Another smash-hit weekend day at the local flee market. I took a little bit more money with me than last time, just in case... and welp, I still SPENT IT ALL!!! 🤣
Basically, the equivalent of $30 got me the following stuff + a good number of non-PC items. So here goes the list (sorry, no pictures... again... been too busy sorting through / cleaning / refurbishing stuff.)
- Syntax SV266a (apparently the same thing as an ECS K7AMA3 v 1.0 - thanks for the info from member soggi here and his website 😉 ). It was a total impulse buy - I just couldn't resist the bright-orange PCB color. Didn't get it quite that cheap compared to other stuff on this flea market... but it's still peanuts in the realm of world prices for retro PC stuff. It was $6... and untested, as usual. Came with a 1600 MHz Duron Applebred + cooler and I think 2x 256 MB PC2700 DDR RAM (the board can take either DDR or SDRAM... so very similar to the ECS K7S5A.) Only got it for a slightly better price because of buying the next item below with it.
- Gigabyte Radeon 9550 128 MB 128-bit (full-height) video card. Again, untested and probably destined for scrap, but looked in pretty good condition. Got it for a mere $3. I've been after one of these (or a Gigabyte Radeon 9600) for a while now, since my custom 933 MHz P3 retro PC has a nice old blue Gigabyte mobo. Currently, I have a Sapphire Radeon 9600 non-pro in it, which has a green PCB. Probably may seem quite silly to buy a card just to match the PCB color (and mobo brand)... but why not? After all, no one but me buys retro PC parts from this particular era on this flea market. So might as well save what I can... and in the process also upgrade / complete my other retro PC projects. For the curious, that 9550 has 4 ns Hynix RAM. I'm not into OC-ing RAM, but I'll definitely make sure it runs up to full spec (250 MHz). And since it's a passively-cooled card and I always add a fan to cool my passively-cooled cards, I imagine the core will be able to take an OC up to 9600 pro speeds... but we will see about that. Either way, even at stock 9550 core speeds, it will be fast enough. The Sapphire 9600 np is a slight over-kill for the system. On the other hand, I have a nice BFG GeForce FX5200 with a neat blue PCB that also matches the color of the mobo. But I find the FX5200 is really not quite up to the task with the 933 MHz P3 - at least in 2000-2001 games, like Need For Speed Underground.
- mid-2000's cheapo black(ish) PC case with a OEM-y socket 370 motherboard (no AGP slots) with a............. 1.3 GHz Celeron!! (Is that what y'all call a Tualeron?) I asked the guy if I can buy only the CPU (for 4 Lev... errr, $2.50) and let him keep the mobo and case that he can sell to one of the scrappers and make more that way. But he didn't want me to part it out. Said to take the whole thing as-is for $6... or for $9 (or was it $12, I don't remember) to take that and another PC he had. Sounded like a pretty good deal... but I just can't carry 3 PCs with me by hand and lug them for 2 miles. So I had to turn the 2nd PC down. It was an old beige case, though a cheapie, not in best of condition, and missing the sides. Inside was a s462 Gigabyte mobo with a an AXP 2000 or 2500 and an HDD, but otherwise the PC was pretty stripped. The GB mobo had a few bad caps of course... so probably revivable. But again, I couldn't carry two PCs with me. After some back and forth, I came back to the guy and he had already sold the beige case with the mobo to a scrapper. So I asked about parting out the other PC with the Celly, but again he refused. In the end, he dropped the price down to 7 LEV (~$4) for the entire PC and I just had to bite. Then "at checkout", asked me if I can make it $5... and I obliged. So we will see what comes out of that system. I suppose it's better that I got it with the motherboard, for testing purposes. Otherwise, there's nothing I care about the motherboard in that system, as it doesn't have an AGP slot and only 3 PCI slots. If the CPU works, it will go in another system. I have a retro PC with a Gigabyte GA-60XT-a. Someone over at another forum told me that since there was a "T" sticker next to the CPU socket, it should be able to take Tualatin CPUs.
Now suppose that it does... I still have to wonder how does that Celeron rank among these other two CPUs: 933 MHz Coppermine and 1 GHz Coppermine (133 FSB). Currently, I have the 933 MHz P3 in the GA-60XT, mostly because it came that way (so some nostalgic value.) The 1 GHz will be a little faster, but I don't want to change the system because of that. On the other hand, if the 1.3 GHz Celeron will be much faster than the 933 or 1G, I'll do the swap.
So anyone know if it's worth upgrading to that Celly?
- beige LG IDE DVD-R/RW drive. $0.60 and untested. Worth the gamble, though.
- black LG SATA CD/DVD-ROM. This one was "hefty"-priced at $1.20. 🤣 I'm regularly short on SATA optical drives, though, so can make the exception. Otherwise, someone was offering me 5 optical drives + 2 floppy drives for $3 total. But I don't have the space for all of that in my backpack... which was already getting heavy and full with the other stuff above.
- Athlon XP 3200+ with an awful lot of bent pins, but should make it out with some straightening... if it's not a burned CPU, that is. Looks OK, though (no darkening underneath the core.) And I don't really care either way, it was $0.60.
- 80 GB Western Digital 3.5" HDD (WD800 series) for $1.20. I swore I would stop buying these due to the high failure rates (in contrast, the era-equivalent Seagate 7200.7 series are almost always guaranteed to work... but I just don't find them as often.) Wish me luck with this one. The 120 GB WD Caviar IDE I purchased 2 weeks ago seems to be spinning up OK, though haven't had the time to test it in a machine yet. Now with that one, I had forgot that the IDE WD Caviars sometimes have ball bearing spindles... making it rather LOUD. I guess I need to pair it with a loud & hot Athlon s462 system.
- 3-heatpipe OEM-looking socket 775 cooler off of a Pentium 4 / Celeron D motherboard. The guy had a bunch of scrap PCBs and was just taking with one of scrapper buyers to give him a price. The scrapper said he'll come talk to him in a few minutes, since he was busy with some other matter. So I asked if we wanted to part me just the heatsink off of that 775 mobo for $2 before selling it to the scrapper (which I know, and he's told me repeatedly that he's after the "BIOS" chips while actually pointing to the Southbridges.). At first, he refused, saying he's just not going to bother doing any work. Of course, I always come prepared with a screw driver set in my pocket, so I offered to do it myself. He saw I was serious, so accepted.
The 3-heatpipe heatsink did not have a fan... but honestly, I'm quite fine with that, as I now have an abundance of fans (thanks to another e-scrapper at the place who doesn't bother with any of the OEM fans and just chucks them behind a fence... that I go behind and rummage through once in a while. 😁 )
- last but not least, a stick of 256 MB 133 MHz SODIMM SDRAM - FREE! If it works, I can finally max my 2rd Dell Latitude c600 laptop to 512 MB of RAM. With Windows XP, these make fantastic workbench laptops for looking at datasheets and/or sending audio signals. With some patience, they can even get on the web to look for info / datasheets / retro PC stuff (i.e. VOGONS too 😀 ).
An that concludes my retro-PC purchases. The rest (and quite a bit) was non-PC related items, mostly. Namely, some large beer-can type of capacitors for ~$0.60 each. If anyone is a fan of Electroboom or PhotonicInduction, you know what I'll be using these for - "experiments", let's call em. 😉
I also picked up a free 22" AOC LED LCD monitor. Not sure how/why no one took it. It was literally sticking out in the middle of a walking isle like a sore thumb... and clearly it was visible that it was next to a pile of abandoned garbage. Then again, today's flee market was HUGE with so many free stuff leftover afterwards, that perhaps people got more than they can carry early on and left. Either way, a free monitor is a free monitor. If I didn't take it, I could see this old guy not too far on the other isle who regularly takes monitors and TVs like this and scraps them just for the (very little) metal inside, completely breaking everything else in the process. So at the very least, I saved the monitor from that fate. The screen didn't look damaged either, so would be repairable if there was an issue. Turns out, though, there was absolutely nothing wrong with it - monitor appears to be working fine. Sweet!
