I can't remember exactly all that I bought/found the last two times I went to the flea market here, but here's a few things I do remember:
- AsRock 775i65 motherboard for parts for $7 (missing metal retainer on LGA775 socket, but socket OK. Board has some traces damaged on the back too, but nothing I think I can't repair.)
- Dell Optiplex (790??) USFF. Not sure, because the plastic front bezzel and top lid are missing. Actually, it's missing everything except for the motherboard and bottom metal part of the case. Sticker on the case suggests this had an i5-2500 and 8 GB of RAM at some point. Could make a nice little overpowered XP box, if it works. For $2, I just had to buy it. 😁 CPU socket is OK.
- Dell Optiplex 790 mATX motherboard with an i5-2500 and 2x 4 GB of DDR3 PC10600u RAM, along with the stock 290W Optiplex ATX PSU (LiteON). This one was $6 total. Good "hot spare" for my Optiplex 790, I suppose... though I haven't had time to test any of it yet.
- Cooler Master Soprano?? (or similar) PC case - nice and heavy, but missing both sides. I think I know where I might be able to find at least the service panel side... or maybe not, we will see. This one was free, left in a dumpster. Probably some gold scrapper bought it cheap for the components inside to harvest. Such a waste, but it is what it is.
Lostdotfish wrote on 2025-07-04, 11:39:
Bought this a few days ago for £29
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Pretty immaculate looking DFI Pentium 4 board... nice!
Aside from the bulging UCC KZG caps next to the CPU... yes, you can say it's immaculate. 🤣
Nice find, nevertheless. Just replace the bulgers with a mix of polymers and Panasonic FR or Rubycon ZLH/ZLQ (to get both low ESR and higher capacity similar to what was there originally.)
justin1985 wrote on 2025-06-30, 14:29:
The PSU is by AC-bel (generally good quality for OEMs?)
Yes, Acbel is pretty good, on par with Delta, Hipro, and LiteON, I'd say.
I recapped one last year for an IBM Netvista P3 PC. Just had 2 bad Teapo caps and still would power on OK. But I couldn't leave it like that. Despite the rest of the caps being OK, I did a full recap (except for the two big 200V caps, since those are expensive and almost never fail.) Very solid little mATX PSU. And had good 5VSB design (with an IC) IIRC, unlike some of the similar Delta PSUs at the time.
justin1985 wrote on 2025-06-30, 14:29:
Any tips for removing the CPU cooler? I tried pushing on the levers, but they seemed very stiff, and I heard some ominous creaks! I'm sure it would benefit from re-pasting, but also sure I've seen horror stories of P4 coolers ripping off the CPU from the socket when removing a dried on cooler?
Put the board out on a really hot sunny day and wait for it to get pretty hot... or alternatively, just blast the CPU heatsink with a hair dryer until it's *almost* too hot to touch. Make sure the heatsink latches/levers are freed/released before this. Then, once hot, twist the heatsink back and forth with ever-so-slightly lifting pressure. One corner should give up and then the rest will come out easily.
Ripping out the CPU with the cooler is usually not that big of a deal - most of the time, it just results in slightly bent pins.
What's often a bigger problem, at least on CPU sockets that use BGA, is that sometimes you can damage the BGA if you flex the board too much from trying to force the heatsink off. I've done it with LGA775 and also seen 478 boards go marginal/bad from too much warping from the cooler due to this. So yeah, careful with that. Also, if the stock heatsink is warping the motherboard under the CPU socket and the CPU socket uses BGA, either get rid of that stock cooler or grind off the lobes a little to ease off the mounting pressure (and thus warpage) that the cooler does to the board.
justin1985 wrote on 2025-06-30, 14:29:
I'm hoping that the Intel 845G integrated graphics would do the job for most Win9x games, and with an SB-Live or YMF744, this little pizza box would do a good job of retro at my main desk - like a thin client type setup - but with original media drives.
Yes, it should be OK-ish. Probably won't be able to set the graphics to high on some late 90's games, but earlier ones will be quite fine. For example, I could see that i845 IGP start to struggle on Need For Speed High Stakes with a full-grid race and maxed graphics details, IIRC. I don't remember what resolution that was at, though - either 800x600 or 1024x768 (probably when trying the latter.) So I had to drop down the resolution a little to get better FPS. CPU was a P4 2 GHz Northwood running stock speed with 2x 256 MB DDR RAM.
Nexxen wrote on 2025-07-04, 11:36:
Push it down with a finger and turn it on.
Worst case it doesn't POST, best, it works only when pushed down.
Agreed!
Try that board as-is and see what happens... unless you have plans to actually send it to someone to do a professional chip replacement.
In any case, I don't think you'll see any fireworks or smoke.
Major Jackyl wrote on 2025-06-27, 23:01:
What?! Sudden northwood death syndrome?!? I've have not heard of this yet, but it may have been what happened to one of mine. Never OC'd , but it wouldn't power-on one day and didn't work in other boards. I'll be looking it up later, but is there a cause or any preventative maintenance to we can do, or is it pretty random?
PcBytes wrote on 2025-06-28, 01:03:
Electromigration. Apparently that's what happens when you push Northwoods (at least early ones, dunno if ALL of them were affected) past 1.7v I think. (which idk why but it sounds way too high IMO, that's a voltage I'd see on Coppermines.)
It's not electromigration most of the time.
Actually, it mostly has to do with the thermal paste under the integrated heat-spreader (IHS) going bad and allowing parts of the core to overheat unnoticed. So for those of you who have high-end or very OC-ed Northwoods, it might be a good idea to delid them and replace the thermal compound.
I also suspect part of the issue could be due to the start of the RoHS era solder bumps. Not sure if P4 chips from that era started going lead-free or not, though. In any case, whatever went wrong with Northwood, Intel quickly fixed it with Prescott, because those CPUs are hard to kill. I actually have not seen a bad one. Perhaps worth noting here is that one physical difference between Northwood and Prescott is that the IHS on Prescott is actually soldered to the CPU core. So don't every try to delid a P4 Prescott, as you'll probably destroy the core.
Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-06-30, 15:32:
It's been a long time since I've tried to game on first gen Intel Extreme Graphics, but I think the performance is somewhere around a vanilla TNT2 or Rage 128 Pro...
Sounds about right from my brief tests too.
I remember Counter-Strike 1.5 and Half-Life running overall OK (40-ish FPS) at either 1024x768 or 800x600, I forget which. Also don't remember if that was in OpenGL or D3D mode. Interestingly enough, since I was testing mine with a 2 GHz P4 CPU, software render wasn't that far behind in performance either on some older games.
A PCI FX 5200 or 5500 should be much better, though - around the same level or slightly better than Intel Extreme Graphics 2... a.k.a. i865 chipset with IGP.
dominusprog wrote on 2025-06-28, 10:08:
Unfortunately, I found out the TEAC has the silver panel afterward.
Hey, that's good! Those are a lot more rare.
If there's one thing I dislike about the silver PC cases from the XP era, it's that it's really hard to find silver optical and floppy drives. Well, floppy drives are more easy to solve with some silver paint. But I don't like doing that to optical drives, because either the printing on the front or the plastic-engraved markings get messed up.
I suppose that's why case doors became a thing/trend... and I never really liked it.
Major Jackyl wrote on 2025-06-27, 23:01:
Sweet board, BTW. Looks like fun. I like the orange sockets, espeically the battery-holder. I loved when they were adding color to everything. My "modern" PC is 15 shades of black, 🤣
Yeah, I like boards from that era with their colorful parts too. Gigabyte was also nice in that regard with their blue boards and brightly-colored connectors and sockets, as was DFI and Jetway (the more gamer-oriented boards anyways, like with ECS.)
When the "black PCs" trend started, especially when PCBs also went for it, that's when I completely started hating the looks of modern PCs. It's just so boring and dull. The RBG barfage isn't helping it either.
Cosmic wrote on 2025-07-04, 18:51:
Very cool! I love the look of these red Athon XP boards. It's a great foundation for a "team red" build: Athlon XP + fast ATI card + red cables, red fans, etc. : )
Indeed!
I have a combo like this that I've been wanting/waiting to build for ages.
Just not sure if I should make it a mid-range and cool-running machine or a high(er)-end (for the time) space heater.
Options are Athlon XP 2500+ running stock with a Chinese Radeon 9600 (semi)-pro or a 3200+ with a Radeon 9700 non-pro OC-ed to Pro levels (on the GPU.)
