supercordo wrote on 2026-09-15, 21:32:

Got this Abit AN7 board for cheap, I would say. Was sold as for parts not working. Was missing the bios chip and all the jumpers. Booted right up after swaping in a new bios chip.

Congrats! You got the best socket A board ever made! I got 4 and they all perform flawlessly with the original Rubicon capacitors. It works even with SSD's! My main retro system has an AN7 with an Athlon XP 3200 and has been running since 2016.

Might have overspent just a little on a cooling fan ... been looking for this one on and off for about a year or two to recreate my lanparty/clangaming machine from back in the day. Came across one on ebay for about €80 excluding shipping more than a year ago and thought to myself "No way am i spending that on a fan" ... then the ad was gone for some time. Ad came back with a pricebump (seller probably had more than one) ... said i was surely not spending more than €/$100 on that fan even though it's rare. There is still a seller (in Greece i think) on ebay selling one ... for an outrageous $140 excl shipping ... simply not worth it (plus you will probably end up with a knocking fan like i did)

Then a stroke of "luck" and recently found one NOS in the UK for £50 ... expensive but won't be getting much more chances on getting one. So £50 for the fan and £40 shipping and import tax to EU ... paid something around €100 total. (Stupid expensive tbh)

Seller pic

When it came in it became clear the box was very yellowed ... praying that the fan itself was not discoloured and luckily it was just the plastic sleeve (you can see it on the pic on the right hand side.

Well on to testing! Hoping the 20 years in a box won't have harmed it (bearings/lube). Started it up and ran fine for all of 20 seconds ... then it started to make a knocking sound. Not the typical rattle but more a constant knocking .. it's the top fan (gold one) making the noise. Problem is i don't see a way of getting it off the hub. Both fans have their PCB pointed at eachother and only the bottom fan has a sticker that probably covers the circlip (the top fan is sealed at the top).

Two pics are from 20+ years ago when i used to run that exact type of fan on my lanparty machine. Pics didn't do it justice but it were the only ones i could find where you could actually see the fan (nevermind the dust .. flash didn't help)

Picture from the review on HEXUS from back in the day

So now i need to do two things .. find out if i can convert this thing to a 3pin connector instead the wire spaghetti going to a pci bracket with a pot on it .... and fix that damn knocking.
Also to be honest the fan was kinda "meh" at best ... also i can remember my example started knocking aswel after a few years and i probably took it apart destroying it in the process. Was great for turning it up to max power at lanparty's though because you couldn't hear it anyway above the ambient noise.

G-X wrote on 2026-09-18, 18:06:

Might have overspent just a little on a cooling fan

When it's something very specific you're after, sometimes you just have to spend the money. I've done that a few times when I found things I just refuse to let get away from me. Like when I found my very first CTX PC from 1997 on eBay, instant buy it now. I also found the same Thermaltake Xaser blue case I used in my first socket A build on eBay, spent too much but I had to have it. And guess what, haven't seen one since, so it was totally worth it.

I cracked open one of those surprise capsules and won a 1TB SATA HDD ... HP SimpleSave $5 yard sale pickup.

One of those middlin' things I never know whether to go to retro or modern thread with, think it's more retro though, modern boxes getting >~2TB.

Dothan Burger wrote on 2026-09-17, 14:46:

Just 3 more brand new graphics cards for my Wall of Graphics. The PNY 4ti comes with 3d glasses that I'd love to try.

Nice pickups. Any photo of your wall of graphics? I'm also afflicted with the boxed GPU curse.

G-X wrote on 2026-09-18, 18:06:

Might have overspent just a little on a cooling fan

Worth it! Looks amazing. And getting the exact thing you’ve been hunting is a great feeling.

BitWrangler wrote on Yesterday, 20:07:

I cracked open one of those surprise capsules and won a 1TB SATA HDD ... HP SimpleSave $5 yard sale pickup.

Dang, crazy good find.

BitWrangler wrote on Yesterday, 20:07:

I cracked open one of those surprise capsules and won a 1TB SATA HDD ... HP SimpleSave $5 yard sale pickup.

One of those middlin' things I never know whether to go to retro or modern thread with, think it's more retro though, modern boxes getting >~2TB.

I had two of these (WD20EARS not EADS), mirrored using drivepool and deduplicated with MS deduplication (which is an intensive thing for HDDs) in my home server.

They ran h24 from 2011 to 2023, then they started to have few sectors difficult to read.

Albeit they are known to do too many head parking actions (mine had about 600.000, twice the guaranteed number by WD), 100.000+ hrs of troublefree service is still pretty impressive.

For the parking behavior, I read there is a fix/workaround, but I never applied it, just because I read of it after I replaced them ....

Bought this VLB I/O controller, and I was very happy to find it since it has a Promise chip. I also did a recap since the caps were damaged. I didn't spend any time on it, but after a quick test, I encountered two issues. When connecting the CD-ROM to the second port, the BIOS detects the HDD twice on both drives C and D. The second issue is after the boot screen, right before the system is supposed to start booting, it just freezes. So, any ideas?

dominusprog wrote on Today, 08:59:

Bought this VLB I/O controller, and I was very happy to find it since it has a Promise chip. I also did a recap since the caps were damaged. I didn't spend any time on it, but after a quick test, I encountered two issues. When connecting the CD-ROM to the second port, the BIOS detects the HDD twice on both drives C and D. The second issue is after the boot screen, right before the system is supposed to start booting, it just freezes. So, any ideas?

The attachment IMG_20260920_121450.jpg is no longer available

The problem solved, I think. The freezing issue caused by the RAM sticks and moving them around fixed the problem. And the issue with BIOS detecting the HDD twice with CD-ROM connecting was solved by removing the DMA jumper on the CD-ROM.

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2026-09-17, 18:35:

CharlieFoxtrot wrote on 2026-08-30, 10:31:

Just got this SB 2.0 CT1350b.

Nice lookin bit of kit that.
Is that the one that didnt need any drivers to work?

Yeah. This card has no mixer that needs to be set up at boot (just the hardware volume wheel). I/O address and IRQ is set using jumpers, and that's all this card has as configurability, so no initialization tool is needed. This is true for any mono SoundBlaster (SB 1.0, SB 1.5, SB 2.0) up to but not including the SB 2.0 with CD interface, which does have a mixer chip. You generally don't need any driver in the strict sense (some software shipped by the card manufacturer that provides a software interface to use the card) with any SoundBlaster compatible card to play the usual games, because those games all support the SoundBlaster hardware interface directly, but most more modern cards need an initialization utility for mixer setup, mode choices (SB vs. WSS) and soft configuration / PnP.

Creative actually designed a sound card driver interface which was provided by CT-VOICE.SYS, which you would load from CONFIG.SYS, but hardly any software except the wave recording/playback utility shipped by Creative with the SB card actually required that driver to be loaded.