Trashbytes wrote on 2025-04-26, 06:17:

clownwolf wrote on 2025-04-26, 04:20:

I bought a couple of Geforce 256 SDRs

Had to use a hair dryer to remove the heatsinks. Almost had a heart attack after seeing the crispy-colored thermal material (or maybe they are supposed to look that way?). Thankfully they still work fine. I test fitted a Logisys clone of the ZM80-HP. It fits fine, I will clean both cards and upgrade both to use the heatsinks since I have about a dozen of these clones.

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Its Thermal Epoxy and doesn't need to be replaced, nVidia and others used this stuff till the Geforce FX, its a bitch to remove. The only cards I would reccomend doing this to are Voodoo 5500 and Geforce 4 both of which came with woefully inadequate cooling.

Personally I leave it alone as its not like thermal paste and doesnt degrade over time, you run a huge risk damaging the core trying to remove the coolers and the epoxy after. (or breaking the fragile BGA solder balls which are getting more fragile with time)

Don't even try it on a GF4, at least not the Ti4400 and higher. I've personally tried to unglue one myself and ripped the chip entirely. I still bash myself for that. It was a Quadro4 900 XGL.

PD2JK wrote on 2025-04-26, 12:10:

Found this for 2 EUR.

What is it though?

devius wrote on 2025-04-26, 17:25:

PD2JK wrote on 2025-04-26, 12:10:

Found this for 2 EUR.

What is it though?

Diamond Voodoo Banshee

PD2JK wrote on 2025-04-26, 12:10:

National holiday with a lot of flea markets here and there. Found this for 2 EUR. Hope it works. VGA connector needs some attention.

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Edit; looks like it's working correctly, about 20 fps in Forsaken at 768p. 😁

I really feel that flea markets here around are broken ... Never a retro hardware part :'(

H3nrik V! wrote on 2025-04-26, 20:16:

PD2JK wrote on 2025-04-26, 12:10:

National holiday with a lot of flea markets here and there.

I really feel that flea markets here around are broken ... Never a retro hardware part :'(

Around here they seem to have devolved to baseball cards, books and coke memorabilia... there's some retro-gaming stuff but it's all nintendo.

Random $5 bag of crap time again...

GPIO breakout for a Pi, Arduino Uno (genuine), blade throw switch
512Mb DDR333 SODIMM, 50mm fan, shrouded 45mm? fan
80 wire PATA cable, single drive floppy cable.

So the attraction of that one was thinking that shrouded fan was a GPU cooler, but maybe it isn't, but maybe it will get abused as one. Also with yet another 512MB laptop RAM I might finally have enough that all northwood-dothan and 754 laptops can run XP SP3, it's a dog on 512 or below. I am hoping that PATA cable is good, I have many around that seem flaky. The single drive cable for floppy is probably not necessary, but at least it's a spare or might "match" something, being blue instead of normal grey.

Top row are gonna be project oriented. The breakout might help me with some LCD displays or SCSI emulators, the Uno may or may not get applied somewhere, the blade switch, heh, kinda gotta find somewhere ridiculous to use that, though obviously can't have exposed AC wall current through it, so tempting as it is to use for power on switch, it's more likely gonna be a turbo switch or something low DC.

BitWrangler wrote on 2025-04-26, 21:08:

Random $5 bag of crap time again... […]
Show full quote

Random $5 bag of crap time again...

GPIO breakout for a Pi, Arduino Uno (genuine), blade throw switch
512Mb DDR333 SODIMM, 50mm fan, shrouded 45mm? fan
80 wire PATA cable, single drive floppy cable.

So the attraction of that one was thinking that shrouded fan was a GPU cooler, but maybe it isn't, but maybe it will get abused as one. Also with yet another 512MB laptop RAM I might finally have enough that all northwood-dothan and 754 laptops can run XP SP3, it's a dog on 512 or below. I am hoping that PATA cable is good, I have many around that seem flaky. The single drive cable for floppy is probably not necessary, but at least it's a spare or might "match" something, being blue instead of normal grey.

Top row are gonna be project oriented. The breakout might help me with some LCD displays or SCSI emulators, the Uno may or may not get applied somewhere, the blade switch, heh, kinda gotta find somewhere ridiculous to use that, though obviously can't have exposed AC wall current through it, so tempting as it is to use for power on switch, it's more likely gonna be a turbo switch or something low DC.

And that TaiSol branded 60mm Delta fan 😀 Great for period correct cooling if you can put up with the racket, the first PC I built had one of those TaiSol coolers which immediately got me interested in how to make PCs quieter.

The other week I got a Toshiba T1850C laptop because it was being sold very cheaply - which was fair, it needed a new floppy drive, hard drive, the keyboard is missing all the plastic surround and I can't get the screen working. It's a nice 386SX laptop when used with an external screen, wish I could figure out why the LCD won't work even after I recapped it, it seems to be shutting off the DC-DC converter in the LCD that makes the around -30v DC to drive the LCD because of a short or something.
Then another Toshiba T1850, the mono one showed up on thebay and it was again cheap enough that I decided why not - this one had screen rot and wasn't displaying anything, oh the DC jack is completely loose and it doesn't boot up at all:

Once the DC jack was soldered back in place, the floppy drive was given a fresh belt and the Conner CP2084 hard drive was repaired by opening it up and replacing the rubber where the head parks. The capacitors on the DC-DC board in the laptop are good and the NiCad RTC battery still works and hasn't leaked, though the AA standby battery that fits under those LED indicators had leaked a bit. I tried for a while to get that original LCD rotted display to display *anything* and this was as close as I could get with good caps, there's stuff clearly wrong with it and I'm not that interested because of that LCD rot that's unfixable:

Did you know it's basically impossible to get this specific Toshiba TLX-5156S-C3M LCD panel? It's very specific to the T1850 with custom mount points. There's a Sharp LCD LM64P823 panel that they could've used instead but also unavailable.
Cool list of LCD panels that are in these old Toshiba laptops can be found here: https://conventionalmemories.com/EMIS/emis41v3.htm
Last year though I bought a Toshiba T4600 (mono) which had vinegar syndrome on the front polariser - I got it in the hopes I could get a working mainboard from it but that was ruined too. I stripped the bad polariser off and it has been stored in a box for the last year. That's an LM64P821 mono LCD in a Toshiba though, from the same time period, could it work? Well the connectors are the same but the backlight cables are different and the mount holes don't match up and there's no front polariser
Eventually I decided to take the LCD glass + PCBs out of the LM64P821 frame and made some small mods to fit that LCD glass into the LM64P823 / TLX-5156S-C3M frame & backlight - an LCD transplant!

Cutting the frame a bit, tape over a screwhole that could've shorted the PCB and then cut down a couple of square rubber bumpers at the corners of the LCD and it worked! The T4600 LCD panel's contrast wheel must've been a bit different because the contrast wheel is very sensitive now but it's working along with the original backlight since the T4600 LCD's backlight uses different connectors and the T1850 really can't easily fit a different inverter board.
You can see what was involved in replacing the front polariser, still a makeshift one that isn't perfect but it's pretty good for grayscale graphics: Re: Vinegar syndrome and choosing new polarising film

So, I bought a Toshiba T1850 and with everything fixed it's now a pretty nice old laptop, especially since it's got 4MB of memory instead of the paltry 2MB that you get on the T1800. I cleaned it up not long after taking this picture 😀

Great work!

Thermalwrong wrote on 2025-04-27, 01:31:

BitWrangler wrote on 2025-04-26, 21:08:

Random $5 bag of crap time again... […]
Show full quote

Random $5 bag of crap time again...

GPIO breakout for a Pi, Arduino Uno (genuine), blade throw switch
512Mb DDR333 SODIMM, 50mm fan, shrouded 45mm? fan
80 wire PATA cable, single drive floppy cable.

So the attraction of that one was thinking that shrouded fan was a GPU cooler, but maybe it isn't, but maybe it will get abused as one. Also with yet another 512MB laptop RAM I might finally have enough that all northwood-dothan and 754 laptops can run XP SP3, it's a dog on 512 or below. I am hoping that PATA cable is good, I have many around that seem flaky. The single drive cable for floppy is probably not necessary, but at least it's a spare or might "match" something, being blue instead of normal grey.

Top row are gonna be project oriented. The breakout might help me with some LCD displays or SCSI emulators, the Uno may or may not get applied somewhere, the blade switch, heh, kinda gotta find somewhere ridiculous to use that, though obviously can't have exposed AC wall current through it, so tempting as it is to use for power on switch, it's more likely gonna be a turbo switch or something low DC.

And that TaiSol branded 60mm Delta fan 😀 Great for period correct cooling if you can put up with the racket, the first PC I built had one of those TaiSol coolers which immediately got me interested in how to make PCs quieter.

Yeah I mis measured it is a 60, forgot the squares on my pad were half inch not cm. Getting specs come up with 23 or 29 cfm for that model number, either way, pretty beefy from a slimish 60mm... will do good on a socket 7 with limited clearance maybe.

Nice Tosh.. Interesting era that one, kinda melding of the two lines where they have the briefcase heft clamshells in "portable workstations" kinda and the cheapest end of market Turbo XT class notebook sized ones (Had a T1100 at one point, miss it.) and then had to bring out machines like this one to be competitive as time moved on into 90s.

Today's scores, a bit on the scarce side:

- Macally iKey Apple keyboard - IIRC from the G3 or G4 era. Bottom is clear blue and top is white. USB.
- ECS K7S6A - successor of the well known K7S5A! Works, came with a Athlon XP 1700, I think T-Bred core. Bonus parts include a 40GB Quantum Fireball lct20, 8MB Matrox G200 and a RTL8139D NIC, as well as 2x256MB RAM, and a Linkworld LPK2-30 PSU.
- Gigabyte GA-8IPE1000-G Rev 1.0 - also works, has Intel CSA LAN. Two Rubycon MBZ caps were bulged and slightly oozing (much to my surprise) and someone recapped the VRM with Rifeking caps that, well... were already bulged, with one oozing from the top. Replaced the bad MBZ with 2x UCC KZE, and the VRM got a mix between 2x Panasonic FL, one Nichicon HM (2006 datecode) and a Samxon GE as I didn't have any tall and thin 1500uF 6.3v caps left.

Scored a Athlon 64 x2 ADA4800DAA6CD for 15 USD ... When these do show up on Evilbay its normally far more than 15 USD ..normally 150 - 200 though I have seen them listed for far more only other one right now is 370 USD.

Pins look to be in great condition, none bent or missing ...so fingers crossed as this is one hell of a CPU for 939.

Im actually expecting the seller to cancel and claim it was listed for the wrong price.

Trashbytes wrote on 2025-04-27, 23:44:

Im actually expecting the seller to cancel and claim it was listed for the wrong price.

Hope you get it, that's a nice CPU. When it came out, I bought an Opteron 165 and got it to about the same speed.

But yes, don't cheer too soon is what they say over here. It's still the bay.

Probably mistaken for an AM2 by the seller I guess. Though I am not sure that this CPU has taken it's dip yet. What normally happens with the fastest CPU on a platform is that it stays high for years, just because it's the fastest CPU that anyone on that platform can upgrade to, thus the target if anyone is still trying to run that platform, keep it in service for their daily computing. Or even an essential machine in a business that they just want to make as fast as possible without changing much. While there are also enthusiasts who are ahead of "the game" as it were in seeking to get the best CPUs for platforms when they are obsolete, like some of us here, there's still the mainstream "nostalgia wave" moving up the years, which increases demand for a sliding window of hardware. This is usually when a generation is getting well established enough in abode and abundance to do the proverbial "buying back their childhood." and teens. This is gonna be late millennials and early genZs. Not sure they are feeling that flush with the circumstances of the last 5 years, so might be a delayed kickoff for this wave.

Anyway, what I'm saying is that that CPU for all it's speed, may have been keeping a system on "life support" but seeing a lot of streaming services stop support on Win7 browsers and need more SSE etc on win10, I guess the last year has finally retired a bunch of hardware from extended "modern" use. So all that will be dumping for cheap, as well as the wave of "can't even win11" retirements that are coming. Covid and the semiconductor shortage (which was brewing independently) also spiked new and recent hardware prices such that systems were kept in service some years longer than might have been the case. So the last of the fast 939 could be retiring late, right now, and not yet be getting lifted up in the mainstream nostalgia purchasing... Early gen Z might be the last to have any nostalgia for desktops, en masse.

BitWrangler wrote on 2025-04-28, 13:40:

Probably mistaken for an AM2 by the seller I guess. Though I am not sure that this CPU has taken it's dip yet. What normally happens with the fastest CPU on a platform is that it stays high for years, just because it's the fastest CPU that anyone on that platform can upgrade to, thus the target if anyone is still trying to run that platform, keep it in service for their daily computing. Or even an essential machine in a business that they just want to make as fast as possible without changing much. While there are also enthusiasts who are ahead of "the game" as it were in seeking to get the best CPUs for platforms when they are obsolete, like some of us here, there's still the mainstream "nostalgia wave" moving up the years, which increases demand for a sliding window of hardware. This is usually when a generation is getting well established enough in abode and abundance to do the proverbial "buying back their childhood." and teens. This is gonna be late millennials and early genZs. Not sure they are feeling that flush with the circumstances of the last 5 years, so might be a delayed kickoff for this wave.

Anyway, what I'm saying is that that CPU for all it's speed, may have been keeping a system on "life support" but seeing a lot of streaming services stop support on Win7 browsers and need more SSE etc on win10, I guess the last year has finally retired a bunch of hardware from extended "modern" use. So all that will be dumping for cheap, as well as the wave of "can't even win11" retirements that are coming. Covid and the semiconductor shortage (which was brewing independently) also spiked new and recent hardware prices such that systems were kept in service some years longer than might have been the case. So the last of the fast 939 could be retiring late, right now, and not yet be getting lifted up in the mainstream nostalgia purchasing... Early gen Z might be the last to have any nostalgia for desktops, en masse.

Possibly, its not hard to mix the two up since there is exactly one pin difference between the sockets.

The order has been confirmed but till it gets sent with tracking Im still expecting the cancellation.

Only a few more CPUs left to grab for 939, the FX57/60, Opteron 156 and Opteron 185/190 ... I see the FX57 pop up occasionally for stupid prices but still have not seen a 156 or 185 in the wild yet. The Opteron 190 might be vaporwavre, its listed in the Wiki as having been released but till I see one its pretty much ghost hardware.

So heres hoping this delayed retirement of 939 puts more of them on to the market for more reasonable pricing. Im sure as hell not paying 400 USD for a FX57.

Edit - FX60 not 62

Atari ST MV16 sound card. Sometime I will test it with B.A.T I & II that support it.

One of the two of these power supplies arrived today.

Have also ordered a few other high end power supplies since I was running out.

cyclone3d wrote on 2025-04-28, 21:47:

One of the two of these power supplies arrived today.

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Have also ordered a few other high end power supplies since I was running out.

Holy cow, that thing is a beast for a pre-80plus unit.

I had an OCZ GameXStream 700W that I bought back when I had a 7950 GX2 (and later 8800 GTX) in ~2006, but that was the biggest I'd used in those days.

Actually... it's funny... now that I think about it, I still have not used a higher wattage PSU than that in my main PC. I went to an XFX 550W Gold PSU after the OCZ died in ~2015, and when I built a new PC in 2019 I got a Seasonic 650W Platinum. That is enough for my 5800X3D and 3080 10GB, so I'm still using it.

A 1000W PSU in 2007 would have been completely nuts. Would be cool to use one for an ultimate 2007 3-way SLI 8800 Ultra build with a Core 2 Extreme QX9650. 😁

It is actually 80 plus rated... But nothing specific like bronze, silver, etc. was reportedly one of the most efficient PSUs when it was released

Probably same thing with my Antec EA500 units - both sport an 80plus sticker, but with no other type of 80+.

cyclone3d wrote on 2025-04-29, 00:23:

It is actually 80 plus rated... But nothing specific like bronze, silver, etc. was reportedly one of the most efficient PSUs when it was released

Yep, you're right! I saw that on a review for it. I was just going by the lack of the 80 Plus logo on the label. To me, that puts it in the "old days" before manufacturers were proudly displaying them.