Trashbytes wrote on 2025-02-14, 14:11:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-02-14, 13:59:

Woa, is this accurate? https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/gigaby … -ga-6bxds#chips […]
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PcBytes wrote on 2025-02-14, 13:54:

S'more stuff from my contact: […]
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S'more stuff from my contact:

- GA-6BXDS
- OR840
- K6BV3+/66
-MS6156
-GA-6BA

nyehehehe 🤣

Woa, is this accurate?
https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/gigaby … -ga-6bxds#chips

Is says this supports Coppermine-T processors? Maybe I'm having a brain fart but I don't believe that is normal for 440BX boards, let alone ones with dual processor support.

Its certainly not typical that's for sure but there isn't much difference between CU and CU-T so if it runs one it should run the other, the question is if its official support in the BIOS or not.

My ASUS P2B-DS can run CUmine with slotkets and there are mods to get it to run Tualatin.

Right, Coppermine support is fairly common as long as the VRM and BIOS are compatible, it's the Coppermine-T that tends to work in fewer boards.

But you know what? I apparently already tested this 5 years ago...

Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

🤣

So yeah, they do work in some 440BX boards. I remember now, I stopped using one in my tester system because I wanted a higher clock speed without overclocking the AGP bus.

Trashbytes wrote on 2025-02-14, 12:39:

Ashtray .. yup that's a very hard pass for me, have had to clean a few chain smoker PCs in the past and will never subject my se […]
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RetroPCCupboard wrote on 2025-02-14, 12:32:

dominusprog wrote on 2025-02-14, 12:23:

That CPU fan needs some serious cleaning 🧐.

I am pretty sure that heatsink isn't sufficient for that CPU anyway. 95W TDP. The whole PC smells like an ashtray. Haha. So will need a clean throughout.

Ashtray .. yup that's a very hard pass for me, have had to clean a few chain smoker PCs in the past and will never subject my self to that gag fest again.

Chainsmoker + Pet = utter gag fest cleaning fans that have sucked all that in...second only to roach motel PCs. Even offered to replace the fans and cooler but nope they wanted them cleaned to save money ....the new ones would have been cheaper since the cleaning time required for the tainted parts was an extra cost and I had the cooler and fans in the spares bin anyway.

have had to deal with both in the past and refuse to touch such PCs anymore.

Edit - For spelling and clarity
Do smokers know how bad stale nicotine smells to a non smoker ?
Do they know how damn hard it is to clean the matted durrie tar off parts ?
Same for Roach motels ...how do people not notice the roaches crawling out of the PC or the smell ?

Ooof, yeah. Second that. I regularly clean PCs and smoke/pet is THE double whammy (that makes me ask: are you sure?) with an extra charge. I got a nightmare to work on in a few weeks. It is Ryzen 1700X w/1060ti in the Fractal Focus G.... Absolutely no airflow anymore. Customer complains of "slow" and uses the top (with 2x120) as a f*@%ing end table. Last I was there, it was slow AND hot... and another system (same house) had a cat piss all over it. If it weren't freezing in there, I don't think they'd make it (avid Minecrafter, usually running 3+ instances, too). I'll try to document some before/afters of that nightmare.

On another note, nice deal on the P5N-D, I love that board, should clean up nicely. Cool to see a matching pair of 9800s in it, too; this was one serious rig!

These two absolute beauties came in the mail today! 😍
A Terratec GeForce FX 5800 & a Winfast A250 Ultra (GF4 Ti 4600).

Very excited to finally add the FX 5800 to my collection. One of two of the last AGP Nvidia cards I need!

I always loved the cooler on those leadteks

Major Jackyl wrote on 2025-02-15, 00:32:

Trashbytes wrote on 2025-02-14, 12:39:

Ashtray .. yup that's a very hard pass for me, have had to clean a few chain smoker PCs in the past and will never subject my se […]
Show full quote

RetroPCCupboard wrote on 2025-02-14, 12:32:

I am pretty sure that heatsink isn't sufficient for that CPU anyway. 95W TDP. The whole PC smells like an ashtray. Haha. So will need a clean throughout.

Ashtray .. yup that's a very hard pass for me, have had to clean a few chain smoker PCs in the past and will never subject my self to that gag fest again.

Chainsmoker + Pet = utter gag fest cleaning fans that have sucked all that in...second only to roach motel PCs. Even offered to replace the fans and cooler but nope they wanted them cleaned to save money ....the new ones would have been cheaper since the cleaning time required for the tainted parts was an extra cost and I had the cooler and fans in the spares bin anyway.

have had to deal with both in the past and refuse to touch such PCs anymore.

Edit - For spelling and clarity
Do smokers know how bad stale nicotine smells to a non smoker ?
Do they know how damn hard it is to clean the matted durrie tar off parts ?
Same for Roach motels ...how do people not notice the roaches crawling out of the PC or the smell ?

Ooof, yeah. Second that. I regularly clean PCs and smoke/pet is THE double whammy (that makes me ask: are you sure?) with an extra charge. I got a nightmare to work on in a few weeks. It is Ryzen 1700X w/1060ti in the Fractal Focus G.... Absolutely no airflow anymore. Customer complains of "slow" and uses the top (with 2x120) as a f*@%ing end table. Last I was there, it was slow AND hot... and another system (same house) had a cat piss all over it. If it weren't freezing in there, I don't think they'd make it (avid Minecrafter, usually running 3+ instances, too). I'll try to document some before/afters of that nightmare.

On another note, nice deal on the P5N-D, I love that board, should clean up nicely. Cool to see a matching pair of 9800s in it, too; this was one serious rig!

Im sitting here gagging at the thought . .cat piss . .yup that system is going right into the incinerator

Nope I can smell that system from here in Australia PTSD is a thing even in IT support, Like opening the door on a supposed server room only to find its actually a cleaning closet with no ventilation and it looks like some Indian telecommunication nightmare street pole.

Makes me want to just close the door and find the nearest pub.

Got the two 5AX in, alongside two AU8820 and a K6-2 500.

I never knew FSC used GB 5AX boards.

Got this socket 370 motherboard. I believe this is a rather unknown Lucky Star 6A815EP. So far I only tested it to BIOS.

Turbo -> wrote on 2025-02-15, 21:20:

Got this socket 370 motherboard. I believe this is a rather unknown Lucky Star 6A815EP. So far I only tested it to BIOS.

Nice! Though it might be a trick of the light, it looks as though there is a bulging capacitor next to the power socket - hopefully I'm wrong.

Repo Man11 wrote on 2025-02-15, 21:32:

Nice! Though it might be a trick of the light, it looks as though there is a bulging capacitor next to the power socket - hopefully I'm wrong.

You are absolutely right. I've noticed that too. I'm waiting for my order of fresh capacitors to arrive, and will replace that one as well.

Repo Man11 wrote on 2025-02-15, 21:32:

Turbo -> wrote on 2025-02-15, 21:20:

Got this socket 370 motherboard. I believe this is a rather unknown Lucky Star 6A815EP. So far I only tested it to BIOS.

Nice! Though it might be a trick of the light, it looks as though there is a bulging capacitor next to the power socket - hopefully I'm wrong.

It is slightly bulged and tilted.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-02-13, 07:56:

Thermalwrong wrote on 2025-02-13, 03:04:

What a curious keyboard, normally I'd rate it down because of those power and sleep buttons displacing the keys that regularly g […]
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sfryers wrote on 2025-02-12, 21:12:

A cheap, yellowed early 2000's keyboard: […]
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A cheap, yellowed early 2000's keyboard:

The attachment IZITK-105M.jpg is no longer available

Wouldn't normally be worth a second glance, except for...

The attachment Buckling Spring keyboard.jpg is no longer available

...the buckling spring mechanism! Hardly an IBM Model-M, but an interesting curiosity nonetheless. Model number is IZITK-105M, apparently manufactured by the Can Technology Co. Ltd., Taiwan.

It has an unusually small spacebar and a Fn key next to the right shift, which can be used to set the repeat rate. Pressing Fn+Print Screen causes it to output the string "eleen enterprise co., ltd. v1.02" to the connected PC.

What a curious keyboard, normally I'd rate it down because of those power and sleep buttons displacing the keys that regularly go in those spots, but it's buckling spring? With a windows key?

Today I got this little 8" LCD TV from a made-up-brand-from-maplins - I was going to take it apart to get the LCD since it's a 640x480 TFT but it works so well as a mini VGA monitor and composite TV that it's going to get used. It's got a really convenient built-in stand, stereo speakers and it looks nice 😀
Nearly pixel perfect VGA is something I find you generally can't get with analogue VGA screens, like the screen would normally do some awkward scaling, but this one doesn't do too badly at VGA resolution:

The attachment littel 8inch tv (1).JPG is no longer available

It's got some weirdness where getting the vertical position right is though, which is especially bad with 720x400 resolution. It's usable but cuts off quite a lot at the top:

The attachment littel 8inch tv (2).JPG is no longer available

Oh, that little thing is cool! I can't believe it actually has a VGA input!

Yeah, maplins did some cool stuff back in the day, I need to test out the latency on it for games but it might not be too bad. With the little kickstand it's a very handy little display, like the mini monitors I love making: Re: A Permanent Solution to the Dell 'Fake ATX' Power Supply Problem?

Today I got another Toshiba T4400c laptop, among others but this one works. It came with a broken CPU & hard drive, then I swapped in a good CPU along with a recapped power board to stop it destroying more things. Today the LTM09C011 control board got recapped too, look at how bad the leaked electrolyte was - this screen actually worked for a bit prior to the recapping:

after:

All put back together - this one is special though because it has the BIOS to support drives other than the original Toshiba 120MB drive (which was also destroyed by leaking caps). It just auto detects a 256MB CompactFlash card and that's so nice. This T4400C looked so good after a wash too, the paint on these is wonderful for how it doesn't age like other plastics:

It had a 4MB memory expansion card and those are ridiculously rare - tragically it would throw a memory error at 6.5MB (4MB internal & 2.5MB of the card). The connector of the memory card I thought was standard JEIDA but no, looks like this Toshiba T4400 / T6400 card has a custom pinout and will only work with cards designed for it. Regular JEIDA cards just do nothing even when they're 5v ones.
So of course this had to be disassembled too - I thought that maybe a power surge that killed the CPU also damaged this RAM card - because the power boards on T4400's are all faulty until recapped, causing havoc when powered up. But the chips on the card looked okay, so I resoldered all the pins on the memory chips of this super rare memory card and wah, now the card works at the full 8MB! At last I have achieved 8MB of memory on a T4400C!

(I have actually had a really bad, terrible time with T4400C & T4400SXC laptops lately. I got careless trying to run a working T4400C before recapping the power board which destroyed the CPU, the hard drive & stopped the mainboard from booting. The other two T4400C / T4400SXC laptops I've got for parts also all seem to have suffered catastrophic damage from the power board fault, with dead mainboards / cpus. The upside is those had good screens, hard drives, recappable power boards. I'm so glad this latest one only had a bad CPU and hard drive...)

Props to your repair work on the Toshiba. Not gonna lie, though. That key cap arrangement would drive me insane.

Thermalwrong wrote on 2025-02-16, 02:14:

Yeah, maplins did some cool stuff back in the day, I need to test out the latency on it for games but it might not be too bad. […]
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Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-02-13, 07:56:

Thermalwrong wrote on 2025-02-13, 03:04:

What a curious keyboard, normally I'd rate it down because of those power and sleep buttons displacing the keys that regularly g […]
Show full quote

What a curious keyboard, normally I'd rate it down because of those power and sleep buttons displacing the keys that regularly go in those spots, but it's buckling spring? With a windows key?

Today I got this little 8" LCD TV from a made-up-brand-from-maplins - I was going to take it apart to get the LCD since it's a 640x480 TFT but it works so well as a mini VGA monitor and composite TV that it's going to get used. It's got a really convenient built-in stand, stereo speakers and it looks nice 😀
Nearly pixel perfect VGA is something I find you generally can't get with analogue VGA screens, like the screen would normally do some awkward scaling, but this one doesn't do too badly at VGA resolution:

The attachment littel 8inch tv (1).JPG is no longer available

It's got some weirdness where getting the vertical position right is though, which is especially bad with 720x400 resolution. It's usable but cuts off quite a lot at the top:

The attachment littel 8inch tv (2).JPG is no longer available

Oh, that little thing is cool! I can't believe it actually has a VGA input!

Yeah, maplins did some cool stuff back in the day, I need to test out the latency on it for games but it might not be too bad. With the little kickstand it's a very handy little display, like the mini monitors I love making: Re: A Permanent Solution to the Dell 'Fake ATX' Power Supply Problem?

Today I got another Toshiba T4400c laptop, among others but this one works. It came with a broken CPU & hard drive, then I swapped in a good CPU along with a recapped power board to stop it destroying more things. Today the LTM09C011 control board got recapped too, look at how bad the leaked electrolyte was - this screen actually worked for a bit prior to the recapping:

The attachment IMG_5280 (Custom).JPG is no longer available

after:

The attachment IMG_5286 (Custom).JPG is no longer available

All put back together - this one is special though because it has the BIOS to support drives other than the original Toshiba 120MB drive (which was also destroyed by leaking caps). It just auto detects a 256MB CompactFlash card and that's so nice. This T4400C looked so good after a wash too, the paint on these is wonderful for how it doesn't age like other plastics:

The attachment IMG_5287 (Custom).JPG is no longer available

It had a 4MB memory expansion card and those are ridiculously rare - tragically it would throw a memory error at 6.5MB (4MB internal & 2.5MB of the card). The connector of the memory card I thought was standard JEIDA but no, looks like this Toshiba T4400 / T6400 card has a custom pinout and will only work with cards designed for it. Regular JEIDA cards just do nothing even when they're 5v ones.
So of course this had to be disassembled too - I thought that maybe a power surge that killed the CPU also damaged this RAM card - because the power boards on T4400's are all faulty until recapped, causing havoc when powered up. But the chips on the card looked okay, so I resoldered all the pins on the memory chips of this super rare memory card and wah, now the card works at the full 8MB! At last I have achieved 8MB of memory on a T4400C!

The attachment IMG_5288 (Custom).JPG is no longer available

(I have actually had a really bad, terrible time with T4400C & T4400SXC laptops lately. I got careless trying to run a working T4400C before recapping the power board which destroyed the CPU, the hard drive & stopped the mainboard from booting. The other two T4400C / T4400SXC laptops I've got for parts also all seem to have suffered catastrophic damage from the power board fault, with dead mainboards / cpus. The upside is those had good screens, hard drives, recappable power boards. I'm so glad this latest one only had a bad CPU and hard drive...)

Round of applause + 1 stadium ola!
Bravo!

Two more goodies from my contact:

- ASUS XG-DLS
- ASUS P5A Rev 1.06

Wow. Bought a haul of broken 5.25" drives. Also a 5.25" Quantum SCSI and NEC MultiSpin(w/cart). Finally got a few nice PCI VGA cards, too: Trident and Cirrus Logic

I also found THIS:

Never seen one before, but all the parts seems here, so it'll be fun to play with. This changer is HUGE!! Easily 20Lbs+ It came with a NOS internal drive and single ext. SCSI drive. Awesome pile of stuff.

Major Jackyl wrote on 2025-02-16, 21:31:

Wow. Bought a haul of broken 5.25" drives. Also a 5.25" Quantum SCSI and NEC MultiSpin(w/cart). Finally got a few nice PCI VGA cards, too: Trident and Cirrus Logic

Wow! That's quite a haul, those 5.25 floppy drives are getting harder and harder to source, and more and more expensive. Wish I'd bought a bunch I saw a few years back, when I could still find them for £20 a piece 😀

Don't forget that you really need two 5.25" drives to complete the set, one for 40 tracks and another for 80 tracks.

5.25" floppy drive reads but can't write?

Kahenraz wrote on 2025-02-16, 06:55:

Props to your repair work on the Toshiba. Not gonna lie, though. That key cap arrangement would drive me insane.

Yeah it does require looking at the area every time I want to press Ctrl or Caps Lock. It's the same for most of the beige Toshiba T series laptops like the T19xx and the whole T4xxx series.

I'm pretty stoked right now, in my last post I said that I was having terrible luck with mainboards for the T4400C and T4400SXC laptops I'd recently bought, where I had killed one by running it before recapping the PSU. That first one is still dead giving a black screen even though it's reading the BIOS there are no POST codes. That mainboard got further than the one I got the other day in a T4400SXC which was seemingly totally dead, it wouldn't even spin up the hard drive and the HDD led would stick on.
The T4400 is really tough to test since it's got the separate power board and lots of flex cables going everywhere, but eventually I set up another recapped PSU on the bench and started probing and checking things with the thermal camera. Thermal camera shows nothing of note except that the RAMDAC on the video card area is getting rather warm - it's got its own clock.
I had thought the gate array that makes up the chipset on this thing was toast, or the keyboard controller was toast since that handles the LED indicators and idk maybe it all falls over

It took me some time to work out how the rest of the mainboard gets its clock, there's a 25mhz oscillator at X2 that I couldn't figure out how it works, what drives it? It's just connected to that little R57 resistor and goes off into a via to elsewhere. The pads on the crystal oscillator go to 1:nowhere, 2:Ground, 3:clock signal 4:5V VCC. Eventually found out that's a thing called an SPXO and they all seem to use the same pinout - when it's working and powered by 5v (which it does on the no POST codes motherboard) - it gives out 0 to 5v DC clock frequency rather than an AC type signal.
I can't find the original part or even the form factor (this one is 4pin SOJ with 7.5mm pitch between pins lengthwise and 5mm pitch widthways.
My theory now is that when the DC-DC power supply board messed up its regulation because of bad caps, the 5v went too high and sometimes it destroys the CPU, sometimes other things but on two of these boards it broke the clock generator, must be a pretty common fault with these I think.

So I pulled off the non functioning SPXO oscillator and used my mini scope the owon hds2102s's signal generator function hooking up ground and the clock signal on the red lead. Power it all up while it looks like this with the frequency being fed in externally and it POSTS!

Wow, I actually have enough working mainboards to put all the T4400s back together, at last! Looks like I'm going to need to figure out a proper replacement for the clock generator though, perhaps overclocking to 33mhz is an option too 😁

That's cool that they're using a full fat 486 DX in there. Is that 50Mhz? Does it need a heatsink or airflow to stay cool?

PcBytes wrote on 2025-02-14, 13:54:

S'more stuff from my contact: […]
Show full quote

S'more stuff from my contact:

- GA-6BXDS
- OR840
- K6BV3+/66
-MS6156
-GA-6BA

nyehehehe 🤣

I wanna know your contact! 🤣