tehsiggi wrote on 2025-10-11, 18:30:

The 5V rail of your PSU is rated at 20A, which nowadays is sufficient, however that's only 100W. The 9700 will take around 20W of it's 60W from the 5V rail. That leaves you with 80W for the rest of the system. Given that socket 462 boards often rely on the 5V rail for CPU power, you might be a bit in a tight spot here under load. Not sure about your a7v8x-mx.

Awesome, thanks for bringing the numbers! Sounds like I'm right to suspect the PSU, even if I was completely off on the exact reasons. I have a X1950 Pro AGP that bluescreened but didn't trip the PSU off when I tested it in this system. I'm going to guess that means it pulls more on the 12V than the 9700, and that if (when) I build a system around it I'll probably be ok with a modern PSU.

tehsiggi wrote on 2025-10-11, 18:30:

I'd leave the caps as is. Of all 9500s, 9700s and 9800s I had, none of them died / failed due to bad caps.

Cool - yeah, none of them look like they've wet themselves so I'm happy to leave them alone.

tehsiggi wrote on 2025-10-11, 18:30:

I'd always grant the memory on 9700s and 9800s memory heatsinks. The memory gets quite warm and the stock cooler already has bad airflow over the memory. Given that you are cooling it passively, I'd highly recommend additional heatsinks on the memory.

Ok on it - I'll wait till I get that sorted to do any further kind of stress testing. Thanks!

Funny, last time I had a 9700 Pro (AIW), I was running it in a tiny Shuttle MiniPC with zero airflow (and a busted PSU in this pic):

Now I want to treat this one like precious cargo.

Had to prep a new HDD for my upcoming "Childhood mashup" build. Its specs are basically the 700MHz Athlon-based Area 51 featured in the December 1999 issue of Maximum PC, with a few slight "twists":

- I'm using the case of my first PC as a kid - Keymouse/KMEX CX-6458/6459 (I hope to get around retrobriting the front bezel one day)
- ODD is a DVD-RW because most of the media I have at easy-n-ready use is... DVD-Rs.
- HDD is a 40GB WD Protege - this was mainly due to the weird azz HDD spec Alienware used - a 34GB IBM Deskstar. My WTH award goes to IBM rather than Alienware, though I'm not really surprised it's none other than IBM pulling this kind of stupid capacities.
- no MPEG decoder unfortunately (idek where I would find out anyways!)

Here's the issue of the said Maximum PC btw: https://archive.org/details/maximum-pc-magazi … e/n113/mode/2up

Huge thanks goes to @Socket3 for the GPU by the way - it's exactly the one from the magazine, and probably THE ONLY NVIDIA THAT ACTUALLY WORKS ON MSI'S 6167. I'm not even joking - this thing REFUSES to run any nVidia past 256. It'll run absolutely anything else (ATi, PowerVR, 3dfx, probably SiS stuff too!) except any nVidia newer than 256 period.

Oh, and possibly having the Dell Dimension 8300 cover part of the 2003-04 period. I'm super excited about the 9800 Pro in it being alive, and usually I've regarded Dell's stuff as high quality.

Successfully patched Wasteland to run in 16 colors on an IBM PCjr.

Next step of the journey. on my Rescued Pentium 4 with Geforce FX card, getting Windows XP onto this think and some benchmarks, man I had a lot of issues with the optical drives lately, its hard enough finding an IDE drive, I had two on this and one was DOA the other was barely working.. is there a way to repair these or common faults? I have more broken IDE drives than working at the moment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWP-IeU5oZg

ubiq wrote on 2025-10-11, 20:23:

Awesome, thanks for bringing the numbers! Sounds like I'm right to suspect the PSU, even if I was completely off on the exact reasons. I have a X1950 Pro AGP that bluescreened but didn't trip the PSU off when I tested it in this system. I'm going to guess that means it pulls more on the 12V than the 9700, and that if (when) I build a system around it I'll probably be ok with a modern PSU.

No need to guess. The 1950Pro on AGP usually has the same layout as the GT. Your assumption is completely right, here are the measurements:

https://tehsiggi.github.io/agp-power-monitor/ … deonx1950gt_256

I reinstalled OS X 10.4 on a G4.
The DVD-ROM that came with it (original apple sticker) wasn't detected anymore.
After replacing it with another one I could complete the installation (to test the unit I used the installation dvd).

To find a good working dvd unit I found even more dead units in my stash.
Boring 30 minutes...

Technically by "today" I mean "last month", but I have in my possession an old MOTU 2408 audio interface that came out in 2003:

It's tricky to get working nowadays. Back in 2003 it came with a PCI card that fit into the host computer - you plugged the PCI card into your Power Macintosh G4, then connected the card to the interface with a FireWire cable. A while back I bought a Power Macintosh G5 that had this card (technically it's 64-bit PCI-X), and the interface was cheap on eBay, so I picked it up. Alas the only Macintosh with PCI slots nowadays is the Mac Pro, and I have no idea if it's compatible with PCI-X, and in any case I thought it would be nice to use the interface with my Mac Mini.

Thankfully interface also has audio pass-through with ADAT lightpipe, but standalone ADAT interfaces with an input are fairly rare. However there's a company called MiniDSP that makes a device called the MCHStreamer (pictured on top of the interface). It's mostly designed so that you can connect speakers to your computer using an optical cable, but it also does ADAT, and it's two-way.

And so with a bit of messing around with drivers I've managed to get this old interface working again. It now goes Interface->ADAT->MCHStreamer->USB. It's like having a complicated USB adapter. It's also potentially useful if you ever need to run a PlayStation 3, but you only have a computer monitor. The PS3 didn't have a headphone output, so if you plug it into a computer monitor you don't get sound, but it does have SPDIF optical outputs.

I also have an old MOTU 828, which uses FireWire. Irritatingly the official Apple Thunderbolt-FireWire adapter dongle went out of production recently, and the price shot up from around £34 new (which was still very high) to something like £80 on the used market, because there's a small market of people who have FireWire equipment they still need to use.

tehsiggi wrote on 2025-10-12, 06:04:

ubiq wrote on 2025-10-11, 20:23:

Awesome, thanks for bringing the numbers! Sounds like I'm right to suspect the PSU, even if I was completely off on the exact reasons. I have a X1950 Pro AGP that bluescreened but didn't trip the PSU off when I tested it in this system. I'm going to guess that means it pulls more on the 12V than the 9700, and that if (when) I build a system around it I'll probably be ok with a modern PSU.

No need to guess. The 1950Pro on AGP usually has the same layout as the GT. Your assumption is completely right, here are the measurements:

https://tehsiggi.github.io/agp-power-monitor/ … deonx1950gt_256

Wow, you don't just have some numbers, you have all the numbers! 🫡

RetroBus wrote on 2025-10-12, 02:03:

Next step of the journey. on my Rescued Pentium 4 with Geforce FX card, getting Windows XP onto this think and some benchmarks, man I had a lot of issues with the optical drives lately, its hard enough finding an IDE drive, I had two on this and one was DOA the other was barely working.. is there a way to repair these or common faults? I have more broken IDE drives than working at the moment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWP-IeU5oZg

In my experience, hard drives are wear items - when they die, they die, usually destructively (head crash). I think a lot of retro tinkerers don't bother with them and just stick to SD/CF to IDE adapters, or a SATA to IDE adapter and use a modern SSD. I prefer to make life difficult for myself and actually try to get spinning metal into my systems whenever possible. To that end, I've had luck buying new old stock IDE hard drives from eBay sellers in China. Not going to find anything older than mid 2000's drives, but that's plenty good for what I get up to.

Actually just had some Toshiba laptop HDs show up today that I'll be using to resurrect a system of mine that died - due to a head crash on a new old stock drive, so your milage may vary!

He's talking about optical drives, not hard drives. Every one of my IDE optical drives appears to have a weak or dead laser. There are "quick fixes" involving increasing the power to the laser, but it's temporary and most people don't have the equipment to properly set laser power (or the spec from the drive manufacturer). Aside from that, there are drives that stick open or closed due to old belts. I'm just using CD emulation through Daemon Tools now (making BIN/CUE images of my own CDs using an old version of Alcohol 120% on a computer that's still old enough to be considered retro, but new enough to have SATA).

I'm going WAY back... to the vacuum tube era (1948'ish).

I had this old NRI Professional Signal Tracer Model 34 given to me last year and it's been sitting on a shelf here ever since. I haven't seen one of these since I was a kid, my dad had one, he used to repair and collect old tube radios and equipment back in the 70's and into the 80's. No way I'm powering it up and risking damage to it ... or fire ... I just need to decide what to do with it. It's an amazing conversation piece, but beyond that I'm out of my depth in terms of repair/restoration with it. Might give it to a local museum if they take such things. I've even got the orignal manual for it. Not sure yet. It's all in such good cosmetic condition.

Just figured I'd share it here becasue it's so darn cool! 🤣

Found this cool video of one being repaired: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGcAXWGQUDw

lti wrote on 2025-10-12, 20:14:

He's talking about optical drives, not hard drives. Every one of my IDE optical drives appears to have a weak or dead laser. There are "quick fixes" involving increasing the power to the laser, but it's temporary and most people don't have the equipment to properly set laser power (or the spec from the drive manufacturer). Aside from that, there are drives that stick open or closed due to old belts. I'm just using CD emulation through Daemon Tools now (making BIN/CUE images of my own CDs using an old version of Alcohol 120% on a computer that's still old enough to be considered retro, but new enough to have SATA).

Ahh, misread that. Yeah, I have a stack of CDROM drives with sticky disc trays that I do not want to deal with. I also use Daemon Tools on systems that can afford the overhead. Just started messing with the PicoGUS's CDROM emulation and it's pretty impressive so far - redbook support and everything. Gives a really retro experience as it only emulates a roughly 2x drive - but appropriate for a 90's era system from when games mostly ran off the disc.

I’m currently trying to figure out how to restore my (5170) IBM floor-standing option without repainting it. The main challenges are removing acid stains, rust, cracks, and chips while keeping the original finish intact.

I want to preserve its authentic look — the surface wear that reflects its history — rather than make it look new. I’m exploring ways to neutralize the acid marks, lift rust, and stabilize small cracks without disturbing the paint or texture. Neutralizing the acid with vinegar works, but it doesn't remove the stains...