an SGI system is the last on my non-x86 bucket list. Great find!

pan069 wrote on 2025-06-23, 20:36:

Came across a pile a garbage the other night on my usual daily walk. People dumping their old stuff on the sidewalk to be collected. As I walked passed I see this open, early 2000's era, PC case lying there. I stop and look inside.. Oh, half recognizable motherboard, the memory still installed but the CPU cooler was removed. I grab the memory. One stick of PC133 256MB and other of 64MB. No worries, I'll take it. Since a few months I have been carrying a screwdriver exactly for scenarios like this. So, I grab the screwdriver out of my bag. first I remove the hard drive, a Seagate 10GB of some sort. Then I remove the motherboard screws. The board doesn't look like it my area of computing, it has some Athlon CPU on covered in white thermal paste. Grab a paper hanky from my bag and clean up as much as possible, get most of the gunk off. Then wrap the CPU in another hanky. The caps on the board are leaking. Definitely not my era of computing. My interest go up to early Pentium era. Anyhow, I can use this board recapping practise. Hopefully next time I find something better... Oh, after I moved on I realized that I didn't pop the IO shield out of the case so I went back and grabbed that as well... Just in case..

The attachment PXL_20250623_081019314.jpg is no longer available

Just checking out the CPU that was on this board. It's a:

Duron 750
750 MHz
64 KB
200 MT/s
7.5x
1.6 V
33.4
September 5, 2000
$181
D750AUT1B

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Duron_processors

The four little rubber grommets that are placed in each of the corners disintegrated while I was cleaning it. Are these required for heatsink placement?

pan069 wrote on 2025-06-25, 07:44:

Just checking out the CPU that was on this board. It's a: […]
Show full quote

pan069 wrote on 2025-06-23, 20:36:

Came across a pile a garbage the other night on my usual daily walk. People dumping their old stuff on the sidewalk to be collected. As I walked passed I see this open, early 2000's era, PC case lying there. I stop and look inside.. Oh, half recognizable motherboard, the memory still installed but the CPU cooler was removed. I grab the memory. One stick of PC133 256MB and other of 64MB. No worries, I'll take it. Since a few months I have been carrying a screwdriver exactly for scenarios like this. So, I grab the screwdriver out of my bag. first I remove the hard drive, a Seagate 10GB of some sort. Then I remove the motherboard screws. The board doesn't look like it my area of computing, it has some Athlon CPU on covered in white thermal paste. Grab a paper hanky from my bag and clean up as much as possible, get most of the gunk off. Then wrap the CPU in another hanky. The caps on the board are leaking. Definitely not my era of computing. My interest go up to early Pentium era. Anyhow, I can use this board recapping practise. Hopefully next time I find something better... Oh, after I moved on I realized that I didn't pop the IO shield out of the case so I went back and grabbed that as well... Just in case..

The attachment PXL_20250623_081019314.jpg is no longer available

Just checking out the CPU that was on this board. It's a:

Duron 750
750 MHz
64 KB
200 MT/s
7.5x
1.6 V
33.4
September 5, 2000
$181
D750AUT1B

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Duron_processors

The four little rubber grommets that are placed in each of the corners disintegrated while I was cleaning. Are these required for heatsink placement?

Looks like a solid MATX Socket A board. The Duron isn't amazing, but will compete with an equivalent P3 or Celeron roughly. The grommets are one each corner to help you not crush the CPU die when mounting the HSF. Id recommend replacing them, they don't guarantee you don't crack the die but def help.

I'd seen this big old beige ATX PC buried under piles of old paperwork on the floor in my in-laws' study a while back. I expressed an interest, and when they visited us this weekend, they brought it along for me to fiddle with - with the request that I extract any files I could retrieve from it (they'd even bought a new external 1Tb HDD for the files!) - potentially some family photos not saved anywhere else ...

I haven't done much with retro PCs in the last few months, so it was interesting to poke around. They said they'd bought it at a local computer fair in around 2003-5 time, and used it for a good few years before moving to iMacs. The case seems super of its time, with the blue accents and the actually hard to use power and reset buttons! The Philips CD burner with shiny bezel is very familiar - I'm sure lots of friends at school had this model.

I normally stick to mATX and obscure SFF retro PCs, so it has made a change to mess around with a full ATX system (so much dead space!).

Inside is a Jetway V333U motherboard (VIA chipset), Socket A Athlon 1400 (as per hand-written sticker on the back), 1Gb (2 x 512Mb) DDR RAM, and a GeForce 2MX 32mb (never actually had one of these before). I got excited when I saw the Retroweb listed this motherboard as having a CMI 8738 sound chip (DOS compatibility) but in reality it has a CMI 9738 (AC'97) - I don't know if that's a board revision difference, or an error?

The PC does boot into BIOS or boot floppy, but the caps near the CPU are all bulging, and the right-most also leaking. I could happily replace these - the question is more, is it worth it for this board? (I'd really been hoping it was a P3 with ISA slots when I saw the case!)

The PSU looks pretty cheap and nasty, but I guess worth keeping for the strong 5V rail needed for SocketA? Any ideas what the PSU connector that looks like half of an AT power connector is? There is only one, so it can't be AT?

Of course, the HDD (Maxtor 7200rpm 120Gb) seems pretty dead. If I boot the PC with it attached, it locks up during 'Detecting IDE Drives'. Connecting via a USB -IDE adapter doesn't get anything detected on a modern system. You can hear the drive spinning, but I haven't heard any seeking noises, so I guess either the arm is jammed, or the electronics are dead?

justin1985 wrote on 2025-06-30, 13:07:

I'd seen this big old beige ATX PC buried under piles of old paperwork on the floor in my in-laws' study a while back. I express […]
Show full quote

I'd seen this big old beige ATX PC buried under piles of old paperwork on the floor in my in-laws' study a while back. I expressed an interest, and when they visited us this weekend, they brought it along for me to fiddle with - with the request that I extract any files I could retrieve from it (they'd even bought a new external 1Tb HDD for the files!) - potentially some family photos not saved anywhere else ...

The attachment IMG20250630123714.jpg is no longer available

I haven't done much with retro PCs in the last few months, so it was interesting to poke around. They said they'd bought it at a local computer fair in around 2003-5 time, and used it for a good few years before moving to iMacs. The case seems super of its time, with the blue accents and the actually hard to use power and reset buttons! The Philips CD burner with shiny bezel is very familiar - I'm sure lots of friends at school had this model.

I normally stick to mATX and obscure SFF retro PCs, so it has made a change to mess around with a full ATX system (so much dead space!).

The attachment IMG20250630123725.jpg is no longer available

Inside is a Jetway V333U motherboard (VIA chipset), Socket A Athlon 1400 (as per hand-written sticker on the back), 1Gb (2 x 512Mb) DDR RAM, and a GeForce 2MX 32mb (never actually had one of these before). I got excited when I saw the Retroweb listed this motherboard as having a CMI 8738 sound chip (DOS compatibility) but in reality it has a CMI 9738 (AC'97) - I don't know if that's a board revision difference, or an error?

The PC does boot into BIOS or boot floppy, but the caps near the CPU are all bulging, and the right-most also leaking. I could happily replace these - the question is more, is it worth it for this board? (I'd really been hoping it was a P3 with ISA slots when I saw the case!)

The PSU looks pretty cheap and nasty, but I guess worth keeping for the strong 5V rail needed for SocketA? Any ideas what the PSU connector that looks like half of an AT power connector is? There is only one, so it can't be AT?

Of course, the HDD (Maxtor 7200rpm 120Gb) seems pretty dead. If I boot the PC with it attached, it locks up during 'Detecting IDE Drives'. Connecting via a USB -IDE adapter doesn't get anything detected on a modern system. You can hear the drive spinning, but I haven't heard any seeking noises, so I guess either the arm is jammed, or the electronics are dead?

Nice looking case!

I would (carefully) open up the PSU and check for visibly bad caps. It is very likely that it has some due to the time period it's from. If it seems okay and you're able to put a PSU tester on it, it might be worth hanging onto... but generally I just use a newer, higher quality used PSU for retro systems. In my experience very few of them really need a massive 5V rail, and it isn't too hard to find ones made in the past 10-15 years with 20-30A on the 5V rail anyway.

As to whether the motherboard is worth fixing, that is entirely up to what you plan to do with it. It isn't particularly valuable, but if you're looking to play Windows 9x games at decently high settings a system like this can do a great job as it is. A better sound card would probably help of course, but those aren't too hard to find. Being able to upgrade to beefier Athlon XP processors (maybe a 2400+ at 2Ghz?) is also a bonus.

Too bad about the hard drive... I'm sure there are others here with a far better grasp of what to do about that, but I would lean toward it being a board failure of some kind. I would put the drive somewhere safe until you have some means of determining whether the data is salvageable or not. Sometimes you can swap the board on the drive from another identical drive that is working, but of course there is always some risk of data loss involved in any repair attempt. If you get it working, be extra careful about hooking it up and letting windows "find and fix errors" of course, as that can destroy data that might otherwise be salvageable. If it is barely working, you may want to clone the drive immediately using some kind of offline cloning tool (not in Windows), so that you can disconnect the original drive as soon as possible to avoid more data loss.

If they really want the data\pictures from it and have some money laying around, I'm sure a data recovery service could get it off of there for a reasonable price.

Not sure how "retro" this is - it seens to have come new with Win10

Helping a friend take apart and move a bed, we found a laptop under it - her
daughter had discarded it when she got a newer/more powerful "gaming" laptop.
She was going to "recycle" it, so I brought it home to check it out.

With a bit of cleaning and restoration .. the thing works! Trackpad doesn't
work at all and keyboard works, but some keys need multiple firm presses to
register (USB/Bluetooth mouse/keyboard work fine!) - I'll be digging deeper
to see if they are repairable.

quite usable: Acer E15 - AMD A8, 8G ram, TB hard drive, Radeon R5.

Sorry - photo is a bit grainy - flash just reflected, so had to take "dark"
and do a lot of gamma correction...

DaveDDS wrote on 2025-07-01, 03:09:

quite usable: Acer E15 - AMD A8, 8G ram, TB hard drive, Radeon R5.

This depends on which specific A8 it is. I have AIO based on A6-9225 and it is spectacularly horrible - legitimately worse than AM2 Athlon64 X2. Use case for this AIO was "kitchen TV" and making youtube work has been a challenge. Even though GPU does support h264 decoding CPU is so bad it struggles with simply transferring required amount of data over https, not to mention loading the page takes minutes...

Archer57 wrote on 2025-07-01, 04:00:

This depends on which specific A8 it is ...

I'm not really up on AMD processors, much more of an "Intel guy"...
Quick count of PCs: 12 desktop, 11 laptop, 3 tablet - the only AMDs are this one and one tablet.
- Intels range from Atom, Core2, I3, I5, I7
- One desktop is: VIA C7
The "new" AMD is: A8-6410 (?)

DaveDDS wrote on 2025-07-01, 03:09:

quite usable: Acer E15 - AMD A8, 8G ram, TB hard drive, Radeon R5.

that sounds like the kind of machine i'd either leave as win10 (until support ends...) or just install linux mint and keep it as an online machine, it's handy enough, i did that with something similar and adding an SSD for the OS made it pretty fast for all non gaming things

DaveDDS wrote on 2025-07-01, 09:59:

I'm not really up on AMD processors, much more of an "Intel guy"... Quick count of PCs: 12 desktop, 11 laptop, 3 tablet - the on […]
Show full quote

I'm not really up on AMD processors, much more of an "Intel guy"...
Quick count of PCs: 12 desktop, 11 laptop, 3 tablet - the only AMDs are this one and one tablet.
- Intels range from Atom, Core2, I3, I5, I7
- One desktop is: VIA C7
The "new" AMD is: A8-6410 (?)

Well, this one at least has 4 cores, should be more decent.

Practically i'd call low power "APUs" equivalent to atom, but with better graphics. Though slow, single channel memory combined with iGPU using that memory does not help performance of either graphics or CPU. So apart from video decoding capabilities better GPU is not really that useful...

Thanks for the information...

I'm not really concerned about performance, I'm not going to be using
it as a gaming machine (in fact, I don't really have any plans for it,
it just kinda "fell into my lap" .. I didn't expect to get a laptop from
helping out my friend)

It seems to have a decent biggish screen, so it may be handy as a second
resource while I'm developing stuff and looking through my code archives...
All I'm probably going to use it for is some simple text viewers/editors
- and possibly run my compiler from time to time.

I'm sure it will be better than the runts of my PCs.. I have an Acer W500
tablet which has an AMD C-50 processor running Win8, and "terrible"
performance, but it works when I have need of it (now all I have to do is
dig up a replacement for the internal SSD which died).

I also have three of the original Acer "Aspire one" netbooks - a super
tiny laptop with an Atom N270 running XP - not considered fast at all, but
"good enough" when I want something super-portable.

Yeah, as long as expectations are reasonable it is going to be useful. Kind of like that AIO i've mentioned - i got it new and dirt cheap, but it also has nice MVA screen, decent speakers, etc. I knew it was going to be slow. Not sure why lenovo even paired such seemingly nice hardware/build with such horrible CPU. But it works and does its job, after some fiddling around with linux and replacing HDD with SSD.

Getting such laptop for free is even better 😀

I still have one of those netbooks too, but in that case the screen is a bit small for my not so great eyesight and it has really hard time competing with modern android tablet in that reagard...

Archer57 wrote on 2025-07-01, 04:00:

DaveDDS wrote on 2025-07-01, 03:09:

quite usable: Acer E15 - AMD A8, 8G ram, TB hard drive, Radeon R5.

This depends on which specific A8 it is. I have AIO based on A6-9225 and it is spectacularly horrible - legitimately worse than AM2 Athlon64 X2. Use case for this AIO was "kitchen TV" and making youtube work has been a challenge. Even though GPU does support h264 decoding CPU is so bad it struggles with simply transferring required amount of data over https, not to mention loading the page takes minutes...

Must have some thermal/power throttling nonsense in that implementation, or bottom end DDR speed or something, my A4-3420 mobile feels quite snappy, works for streaming, or did until Prime unsupported Win7 Chrome a couple of months back.

If this monster link works.. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/19vs89vs … Core2-Duo-E4600

It should be showing at about 30% faster than an X2-6400+

BitWrangler wrote on 2025-07-02, 12:43:

Must have some thermal/power throttling nonsense in that implementation, or bottom end DDR speed or something, my A4-3420 mobile feels quite snappy, works for streaming, or did until Prime unsupported Win7 Chrome a couple of months back.

If this monster link works.. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/19vs89vs … Core2-Duo-E4600

It should be showing at about 30% faster than an X2-6400+

Seems to sit happily at 3Ghz for days, so does not seem to be throttling.

Memory is single channel DDR4-2133, maximum it supports. May very well be the bottleneck given i am actually trying to use the GPU, which those synthetic benchmarks do not account for.

It is running from 16GB optane M10 at this point, so storage is quite fast (16GB is enough for linux with healthy amount of swap and some headroom).

I did not really run benchmarks, but simply comparing side by side 6000+ x2 with gtx660 (or E8600+gtx660 for that matter) to this... it is not even comparable. One pretty much feels like a modern system, another is struggling to open firefox. And yeah, i get it, different power, size, etc. Just crazy how slow this relatively modern CPU is.

It is also single module with 2 cores, so not really full 2 cores and perhaps such low performance may be explained by somehow not favorable workload.

Also "Performance" section here seems to indicate i am not alone with such issues: https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-A6-9225-Pro … s.405906.0.html

Archer57 wrote on 2025-07-02, 05:22:

I still have one of those netbooks too, but in that case the screen is a bit small for my not so great eyesight and it has really hard time competing with modern android tablet in that reagard...

Yeah, my eyesight isn't go great either (due to my age/accident) - but at least for me the problem is more with peripheral vision... so the tiny screen
is quite good for me (I can see all of it at once!)- and since I do tend to work on it most in a 25x80 DOS text screen, the characters aren't "too small".

** I have another Acer netbook that you might like better: Aspire 1410

Similar to the "Aspire one" in thickness, this has an 11.6" screen instead of the 9" screen (goes a bit closer to the edges so the netboot itself is only
about 1.5" bigger on the diagonal.

It's also more powerful - Intel SU4100 Pentium dual-core, 3G ram.

It technically is a 64bit CPU, but I have 32-bit Windows7 on it, so it runs 16-bit/DOS stuff just fine! - I'm very happy with it!

** To give an idea of how much faster it is that the Aspire One - since I have plenty of Win64 machines, and still run a lot of my own
DOS stuff, I use DosBox a lot - sometimes in testing, I want to run DosBox on a 32-bit machine ... DosBox is horribly slow on the
Aspire One, but quite reasonable on the Aspire 1410 - fwiw.

-- Btw -- the reason I have three of the Aspire ones is that one of them is one of very few computers I actually bought new - because
I absolutely love the size and that it still has a reasonably usable keyboard.

Later, a friend who did IT and had a lot of "used" systems go through his hands (a fair number of my PCs came from him) offered me
one - which I have.

Another friend had bought one at the same time/place is I did. He eventually decided it was too limited, and gave it to his kids, who over
some time killed the battery, and spilled something into the keyboard which makes 3-4 keys in one corner no longer work - so was going
to toss it ... but since it still works (fine with a USB keyboard) and I've "known it since new" - I keep as spare parts in case one of my
other ones dies.

I recently picked up this card in the hopes of being able to use it in what I believe to be a XT 8088. I think EduBat was correct and that the mother board I posted a picture of earlier in this thread is a DTK PIM-TB10-Z. Here is the link that EduBat provided earlier https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/dtk-pim-tb10-z. I'm wondering if the new card I picked up will work in this system so I could use a VGA cable to connect the computer to a more modern monitor? I don't have any way of connecting to the 9 pin d-sub/EGA port the current video card uses.

While other Trident cards seem to have an 8bit/16bit jumper, that one does not, so I am not sure if it autodetects bus width or not.

According to the video here
http://vgamuseum.info/index.php/companies/ite … ident-tvga8900c
The card will work.

Ok great, this is very encouraging! Hopefully I will get a chance to plug it in and give it a shot soon. Thanks again for the help!

DaveDDS wrote on 2025-07-02, 14:16:

** I have another Acer netbook that you might like better: Aspire 1410 […]
Show full quote

** I have another Acer netbook that you might like better: Aspire 1410

Similar to the "Aspire one" in thickness, this has an 11.6" screen instead of the 9" screen (goes a bit closer to the edges so the netboot itself is only
about 1.5" bigger on the diagonal.

It's also more powerful - Intel SU4100 Pentium dual-core, 3G ram.

It technically is a 64bit CPU, but I have 32-bit Windows7 on it, so it runs 16-bit/DOS stuff just fine! - I'm very happy with it!

** To give an idea of how much faster it is that the Aspire One - since I have plenty of Win64 machines, and still run a lot of my own
DOS stuff, I use DosBox a lot - sometimes in testing, I want to run DosBox on a 32-bit machine ... DosBox is horribly slow on the
Aspire One, but quite reasonable on the Aspire 1410 - fwiw.

Yep, to me 11-12 inch screens feel like the sweet spot for portable stuff. Still small and light to carry, not so small screen that it becomes hard to read. The difference between those 8.9 inch screen and 11.6 one is substantial.

I have Acer Aspire TimelineX 1830T with i3-330um, which i bought new myself back then, and i've used this thing a lot. Even bought an SSD for it back then, 120GB intel 510, which was not cheap at all, but totally worth it for performance and durability. I still us it, upgraded RAM to 8GB at some point and with that and SSD it still performs really well.

It is a shame netbooks basically disappeared. While cheap atom stuff was not amazing, this more "premium" ones were really, really great. Nowadays it is basically impossible to find something that is not a tablet and is smaller than 13.3...

The only disadvantage is the screen. I did buy a 11 inch tablet with oled and 11 inch e-ink reader last year and it is really hard to go back to those old TN screen on 1830T after using those. With how progress had slowed down in terms of performance... screen tech has really, really improved in last decade or so.