bearking wrote on 2023-09-23, 21:01:

Found these little gems at the flea market today: 20230923_121549.jpg It looks to be a TOPTEK 286 system board, at least this is […]
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Found these little gems at the flea market today:
20230923_121549.jpg
It looks to be a TOPTEK 286 system board, at least this is the closes I found on theretroweb.com archive.
It came with an Intel 80286 SX005 @12 MHz and 4 MB of RAM, if I'm right about the onboard memory chips.
20230923_121851.jpg
An ABIT AB-AK3(probably) with a soldered AMD 386DX40 and 8x1 MB RAM + some cache
20230923_121916.jpg
An ABIT AB-AX4 REV 2.2 + an AMD 486 DX2 66 + 4x4 MB RAM + some cache
An two older ISA VGA cards:
20230923_121959.jpg
This older one with the Ahead V5000-50PC-B chip... I'm guessing it has 512K RAM...
20230923_122141.jpg
Tseng ET4000AX with 1 MB RAM...
Unfortunately all the mainboards are affected by the leaky barrel batteries, Strangely the most damaged board is the 486 ant the one with almost no damage is the 286...
Anyway, I paid only 25 USD for all, so it was a good deal even if a can't get any of the board to work... We'll see...

Wow this is so awesome. Congrats 🙂
The most flea markets I have been to lately have been mostly old clothes… meeh

bearking wrote on 2023-09-23, 21:01:

Found these little gems at the flea market today:

The RAM on the 286 board is worth a kidney...

Last week I found an eBay offer depicting a total crap looking PC case and the status "defective - for parts only" from a commercial seller that also said they just got this and didn't test it so they sell it as defective. Totally tempted I pulled the trigger on this for 63 Euros and free shipping. The chance that enough could be salvaged to get a ROI of at least these 63 was high. They also offered it with a 14d return policy...So risk was basically zero, 🤣.

What was in there:

An SNI P75 with 256k cache and 32MB ram. The board looks like new. And it does not only look like new top and bottom it functions flawlessly. I ran tests all weekend and inspected it with a magnifier and my multimeter. The only thing to do really was installing a new battery and not getting too much fingerprints on it. This board has never been tempered with. It looks like the case was never opened or anything. Even the Caps show no sign of age whatsoever.
I trying to come up with a good selling price that is realistic and would make me as a hobbyist happy if I would try to hunt down such a board.

Some expansion cards. Also fully working. Not the most impressive cards. But I guess selling them for 10 bucks each should be okay?
And a gem of a hard disk that is also working, has no defective sectors or such and sounds phenomenal. No clicks or anything. Just calm purring rotation and crisp head movement.
The disk I will definitely keep. But the question is: should I use it and risk breaking it at some point? Such disks are really hard to come by and they are also sold for much too high prices

EDIT: What I also got (from a different offer where I wanted the board only) was a socket 3 voltage regulator with an installed am5x86-p75. Both I will keep. Especially the voltage regulator was a nice surprise. P75s I have plenty now. But they are also my most widely used 486 cpus for overclocking.

Got this PC today. Very nice condition. Inside there was an Elitegroup socket 462 motherboard.

I picked up an ATI Radeon X1950 XTX to upgrade an X1950 XT 256MB. I was looking for a 512MB version of the XT, but this one popped up. So much the better.

Today I bought a 286 boars on ebay, I'm attaching the seller's pic as it'll come from the Czech Republic.

I can't really determine the model, but it looks close to these two:

https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/dfi-286-20#expchips
https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/iqs-jli

Seller complains no post, cpu hot and VARTA damage.
He attempted a repair but he failed.
No idea what the wire is for, I'll ask later.

Another long project I guess.

Good luck. First glance to me, the ROMs don't look properly seated.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-09-26, 18:54:

Good luck. First glance to me, the ROMs don't look properly seated.

The lack of memory might also be a problem?

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-09-26, 18:54:

Good luck. First glance to me, the ROMs don't look properly seated.

I'll have to take everything from the beginning. Even BIOS...
You'll read about this board repair, I know myself well enough to open a new topic in the future.

One thing I'm betting on is that some traces are broken.

Ok today bought for a somewhat "retro" / vintage computer a low profile video card. Been looking for a cheap one to put in my mini InWin desktop case to replace the horrid Intel GMA X4500 onboard video from the Intel DG41RQ (soc775)
https://ia802806.us.archive.org/view_archive. … echProdSpec.pdf
and E5200 cpu. Not building a game rig but the wanted better video so bought this NOS from 2015/16 Gigabyte GT710 1Gb from a local thrift store for $9.99 and it has the extra low profile backplates....
I know it is only good for desktop stuff but the price was right 😁

I don't see anything wrong with these underpowered GPUs for retro gaming. They won't support anything too demanding but are still absolutely perfect for lots of stuff up through early XP, and they have solid OpenGL and DirectX 9 performance.

Horun wrote on 2023-09-28, 02:47:

Ok today bought for a somewhat "retro" / vintage computer a low profile video card. Been looking for a cheap one to put in my mi […]
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Ok today bought for a somewhat "retro" / vintage computer a low profile video card. Been looking for a cheap one to put in my mini InWin desktop case to replace the horrid Intel GMA X4500 onboard video from the Intel DG41RQ (soc775)
https://ia802806.us.archive.org/view_archive. … echProdSpec.pdf
and E5200 cpu. Not building a game rig but the wanted better video so bought this NOS from 2015/16 Gigabyte GT710 1Gb from a local thrift store for $9.99 and it has the extra low profile backplates....
I know it is only good for desktop stuff but the price was right 😁

My company probably still have piles of these cards.
Before switching all employees to laptops around the pandemic we used to have Dell desktops with these cards for multi monitor setup.
They were more or less considered as "consumables" because they often died. I remember having to ask for a new one on multiple occasions to replace a broken card. Then the helpdesk person would give you a new card and a screwdriver and you had to replace it yourself and trash the old card.

I used to use Quadro NVS cards for my multimonitor setup, because they were inexpensive and worked with whatever GeForce I had at the time. This was fine, up until NVIDIA dropped support for them.

This was particularly annoying, because I had to viable replacement, since the cards I was using were single-slot with PCI-e 1x edge connectors.

Black gotek to fit into my antec 300 housing my 3dfx build. Using black brushed metal Lian li 5.25" bracket to house it when it arrives tomorrow. £18 Amazon prime

Picked up this nice AIW 7500 VE today, normally wouldn't bother with the AIW models but this one was mislabeled as AGP but is actually the PCI model which makes it more interesting. Should make for a really nice card for my Dual Tualatin board that doesn't have AGP on it, not sure how a 7500 will perform on a Tualatin setup but PCI options can be limiting at reasonable prices.

It should be pretty decent on a dually tually given lack of other options. I would say that the CPUs could handle some well threaded DX9 stuff, but you'd have to go to a PCI 9400GT to get any GPU speed on DX9 and then that would not play older stuff so well.

Trashbytes wrote on 2023-09-29, 02:58:

was mislabeled as AGP but is actually the PCI model

I love that, feels like christmas when this happens and you're the first one to grab it.

Bought six strips (three pairs) of 2GB DDR2-800 for NT$200 (US$6.25). The seller priced "NT$100 for each pair; buy two and get one free" so I bought three pairs. 😄

I also asked him about Socket 370 heatsink but he only got 478 or newer types (shrug).

Trashbytes wrote on 2023-09-29, 02:58:

Picked up this nice AIW 7500 VE today, normally wouldn't bother with the AIW models but this one was mislabeled as AGP but is actually the PCI model which makes it more interesting. Should make for a really nice card for my Dual Tualatin board that doesn't have AGP on it, not sure how a 7500 will perform on a Tualatin setup but PCI options can be limiting at reasonable prices.

7500 AIW Box.jpg7500 AIW PCI.jpg

The theater 200 chip has good analog capture.

Nexxen wrote on 2023-09-26, 15:57:

Today I bought a 286 boars on ebay, I'm attaching the seller's pic as it'll come from the Czech Republic. […]
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Today I bought a 286 boars on ebay, I'm attaching the seller's pic as it'll come from the Czech Republic.

I can't really determine the model, but it looks close to these two:

https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/dfi-286-20#expchips
https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/iqs-jli

Seller complains no post, cpu hot and VARTA damage.
He attempted a repair but he failed.
No idea what the wire is for, I'll ask later.

Another long project I guess.

Congratulations, I kept an eye on that card too, but I didn't have time to decide if it could be repaired, looking at it it seemed damaged (interrupted) some traces near the battery, I think the repair was attempted, but they didn't understand much, certainly if you can understand what brand and model it is, it would already be a small step forward, then all the jumpers would have to be checked, but perhaps by fixing the broken tracks and redoing some soldering (in the battery area), it could give some sign of awakening.???