OCZ is not good these days. They used to use trash including sandforce based controller SSDs that is a trouble. Only one I had good luck was solid copper heatsinks OCZ memory modules but that was long ago.

There were lot of SSDs using sandforce controller back in the day including Intel (!!?) eg: Intel 535 SSD.

Cheers,

pentiumspeed wrote on 2022-05-13, 16:05:

OCZ is not good these days. They used to use trash including sandforce based controller SSDs that is a trouble. Only one I had good luck was solid copper heatsinks OCZ memory modules but that was long ago.

That was due to OCZ shifting focus to SSDs and their products being rushed without proper QA testing.

There were lot of SSDs using sandforce controller back in the day including Intel (!!?) eg: Intel 535 SSD.

Only Intel did proper validation with their SSDs using these SandForce controllers. However, their consumer SSDs are de-emphasized nowdays that they no longer use their own controllers.

Gmlb256 wrote on 2022-05-13, 16:12:

That was due to OCZ shifting focus to SSDs and their products being rushed without proper QA testing. […]
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pentiumspeed wrote on 2022-05-13, 16:05:

OCZ is not good these days. They used to use trash including sandforce based controller SSDs that is a trouble. Only one I had good luck was solid copper heatsinks OCZ memory modules but that was long ago.

That was due to OCZ shifting focus to SSDs and their products being rushed without proper QA testing.

There were lot of SSDs using sandforce controller back in the day including Intel (!!?) eg: Intel 535 SSD.

Only Intel did proper validation with their SSDs using these SandForce controllers. However, their consumer SSDs are de-emphasized nowdays that they no longer use their own controllers.

Used to have an OCZ USB stick that was not recognized by Macs.
So, Macs suck.

Jura Tastatura wrote on 2022-05-12, 18:55:

Today's lucky find for my RAM collection. Probably going to use it in my overpowered XP build (C2D, X38 chipset, GTX280).

I've got a set of 2GB OCZ SLI RAM in a machine, they all work. Maybe I'm lucky?

I've always liked how those OCZ DIMMs looked like. I should still have a pair of DDR-400 OCZ modules which I bought new back in the day. Should still work as these had never been overclocked.

Cuttoon wrote on 2022-05-10, 13:31:

I'm still having a hard time getting used to the fact that a S7 system with that vanilla setup is any more than some "old PC" bu […]
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I'm still having a hard time getting used to the fact that a S7 system with that vanilla setup is any more than some "old PC" but here we are.
Nice AT towers have become so rare that it's probably even worth replacing that cover somehow. Plexiglas? 😜
I know I could google it, but what's so special about that Plextor drive? Read that brand a lot in this context.

I know it doesn't matter and it's a good catch, but that non-gold AWE64 or other cards with that particular color scheme on the ports - is it just me, or do those look cheap and ugly as sin?

Nah I feel old so get that enough time has passed that S7 is kinda cool, it's not as desirable as SS7 but then I don't get people wanting S370 over Slot 1 , doesn't mean I'd say no to any P3 based PC though
If it was an ATX case I'd thow it for sure, but as you say AT cases are hard to come by. Some one had luck somewhere that did metalwork, I just can't remember the post or which place he went (he was located Coniston N.S.W. which I remember as grew up not that far away) but anyway bending a bit of metal shouldn't be hard for a company that does this kind of work. Wont be good as new but would be good enough I'd think .

Plextor was one of the most desirable brands when CD burners hit the consumer market, Think the quality may have dropped off a bit by the time of my DVD-RW but still nice to have something from a big brand back in the day.

And I fully agree, it's useful as hell but the colored jacks do cheapen the look, yet if it's a onboard sound card I don't mind for some reason? People are strange

I found these 2 486 computers in the scrapyard yesterday, however both had their CPUs removed by a gold scrapper. It's a shame but whatever. The LPX system had a fair amount of battery corosion which I'm in the process of cleaning up. The other one uses a CR2032 and apparantly once had a 133MHz 486 per the clock display on the front of the case. Both were complete except the CPUs and coolers. And yes, I took them home on a bike. Both. At once.

Stash or trash? 😁

Nice, I see dual SLI potential. The appropriate I/O shield is going to be hard to find I'm afraid...

Jura Tastatura wrote on 2022-05-16, 08:16:

Stash or trash? 😁

Definitely stash DFI Lanparty boards were great. That would make a great platform for some XP era SLI fun.

I came across a pile of partially disassembled computers near a dumpster today - standard cheap looking 2002-2006 beige boxes. The cases were either incomplete (missing panels), rusty or pain bent / broken fascia, so I grabbed a screwdriver out of my car's toolbox and got to work. This is some of what I took back home:

- PCChips M848A - a very late Socket A SiS 748/963L board. It came with a very nice and quiet 80mm copper core cooler and a 1800MHz AMD Duron. Never had a working one, and apparently this one refuses to POST as well. I think it's a BIOS issue, so at one point I'll have a go at de-0soldering (yeah, they soldered the bloody EEPROM onto the board to save 20 cents) and re-flashing the bios.

- MSI KT3 ULTRA - VIA KT333 Socket A. It came with an Athlon XP 1700+ and a noisy Titan copper core 80mm CPU cooler. Despite having several blown 1000uf caps and a crispy fan header complete with burned traces, the board posted just fine. It's a bit picky about video cards it seems - it simply refused to post with my FX5200 test card or my FX5500 PCI, but fired right up with a Geforce 3 Ti200 I had lying around. I was surprised to see it's got a really comprehensive bios witch lets you select the CPU multiplier as well as FSB up to 200MHz (yea right) and voltage. I plan to recap it and test it further. Maybe put one of AMD Geodes in it - would make for an interesting retro PC. I wonder if SETMUL works with the Geode. Universal AGP would work great with a Voodoo 5, but I had 3 over the years and all of them died so I gave up on owning a working one.

- Asrock P4i45GV. This one came with a stock intel cooler and a 2533MHz Celeron. Intel i845. I have a intel i865 version of this board in both socket 478 (P4i65G) and LGA775 (775i65PE). Great for making small form factor retro PCs for running 1997-2005 games. This one also came with a black inno3d FX5200 with 256MB of VRAM. Both the mainboard and video card work fine. No blown caps on any of them.

- Asus P5S800-VM. SiS 671FX chipset, with AGP and DDR1. According to CPU-Upgrade this chipset supports some core 2 duo and pentium dual core processors, providing the manufacturer incuded microcode for them. Looking at the Asus page for this board it seems it doesn't even have Pentium D CPU support - something even my Asrock 775i65PE and Foxconn 865G7MC-ES intel i865 boards can run with no difficulties. It came with no CPU, but the case did contain a 256MB stick of DDR1 and a dead 40GB HDD. No bent pins on the socket, but I haven't tested the board yet.

- MSI PM8M2-V MS-7071- P4M800 Chipset board. AGP and DDR1. Came with a 2666Mhz celeron D and a L-Shaped Radeon 9000 with 64MB of vram over 128 bit bus. No cooler, no ram, no HDD. Haven't tested it yet. It has a couple of bulging capacitors near the CPU socket. Looks like blown caps are a thing for MSI boards of this vintage.

And finally - Le piece de resistance:

- An ASUS TUSI-M (bless you). Came with a Celeron 1300 witch was incorrectly configured for some reason, so the PC booted at 1466MHz (at least that's what the POST screen was showing). It also came with a weird dual fan cylindrical Acorp cooler, 512MB of SDRAM, two 40GB disk drives, a Plextor CD-RW and a Plextor DVD rom drive and a Hercules 3D Prophet II MX 64MB. The case was pretty cute too, a tiny mATX tower with only 2 5'25" bays... to bad it was completely trashed 🙁

This little board booted right into windows XP (with it's original disk drives, ram and video card) and ran perfectly fine at "1466Mhz" witch I found quite surprising. Well, not at first - fist it locked up after 10 minutes of messing around, so I went into bios to set the FSB to the correct 100Mhz this CPU runs at and noticed the CPU was operating at 71C. So I pulled off the weird noisy acorp cooler (one of the two fans failed, and the other was making very unpleasant noises) and slapped on big socket A copper core cooler off one of the socket A boards. Managed to run 3DMark01 where it scored about 2700 pts. Not bad for a pentium 3 running XP. I checked the CPU clock it was running at with CPU-Z, witch reported 1596Mhz - not 1466. No idea how that's possible. I'll do a fresh win98 install Monday afternoon, find a case for it and check out why the CPU is running at 12x instead of 13x multiplier. Maybe I misread the model number and it's in fact a 1200Mhz Celeron....

I really wished it had an AGP slot tough. I also experimented for a bit with the TUSI-M - tried to run it with a pentium 3 1400-S (tualatin 512k) but it refuses to POST. I guess it works with any tualatin chip apart from the 512KB L2 versions. I also put 2x 512MB PC133 CL2 samsung modules in it and they got detected just fine witch is a bit odd - I remember the i815 could only run with 768MB MAX - but this board runs with 1GB no problem... weird. Maybe I remember wrong or the i815T supports 1GB of ram. I also tried one of my new fx 5500 PCI cards in it - didn't like that either, it refused to post - but it started up happily enough with a voodoo 3 PCI. Maybe it didn't like the FX5500 because it's a newly build card - read similar stories about newly built Rage XL PCI cards, maybe it's a similar issue.

I also scored a SB LIVE!, two 40GB IDE drives - a WD and a Maxtor, an 80GB Maxtor, a 120GB Maxtor and an 80GB Samsung drive, all IDE, as well as some IDE optical drives - Plextor, LG and a TEAC and a noname 17" flatscreen CRT witch works, is very bright and clear, but the image won't stretch all the way to the edges of the screen. The horizontal adjustment works, but only up to 80% of the screen. Probably a bad capacitor someware. Worth fixing since the CRT is so bright and clear.

I also picked up an Acer Veriton SFF PC witch came with a Core 2 Duo e6300, 1GB DDR2 SODIMM, a slot loading laptop ODD and a 160GB SATA HDD. The front bezel was smashed to pieces but the rest of the PC looked fine... hoping the HDD still works, although I doubt it judging by the condition of case.

Today while was going to the dumpster to trow some bad food, that was not in eatable condition anymore, found this crap Lenovo M30 (model from 2014 it appears with core I3, 4GB ram and 500GB HDD) and took it. The fun part is that the HDD is 100% working and no bad sectors 🤣... The mem stick is working (as they all do normally), CPU is soldered. So far none of mine retro laptops (Compaq Armada E500, Texas Instruments Extensa Pentium 1) are not compatible with the power plug, even one more modern laptop as well, so cant power it on for now.

Even when i find proper power plug and if does not work, at least the HDD and the RAM are working, and prob the matrix and some other small stuff.. I bet i can sell it on parts for like 50-60 euros.. So in worst case i will be able to fund some retro purchase/s with this crap laptop..

This was funny, the previous user seems did not use like 70% of the disk..

I just spotted this ad this morning. If people want to give things away, they are free to do it in any way they please, but as someone who both picks things up and gives things away on Craigslist, I really dislike the technique of putting up the ad and leaving the item(s) out in a public spot. That puts the person who wants to pick it up in a dilemma - do you spend the money on gasoline to go and get it knowing that there's a good chance it will already be gone when you get there? What if two (or more!) people who really want it show up at the same time?

It's much better to post the ad, and when someone responds, tell them the location and time where they can pick it up. That way if it is something that they are willing to drive some distance to pick up, they can be sure it will be there when they arrive. If I could be sure these would be there, I would make the drive (around a two hour round trip) but there's no way I would take the chance and spend the money on gas when what I would really want is probably already gone. Heavy sigh.

Repo Man11 wrote on 2022-05-28, 16:21:

It's much better to post the ad, and when someone responds, tell them the location and time where they can pick it up. That way if it is something that they are willing to drive some distance to pick up, they can be sure it will be there when they arrive. If I could be sure these would be there, I would make the drive (around a two hour round trip) but there's no way I would take the chance and spend the money on gas when what I would really want is probably already gone. Heavy sigh.

Problem with that is that you have to deal with all the strange people that "free" items attract! Timewasters and a whole level of crazy that paid for items don't attract.

I don't blame sellers in the slightest for putting the ad up and just dumping it outside.

canthearu wrote on 2022-05-28, 16:29:

Repo Man11 wrote on 2022-05-28, 16:21:

It's much better to post the ad, and when someone responds, tell them the location and time where they can pick it up. That way if it is something that they are willing to drive some distance to pick up, they can be sure it will be there when they arrive. If I could be sure these would be there, I would make the drive (around a two hour round trip) but there's no way I would take the chance and spend the money on gas when what I would really want is probably already gone. Heavy sigh.

Problem with that is that you have to deal with all the strange people that "free" items attract! Timewasters and a whole level of crazy that paid for items don't attract.

I don't blame sellers in the slightest for putting the ad up and just dumping it outside.

Just pick the first email you get, and ignore the rest. If they flake out, you move to the next one on the list. I've given away quite a few things on Craigslist, and it isn't at all difficult to do it this way.

Repo Man11 wrote on 2022-05-28, 16:31:

Just pick the first email you get, and ignore the rest. If they flake out, you move to the next one on the list. I've given away quite a few things on Craigslist, and it isn't at all difficult to do it this way.

I agree with you it's really not the best way to dispose of items. In my area the metal scrappers would have snatched this long before any retro enthusiast would have a chance to pick them up

I can see what looks like a Dell Dimension and an Antec Sonata among these systems

Repo Man11 wrote on 2022-05-28, 16:21:

What if two (or more!) people who really want it show up at the same time?

As soon as you see a challenger showing up at the same time you RUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUN!! Till you get to da loot "ITSAMINE! GRRRRRRRRR.....My....precious! 😁" 🤗

This was not found in the dumpster but hear me out.. I was talking with a colleague of mine, then at some point he said he need fast to replace his warehouse, as the big one was draining too much money every month rent, so he was tired of spending too much, to store useless for him stuff.. So he was about to trow all these things to the garbage, i told him i can get them.. So they was going to be trash can stuff...

Not sure how much that Warhammer desk game cost...
Also got a bit lucky there was these 3 drives the Adata seems ded, but the rest are working fine nice upgrades... Now imagine if there is an BITcoin in some of them........
Cougar Immersa and Phontum headphones (the immers i think sounds very good for free sound ofc), and Hama uRAGE keyboards, these are any good for presents when someone buy something from me lmao..
There is total of 44 TT cases, and 38-40 of them are fine, rest are a bit broken. Nice funding of new retro HW purchases.. Computer HW exotics, rares and good stuff here i come >>>>>

Tetrium wrote on 2022-05-28, 22:07:

Repo Man11 wrote on 2022-05-28, 16:21:

What if two (or more!) people who really want it show up at the same time?

As soon as you see a challenger showing up at the same time you RUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUN!! Till you get to da loot "ITSAMINE! GRRRRRRRRR.....My....precious! 😁" 🤗

That was almost how it went with these two. They were part of a bunch of stuff being given away on Craigslist where it was all left out on their driveway. I saw the ad very soon after it was posted; it was nearby, so I jumped in my truck and drove over immediately. The house was located in a cul de sac and when I arrived, I saw another car that was obviously there for the same reason. Luckily, he didn't seem interested in either of the computers, but was after some of the other things (none of which were of interest to me).

After getting them home and having a closer look, they were a bit of a disappointment. Both have Core 2 Duo CPUs and only have onboard video, and were bare bones systems that had been used at a YWCA. The Lenovo has a Q9500 in a DDR2 mother board with only two memory slots. The Optiplex has a dual core, but the motherboard uses DDR3 and has four memory slots. If I move the Q9500 into the Optiplex and bump it up to eight gigs of memory, that would be a decent system that someone could use, though I don't know anyone who needs a basic computer right now.

Optiplex 780 can go up to 16GB using DDR3 1333 or DDR3 1600 (running at 1333), this what I done for win 7 or windows 10. Does not matter with XP, will see as 3.5GB. If the COA sticker is windows 7 pro from either computers, even better, you can use this key to activate the windows 10 Pro.
Supports up to Quad Q9650 fsb 1333 45nm chips. Q9500 is also supported in 780. Best CPU to have is E8600 running at 3.33GHz and is incredibly cheapest of all to get this CPU.

Pop in a 25-30 dollars Intel PT pro/1000 PCIe x1 1 port ethernet card. This will off load the CPU to network card's, and this is significant improvement. That PCIe x1 slot is tied to the southbridge. The x16 is tied to the northbridge in turn linked to the processor.
Only small issue, up to 7 inches long one slot GPU card can be fitted. But I had no issues using this like this: https://www.ebay.ca/itm/224961270388?hash=ite … JQAAOSwyi1iV2HB
Has to have one slot bracket and compact heatsink to clear everything. Quadro 2000 or Quadro K2000 is also perfect for these.

780 is pretty good computer to have. Lenovo is garbage, had too much issues with them.

Cheers,