Here's my tally from this weekend's flea market:

- Gigabyte GA-6BX7 rev 2.4 motherboard. Socket 370 with 443BX chipset and 2 ISA slots. No idea if it works, but I'm excited about it. Gonna need caps eventually. The Choyo's on it still look OK by whatever miracle. The guy selling it had a bunch of other boards, all looked like they were ready to hit the scrap center. But the price was right - $4. Came with a 667 MHz Celly and a rather oversized (for s370) Spire cooler. Probably should have gotten a few more boards from this seller. There was one newer AsRock (or maybe it was Gigabyte again??) socket 462 board, also complete with CPU and cooler.

- Yamaha YMF724 (I think) sound card. It's a newer one (has colored output jacks, so I imagine '99 or later build). Untested, as usual. But hey, it was 60 cents! Actually, we will see what its price was. The lady I got it from I've known since day one I set foot on this flea market - she's a regular and she knows I'm a regular too. She asked me if she could borrow $10 today to pay some bills or whatever. So if she runs off and never comes back (I doubt it very much), then that's how much this sound card would cost. Not that I care about this. Actually makes the interaction a little more fun. She seems like a nice person, though.

- 2x ATX power supplies. One is a cheapo gutless wonder with paper-thin case that's been a little mangled up. I bought it mainly for the output cables. They are nothing special, but I have a few projects in mind. The other power supply is (I think) an AcBel Polytechnic (judging by the "API" marks on the transformers), as it's just a bare board without the case or anything else. This one I might try to fix up... eventually (I have like 20 PSUs, if not more, that need work). Looks like a nice 350 Watt or so. Has a 6-pin PCI-E connector. Output toroid looks beefy, as do the 5V rail rectifiers. So could be a potential retro 5V PSU. The snubber cap(s) on the primary are split open, so there's a good chance there's more wrong with it. But whatever, I just felt bad seeing the guy about to hit it with a hammer to get the aluminum heatsinks out of it. Paid $1.20 for it, which is more than he would have gotten for the Alu heatsinks and copper in the cables. And worth it to me as well, since the parts in this PSU alone are worth 10x more. Funny, I got the gutless wonder above for the same price (or maybe it was $1.80, I don't remember.)

- SNES clone - cheapo Eastern European version. I don't remember if a friend from my childhood had a system like this or a real SNES. But either way, curiosity and nostalgia got the better part of me here... and also, I found 2 generic game cartridges for these SNES clones last weekend (again, more abandoned/free stuff.) Then the following day found a light gun $0.60, so bought that. Then the lady abandoned here sale and I found two generic red controllers. Then fast forward to this week, and I got the SNES clone yesterday. And in a similar manner, the guy who sold it to me had the light gun for it, but it was in a different part of his "sale rug" so I didn't see it. Once he abandoned his unsold stuff, I found the light gun on the 2nd (or 3rd?) re-run at the place. So now I have a complete system... I think. Also got a small CRT TV (15"?) a while back from my nephew who got it from his friend's house when they mentioned they were doing some cleaning around and were going to trash it.

- Quantum Fireball ES (ES 3.2??) 3.5" IDE HDD. Again, condition unknown. My limit for HDDs from the flea market is $2 per drive, since half the time they don't work. This one I got for $1.20.

- Western Digital WD800JD 3.5" SATA HDD. Freebie, abandoned under a pile of books and CDs. Was a little wet from the rain on Saturday morning, but should be OK. Plating on the board looks tarnished as heck, as it always does with these. Will clean the head amp contacts on the PCB before powering it up, as those are likely charcoal black tarnish at this point. If the drive is good, I'll re-tin them with leaded solder - this puts an end to that problem.

- Acorp socket 370 cooler with 50 mm fan. Abandoned under a different pile of books... so freebie again.

- A pile of 40/80-pin IDE and floppy drive cables - just left in the middle of an isle and no one cared to pick them up (not even for scrap copper!) Nice and clean too.

- A small cake box (10 or 25 pack??) of Verbatim CD-Rs. $0.30. First time I see such clean CD-Rs in this place.

- black DVD-R/RW IDE optical drive. Testing pending. $0.60. From one of the regular sellers.

- various recorded DVDs and CDs. Still cralwing through these and probably will be for another few weeks. There's CDs with music (both MP3 and CDA audio), programs, movies... and etc. I think the most exciting from today's finds are Windows 98 SE, MS Office 2003, Linux Live CD (yay - I was always too lazy to make one, so here I have it now), and probably an XP install CD, as the CD key looks XP-ish.

- white DVD-R/RW IDE optical drive with removed mainboard. Free. There's this dumb bloke at the flea market that would rather pull PCBs out of old PCs and scrap them for cents rather than me buy parts from him for a few $ (or even more than a few - I was pretty realistic with my prices, I'd say.) When I asked him to give me a bulk price, he acted exactly like those crazy ebay sellers - wanted about $15 per board, even for the boards that already had their heatsinks pulled and capacitors (along with who knows that else) mangled up. What a greedy tool! Oh well, if he wants to take the time to pull boards out of optical drives to make less than 10 cents per board (while I offered him $1.50 per drive), he can do that all he wants. What's even more stupid is he doesn't clean up after himself either - he chucks most of the "non-worthwhile" bits behind the fence. There's actually a pile of plastic front bezels for ATX cases, cooler brackets and braces, and whatnot. Oh, and SATA and IDE cables too. See next item below.

- a bunch of small knick-knack PC parts: fans for Intel s775 and AMD 939/AM2/AM3 coolers, top and bottom brackets for same systems, and I can't remember what else. All free.

Oh, and I forgot to post last weekend's and last last weekend's stuff, though I can't remember most of them anymore really.

- ASUS Radeon x600 Pro FE (Filthy Edition 🤣 )... basically a Radeon 9600 in native PCI-E. $1.20. Testing pending. Cooler was warped badly, likely from whoever zip-tied a 50 mm fan onto it (original fan likely seized and was MIA when I got the card.) I replaced it, at least for now, with a cooler from a Medion Radeon 9800 XL (which is a joke of a cooler for the 9800XL, but might actually be just enough for the x600's TDP.)
- Ensoniq AudioPCI300 with ES1370 chip - dirty, but washed it already. $1.20, IIRC.
- Matrox Productiva g100 AGP video card. Again, nothing special. Just saving some old hardware from the scrappers, 60 cents at a time. 🤣
- GeForce MX 200 AGP BTFE (Blutooth Fan Edition 🤣 ). Another "feel sorry for this" purchase. Initially looked OK, but upon closer look, there's a blown protection diode and charred ferite bead on the S-video output, along with an IC of some sort (video scaler?) connecting to the S-video output that has a nice "pregnancy bump" over its center. First time I see an IC deformed like this. 🤣 I'd be very surprised if this card works... and even if it does, what could I even use it for? 😁
- IBM DTLA-307030 (GXP-75 series) 30 GB IDE HDD and a Maxtor Diamondmax 9 80 GB IDE HDD. Both untested. $1.20 each. A quick power-up with PSU only shows them appear to calibrate OK without any weird noises. So maybe OK. We will see about that, I suppose.
- two beige optical IDE drives. One is a DVD-ROM and the other is an R/RW unit. Funny, I bought the ROM unit (0.60), and then a little later in the day found the R/RW unit abandoned (so free.)
- two black optical IDE drives with the mainboards missing. One is HLDS and the other is a LiteOn. Both were free. Good for gears and belts, I guess?? Or if anyone needs particular parts for a similar unit??
- 16 GB flash drive. Found on the ground. Free & works! Even more bonus: came with music on it, some of which was decent (even if a little low bitrate MP3.)

G-X wrote on 2024-09-15, 17:04:

Well initial test in 2 different boards of different generations ... indeed no video. However in one the fan spun 100% all the time and in the other it went to idle after the initial ramp-up. So there is at least some life in the card.

Then (since the other boards didn't crap out because of the card) i risked putting it into my main/current ryzen pc. And what do you know ... IT POSTS and i have video!

No clue as to why this would be .. i was thinking power delivery but then again the other boards had a 620W psu connected so i don't know.

That's typical behavior for a failing ATI GPU sometimes.
My theory is that when I see this "sometimes works, sometimes it doesn't" behavior, it's probably the PCI-E lanes going to the GPU chip that are getting affected from the bumps on the core separating.
One "trick" I started practicing lately when testing PCI-E video cards is to put them in one of those coin miner risers (PCI-E 16x slots that are electrically only a 1x slot). That way, if there are any faulty lanes, this increases the chance that the faulty ones may not be used, thus end up not causing a problem. IME, when a single signal line is lost to a PCI-E lane, that will almost always make the card not work rather than cause it to work at a lower speed. So it 's worth a try.

It is most definitely not a power delivery issue. I don't know why this myth keeps spreading. A power delivery issue will almost always result in one of these:
- PC constantly boot-looping due to low and/or dirty voltage from the over-loaded rail(s)
- PSU trip short-circuit or OPP or OCP protection
- PSU blow up (if it's a cheapie no-name one)

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-09-15, 17:10:

I would say to inspect the capacitors, but those look like quality polymer capacitors that probably aren't bad.

Exactly!

However, you're not completely on the wrong track here.

That capacitors that should always be inspected on PCI-E video cards are the signal coupling ones by the PCI-E connector. These are typically 82 to 200 nF caps. A chipped or cracked one can become either open-circuited or short-circuited. On a card that doesn't detect, this is my 1st go-to item to check, especially if the card looks like it was mishandled before. My multimeter has a capacitance test function. While checking capacitors in circuit is usually not useful (due to high chance of getting a completely inaccurate reading), the ceramic coupling caps on the PCI-E lanes are an exception as they are not connected to anything on one end (the one that goes to the PCI-E edge connector.) Thus, these can be checked in circuit. If you don't get a healthy capacitance reading around 82 to 200 nF, then that can mean a cap is faulty. I saved a few video cards like this. On one of them, none of the caps even looked bad. But one was short-circuited. Removed & replaced and that got the card working fine afterwards.

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-09-15, 17:10:

Or maybe it's oxidation on the contacts that I'm scraping away through repeated insertions.

Rarely the case, but still worth checking.

Got this Terratec Maestro 32/96. Pretty happy I finally own one. They seem to be pretty rare considering they stopped production after Roland sued them because the MIDI wavetable sounded like a SC-55 (probably a copy). I'll need to compare it to my SC-55 and see if I can pickup any differences. What's interesting is the previous owner said he had it running in a K6-3+ 500 (it supposed to freeze on fast processors or maybe it's only on Intel P2's and P3's?). No mods (C58 cap replacement) have been done so I wonder if it's a late revision (even though it says v1.0).

Here is a picture (see link) of another one and it has a few tantalum capacitors (including C58) but with the one I just got they are all purple electrolytic capacitors.

https://retronn.de/imports/hwgal/hw_sound_car … 3296_front.html

Today's purchase was quite literally small.

I now finally have a 186. What's even better is it seems to not be one of the explicit microcontroller versions. This also means that I technically have every major generation of Intel x86 Processor in my collection, at least up until the actually useful P4s.

The only processors I have that aren't in the case are separately displayed slot 1 P2/P3s

Tbh, I've only ever seen a 186 in the wild once - it was in a Checkpoint security antenna and AMD.

I really didn't think they existed until then

I have some MCA multi serial card with an 80186 chip on it.

Is the 80186 a pure 16-bit cpu or 8-bit external?

Like with 8086, there's 80188 which is the 8bit databus one.

momaka wrote on 2024-09-16, 00:55:

One "trick" I started practicing lately when testing PCI-E video cards is to put them in one of those coin miner risers (PCI-E 16x slots that are electrically only a 1x slot). That way, if there are any faulty lanes, this increases the chance that the faulty ones may not be used, thus end up not causing a problem. IME, when a single signal line is lost to a PCI-E lane, that will almost always make the card not work rather than cause it to work at a lower speed. So it 's worth a try.

Ohh that's a great idea. Thanks !
Even in 1x slots. Some connectors might have a notch to allow a longer card to fit. (Like 64bit PCI cards can sometime fit into regular ones)

Just snagged a super rare gfx card for a few bucks on ebay, seconds after it was posted.... I won't say what card it is until it's in my hands 😁 because the last time I bought something quickly the seller realized they could've sold it for more, so they cancelled my purchase..... but I will give you a hint. It's red, and it has the most "2000s" shroud design ever conceived.

BetaC wrote on 2024-09-16, 07:29:

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Love this pic. Would love to do something similar myself one day. What's the names of these CPUs? I only recognize the labeled ones 😁 and the pentium 3s

Wes1262 wrote on 2024-09-16, 15:30:

Just snagged a super rare gfx card for a few bucks on ebay, seconds after it was posted.... I won't say what card it is until it's in my hands 😁 because the last time I bought something quickly the seller realized they could've sold it for more, so they cancelled my purchase..... but I will give you a hint. It's red, and it has the most "2000s" shroud design ever conceived.

hmm interesting... I haven't really seen anything super crazy lately. Excited to find out! Must be a pretty old ball search parameter.

Wes1262 wrote on 2024-09-16, 15:30:

Just snagged a super rare gfx card for a few bucks on ebay, seconds after it was posted.... I won't say what card it is until it's in my hands 😁 because the last time I bought something quickly the seller realized they could've sold it for more, so they cancelled my purchase..... but I will give you a hint. It's red, and it has the most "2000s" shroud design ever conceived.

Red shroud .. sounds like an ATI card.

AGP4LIfe? wrote on 2024-09-16, 15:54:

Wes1262 wrote on 2024-09-16, 15:30:

Just snagged a super rare gfx card for a few bucks on ebay, seconds after it was posted.... I won't say what card it is until it's in my hands 😁 because the last time I bought something quickly the seller realized they could've sold it for more, so they cancelled my purchase..... but I will give you a hint. It's red, and it has the most "2000s" shroud design ever conceived.

hmm interesting... I haven't really seen anything super crazy lately. Excited to find out! Must be a pretty old ball search parameter.

It's nothing too special, but I believe it's rare because it was on sale only for a few months before it was replaced by yet another series of cards. The 2000s were crazy.

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-09-16, 16:02:

Wes1262 wrote on 2024-09-16, 15:30:

Just snagged a super rare gfx card for a few bucks on ebay, seconds after it was posted.... I won't say what card it is until it's in my hands 😁 because the last time I bought something quickly the seller realized they could've sold it for more, so they cancelled my purchase..... but I will give you a hint. It's red, and it has the most "2000s" shroud design ever conceived.

Red shroud .. sounds like an ATI card.

AGP4LIfe? wrote on 2024-09-16, 15:54:

Wes1262 wrote on 2024-09-16, 15:30:

Just snagged a super rare gfx card for a few bucks on ebay, seconds after it was posted.... I won't say what card it is until it's in my hands 😁 because the last time I bought something quickly the seller realized they could've sold it for more, so they cancelled my purchase..... but I will give you a hint. It's red, and it has the most "2000s" shroud design ever conceived.

hmm interesting... I haven't really seen anything super crazy lately. Excited to find out! Must be a pretty odd ball search parameter.

Wes1262 wrote on 2024-09-16, 16:08:

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-09-16, 16:02:

Wes1262 wrote on 2024-09-16, 15:30:

Just snagged a super rare gfx card for a few bucks on ebay, seconds after it was posted.... I won't say what card it is until it's in my hands 😁 because the last time I bought something quickly the seller realized they could've sold it for more, so they cancelled my purchase..... but I will give you a hint. It's red, and it has the most "2000s" shroud design ever conceived.

Red shroud .. sounds like an ATI card.

Maybe.

hmm HD2900 XT ?

Its a rather rare card .. not exactly a great card but cetainly rare enough and its got that uhhh racing red shroud and would fit with the replaced soon after relase . .since the 3000 series came out super fast not long after the 2900Xt was released.

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-09-16, 17:24:

hmm HD2900 XT ?
Its a rather rare card .. not exactly a great card but cetainly rare enough and its got that uhhh racing red shroud and would fit with the replaced soon after relase . .since the 3000 series came out super fast not long after the 2900Xt was released.

Can't hide anything from you guys xD

Wes1262 wrote on 2024-09-16, 17:30:

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-09-16, 17:24:

hmm HD2900 XT ?
Its a rather rare card .. not exactly a great card but cetainly rare enough and its got that uhhh racing red shroud and would fit with the replaced soon after relase . .since the 3000 series came out super fast not long after the 2900Xt was released.

Can't hide anything from you guys xD

As someone who owns said racing red GPU and fought with it to play Stalker with out crashing .. picked it in your first post wasn't sold till you said "2000s" and replaced soon after its release. 😁

Its a fun card to play with but its HOT and Loud and not a great performer for the wattage it eats but once I got STALKER running on it I had fun with it, hearing it sound like a jet engine as it turned into a space heater was 10/10 would do it again !

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-09-16, 17:24:

Wes1262 wrote on 2024-09-16, 16:08:

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-09-16, 16:02:

Red shroud .. sounds like an ATI card.

Maybe.

hmm HD2900 XT ?

Its a rather rare card .. not exactly a great card but cetainly rare enough and its got that uhhh racing red shroud and would fit with the replaced soon after relase . .since the 3000 series came out super fast not long after the 2900Xt was released.

I didn't realize the 2900XT was considered a rare card, but it falls outside my view being that its PCI-E. Although I confess I have a Fiji Architecture Radeon Pro Duo at home. For some reason iIthought those original HBM Cards were going to make history.

It can't possibly be louder than the x1800/x1900... or is it? But anyway, I don't really use any of my GPUs except the mid range low value ones. Right now I am playing Vice City on a Radeon 9600 Pro and that's plenty!