it.

Uuuu oke... So you think i did fly to some rich arabian country to get all stuff i have in here, or i did get them from ebay or something ?!?!? And you think i did not get stuff from dumpsters and shit.. Seems you got the wrong idea about what i mean (or maybe as i speak more harsh about parts that I DONT really like), sure for me such Super "brand"parts or like Acorp and other are crap and working scrap, BUT that does not mean i will trow them to scrappers or destroy them. No i will jsut sell them, trade them and just be happy while doing that and replacing these nasty to me crap brands with some parts with better quality or even PCB if you want.. And yes if someone CANT tell the difference between and low quality par and way better one, look at MatroX cards for example, or ELSA specially Diamond, if i have to choose Diamond Voodoo cards vs Super or some nasty no name dog brands id go every time with Diamond ofc... Here where i am i preserve and safe the good retro HW parts ( shit i even safe crap stuff such as this Super Banshee, ECS boards, Acorp parts, ASSrock and other crap) . I am all about for getting cheap and nice parts, but i never liked, and never will budget brands (hell i even hate ASUS as well they suck for me dont like them, no matter everyone consider them the holy grail of retro brands) they are just nasty to me, to look at them.. Compare Compaq/ IBM PCB quality to lets say these Super cards... Or take a look at S3 for example Trio and Vorge cards, the no name brands are garbage, BUT compare them to Virge/ Trio made by Number Nine, Diamond these cards are better quality and i prefer them.. Damn i can even tell they are beter made then the no name dog brands even when holding them on my hand.. Not that it matters to most ppl, as that Super card may be nasty cheap to me, BUT it will prob work just fine.. Still i am a perfectionist, i hate alsos stuff like if a cool part i find (lets take for example AWE64 Gold) and the previous owner was slappy and did scratch the PCB, chips or something, and even cleaning the card wont fix that scratches i really f**king hate that it piss me more then dog branded parts such as Voodoo... Or when some idiot decide to send me some old/ vintage HW part with original box, and he does not take the care to preserver the f**king original box, and use tape on it for safer shipping DAMN hate that so much, it makes the original box with glue all over, and then need to use isopropyl alcohol and ALOT of rubbing in order to fix the box to its original state FFS....

Whatever as my name suggest i am an Radical person, i see things differently, but that is my point of view.. Even if i find whole box full of some 3Dfx cards and all are some garbage UNDERdog brand i will ofc happily take them and sell/ trade every single one of them.. I also as an old HW enthusiast have some twisted feeling of joy, when i watch some cheap garbage stuff such as KME "300w" PSU, dog brands such as PCchips boards and others, but that is only when i get some for free, i just like how crap and cheap they feel, but ofc i will never collect such things, i have them for sale, but most of the time no one buy that crap... After all everyone is different, some ppl will be happy on a single 3Dfx cards, others like me get disgusted by cheap brands..

Most of my Collection, as you can see i saved ton of parts from the garbage, as many of these was going to end up to the trash, or some idiot was going to destroy them as scrap or, as they dont care about the old HW parts as much as me, or everyone here..

https://imgur.com/a/wWe1b

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-05-08, 06:47:

Edit - Saw a Voodoo3 3000 listed on eBay .. thing is .. its one of them rare Compaq Vodoo3 3500's that doesnt need the silly breakout cable, Ill add it to my Voodoo Collection which is now complete .. aside from a Rush which quite frankly are not worth the bother. (Knowing me Ill likely buy one later when a super cheap one shows up !)

Interesting Rush sure is not very common card, but to have other Voodoo cards, and not rush.. But depend since when someone collects.. The ppl that started like 20 years ago are faaaar from the rest of us, that stared like 7-8 years ago collecting... Well in some local shop you may find some of them if lucky...

Gmlb256 wrote on 2022-05-08, 14:19:

Nice! Compaq does make quality video cards from existing components. Have a S3 ViRGE/GX and nVidia TNT2 cards built by them.

Well tell that to ppl that think Compaq, Dimond, Elsa, Creative, Number 9, MatroX and others high quality cards, are same like UNDERdog garbage ones such as Super, Axle and whatever NOname you can think of, as they are not clearly...

Finding a Voodoo Rush is easier than finding a good Voodoo 1 I'm spoiled for choice when it comes to the rush cards and if I decide to grab one I might wait till a rare 8mb one shows up or a nice Stingray shows up at a reasonable price.

Found this unbelievable score on EBay for $45 and free shipping! Seller's listing stated unit was untested and no HDD. For $45 it was worth the gamble and it paid off. It's in excellent condition and works perfectly. Even has the original hard drive sled. Only thing that needed replacing was the dead BR2350 with a CR2032.

Brickpad wrote on 2022-05-15, 03:40:

Found this unbelievable score on EBay for $45 and free shipping! Seller's listing stated unit was untested and no HDD. For $45 it was worth the gamble and it paid off. It's in excellent condition and works perfectly. Even has the original hard drive sled. Only thing that needed replacing was the dead BR2350 with a CR2032.

Cool looking case. Whats inside?

pan069 wrote on 2022-05-15, 05:31:

Brickpad wrote on 2022-05-15, 03:40:

Found this unbelievable score on EBay for $45 and free shipping! Seller's listing stated unit was untested and no HDD. For $45 it was worth the gamble and it paid off. It's in excellent condition and works perfectly. Even has the original hard drive sled. Only thing that needed replacing was the dead BR2350 with a CR2032.

Cool looking case. Whats inside?

That's half the fun of mystery eBay cases 🤣, the other half is opening it up and finding something rare or unusual.

Brickpad wrote on 2022-05-15, 03:40:

Only thing that needed replacing was the dead BR2350 with a CR2032.

BRxxxx is rechargable, CRxxxx is not. Be careful!

Socket3 wrote on 2022-05-14, 23:19:

You keep talking about brands. "shit" companies such as ECS and PCChips have made some great quality boards over the years, desp […]
Show full quote

Radical Vision wrote on 2022-05-14, 19:57:

Interesting.. Some times dog brand such as EliteGroup, ASSrock, PcChips, QDI, Acorp ect just tend to die way less, and most of t […]
Show full quote

Gmlb256 wrote on 2022-05-14, 17:21:

At least I respect the opinion of others if they enjoyed it and telling this to them on this thread is a very futile attempt.

BTW, I have a noname S3 Trio3D/2X 8MB PCI card that has very good image quality (aside from the brightness bug which can be easily dealt with) and it can handle PCI bus clocks that are out of spec unlike my Compaq S3 ViRGE/GX (which suffers from occasional palette corruption if the PCI bus clock is above 33 MHz). Currently using it on my Socket 7 computer along with a single Voodoo2 12MB card from InnoVision.

Interesting.. Some times dog brand such as EliteGroup, ASSrock, PcChips, QDI, Acorp ect just tend to die way less, and most of the time they just work, meanwhile good brands such as ABIT, ASUS (dont cosider ASUS premium, but they usually use expensive Rubycon caps) . But normally premium brands work better from what i saw. I think is not good to use overall parts that need to be on less clock speed (for example PCI bus, sometimes from OC the bus rises, better to have a way of not rising the bus in the first place), not on more, and you may end up with some broken parts, usually HDD may get affected and other problems. Some cheaper parts dont have even CPU protection, that does not mean, when an quality board hard shut down to prevent damage, the cheap one wont care, and then ur system my fry, or die from overvolting for example..

HanSolo wrote on 2022-05-14, 17:32:

I still don't get how you define 'high quality'. What are your objective criteria?

If you have Diamond cards compare them, to no name cards, just by putting them next to eatch other, you will see the Diamond card is better build.
Even the parts on the quality brand and PCB look and even feel better when you touch it with hand..

There was also in the past from the "good" brands as ppl claim they are fine, like PChips that used fake cache modules on their 386/ 486 boards. Ypu see the board have cache on it, BUT there are no traces there LMAO.. Brands such as AOpen, Gigabyte (depends on the model) , ASUS (they use most of the time the best brand Rubycon) use high quality caps, specially most AOpen and ASUS boards use mostly Rubycon caps, AOpen uses most of the time mix between ruby and crap ones, other times only Rubycon. Gigabyte boards even in Slot 1 (the more high end only) have DUAL BIOS and better caps and even CPU overvoltage protection.. Wonder why ATi and MatroX cards are one of the very best to par with 3Dfx Voodoo I and II, simple as their cards are of very high build quality and the chipset as well provide better 2D quality, but the components on the PCB will help even further for the image quality.

For you and others that claim about quality and stuff.. Take for example 3.5 inch Floppy drives, normally brands aside from TEAC and panasonic are garbage, SONY also have fine drives, but rest brands are just bad and dont read anyhing.

So you and the rest that claim, there is no difference.. The Hercules Terminator S3 card, is clear it have better PCB, better caps that last way longer, and does not show crap image quality.. While the NOname S3 is clear the PCB is cheap and nasty, and there are caps that are dry AF, and normally on so old cards these electrolytic caps are very dead, and will produce very bad image quality. It is clear they did even cheap out on memory size, you need to find memory chips now, while on the more premium card with the way more premium PCB that is not the case..
I bet every single component aside from the main chipset, is WAY more cheaper on the UNDERdog "branded" S3 card, compared to the Hercules Terminator.
Also there appears to be feature connectors on both cards, but the Terminator card have x2 more connectors on it and an jumper to set something...

IMG_20181224_110751.jpg
IMG_20181224_123546.jpg

Now these
The Gigabyte have superior quality to this garbage Gainward board. Allbig caps are Sanyo quality caps, no need to mention the Dual BIOS that the other board and many lacks, CPU overvoltage protection, speaker and 4 slots of memory supporting max of 1GB SDram total, compared to 700MB on the green board. The Gigabyte have also way more capacitors, more mosfets (keep in mind this board is mostly for Pentium II, while the gainward supports up to 700MHz vs like 450MHz means Gigabyte did overbuild their board)..

IMG_20171015_164135.jpg
IMG_20160325_134909.jpg

Brawndo wrote on 2022-05-14, 17:45:

I could be wrong, but it's possible the BIOS wouldn't support ISA even if you did solder a connector on, in which case you'd need a modified BIOS for it to work.

It is still an option prob, sadly they did not bother to solder an ISA slot..

You keep talking about brands. "shit" companies such as ECS and PCChips have made some great quality boards over the years, despite the fact that they generally make garbage. The ECS KV2 Extreme is one such board, and another is the K7VTA3 (certain revisions at least). PCChips makes the M519? or something, a pretty speedy and fairly reliable socket 3 motherboard - despite some boards using fake L2 cache.

On the other hand Asus, a company lots of collectors and enthusiasts keep parsing, made and sold as many poor quality boards as good quality ones. Am I to take it a brand is considered good if most of their products are better then average? Well then we're in trouble.. By that logic Asus is a "meh" brand - at least when it comes to motherboards. When it comes to video cards, they're a disaster. Dead ROG Strix RX Vega 64. Dead HD 280x. 3x Dead Geforce 4 Ti 4600s. Dead DirectCU II TOP GTX 680. Dead 8800GTX. All these cards were working when I got them. The Vega64, 680 and 280x were bought when they were new. The vega lasted 11 months. Then RMA. The replacement card died after a little over a year. No overclocking - very well ventilated case (cooler master HAF XB). The 280x started to show artifacts. Had to replace the BIOS with an updated one that dropped the clocks. It lasted 4 years in a living room PC that was used for movies and netflix 99% of the time. The 680 lasted the warranty period then died - blown mosfet - took traces with it. And so on. The P5B (ooooh I'm gonna get so much flack for this) is a dumpster fire from start to finish. 5 or 6 revisions, all quite different. Some can't feed faster video cards like a Voodoo 3. Others can't run the more power hungry CPUs (Early cyrix, fast K6-3's, etc) and compared to it's Acorp counterpart with the same chipset, they keep dying. I have 5 P5B boards, only one works and I'm afraid to use it in a build. All their socket 7 era boards are rubbish. The P55T2P4 is a mediocre board - it's extremely picky about SDRAM modules (runs OK with most SIMMs tho), it can't deliver enough power to the PCI slots for a Voodoo 3 3000 PCI and is unstable with a PCI Banshee... VRMs get phenomenally hot even with a 166mHz pentium 1 MMX... and I have 3 dead ones in a box. Found quite a few of these, built systems with them, then traded them off. This model was pretty common in my neck of the woods and I found quite a few of them - most in working order. Asus socket A era stuff is complete trash. The only board that stands out is the A7V8X-X but some of these loose a memory channel and are affected by capacitor plague. The P4P800-X/Deluxe/VM series has issues writing or reading from EEPROM using the stock winbond chips they come with and sometimes corrupt BIOS. Replacing the stock EEPROM with Amtel chips I got on ebay fixed my boards as they started dying one by one. They do make exceptional boards as well, but only later generations.

Now the good - the P5K-WS is amazing, and so is the P6T Deluxe. Most of their mid-high end boards from that generation on are very good, but the lower end stuff is horrendous and overpriced. The Asus Crosshair series are some of the most feature ritch boards I've ever used. Their gaming laptops are also very good and rather well priced - even the cheaper ones are at least decent - despite inadequate cooling. Hell, my old TUG Gaming FA506IV frequently got to 95C during gaming, and despite that it's still around - my kid is using it now - and I roasted that sucker for over 2 years. The battery on it is incredible as well. 2.5 years of usage and battery health is 80%. I also had a couple of G751 laptops a few years ago - a G751JT and a G751JY - and I loved those machines. My current daily driver is a G713QY and I love it. I tried Lenovo, MSI and Acer laptops but something's always missing. For lenovo it's performance and driver support. I bought a 15" model (can't remember model number) with a GTX 1060 and an I5 CPU and although I was impressed with the cooling and build quality, performance and driver support was a joke. The 1060 performed like a 1050ti... MSI's laptops feel cheap - at least the one I had witch was a mid-high end model with a GTX 1070 and a 17" screen. Cheap feeling plastic, horrible trackpad with integrated buttons, bendy keyboard... performance was great, and so was cooling. The screen wasn't great either. Some TN panel that looked really washed out compared to other laptops and some desktop monitors. Acer's Preadator line I did like a lot, but they don't seem to include large capacity batteries in their gaming laptops, so after only a few months I traded my predator 17 for... an Asus TUF with similar specs. Acer only provided a 50wh battery witch was good for 3-4 hours of work. The little TUF gaming came with a 90wh battery witch lasted for over 7 hours of work. Hell my current ROG G713QY has 7 to 9 hours of battery life - tough to find a 17" laptop with a better battery or nicer build.

Abit is generally considered a great brand - and is in fact one of my favorites. Their motherboards are some of the most feature ritch and capable of their time - but they used rubbish components. Cheap caps and no-name VRMs and FETs on some models you can't even find equivalents for.

No idea what you have against asrock - they make some of the most robust motherboards of any manufacturer - and that spans across many platforms and generations. All the asrock boards in my collection work flawlessly. Build quality and layout is better then even on their budget models like the K7S41GX. Asrock Z68 and Z77 boards are amazing. Asus level features, incredible reliability and low price. I have a H55 Asrock mATX motherboard that I got like 4 or 5 years ago witch I beat the SHIT out of... i5 750 overclocked to 4.1GHz witch crazy voltage.... I used 1833 and 2133Mhz ddr3 in the thing.... i7 860 overclocked to 4.316Ghz - an all on a puny budget Asrock H55M witch is still going! My mon is using it, together with said i7 860 (stock clocks this time), 8Gb of 2133MHz DDR3 running at 1600MHz and a GTX 460. Had some great fun with my Z77 Extreme 3 back in the day. I remember pushing a 2500k to 4.4Ghz on that board...

Biostar is another brand that makes very good quality mainboards. The MB8433UUD-A is already legendary. They have some amazing socket 7 (8500TUD-A), socket A and AM3 motherboards as well. Sure, their current models look cheap and extremely chinese - "racing"? Really? Are they marketing them to 10 year olds? Some of the best Biostar motherboards I've ever used are the A780L3, TA790GX and a X370GTN. The A780L3 was used as a test board for many years, intensively while I still had my shop open. It still works great. It's on a shelf with a Phenom II X3 installed in the socket.

MSI build pretty dodgy boards back in the day. Their early 90's stuff is pretty good. In fact one of my favorite socket 3 motherboards is the MSI MS-4144 - I have two of these - one purchased from a recycling center, the other came in a complete build with a POD83 - they both work flawlessly. Hell, the one from the recycling center was sitting outside in dirt and rain in a pile of other boards for god knows how long. I also liked their Z77 boards - used to own a z77a-g45 back in the day and I was pretty happy with it. My favorite MSI board has to be the p35 platinum - boy was this baby overbuilt. I had loads of fun overclocking my Q6600 then my Q9550. But their socket a to early LGA775 boards are horrendous. Poor features on most, crappy design, crappy components.

Gigabyte is... OK? For the most part? Don't have much to say about their motherboards - I'd characterize them as unremarkable. I've had good experience with them from a reliability point of view, and they always seem to be well priced, but they are not exciting. My oldest Gigabyte board is a (no surprise here) socket 3 GA486AM/S. Good little board - fast, compatible, stable, hell, even the soldered DALLAS RTC chip it came with is still holding a charge believe it or not! I'm a fan of their newer boards - they seem very well built and have great layout and features. Great pricing too. Right now my media center PC is using a Gigabyte B550M Aorus Elite and man do I like this thing. Built like a tank, It took my 5700G to 4.7GHz without complaints or complications, it could even drive the iGPU easily to 2.4Ghz. I did have some minor issues with a GA-X79-UD5 back in the day - it liked to corrupt cmos settings for some reason. If I left my PC off for more then 48 hours it would often corrupt cmos and I had to go into bios and load the OC profile I made. My brother in law had similar CMOS related issues with a GA-Z77X-UD5H.

Gainward and Palit... you were trashing gainward back there but I have a sizeable collection of Gainward / Palit / PC Partner boards and they all work flawlessly. Palit cards in particular are incredibly well built although their 2000's stuff looks a bit dodgy - AND Palit is an OEM for other brands as well. If I'm not mistaking Galaxy's Hall of Fame GTX 980 was in fact manufactured by palit. I have palit video cards from the '80's - I think my oldest palit card is a WDC Paradise with 256k of ram. I also have an ET4000AX made by them, as well as a couple of Geforce 3 Ti200, several FX series cards and so on - all working. Hell, I have some cheap Geforce 2 MX palit cards that have been thrown around my shop, used for testing when AGP was still relevant, overclocked for poops and giggles, and they still work. As for Gainward I have a Voodoo 2 card made by them and a Voodoo 4.

My point is most manufacturers have good and bad products, calling a brand good or bad is irrelevant. But what do I know, there's people on this forum who swear by the P5B and here I am sitting on four dead P5B's.

I think you explained it really well 🙂
One does not simply lump brands into single categories like that, that's just stupid.

Gigabyte has made some very solid boards. My personal experience with them (the ones that I recall atm) is the GA-5AX, GA-6OXT and a KT600 based board (can't remember the model number except that it was not the GA-7VT600), but from my latest build (an older i5) the Gigabyte board simply died by ....turning it on and apparently Gigabyte boards of that era tend to spontaneously die a lot for no obvious reason whatsoever and with no obvious fix. Imo that board is just trash. Boards shouldn't just spontaneously die like that, this is a bad Gigabyte board and I'm still not at all happy with it (died like only a week ago so still somewhat fresh and not completely unbiased by it and I needed that system for a project of mine).
But the ones I mentioned earlier have been very solid to me and my most recent experience doesn't make Gigabyte as a brand, "junk" -_-

And one other thing that I felt is sometimes missing is that often things aren't great, but they aren't trash either. Oftentimes a certain part is simply unremarkable but that doesn't make it junk or great.

Life is simply not just black and white and some people seem to tend to forget that.

And I'm glad to see people sharing my opinion regarding this 🙂
If Vogons ever becomes a mere elitist echochambering narcisistic dickmeasuring contest I hope it all just gets deleted but I sincerely hope it will never come to that.

Gigabyte, Abit, QDI, AOpen and some other "cheap" like Chaintech had rock solid motherboards until the middle of 2000s. All my modern systems since Athlon XP are build on a Gigabyte.

Tetrium wrote on 2022-05-15, 07:51:

I think you explained it really well 🙂 One does not simply lump brands into single categories like that, that's just stupid. […]
Show full quote

Socket3 wrote on 2022-05-14, 23:19:

You keep talking about brands. "shit" companies such as ECS and PCChips have made some great quality boards over the years, desp […]
Show full quote

Radical Vision wrote on 2022-05-14, 19:57:

Interesting.. Some times dog brand such as EliteGroup, ASSrock, PcChips, QDI, Acorp ect just tend to die way less, and most of t […]
Show full quote

Interesting.. Some times dog brand such as EliteGroup, ASSrock, PcChips, QDI, Acorp ect just tend to die way less, and most of the time they just work, meanwhile good brands such as ABIT, ASUS (dont cosider ASUS premium, but they usually use expensive Rubycon caps) . But normally premium brands work better from what i saw. I think is not good to use overall parts that need to be on less clock speed (for example PCI bus, sometimes from OC the bus rises, better to have a way of not rising the bus in the first place), not on more, and you may end up with some broken parts, usually HDD may get affected and other problems. Some cheaper parts dont have even CPU protection, that does not mean, when an quality board hard shut down to prevent damage, the cheap one wont care, and then ur system my fry, or die from overvolting for example..

If you have Diamond cards compare them, to no name cards, just by putting them next to eatch other, you will see the Diamond card is better build.
Even the parts on the quality brand and PCB look and even feel better when you touch it with hand..

There was also in the past from the "good" brands as ppl claim they are fine, like PChips that used fake cache modules on their 386/ 486 boards. Ypu see the board have cache on it, BUT there are no traces there LMAO.. Brands such as AOpen, Gigabyte (depends on the model) , ASUS (they use most of the time the best brand Rubycon) use high quality caps, specially most AOpen and ASUS boards use mostly Rubycon caps, AOpen uses most of the time mix between ruby and crap ones, other times only Rubycon. Gigabyte boards even in Slot 1 (the more high end only) have DUAL BIOS and better caps and even CPU overvoltage protection.. Wonder why ATi and MatroX cards are one of the very best to par with 3Dfx Voodoo I and II, simple as their cards are of very high build quality and the chipset as well provide better 2D quality, but the components on the PCB will help even further for the image quality.

For you and others that claim about quality and stuff.. Take for example 3.5 inch Floppy drives, normally brands aside from TEAC and panasonic are garbage, SONY also have fine drives, but rest brands are just bad and dont read anyhing.

So you and the rest that claim, there is no difference.. The Hercules Terminator S3 card, is clear it have better PCB, better caps that last way longer, and does not show crap image quality.. While the NOname S3 is clear the PCB is cheap and nasty, and there are caps that are dry AF, and normally on so old cards these electrolytic caps are very dead, and will produce very bad image quality. It is clear they did even cheap out on memory size, you need to find memory chips now, while on the more premium card with the way more premium PCB that is not the case..
I bet every single component aside from the main chipset, is WAY more cheaper on the UNDERdog "branded" S3 card, compared to the Hercules Terminator.
Also there appears to be feature connectors on both cards, but the Terminator card have x2 more connectors on it and an jumper to set something...

IMG_20181224_110751.jpg
IMG_20181224_123546.jpg

Now these
The Gigabyte have superior quality to this garbage Gainward board. Allbig caps are Sanyo quality caps, no need to mention the Dual BIOS that the other board and many lacks, CPU overvoltage protection, speaker and 4 slots of memory supporting max of 1GB SDram total, compared to 700MB on the green board. The Gigabyte have also way more capacitors, more mosfets (keep in mind this board is mostly for Pentium II, while the gainward supports up to 700MHz vs like 450MHz means Gigabyte did overbuild their board)..

IMG_20171015_164135.jpg
IMG_20160325_134909.jpg

It is still an option prob, sadly they did not bother to solder an ISA slot..

You keep talking about brands. "shit" companies such as ECS and PCChips have made some great quality boards over the years, despite the fact that they generally make garbage. The ECS KV2 Extreme is one such board, and another is the K7VTA3 (certain revisions at least). PCChips makes the M519? or something, a pretty speedy and fairly reliable socket 3 motherboard - despite some boards using fake L2 cache.

On the other hand Asus, a company lots of collectors and enthusiasts keep parsing, made and sold as many poor quality boards as good quality ones. Am I to take it a brand is considered good if most of their products are better then average? Well then we're in trouble.. By that logic Asus is a "meh" brand - at least when it comes to motherboards. When it comes to video cards, they're a disaster. Dead ROG Strix RX Vega 64. Dead HD 280x. 3x Dead Geforce 4 Ti 4600s. Dead DirectCU II TOP GTX 680. Dead 8800GTX. All these cards were working when I got them. The Vega64, 680 and 280x were bought when they were new. The vega lasted 11 months. Then RMA. The replacement card died after a little over a year. No overclocking - very well ventilated case (cooler master HAF XB). The 280x started to show artifacts. Had to replace the BIOS with an updated one that dropped the clocks. It lasted 4 years in a living room PC that was used for movies and netflix 99% of the time. The 680 lasted the warranty period then died - blown mosfet - took traces with it. And so on. The P5B (ooooh I'm gonna get so much flack for this) is a dumpster fire from start to finish. 5 or 6 revisions, all quite different. Some can't feed faster video cards like a Voodoo 3. Others can't run the more power hungry CPUs (Early cyrix, fast K6-3's, etc) and compared to it's Acorp counterpart with the same chipset, they keep dying. I have 5 P5B boards, only one works and I'm afraid to use it in a build. All their socket 7 era boards are rubbish. The P55T2P4 is a mediocre board - it's extremely picky about SDRAM modules (runs OK with most SIMMs tho), it can't deliver enough power to the PCI slots for a Voodoo 3 3000 PCI and is unstable with a PCI Banshee... VRMs get phenomenally hot even with a 166mHz pentium 1 MMX... and I have 3 dead ones in a box. Found quite a few of these, built systems with them, then traded them off. This model was pretty common in my neck of the woods and I found quite a few of them - most in working order. Asus socket A era stuff is complete trash. The only board that stands out is the A7V8X-X but some of these loose a memory channel and are affected by capacitor plague. The P4P800-X/Deluxe/VM series has issues writing or reading from EEPROM using the stock winbond chips they come with and sometimes corrupt BIOS. Replacing the stock EEPROM with Amtel chips I got on ebay fixed my boards as they started dying one by one. They do make exceptional boards as well, but only later generations.

Now the good - the P5K-WS is amazing, and so is the P6T Deluxe. Most of their mid-high end boards from that generation on are very good, but the lower end stuff is horrendous and overpriced. The Asus Crosshair series are some of the most feature ritch boards I've ever used. Their gaming laptops are also very good and rather well priced - even the cheaper ones are at least decent - despite inadequate cooling. Hell, my old TUG Gaming FA506IV frequently got to 95C during gaming, and despite that it's still around - my kid is using it now - and I roasted that sucker for over 2 years. The battery on it is incredible as well. 2.5 years of usage and battery health is 80%. I also had a couple of G751 laptops a few years ago - a G751JT and a G751JY - and I loved those machines. My current daily driver is a G713QY and I love it. I tried Lenovo, MSI and Acer laptops but something's always missing. For lenovo it's performance and driver support. I bought a 15" model (can't remember model number) with a GTX 1060 and an I5 CPU and although I was impressed with the cooling and build quality, performance and driver support was a joke. The 1060 performed like a 1050ti... MSI's laptops feel cheap - at least the one I had witch was a mid-high end model with a GTX 1070 and a 17" screen. Cheap feeling plastic, horrible trackpad with integrated buttons, bendy keyboard... performance was great, and so was cooling. The screen wasn't great either. Some TN panel that looked really washed out compared to other laptops and some desktop monitors. Acer's Preadator line I did like a lot, but they don't seem to include large capacity batteries in their gaming laptops, so after only a few months I traded my predator 17 for... an Asus TUF with similar specs. Acer only provided a 50wh battery witch was good for 3-4 hours of work. The little TUF gaming came with a 90wh battery witch lasted for over 7 hours of work. Hell my current ROG G713QY has 7 to 9 hours of battery life - tough to find a 17" laptop with a better battery or nicer build.

Abit is generally considered a great brand - and is in fact one of my favorites. Their motherboards are some of the most feature ritch and capable of their time - but they used rubbish components. Cheap caps and no-name VRMs and FETs on some models you can't even find equivalents for.

No idea what you have against asrock - they make some of the most robust motherboards of any manufacturer - and that spans across many platforms and generations. All the asrock boards in my collection work flawlessly. Build quality and layout is better then even on their budget models like the K7S41GX. Asrock Z68 and Z77 boards are amazing. Asus level features, incredible reliability and low price. I have a H55 Asrock mATX motherboard that I got like 4 or 5 years ago witch I beat the SHIT out of... i5 750 overclocked to 4.1GHz witch crazy voltage.... I used 1833 and 2133Mhz ddr3 in the thing.... i7 860 overclocked to 4.316Ghz - an all on a puny budget Asrock H55M witch is still going! My mon is using it, together with said i7 860 (stock clocks this time), 8Gb of 2133MHz DDR3 running at 1600MHz and a GTX 460. Had some great fun with my Z77 Extreme 3 back in the day. I remember pushing a 2500k to 4.4Ghz on that board...

Biostar is another brand that makes very good quality mainboards. The MB8433UUD-A is already legendary. They have some amazing socket 7 (8500TUD-A), socket A and AM3 motherboards as well. Sure, their current models look cheap and extremely chinese - "racing"? Really? Are they marketing them to 10 year olds? Some of the best Biostar motherboards I've ever used are the A780L3, TA790GX and a X370GTN. The A780L3 was used as a test board for many years, intensively while I still had my shop open. It still works great. It's on a shelf with a Phenom II X3 installed in the socket.

MSI build pretty dodgy boards back in the day. Their early 90's stuff is pretty good. In fact one of my favorite socket 3 motherboards is the MSI MS-4144 - I have two of these - one purchased from a recycling center, the other came in a complete build with a POD83 - they both work flawlessly. Hell, the one from the recycling center was sitting outside in dirt and rain in a pile of other boards for god knows how long. I also liked their Z77 boards - used to own a z77a-g45 back in the day and I was pretty happy with it. My favorite MSI board has to be the p35 platinum - boy was this baby overbuilt. I had loads of fun overclocking my Q6600 then my Q9550. But their socket a to early LGA775 boards are horrendous. Poor features on most, crappy design, crappy components.

Gigabyte is... OK? For the most part? Don't have much to say about their motherboards - I'd characterize them as unremarkable. I've had good experience with them from a reliability point of view, and they always seem to be well priced, but they are not exciting. My oldest Gigabyte board is a (no surprise here) socket 3 GA486AM/S. Good little board - fast, compatible, stable, hell, even the soldered DALLAS RTC chip it came with is still holding a charge believe it or not! I'm a fan of their newer boards - they seem very well built and have great layout and features. Great pricing too. Right now my media center PC is using a Gigabyte B550M Aorus Elite and man do I like this thing. Built like a tank, It took my 5700G to 4.7GHz without complaints or complications, it could even drive the iGPU easily to 2.4Ghz. I did have some minor issues with a GA-X79-UD5 back in the day - it liked to corrupt cmos settings for some reason. If I left my PC off for more then 48 hours it would often corrupt cmos and I had to go into bios and load the OC profile I made. My brother in law had similar CMOS related issues with a GA-Z77X-UD5H.

Gainward and Palit... you were trashing gainward back there but I have a sizeable collection of Gainward / Palit / PC Partner boards and they all work flawlessly. Palit cards in particular are incredibly well built although their 2000's stuff looks a bit dodgy - AND Palit is an OEM for other brands as well. If I'm not mistaking Galaxy's Hall of Fame GTX 980 was in fact manufactured by palit. I have palit video cards from the '80's - I think my oldest palit card is a WDC Paradise with 256k of ram. I also have an ET4000AX made by them, as well as a couple of Geforce 3 Ti200, several FX series cards and so on - all working. Hell, I have some cheap Geforce 2 MX palit cards that have been thrown around my shop, used for testing when AGP was still relevant, overclocked for poops and giggles, and they still work. As for Gainward I have a Voodoo 2 card made by them and a Voodoo 4.

My point is most manufacturers have good and bad products, calling a brand good or bad is irrelevant. But what do I know, there's people on this forum who swear by the P5B and here I am sitting on four dead P5B's.

I think you explained it really well 🙂
One does not simply lump brands into single categories like that, that's just stupid.

Gigabyte has made some very solid boards. My personal experience with them (the ones that I recall atm) is the GA-5AX, GA-6OXT and a KT600 based board (can't remember the model number except that it was not the GA-7VT600), but from my latest build (an older i5) the Gigabyte board simply died by ....turning it on and apparently Gigabyte boards of that era tend to spontaneously die a lot for no obvious reason whatsoever and with no obvious fix. Imo that board is just trash. Boards shouldn't just spontaneously die like that, this is a bad Gigabyte board and I'm still not at all happy with it (died like only a week ago so still somewhat fresh and not completely unbiased by it and I needed that system for a project of mine).
But the ones I mentioned earlier have been very solid to me and my most recent experience doesn't make Gigabyte as a brand, "junk" -_-

And one other thing that I felt is sometimes missing is that often things aren't great, but they aren't trash either. Oftentimes a certain part is simply unremarkable but that doesn't make it junk or great.

Life is simply not just black and white and some people seem to tend to forget that.

And I'm glad to see people sharing my opinion regarding this 🙂
If Vogons ever becomes a mere elitist echochambering narcisistic dickmeasuring contest I hope it all just gets deleted but I sincerely hope it will never come to that.

Even the so called junk hardware is fun to tinker with, if it dies then so be it but my experience is that even some of the worst "shit" hardware can be surprisingly hardy and take quite a bit to actually kill which makes it great for test rigs where survival of the rig isn't a priority. Would I use "shit" hardware in my 24/7 retro rigs ..depends on what it is and if I can actually get a good replacement for it at a reasonable price, GPUs ? Yes no problem, CPUs/Ram/soundcard also yes, motherboard is a maybe since finding alternatives isn't hard or expensive. I draw the line at power supplies, they are the only item I will be snobbish about since the entire rig can be smoked by one bad PSU cap.

But I cant really say much about PSUs since I have a rig currently using the "600watt" Chinesium SHAW, so far its been fine and that PSU got tested and opened before I used it.

I love Vogons just for the huge amount of cool hardware users here have or find and I enjoy seeing it get posted here and discussed.

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-05-15, 08:08:

Even the so called junk hardware is fun to tinker with, if it dies then so be it but my experience is that even some of the wors […]
Show full quote

Tetrium wrote on 2022-05-15, 07:51:

I think you explained it really well 🙂 One does not simply lump brands into single categories like that, that's just stupid. […]
Show full quote

Socket3 wrote on 2022-05-14, 23:19:

You keep talking about brands. "shit" companies such as ECS and PCChips have made some great quality boards over the years, desp […]
Show full quote

You keep talking about brands. "shit" companies such as ECS and PCChips have made some great quality boards over the years, despite the fact that they generally make garbage. The ECS KV2 Extreme is one such board, and another is the K7VTA3 (certain revisions at least). PCChips makes the M519? or something, a pretty speedy and fairly reliable socket 3 motherboard - despite some boards using fake L2 cache.

On the other hand Asus, a company lots of collectors and enthusiasts keep parsing, made and sold as many poor quality boards as good quality ones. Am I to take it a brand is considered good if most of their products are better then average? Well then we're in trouble.. By that logic Asus is a "meh" brand - at least when it comes to motherboards. When it comes to video cards, they're a disaster. Dead ROG Strix RX Vega 64. Dead HD 280x. 3x Dead Geforce 4 Ti 4600s. Dead DirectCU II TOP GTX 680. Dead 8800GTX. All these cards were working when I got them. The Vega64, 680 and 280x were bought when they were new. The vega lasted 11 months. Then RMA. The replacement card died after a little over a year. No overclocking - very well ventilated case (cooler master HAF XB). The 280x started to show artifacts. Had to replace the BIOS with an updated one that dropped the clocks. It lasted 4 years in a living room PC that was used for movies and netflix 99% of the time. The 680 lasted the warranty period then died - blown mosfet - took traces with it. And so on. The P5B (ooooh I'm gonna get so much flack for this) is a dumpster fire from start to finish. 5 or 6 revisions, all quite different. Some can't feed faster video cards like a Voodoo 3. Others can't run the more power hungry CPUs (Early cyrix, fast K6-3's, etc) and compared to it's Acorp counterpart with the same chipset, they keep dying. I have 5 P5B boards, only one works and I'm afraid to use it in a build. All their socket 7 era boards are rubbish. The P55T2P4 is a mediocre board - it's extremely picky about SDRAM modules (runs OK with most SIMMs tho), it can't deliver enough power to the PCI slots for a Voodoo 3 3000 PCI and is unstable with a PCI Banshee... VRMs get phenomenally hot even with a 166mHz pentium 1 MMX... and I have 3 dead ones in a box. Found quite a few of these, built systems with them, then traded them off. This model was pretty common in my neck of the woods and I found quite a few of them - most in working order. Asus socket A era stuff is complete trash. The only board that stands out is the A7V8X-X but some of these loose a memory channel and are affected by capacitor plague. The P4P800-X/Deluxe/VM series has issues writing or reading from EEPROM using the stock winbond chips they come with and sometimes corrupt BIOS. Replacing the stock EEPROM with Amtel chips I got on ebay fixed my boards as they started dying one by one. They do make exceptional boards as well, but only later generations.

Now the good - the P5K-WS is amazing, and so is the P6T Deluxe. Most of their mid-high end boards from that generation on are very good, but the lower end stuff is horrendous and overpriced. The Asus Crosshair series are some of the most feature ritch boards I've ever used. Their gaming laptops are also very good and rather well priced - even the cheaper ones are at least decent - despite inadequate cooling. Hell, my old TUG Gaming FA506IV frequently got to 95C during gaming, and despite that it's still around - my kid is using it now - and I roasted that sucker for over 2 years. The battery on it is incredible as well. 2.5 years of usage and battery health is 80%. I also had a couple of G751 laptops a few years ago - a G751JT and a G751JY - and I loved those machines. My current daily driver is a G713QY and I love it. I tried Lenovo, MSI and Acer laptops but something's always missing. For lenovo it's performance and driver support. I bought a 15" model (can't remember model number) with a GTX 1060 and an I5 CPU and although I was impressed with the cooling and build quality, performance and driver support was a joke. The 1060 performed like a 1050ti... MSI's laptops feel cheap - at least the one I had witch was a mid-high end model with a GTX 1070 and a 17" screen. Cheap feeling plastic, horrible trackpad with integrated buttons, bendy keyboard... performance was great, and so was cooling. The screen wasn't great either. Some TN panel that looked really washed out compared to other laptops and some desktop monitors. Acer's Preadator line I did like a lot, but they don't seem to include large capacity batteries in their gaming laptops, so after only a few months I traded my predator 17 for... an Asus TUF with similar specs. Acer only provided a 50wh battery witch was good for 3-4 hours of work. The little TUF gaming came with a 90wh battery witch lasted for over 7 hours of work. Hell my current ROG G713QY has 7 to 9 hours of battery life - tough to find a 17" laptop with a better battery or nicer build.

Abit is generally considered a great brand - and is in fact one of my favorites. Their motherboards are some of the most feature ritch and capable of their time - but they used rubbish components. Cheap caps and no-name VRMs and FETs on some models you can't even find equivalents for.

No idea what you have against asrock - they make some of the most robust motherboards of any manufacturer - and that spans across many platforms and generations. All the asrock boards in my collection work flawlessly. Build quality and layout is better then even on their budget models like the K7S41GX. Asrock Z68 and Z77 boards are amazing. Asus level features, incredible reliability and low price. I have a H55 Asrock mATX motherboard that I got like 4 or 5 years ago witch I beat the SHIT out of... i5 750 overclocked to 4.1GHz witch crazy voltage.... I used 1833 and 2133Mhz ddr3 in the thing.... i7 860 overclocked to 4.316Ghz - an all on a puny budget Asrock H55M witch is still going! My mon is using it, together with said i7 860 (stock clocks this time), 8Gb of 2133MHz DDR3 running at 1600MHz and a GTX 460. Had some great fun with my Z77 Extreme 3 back in the day. I remember pushing a 2500k to 4.4Ghz on that board...

Biostar is another brand that makes very good quality mainboards. The MB8433UUD-A is already legendary. They have some amazing socket 7 (8500TUD-A), socket A and AM3 motherboards as well. Sure, their current models look cheap and extremely chinese - "racing"? Really? Are they marketing them to 10 year olds? Some of the best Biostar motherboards I've ever used are the A780L3, TA790GX and a X370GTN. The A780L3 was used as a test board for many years, intensively while I still had my shop open. It still works great. It's on a shelf with a Phenom II X3 installed in the socket.

MSI build pretty dodgy boards back in the day. Their early 90's stuff is pretty good. In fact one of my favorite socket 3 motherboards is the MSI MS-4144 - I have two of these - one purchased from a recycling center, the other came in a complete build with a POD83 - they both work flawlessly. Hell, the one from the recycling center was sitting outside in dirt and rain in a pile of other boards for god knows how long. I also liked their Z77 boards - used to own a z77a-g45 back in the day and I was pretty happy with it. My favorite MSI board has to be the p35 platinum - boy was this baby overbuilt. I had loads of fun overclocking my Q6600 then my Q9550. But their socket a to early LGA775 boards are horrendous. Poor features on most, crappy design, crappy components.

Gigabyte is... OK? For the most part? Don't have much to say about their motherboards - I'd characterize them as unremarkable. I've had good experience with them from a reliability point of view, and they always seem to be well priced, but they are not exciting. My oldest Gigabyte board is a (no surprise here) socket 3 GA486AM/S. Good little board - fast, compatible, stable, hell, even the soldered DALLAS RTC chip it came with is still holding a charge believe it or not! I'm a fan of their newer boards - they seem very well built and have great layout and features. Great pricing too. Right now my media center PC is using a Gigabyte B550M Aorus Elite and man do I like this thing. Built like a tank, It took my 5700G to 4.7GHz without complaints or complications, it could even drive the iGPU easily to 2.4Ghz. I did have some minor issues with a GA-X79-UD5 back in the day - it liked to corrupt cmos settings for some reason. If I left my PC off for more then 48 hours it would often corrupt cmos and I had to go into bios and load the OC profile I made. My brother in law had similar CMOS related issues with a GA-Z77X-UD5H.

Gainward and Palit... you were trashing gainward back there but I have a sizeable collection of Gainward / Palit / PC Partner boards and they all work flawlessly. Palit cards in particular are incredibly well built although their 2000's stuff looks a bit dodgy - AND Palit is an OEM for other brands as well. If I'm not mistaking Galaxy's Hall of Fame GTX 980 was in fact manufactured by palit. I have palit video cards from the '80's - I think my oldest palit card is a WDC Paradise with 256k of ram. I also have an ET4000AX made by them, as well as a couple of Geforce 3 Ti200, several FX series cards and so on - all working. Hell, I have some cheap Geforce 2 MX palit cards that have been thrown around my shop, used for testing when AGP was still relevant, overclocked for poops and giggles, and they still work. As for Gainward I have a Voodoo 2 card made by them and a Voodoo 4.

My point is most manufacturers have good and bad products, calling a brand good or bad is irrelevant. But what do I know, there's people on this forum who swear by the P5B and here I am sitting on four dead P5B's.

I think you explained it really well 🙂
One does not simply lump brands into single categories like that, that's just stupid.

Gigabyte has made some very solid boards. My personal experience with them (the ones that I recall atm) is the GA-5AX, GA-6OXT and a KT600 based board (can't remember the model number except that it was not the GA-7VT600), but from my latest build (an older i5) the Gigabyte board simply died by ....turning it on and apparently Gigabyte boards of that era tend to spontaneously die a lot for no obvious reason whatsoever and with no obvious fix. Imo that board is just trash. Boards shouldn't just spontaneously die like that, this is a bad Gigabyte board and I'm still not at all happy with it (died like only a week ago so still somewhat fresh and not completely unbiased by it and I needed that system for a project of mine).
But the ones I mentioned earlier have been very solid to me and my most recent experience doesn't make Gigabyte as a brand, "junk" -_-

And one other thing that I felt is sometimes missing is that often things aren't great, but they aren't trash either. Oftentimes a certain part is simply unremarkable but that doesn't make it junk or great.

Life is simply not just black and white and some people seem to tend to forget that.

And I'm glad to see people sharing my opinion regarding this 🙂
If Vogons ever becomes a mere elitist echochambering narcisistic dickmeasuring contest I hope it all just gets deleted but I sincerely hope it will never come to that.

Even the so called junk hardware is fun to tinker with, if it dies then so be it but my experience is that even some of the worst "shit" hardware can be surprisingly hardy and take quite a bit to actually kill which makes it great for test rigs where survival of the rig isn't a priority. Would I use "shit" hardware in my 24/7 retro rigs ..depends on what it is and if I can actually get a good replacement for it at a reasonable price, GPUs ? Yes no problem, CPUs/Ram/soundcard also yes, motherboard is a maybe since finding alternatives isn't hard or expensive. I draw the line at power supplies, they are the only item I will be snobbish about since the entire rig can be smoked by one bad PSU cap.

But I cant really say much about PSUs since I have a rig currently using the "600watt" Chinesium SHAW, so far its been fine and that PSU got tested and opened before I used it.

I love Vogons just for the huge amount of cool hardware users here have or find and I enjoy seeing it get posted here and discussed.

For me junk is literally that, a part that is so bad that it's best to bin it (like parts that are not just defective themselves, but also kill any hardware it is installed in or are just plain dangerous to use).
Like my recently deceased Gigabyte motherboard which is almost at that point. It still starts and soft-resets, but won't ever POST successfully anymore, but I did notice it does still recognize when all the memory slots are left empty so I could still use it to test dodgy DDR3 memory modules. Same with HP branded PSUs which appear to have standard ATX wiring, I might as well test those with this board. I'd rather not have a working board ruined by testing dodgy DDR3 memory.

This Gigabyte board is now my yolotester board 😜

I definitely agree with you on the PSUs. And yes, I've used some "shit" parts before. I mean one of my first builds ever was based on a motherboard + CPU that I had taken out of an OEM system with a burned out PSU (I had a chance to speak to its previous owner who had dumped it on the street as it wasn't actually far from where I lived at the time).
I mean it was apparently a probably fried s370 AGP-deficient 440LX 400MHz Celeron-only system, how trash/junk/shit/worthless can it get? Yet its remains ended up powering my first ever really extensively used retro rig, I kept using this system running for a number of years even after I had gotten much superior rigs going, I just loved that system so much <3
I had upgraded it with a 16MB TNT2 M64 PCI and some 64MB and 128MB PC-100 SDRAM (and a new PSU, obviously 🤣) and put WinME on there, I mean literally nothing in this rig was something any elitist would consider not-shit. But this literal phoenix worked like an elite soldier for me and it soldiered on through an entire Unreal playthrough and it was a stable, great and relatively quiet system and it was the first rig on which I really dared to test my WinME tweaks.
When I found it, it was so dirty. Even now I'm kinda sad I didn't take any pics of it (especially of the burned carcass I originally found it in, it was gross), but it was during an era when digital cameras weren't really a thing yet.

Only a fool would dismiss a rig like that ^^

Tetrium wrote on 2022-05-15, 09:01:

For me junk is literally that, a part that is so bad that it's best to bin it (like parts that are not just defective themselves […]
Show full quote

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-05-15, 08:08:

Even the so called junk hardware is fun to tinker with, if it dies then so be it but my experience is that even some of the wors […]
Show full quote

Tetrium wrote on 2022-05-15, 07:51:

I think you explained it really well 🙂 One does not simply lump brands into single categories like that, that's just stupid. […]
Show full quote

I think you explained it really well 🙂
One does not simply lump brands into single categories like that, that's just stupid.

Gigabyte has made some very solid boards. My personal experience with them (the ones that I recall atm) is the GA-5AX, GA-6OXT and a KT600 based board (can't remember the model number except that it was not the GA-7VT600), but from my latest build (an older i5) the Gigabyte board simply died by ....turning it on and apparently Gigabyte boards of that era tend to spontaneously die a lot for no obvious reason whatsoever and with no obvious fix. Imo that board is just trash. Boards shouldn't just spontaneously die like that, this is a bad Gigabyte board and I'm still not at all happy with it (died like only a week ago so still somewhat fresh and not completely unbiased by it and I needed that system for a project of mine).
But the ones I mentioned earlier have been very solid to me and my most recent experience doesn't make Gigabyte as a brand, "junk" -_-

And one other thing that I felt is sometimes missing is that often things aren't great, but they aren't trash either. Oftentimes a certain part is simply unremarkable but that doesn't make it junk or great.

Life is simply not just black and white and some people seem to tend to forget that.

And I'm glad to see people sharing my opinion regarding this 🙂
If Vogons ever becomes a mere elitist echochambering narcisistic dickmeasuring contest I hope it all just gets deleted but I sincerely hope it will never come to that.

Even the so called junk hardware is fun to tinker with, if it dies then so be it but my experience is that even some of the worst "shit" hardware can be surprisingly hardy and take quite a bit to actually kill which makes it great for test rigs where survival of the rig isn't a priority. Would I use "shit" hardware in my 24/7 retro rigs ..depends on what it is and if I can actually get a good replacement for it at a reasonable price, GPUs ? Yes no problem, CPUs/Ram/soundcard also yes, motherboard is a maybe since finding alternatives isn't hard or expensive. I draw the line at power supplies, they are the only item I will be snobbish about since the entire rig can be smoked by one bad PSU cap.

But I cant really say much about PSUs since I have a rig currently using the "600watt" Chinesium SHAW, so far its been fine and that PSU got tested and opened before I used it.

I love Vogons just for the huge amount of cool hardware users here have or find and I enjoy seeing it get posted here and discussed.

For me junk is literally that, a part that is so bad that it's best to bin it (like parts that are not just defective themselves, but also kill any hardware it is installed in or are just plain dangerous to use).
Like my recently deceased Gigabyte motherboard which is almost at that point. It still starts and soft-resets, but won't ever POST successfully anymore, but I did notice it does still recognize when all the memory slots are left empty so I could still use it to test dodgy DDR3 memory modules. Same with HP branded PSUs which appear to have standard ATX wiring, I might as well test those with this board. I'd rather not have a working board ruined by testing dodgy DDR3 memory.

This Gigabyte board is now my yolotester board 😜

I definitely agree with you on the PSUs. And yes, I've used some "shit" parts before. I mean one of my first builds ever was based on a motherboard + CPU that I had taken out of an OEM system with a burned out PSU (I had a chance to speak to its previous owner who had dumped it on the street as it wasn't actually far from where I lived at the time).
I mean it was apparently a probably fried s370 AGP-deficient 440LX 400MHz Celeron-only system, how trash/junk/shit/worthless can it get? Yet its remains ended up powering my first ever really extensively used retro rig, I kept using this system running for a number of years even after I had gotten much superior rigs going, I just loved that system so much <3
I had upgraded it with a 16MB TNT2 M64 PCI and some 64MB and 128MB PC-100 SDRAM (and a new PSU, obviously 🤣) and put WinME on there, I mean literally nothing in this rig was something any elitist would consider not-shit. But this literal phoenix worked like an elite soldier for me and it soldiered on through an entire Unreal playthrough and it was a stable, great and relatively quiet system and it was the first rig on which I really dared to test my WinME tweaks.
When I found it, it was so dirty. Even now I'm kinda sad I didn't take any pics of it (especially of the burned carcass I originally found it in, it was gross), but it was during an era when digital cameras weren't really a thing yet.

Only a fool would dismiss a rig like that ^^

You've never grabbed a junk GPU and forced it to run ?

>>
<<

I have . .it didn't run for long but making sure it was utterly dead was enjoyable, I then sent it to the recycling bin which goes to a guy who scraps it for valuable metals. (this GPU had a damaged VRM, so I just uhh did a bodge wire job to replace the dead mosfet, had it hanging off the front of the GPU 🤣)

That PCI M64 would have been a great little testing GPU too and that rig sounds like a Junker car that you just cant help but love.

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-05-15, 09:22:

You've never grabbed a junk GPU and forced it to run ? […]
Show full quote

Tetrium wrote on 2022-05-15, 09:01:

For me junk is literally that, a part that is so bad that it's best to bin it (like parts that are not just defective themselves […]
Show full quote

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-05-15, 08:08:

Even the so called junk hardware is fun to tinker with, if it dies then so be it but my experience is that even some of the worst "shit" hardware can be surprisingly hardy and take quite a bit to actually kill which makes it great for test rigs where survival of the rig isn't a priority. Would I use "shit" hardware in my 24/7 retro rigs ..depends on what it is and if I can actually get a good replacement for it at a reasonable price, GPUs ? Yes no problem, CPUs/Ram/soundcard also yes, motherboard is a maybe since finding alternatives isn't hard or expensive. I draw the line at power supplies, they are the only item I will be snobbish about since the entire rig can be smoked by one bad PSU cap.

But I cant really say much about PSUs since I have a rig currently using the "600watt" Chinesium SHAW, so far its been fine and that PSU got tested and opened before I used it.

I love Vogons just for the huge amount of cool hardware users here have or find and I enjoy seeing it get posted here and discussed.

For me junk is literally that, a part that is so bad that it's best to bin it (like parts that are not just defective themselves, but also kill any hardware it is installed in or are just plain dangerous to use).
Like my recently deceased Gigabyte motherboard which is almost at that point. It still starts and soft-resets, but won't ever POST successfully anymore, but I did notice it does still recognize when all the memory slots are left empty so I could still use it to test dodgy DDR3 memory modules. Same with HP branded PSUs which appear to have standard ATX wiring, I might as well test those with this board. I'd rather not have a working board ruined by testing dodgy DDR3 memory.

This Gigabyte board is now my yolotester board 😜

I definitely agree with you on the PSUs. And yes, I've used some "shit" parts before. I mean one of my first builds ever was based on a motherboard + CPU that I had taken out of an OEM system with a burned out PSU (I had a chance to speak to its previous owner who had dumped it on the street as it wasn't actually far from where I lived at the time).
I mean it was apparently a probably fried s370 AGP-deficient 440LX 400MHz Celeron-only system, how trash/junk/shit/worthless can it get? Yet its remains ended up powering my first ever really extensively used retro rig, I kept using this system running for a number of years even after I had gotten much superior rigs going, I just loved that system so much <3
I had upgraded it with a 16MB TNT2 M64 PCI and some 64MB and 128MB PC-100 SDRAM (and a new PSU, obviously 🤣) and put WinME on there, I mean literally nothing in this rig was something any elitist would consider not-shit. But this literal phoenix worked like an elite soldier for me and it soldiered on through an entire Unreal playthrough and it was a stable, great and relatively quiet system and it was the first rig on which I really dared to test my WinME tweaks.
When I found it, it was so dirty. Even now I'm kinda sad I didn't take any pics of it (especially of the burned carcass I originally found it in, it was gross), but it was during an era when digital cameras weren't really a thing yet.

Only a fool would dismiss a rig like that ^^

You've never grabbed a junk GPU and forced it to run ?

>>
<<

I have . .it didn't run for long but making sure it was utterly dead was enjoyable, I then sent it to the recycling bin which goes to a guy who scraps it for valuable metals. (this GPU had a damaged VRM, so I just uhh did a bodge wire job to replace the dead mosfet, had it hanging off the front of the GPU 🤣)

That PCI M64 would have been a great little testing GPU too and that rig sounds like a Junker car that you just cant help but love.

The graphics cards I tested were usually either in working condition or defective right from the start with one exception: A sole Voodoo 2.
This card, for as long as I remember having it, had one rectangular block on the screen filled with (iirc) bluish pixels. The location on the screen only changed when the resolution changed so my guess was some problem with one of the memory chips.
I played through the entire Unreal campaign with it (this was not on the Celeron rig but on the K6-III/400 I build later) and it never got any better or worse.
Of course I never tossed that card, even though a fully working one had the grand value of a can of beer at that time.

Thus far I haven't had any graphics cards actually die on me while I was using them. This Gigabyte mobo was (afaicr) actually the first motherboard to die spontaneously while under my watch. I mean I think I have killed an Asus A7V333 by accident one time and thus far both my GF7600GS's still haven't perished from bumpgate yet.

I have however had one piece of hardware die on me from which I knew it would probably die rather sooner than later and this was my IBM Deathstar! It definitely died within a short while of me using it but it still came as a surprise for me 😂

But I'm usually not careless when using parts. Sure, sometimes I take risks (like the one time I tried a PSU on a known Compaq board of which I knew many of those boards used proprietary style PSU pinout and powering it up for the first time definitely made my heart rush xD. I mean I literally yoloed it).
Most of the time I'm fairly careful if only because I don't have the money to spend on replacement parts. The only way for me to be able to afford it with current prices would be to sell something else.

Oh god Deathstar drives ...Ya dude its damn hard to write data to a glass platter, YO IBM perhaps you should bond the rust to the platters better.

This GPU had been flaky ever since I had gotten it, cant even remember where I got it from but it was likely a curb side rescue, one day it quit working totally and I tracked it back to a dead mosfet on the vrm so I tossed it into the spares box and forgot about it.

Eventually had enough spare time to take a look at it and bodge wired a similar mosfet to it, it worked but didn't last long, was a fun little diversion on a GPU that was only heading to recycling.

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-05-15, 05:36:

pan069 wrote on 2022-05-15, 05:31:

Brickpad wrote on 2022-05-15, 03:40:

Found this unbelievable score on EBay for $45 and free shipping! Seller's listing stated unit was untested and no HDD. For $45 it was worth the gamble and it paid off. It's in excellent condition and works perfectly. Even has the original hard drive sled. Only thing that needed replacing was the dead BR2350 with a CR2032.

Cool looking case. Whats inside?

That's half the fun of mystery eBay cases 🤣, the other half is opening it up and finding something rare or unusual.

I'm yet to find anything interesting inside a mystery eBay PC 🙁 But I'm forever hopeful! 😀

SteveC wrote on 2022-05-15, 10:56:

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-05-15, 05:36:

pan069 wrote on 2022-05-15, 05:31:

Cool looking case. Whats inside?

That's half the fun of mystery eBay cases 🤣, the other half is opening it up and finding something rare or unusual.

I'm yet to find anything interesting inside a mystery eBay PC 🙁 But I'm forever hopeful! 😀

I got a nice SB32 with 32mb of memory in it in one mystery box, pretty much paid for the entire machine with that find, not found anything rare yet but like you im hopeful that one day Ill find a Gravis or a wave blaster daughter board in one. (even a nice Yamaha ISA sound card or XG card would be ok)

GigAHerZ wrote on 2022-05-15, 07:36:

Brickpad wrote on 2022-05-15, 03:40:

Only thing that needed replacing was the dead BR2350 with a CR2032.

BRxxxx is rechargable, CRxxxx is not. Be careful!

I think that's the LiR-type that's rechargeable. I've looked everywhere and can't find any information about the BR-type coin cells as being rechargeable. I have a cross-reference sheet that shows a CR2032 and BR2032 (same as BR2325, just a smaller diameter and thicker) as interchangeable as well. Also, the cell would have "rechargeable" stamped into it.

Are BR2032 and CR2032 the same?
However, there are two main models on the market today: the CR2032 batteries and the BR2032 ones. The main difference between these two types resides in their electrode. While similar, the BR2032 uses carbon monofluoride as the positive electrode. The CR2032 uses manganese dioxide for the positive electrode.

pan069 wrote on 2022-05-15, 05:31:

Cool looking case. Whats inside? […]
Show full quote

Brickpad wrote on 2022-05-15, 03:40:

Found this unbelievable score on EBay for $45 and free shipping! Seller's listing stated unit was untested and no HDD. For $45 it was worth the gamble and it paid off. It's in excellent condition and works perfectly. Even has the original hard drive sled. Only thing that needed replacing was the dead BR2350 with a CR2032.

Cool looking case. Whats inside?

Intel 486 DX2 50, 16MB RAM, and a dual game-port card. No hard drive as mentioned, but they left the sled.

Tetrium wrote on 2022-05-15, 09:01:

For me junk is literally that, a part that is so bad that it's best to bin it (like parts that are not just defective themselves, but also kill any hardware it is installed in or are just plain dangerous to use).

Like my recently deceased Gigabyte motherboard which is almost at that point. It still starts and soft-resets, but won't ever POST successfully anymore, but I did notice it does still recognize when all the memory slots are left empty so I could still use it to test dodgy DDR3 memory modules.

Do not junk that mainboard yet - it's not dead! Like I said, there's a known issue with gigabyte LGA1150 and LGA2011 boards of that generation corrupting CMOS.

Try this:

- remove the CMOS battery
- power the system on
- turn the system off by holding the power button for 45 seconds (50 to make sure - it's important, this triggers a soft CMOS clear on gigabyte boards, just like on laptops!)
- put the CMOS clear jumper in the "clear" position and wait 10 seconds
- power the board on - it should not POST because of the Clear CMOS jumper
- power it off by holding the power button for 45 seconds again
- wait 10 seconds and turn it back on - it should POST. Put the CMOS battery back in while it's running. If the RTC battery holder is under your video card, then put it back in before this last step.

If that didn't work, the actual EEPROM is corrupted and you can re-flash the bios using a thumb drive - there's a how to in the manual. Like I said, my brother in law had a Z77 gigabyte board that did this randomly - a CMOS clear by the method I described above usually worked, and when it didn't he could re-flash the bios using a thumb drive. At one point Gigabyte released a BIOS revision for this board and it stopped corrupting CMOS.

I do have one dead gigabyte board - a late model KT400A. It has a short someware. It was working when I stored it, it's possible some crud got where it's not supposed to be or a capacitor dried up and shorted. I did like their KT400 and KT600 boards - they were among the few boards that let you select the CPU multiplier in BIOS. Not all GA boards with this chipset will let you do this, but the fancier ones with the golden northbridge heatsink and active cooling will. Great for pairing with an Athlon XP-M or Geode.