Heavily inspired by this thread: Best 100mhz FSB Processor? (that I currently own!)

I had to buy it, when I stumbled upon a 1.1 Coppermine P!!!

Especially since I already owned one - and an Asus P2B-DS 😁

Got this in the mail last week and fixed it. It's a NEC PC-9801es. It's just a normal 386...except it has a V30 too and can run classic point and click adventure games like Yu-No. Luckily it still works despite battery leakage and I had to build a homemade PSU adapter. I mainly bought this to drive a rare sound card, I need to unstick the floppy drives as the heads sound jammed and won't boot from disks. I also need to install a SCSI board but I have plenty.

Looks more like an XT class (with the V30 on the motherboard) with a 386 upgrade board (the 386 being added on top of the MoBo). Not a regular 386 with an added V30 😀

Nice, whichever way you look at it 😀

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-01-29, 06:51:

Athlon XP-M 3000, been looking out for one of these to throw into my Abit NF7-S box but they don't show up on the bay very often and are usually priced stupidly high, this one was pretty reasonable. IIRC these are unlocked out of the box so it should make for a fun little overclocker.

Athlon XP-M CPUs are great with Abit KT7A, you can build an epic all-arounder because that mobo has that one ISA-slot... You can change mobile-Athlon multiplier from DOS (setmul.exe) or from Windows freely.

dj_pirtu wrote on 2023-01-30, 09:00:

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-01-29, 06:51:

Athlon XP-M 3000, been looking out for one of these to throw into my Abit NF7-S box but they don't show up on the bay very often and are usually priced stupidly high, this one was pretty reasonable. IIRC these are unlocked out of the box so it should make for a fun little overclocker.

Athlon XP-M CPUs are great with Abit KT7A, you can build an epic all-arounder because that mobo has that one ISA-slot... You can change mobile-Athlon multiplier from DOS (setmul.exe) or from Windows freely.

Heh, I have a lot of options for ISA, including a Slot A Athlon, if I run across a KT7A that doesn't need recapping at a nice price Ill be sure to pick one up but most of the ones I see require new caps which means more work that I don't have free time for.

I rescued this laptop from recycling, the aesthetic and functional condition is very good, only the hard drive cover is missing, celeron 500, 64mb ram and savage3d

LewisRaz wrote on 2023-01-28, 10:42:

7600GS AGP. Not sure what system I will build with it but could not pass it up for £10

If it works, that's a good deal for such a card.
I have 2 GF7600GS AGP cards, one by MSI and the other may be this exact one.

I'd advice to keep a close eye on temps, I ended up adding case fans juryrigged to the heatsinks in order to keep them cool, after which they worked fine for years.

My first one first ended up in my AthlonXP 3200+ rig and the second ended up in an A64 AGP rig.

But do consider adding active cooling in some form, or at least consider it.

pete8475 wrote on 2023-01-28, 14:53:

SrFenix wrote on 2023-01-28, 14:32:

I bought a pc for €20, and I found this inside, not bad, it's not retro but it's pretty good hardware. The plate did not start a […]
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I bought a pc for €20, and I found this inside, not bad, it's not retro but it's pretty good hardware. The plate did not start and after a wash it works perfectly.

I would throw the OCZ ram directly into the trash where it belongs. Otherwise good stuff.

Why throw the OCZ memory away?
If it works perfectly fine, then throwing it away is rather foolish. or at the very least it's a waste.

And to add to what others have already said, I've personally used 2x2GB DDR3 1333 for years in one of my rigs and it always worked perfectly fine.
The only thing I didn't like was that the advertised latency could only be reached by overvolting. Kinda lame marketing but since the modules worked fine, did everything I needed it to do (and on top of that looked rather good), I'd definitely not consider OCZ memory that bad.

Interesting seeing your experiences with OCZ customer support. Seems rather lame indeed but tbh it's not the only company with useless customer support like that. It definitely doesn't bode well for the reliability of that company and the products they had for sale at that time BUT that was then and now is now, if the memory comes out of a working system, the memory probably worked fine for at least a while.

I'd say just test it and if it works fine, use it. Parts I personally think are rather overrated, I'll probably run it at more relaxed settings if that helps make things run stably.
But OCZ is not a brand one should throw out on sight. That should be reserved for parts that can be outright dangerous (like certain PSUs for instance).

Of course it is confirmation bias but I have only had good experience with OCZ

debs3759 wrote on 2023-01-30, 08:20:

Looks more like an XT class (with the V30 on the motherboard) with a 386 upgrade board (the 386 being added on top of the MoBo). Not a regular 386 with an added V30 😀

Nice, whichever way you look at it 😀

More like PC-9801VM class in this case (except it's technically a VX+ given that it has the EGC chip, which the VM lacks). The reason I say that is Epson made 286/386 machines without the EGC chip (only the GCRG chip), which means that they cannot run games that use the EGC chip. NEC handled backwards compatibility by using a physical NEC V30 chip that could be toggled via a front panel switch and later a "speed" switch in the setup menu to slow the CPU down at boot, while Epson handled this with a "speed switch" on the front of the machine that actually acted like a true turbo switch. There's a V30 emulation mode in many machines however the speed is dodgy when playing games like The Screamer (DEHUMANIZE YOURSELF AND FACE TO BLOODSHED) among others.

Tetrium wrote on 2023-01-30, 15:53:

Why throw the OCZ memory away? If it works perfectly fine, then throwing it away is rather foolish. or at the very least it's a […]
Show full quote

Why throw the OCZ memory away?
If it works perfectly fine, then throwing it away is rather foolish. or at the very least it's a waste.

And to add to what others have already said, I've personally used 2x2GB DDR3 1333 for years in one of my rigs and it always worked perfectly fine.
The only thing I didn't like was that the advertised latency could only be reached by overvolting. Kinda lame marketing but since the modules worked fine, did everything I needed it to do (and on top of that looked rather good), I'd definitely not consider OCZ memory that bad.

Interesting seeing your experiences with OCZ customer support. Seems rather lame indeed but tbh it's not the only company with useless customer support like that. It definitely doesn't bode well for the reliability of that company and the products they had for sale at that time BUT that was then and now is now, if the memory comes out of a working system, the memory probably worked fine for at least a while.

I'd say just test it and if it works fine, use it. Parts I personally think are rather overrated, I'll probably run it at more relaxed settings if that helps make things run stably.
But OCZ is not a brand one should throw out on sight. That should be reserved for parts that can be outright dangerous (like certain PSUs for instance).

Why throw it out? For the reasons I already mentioned, in short I consider it bottom of the barrel trash. I have quite literally hundreds of good SD, DDR, DDR-2 and DDR-3 ram modules on hand anyway, so no need to add junk to my stock.

pete8475 wrote on 2023-01-30, 20:54:

Tetrium wrote on 2023-01-30, 15:53:

Why throw the OCZ memory away? If it works perfectly fine, then throwing it away is rather foolish. or at the very least it's a […]
Show full quote

Why throw the OCZ memory away?
If it works perfectly fine, then throwing it away is rather foolish. or at the very least it's a waste.

And to add to what others have already said, I've personally used 2x2GB DDR3 1333 for years in one of my rigs and it always worked perfectly fine.
The only thing I didn't like was that the advertised latency could only be reached by overvolting. Kinda lame marketing but since the modules worked fine, did everything I needed it to do (and on top of that looked rather good), I'd definitely not consider OCZ memory that bad.

Interesting seeing your experiences with OCZ customer support. Seems rather lame indeed but tbh it's not the only company with useless customer support like that. It definitely doesn't bode well for the reliability of that company and the products they had for sale at that time BUT that was then and now is now, if the memory comes out of a working system, the memory probably worked fine for at least a while.

I'd say just test it and if it works fine, use it. Parts I personally think are rather overrated, I'll probably run it at more relaxed settings if that helps make things run stably.
But OCZ is not a brand one should throw out on sight. That should be reserved for parts that can be outright dangerous (like certain PSUs for instance).

Why throw it out? For the reasons I already mentioned, in short I consider it bottom of the barrel trash. I have quite literally hundreds of good SD, DDR, DDR-2 and DDR-3 ram modules on hand anyway, so no need to add junk to my stock.

Then why advice someone of who you don't know if they also have quite literally hundreds of good DIMMs in their stash to ASAP toss the OCZ modules out without a second thought? Because that advice came across more as if OCZ modules are inherently flawed so badly that throwing all out is the only sane option or something.

Some DDR3-1866, but I can't see any advantage over 1600.
Maybe FPS in games? Probably so.
Could be handy for some overclock.

Tetrium wrote on 2023-01-30, 21:42:

Then why advice someone of who you don't know if they also have quite literally hundreds of good DIMMs in their stash to ASAP toss the OCZ modules out without a second thought? Because that advice came across more as if OCZ modules are inherently flawed so badly that throwing all out is the only sane option or something.

Again this is what an OCZ rep says about their modules; "prime 95 generally stresses our memory out too much"

This is my last post on the matter, so I'll just end with it's trash and the people that worked there admit it. Trash goes in the trash bin.

pete8475 wrote on 2023-01-30, 22:05:

Tetrium wrote on 2023-01-30, 21:42:

Then why advice someone of who you don't know if they also have quite literally hundreds of good DIMMs in their stash to ASAP toss the OCZ modules out without a second thought? Because that advice came across more as if OCZ modules are inherently flawed so badly that throwing all out is the only sane option or something.

Again this is what an OCZ rep says about their modules; "prime 95 generally stresses our memory out too much"

This is my last post on the matter, so I'll just end with it's trash and the people that worked there admit it. Trash goes in the trash bin.

Painting with a board brush is generally a bad idea, sure some of their modules are known to be trash but not all their modules were trash. And of the trash modules 99% of them work just fine with a tiny voltage adjustment or at slightly lower ratings.

I have dozens of OCZ modules in DDR/DDR2 and DDR3 and they all work as expected, now if you were to ask me which modules I have had serious issues with then Kingston would be at the top of that list with Corsair a close second, but again not all of the modules from Kingston and Corsair are garbage. Corsair in particular made some really great modules and at one point had the absolute best DDR2/DDR3 modules on the market.

Perhaps you might want to consider using a smaller brush when defining "Trash"

This board arrived today and on closer inspection well I'm not having much luck with Dual Tualatin boards ..now I have three boards that need recaps...sigh

They all post and appear to work just fine, so I may just pick the best one of the three and recap that one and keep the other two as spares in my projects box.

Hopefully I can find the caps I need from Mouser/Digikey, will likely make a thread on this board to get some advice on replacement caps. (The search engines on mouser/digikey are damn confusing to the uninitiated)

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-01-31, 01:50:

Painting with a board brush is generally a bad idea

Especially when one takes law of averages into account. One person's bad experience might just be that: a bad experience. It may hardly be indicative of a product line or company as a whole.

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-01-31, 02:03:

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-01-31, 01:50:

Painting with a board brush is generally a bad idea

Especially when one takes law of averages into account. One person's bad experience might just be that: a bad experience. It may hardly be indicative of a product line or company as a whole.

ASUS is a good example of this..they have had a lot of stinkers but also a lot of award winners and I find that assessing each item on its own merits is better than just claiming every product from them is garbage. (I know at least one user here will disagree with me about ASUS)

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-01-31, 01:50:

Painting with a board brush is generally a bad idea, sure some of their modules are known to be trash but not all their modules […]
Show full quote

pete8475 wrote on 2023-01-30, 22:05:

Tetrium wrote on 2023-01-30, 21:42:

Then why advice someone of who you don't know if they also have quite literally hundreds of good DIMMs in their stash to ASAP toss the OCZ modules out without a second thought? Because that advice came across more as if OCZ modules are inherently flawed so badly that throwing all out is the only sane option or something.

Again this is what an OCZ rep says about their modules; "prime 95 generally stresses our memory out too much"

This is my last post on the matter, so I'll just end with it's trash and the people that worked there admit it. Trash goes in the trash bin.

Painting with a board brush is generally a bad idea, sure some of their modules are known to be trash but not all their modules were trash. And of the trash modules 99% of them work just fine with a tiny voltage adjustment or at slightly lower ratings.

I have dozens of OCZ modules in DDR/DDR2 and DDR3 and they all work as expected, now if you were to ask me which modules I have had serious issues with then Kingston would be at the top of that list with Corsair a close second, but again not all of the modules from Kingston and Corsair are garbage. Corsair in particular made some really great modules and at one point had the absolute best DDR2/DDR3 modules on the market.

Perhaps you might want to consider using a smaller brush when defining "Trash"

Just to add my 2 cents... I only recall coming across defective memory three times in the past ~22 years or so. Once was a high density generic 256MB PC-133 stick back when that stuff was really cheap and often garbage. Second one was a stick of Wintec AMPX overclocked DDR2 memory that went bad after it was discontinued. They were a pain to deal with but I got my original purchase price refunded entirely after a while. Also found a bad stick of Patriot DDR3 in a laptop a couple years ago which was a bit surprising.

I had some OCZ DDR-500 Gold memory which was very expensive when new. I kept it around for several years, and one day looked it up and saw that it was worth even more than I spent on it originally... and this was long before the retro-PC craze kicked in 6-7 years ago. I tested that memory out and it still worked fine at it's rated speed\specs so I sold it for what was, in my opinion, a ridiculous price at a time when new PCs were using DDR3. It must have worked fine for the buyer too, because they kept it.

I also had some OCZ DDR2 and it was also totally fine.

I would test OCZ memory now, and if it tested fine I would hang onto it. It's pretty uncommon to find high speed DDR and DDR2 these days.

Yes, outgoing memory tech gets a dead cat bounce as availability dries up while systems maxed out are still useful. DDR3 appears to be near the bottom of the curve at the moment, but in a year or two will go spendy for a while again, so stock up if you think you'll need it.