Kahenraz wrote on 2025-02-16, 12:35:

What's a goldfinger? Can you share a photo?

https://www.anandtech.com/show/457

Kahenraz wrote on 2025-02-16, 12:35:

Trashbytes wrote on 2025-02-16, 07:26:

Kahenraz wrote on 2025-02-16, 06:57:

What do you do to take advantage of the better cores? Move some resistors around on the PCB?

Well I have a goldfinger which works handily.

What's a goldfinger? Can you share a photo?

Here's a picture of a stripped slotA athlon and the location of the golden fingers.

Just so happens to be that recent posts are about GFDs. I today built a Freespeed Pro clone for myself, I got the PCBs and components during the last couple of weeks. The plan is to test it with my 650MHz Pluto when I have time. I also have NOS GlobalWin VOS32 cooler at hand, so getting some extra out of that thing shouldn’t be because of the lack of cooling.

My current Slot A setup is running stock, recapped Epox 7KXA and 750MHz Pluto with Coolermaster heatsink. It is one of my favourite setups and I can’t wait tinkering with GFD. Slot A is such an interesting platform.

amadeus777999 wrote on 2025-02-15, 18:58:

As far as I can tell - yes, the refresh rate is untouched which can be an unpleasant surprise if you're on a television not supp […]
Show full quote

xelizor wrote on 2025-02-15, 16:08:

amadeus777999 wrote on 2025-02-14, 17:49:

After a LONG time I finally got to buy an OSSC and try it with some of my old PCs... I have to admit it's pretty nice!(It would be prefect if more monitors had a vertical resolution of 1200 pixels)
Only drawback one needs a monitor/TV able to display refresh rates higher than 60hz.
I have some CRTs but I do not like to "use them up" for things that take long work hours.

Nice one, does it pass-through the refresh rate? Like 1600x1200 144hz? There's any refresh rate (hz) limit imposed by ossc itseld?

Best regards

As far as I can tell - yes, the refresh rate is untouched which can be an unpleasant surprise if you're on a television not supporting rates in excess of 60hz(->black screen).
Since I'm only using the OSSC for old PCs I can't tell the upper limits of its capabilities from experience.
But... I read the "absolute threshold rate" of the unit is 2560x1440x70hz - maybe 60hz at most, but no guarantees.

Thanks for the answer, it looks promising for using it with older vga video cards and high refresh monitors 😜

Cheers

I managed to find and repair the original speakers, for my mom's 1998 IBM Aptiva. They were retired decades ago, when my mom got a Dell, and the power switch had contact issues so it had a huge piece of ducttape plastered over it. They've been up in the attic ever since, inside a duffle bag.

I disassembled the primary speaker, and gave the casing a good scrub and wash in the sink with some dish detergent. The power switch was a surprisingly easy fix and just needed a contact plate to be pressed down firmly, with a pin, until it clicked back into the place. Now everything works perfectly and the sound quality is surprisingly good! 🥳

xelizor wrote on 2025-02-17, 11:00:

amadeus777999 wrote on 2025-02-15, 18:58:

As far as I can tell - yes, the refresh rate is untouched which can be an unpleasant surprise if you're on a television not supp […]
Show full quote

xelizor wrote on 2025-02-15, 16:08:

Nice one, does it pass-through the refresh rate? Like 1600x1200 144hz? There's any refresh rate (hz) limit imposed by ossc itseld?

Best regards

As far as I can tell - yes, the refresh rate is untouched which can be an unpleasant surprise if you're on a television not supporting rates in excess of 60hz(->black screen).
Since I'm only using the OSSC for old PCs I can't tell the upper limits of its capabilities from experience.
But... I read the "absolute threshold rate" of the unit is 2560x1440x70hz - maybe 60hz at most, but no guarantees.

Thanks for the answer, it looks promising for using it with older vga video cards and high refresh monitors 😜

Cheers

For the price it is beyond pleasantly surprising picture wise.
Also if one is into fine-tuning, the OSSC can be near perfectly adapted to the screen mode due to its vast array of parameters.
I'll pick up a 1920x1200 screen in the coming days and will post some line-tripled results.

Cleaning the most horrible Highscreen system. Yes, it was from a smoker. Foam cleaner to the rescue!

PSU:

So I'm working on this SS-7 build, and yesterday I've replaced the power supply, did some benchmarks, turn it off so I can screw the power supply. But when I turn it on again, none of the IDE ports worked anymore. Only thing I did was connecting this old keyboard with a switch for selecting between AT and XT. Have any ideas to what happened?

https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/a-tren … v1-atc-5200m-v1

Check for continuity for all voltage pins on one of the channels and see if there is a break or a short.

Tried out an MSI K7N2 board with a Athlon XP 3000. Both work fine, though the cpu is being mis-identified in POST, so I'll probably need to do a bios update.

I'll need to check the memory at some point with memtest86.

The last few days I've been going at my Toshiba T4400C collection trying to get them all working - I have at last got to enjoy one and it's a real speed demon...

Well, it's an ISA system from like 1991 / 1992, it's fast for its time. This one is running an SX2-50 processor instead of the regular SX-25.

Last week I bought 2 more because I had spare caps leftover from my recapping of the other power supplies. I don't really intend to keep them all but it's been a learning experience.
See this post for the kind of problems I had: Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today
Two out of four had dead motherboards and I tracked it down on both of them, to the clock generator which is a little SPXO like a surface mount version of a clock can like the one wiretap made a replacement for.
One mainboard I was able to use the working 25mhz clock generator from another motherboard that was broken in other ways, which is now just for parts. That's three out of four working but getting a new 5 volt 25mhz (or 33mhz) clock generator that will fit in the limited space is not easy, it's not micro soldering but a can clock would be too big.
There are some 5v 25mhz clock generators I found but that means waiting for parts to come in and I wanted them all fixed today. And they need significant adapting to fit the weird footprint this clock generator used.

Going through my box of scrap boards I found a 25mhz crystal on an office pbx system board, but it seems to be 3.3v - which requires stepping down because the Toshiba T4400 is 5v all the way, 3.3v was not invented yet when this thing was made. Using a 3.3v LDO, a 1uF MLCC capacitor and some cut capacitor leads as traces, it's all bodged into place:

And that works, hooray. Then I found out its keyboard is broken with the enter key not working, which makes it pretty useless. The keyboards on these, the T4500 / T4600 / T4700 / T4800 / T4900 / T1900 laptops are made by Alps and I can't see a way to fix this keyboard, there's a little 3-leg chip glued to the flex pcb and that connects to the enter-key-pad - I can't fix that like I can a regular membrane keyboard.

Kahenraz wrote on 2025-02-18, 00:01:

Check for continuity for all voltage pins on one of the channels and see if there is a break or a short.

So I've check for the continuity on the 5V rail, and all the legs on all regulators except for one are connected to 5V rail. Is this normal?

I couldn't say. You can easily compare it with another board though.

Kahenraz wrote on 2025-02-18, 17:26:

I couldn't say. You can easily compare it with another board though.

OK, thanks.

Thermalwrong wrote on 2025-02-18, 03:18:

The last few days I've been going at my Toshiba T4400C collection trying to get them all working - I have at last got to enjoy o […]
Show full quote

The last few days I've been going at my Toshiba T4400C collection trying to get them all working - I have at last got to enjoy one and it's a real speed demon...

The attachment IMG_5299 (Custom).JPG is no longer available

Well, it's an ISA system from like 1991 / 1992, it's fast for its time. This one is running an SX2-50 processor instead of the regular SX-25.

Last week I bought 2 more because I had spare caps leftover from my recapping of the other power supplies. I don't really intend to keep them all but it's been a learning experience.
See this post for the kind of problems I had: Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today
Two out of four had dead motherboards and I tracked it down on both of them, to the clock generator which is a little SPXO like a surface mount version of a clock can like the one wiretap made a replacement for.
One mainboard I was able to use the working 25mhz clock generator from another motherboard that was broken in other ways, which is now just for parts. That's three out of four working but getting a new 5 volt 25mhz (or 33mhz) clock generator that will fit in the limited space is not easy, it's not micro soldering but a can clock would be too big.
There are some 5v 25mhz clock generators I found but that means waiting for parts to come in and I wanted them all fixed today. And they need significant adapting to fit the weird footprint this clock generator used.

Going through my box of scrap boards I found a 25mhz crystal on an office pbx system board, but it seems to be 3.3v - which requires stepping down because the Toshiba T4400 is 5v all the way, 3.3v was not invented yet when this thing was made. Using a 3.3v LDO, a 1uF MLCC capacitor and some cut capacitor leads as traces, it's all bodged into place:

The attachment t4400c-new-clock-wiring.JPG is no longer available

The attachment t4400c-new-clock.JPG is no longer available

And that works, hooray. Then I found out its keyboard is broken with the enter key not working, which makes it pretty useless. The keyboards on these, the T4500 / T4600 / T4700 / T4800 / T4900 / T1900 laptops are made by Alps and I can't see a way to fix this keyboard, there's a little 3-leg chip glued to the flex pcb and that connects to the enter-key-pad - I can't fix that like I can a regular membrane keyboard.

Ahh, I fixed the keyboard which was down to 3 of the traces on one of the keyboard sheets being discoloured from what I guess is water ingress since the aluminium backing plate was corroded there. Used the conductive paint with kapton tape masking and hotplate paint curing method again, got all 3 traces within 50 ohms and not shorting each other (which they were, but the excess paint scrapes off with a bit of effort). Tested the keyboard in parts and the Enter key now works, put it all back together and re-melted all the heat stakes that hold the keyboard plastic to the backing plate and that worked, hooray.
But now I think that this T4400C #4 has killed a processor since it's tripping the DC-DC board's 5v low voltage limit...
Of course I need to test this - I have this Taken PCI400 that I 'fixed' a few weeks ago!

Thermalwrong wrote on 2025-01-31, 21:52:

What was the original TIM like? Was it still good enough for the cpu to cool properly or did it need replacing? […]
Show full quote

AGP4LIfe? wrote on 2025-01-30, 07:00:

I decided to dive into the deep end and replace the thermal paste on a Slot A 600Mhz CPU. I really want to replace the factory […]
Show full quote

I decided to dive into the deep end and replace the thermal paste on a Slot A 600Mhz CPU. I really want to replace the factory TIM on my 950Mhz Thunderbird, so I used this 600 to "learn" the opening process..

I gotta say it doesn't feel great, those pins are tough and you really have apply a lot of pressure. However seeing the garage factory TIM on the inside of the 600 makes me wonder how hot these things really get, and further entices me to now replace the 950's.

I also found out my 600, has a 700 core. Interesting 🤔.

Everything went well and the CPU still works with no damage to the exterior case.Feels good. I think I'll practice one more time on a 650.

The attachment PXL_20250130_034728245~3.jpg is no longer available

The attachment PXL_20250130_034814466.jpg is no longer available

The attachment PXL_20250130_034746387.jpg is no longer available

What was the original TIM like? Was it still good enough for the cpu to cool properly or did it need replacing?

I have been trying to use the motherboard I fixed here, my Taken PCI400-4 which was working after a socket replacement and some loose pins around the southbridge resoldered: Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today
I was trying to test an ISA soundcard on it but it wouldn't boot reliably, getting stuck on / flipping between "C0" and "C1" post codes. Initially I thought it was another loose pin on one of the chipsets so spent ages reflowing the solder on those but to no avail.
Shoulda checked the basics at this point specifically clockspeed, but after some time figured out that the board would boot normally if heated around the CPU / northbridge area which is why I thought it was the northbridge. It would work sometimes when started up but it seemed whenever I left it for a while and it got cold, it would go back to being broken.

Using the hot air with a nozzle I was able to narrow it down to the area around the clock generator, the ARK 915A which has a bash mark on it:

The attachment IMG_5162 (Custom) (1).JPG is no longer available

Checking with the oscilloscope it was showing an unstable ~9mhz on the main cpu clock instead of the 33mhz it's supposed to be. Can't find a datasheet for the ARK 915A or Macronix MX8318 clock generators, but the MX8315 is pretty close. There was no clock on the 14.318mhz crystal so I thought perhaps it was the crystal that was bad, swapped that and no difference 😐

The conclusion seems to be that there's a broken bond wire inside the ARK 915A clock generator since borrowing the MX8318 from my Zida 4DPS has made the board reliable again.
When the ARK 915A clock generator is heated up then it will work with the crystal and do its job properly, but when cold the crystal oscillator is dead so I assume that the XO crystal output pin of the clock generator which drives the oscillator, only has a working connection when warm.
If I heat the ARK 915A then it works and it seems to keep working if it works when it starts up, so a heater atop the chip could work. Mechanical pressure also seems to work so I might try some kind of clip on top of the chip to keep pressure on it.
Or I could look at making some alternative clock generator work, I'd rather not do that and replacements for the ARK 915A or MX8318 both seem to be unavailable. Getting an alternative clock generator working would be a lot of work...

Anyways, now the board works again (albeit at the cost of the 4DPS which I'm not using right now) and it's set up for a Cyrix 5x86 processor I thought I'd try out my 5x86 chips - the IBM one works perfectly and seems to run very cool.
I have another one with the green heatsink and cyrix branding and that works just fine as well. Then there's the one I got on this M919 from a junk lot quite a while back: Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today
I've not tested that chip until now because pin R1 broke off when I was cleaning it, there was only the tiniest little dot of a connection poking through the ceramic. I tried soldering a pin directly to that and making it strong mechanically with superglue, but didn't want to test it because well... I don't think that's going to work.
I tried it this evening and the processor was dead, just "--" on the post card 🙁 As suspected, it did not work. Not possible to solder to something so tiny and have that stay connected to something as big as a cpu pin.
A couple of weeks ago though, while I was trying to go to sleep I was for some reason thinking about this and visualised a new way I could do that repair. I have some scrap PCBs that are 0.8mm thick with 2.54mm spaced through-holes, I used the mini grinder pen to clean off all the traces so now I've got some 6-pin segments of a PCB. Those slide over the pins at each corner of the CPU so that this modified CPU sits level in the socket.

The attachment 5x86_Prelim_199507-brokenpin.png is no longer available

I've soldered a long single strand of copper wire to pin R1's little silver dot of a connection and checked it's functioning by checking the resistance to ground of this missing R1 pin for Address line 28 and the adjacent address pin, both measure 17mega ohms to ground so the wire is working 😀
To get the PCB with the wire to sit flush there's a channel carved into the backside and a pin from a very dead Pentium 200MMX is soldered into the front-side of the pin repair PCB, which is better for this than a regular CPU pin because there's a larger peg that sits inside the Pentium's organic PCB. That peg gives a bit more mechanical strength and makes alignment easier.

The attachment cyrix-5x86-pin-repair.jpg is no longer available

The little PCB bits are held in place at the corners with superglue. The strand of wire is looped around from the outside of the CPU / pin repair PCB and is soldered to the pin at the front-side, so it now has no mechanical connection to the CPU pin but has an electrical connection.

The attachment 5x86 cpu and pci400 mainboard repaired.JPG is no longer available

Now the CPU works! 😁

edit: ugh now the floppy controller is giving me trouble... not this CPU that's causing it though!!

The floppy controller on this Taken PCI400 board was not working, giving a floppy disk fail message in the BIOS and not even trying to move the heads. The board around the floppy controller area is immaculate, but these faults don't exist in a vacuum so I started comparing my Taken PCI400 against the Zida 4DPS - the floppy controller (super i/o) chip on the 4DPS has a 24mhz crystal by it, but there's no crystal on the Taken PCI400...
Spent a *while* trying to find where the floppy controller's clock input linked to but it seems to go to pin #5 of the clock generator chip, which I'd swapped out with the clock generator from the Zida 4DPS (this kills the 4DPS).

Checking pin #5 of the clkgen with the oscilloscope when it's on shows that with the MX8318 gives out 16.24mhz - there's yer prahblem. That should be 24mhz according to the W83787IF datasheet and the clock crystal on the Zida 4DPS by the super i/o chip.
So it seems that the Ark 915A incorporates a couple more clocks which the PCI400 makes full use of, not possible to swap the ARK 915A for the MX8318 and still have the board 100% working.

Put the ARK 915A clock generator back and it still does that thing where when it's cold it'll give out an unstable ~10mhz to the cpu which causes it to fail to boot up. It gets better and worse as it gets warmer/colder and it seems that pressing on the chip makes it work more reliably. Here I've tried a metal springy clip on top of the chip to apply pressure, it didn't really work...

Trying another way instead I moved pins 2 (crystal output) and 3 (crystal input or frequency) input out of the socket so that the ARK 915A has no connection to the 14.318mhz crystal that the PLL bases all other frequencies off of. Hooked up the frequency generator to pin 3 and ground and fed it 14.318mhz and it now works every time. This bypasses the damaged connection that I think is on the crystal-output pin that would normally drive the crystal.
Gonna see if I can use some useless microcontroller to use / drive this crystal instead and save this board so it can work all the time instead of only sometimes / only when warmed up.

Lately it seems all the problems I'm facing are clock frequency issues, I could put an SPXO frequency generator there instead but 5v input simple oscillators are hard to find. I actually broke apart one of the broken SMD SPXO oscillators from one of the Toshiba T4400C mainboards and it's got a little tube type crystal inside along with some silicon that drives it, guess the bond wires melt when it gets overvoltage.

edit: aww heck yeah. Went through my box of spare microcontrollers like atmels and pics and the attiny2313a was the best option to hand. Requires no extra circuitry to run the crystal (PICs do) and has a ckout pin, kind of a cruel fate but it's got no code and just has the fuse bits set to use an external crystal and provide the CKOUT pin - doing the same thing as the SPXO on my T4400C motherboards were doing. That feeds into the Clock Input pin of the ARK 915A, with the ATTINY 2313A piggy backing the VCC & GND of the 74LS244 beneath it, with all its other pins folded underneath.

Now the board starts every time! 😁 (and the floppy controller works great)

Thermalwrong wrote on 2025-02-19, 02:02:

edit: aww heck yeah. Went through my box of spare microcontrollers like atmels and pics and the attiny2313a was the best option to hand. Requires no extra circuitry to run the crystal (PICs do) and has a ckout pin, kind of a cruel fate but it's got no code and just has the fuse bits set to use an external crystal and provide the CKOUT pin - doing the same thing as the SPXO on my T4400C motherboards were doing. That feeds into the Clock Input pin of the ARK 915A, with the ATTINY 2313A piggy backing the VCC & GND of the 74LS244 beneath it, with all its other pins folded underneath.

The attachment IMG_5333 (Custom).JPG is no longer available

Now the board starts every time! 😁 (and the floppy controller works great)

This I call a hack! Well done!

Picked up another cheap ($10 + shipping) unobtainium for the Mathematica. Inc. (no relation to Wolfram Mathematica) Tempra archive I've been working on for 7+ years. Three mint instructional VHS tapes. Never knew they existed. This will be a phenomenal addition. Numerous years ago I recorded an instructional video of how to use the MS-DOS based Tempra video authoring software with an ISA video capture/pass-through card and the raw video somehow got deleted during the process. So a nice find after a frustrating loss.

Seller's photo

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-02-19, 19:29:

Now I'm wondering what's in my 1Ghz Orion.

What's the easiest way to open one of these things up without maiming myself or the processor?

EDIT: If there's a better place to discuss this we can take this to another thread so as not to derail too badly.

I follow the method used in the video below and it works really well for opening the CPU without damage. I would still practice on one lower spec'd unit before cracking the 1Ghz Case, you need to feel the experience at least once.

I use 3 Cards instead of two and I put some masking tape on the screw driver as I don't like to even scratch the internal aluminum plate. (Put one card on each side of the screw driver and one underneath) Basically the screw driver never touches anything but the cards.

Starts at 2 Mins.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgUkHjfyaeY

So far every disassembly has come out perfect. As far as removing the backside CPU clips after the black case is off. Ill leave that up to you. Maybe I'll make a video someday about how I take them off easily.

OC'd my 600MHz Pluto to 900MHz by copying the resistor config off an Orion.

It surprisingly works.

PcBytes wrote on 2025-02-19, 21:33:

OC'd my 600MHz Pluto to 900MHz by copying the resistor config off an Orion.

It surprisingly works.

Awesomeeeee.. I saw you have to bump it down to 800, Still fantastic up lift! 25% overclock!
I will do this to my 900Mhz T-Bird when I get a chance. I might even set it to 1050Mhz, which is the highest the register configuration allows.