Another day of testing parts. Ran into a couple of frustrations that gave me that retro feeling 😁
First up was an NFS-7 V2 board that was working quite well with an XP1800+, until I tried a 2500+ in it that looked OK (though I think I've previously cooked this chip). From then on it refused to boot with the XPs - it shows signs of activity but then cuts out completely. Curiously it would boot perfectly with a Duron 900 - reminded me of the old Duron trick to clear the BIOS settings. I then took the CMOS battery out, left it for a bit, tried to start it with the clear CMOS jumper on, and with nothing hooked up - still the same problem. Maybe the 1800+ is also borked.
Then I tested three SiS 6326 AGP boards I got in a job lot - and none of them worked in either of my Socket A boards. Seems like they're one or two pins too short for the AGP slots. Might take a pic of it, but couldn't find any info about it other than that they're a bit of a workhorse video card that sold in the millions! http://vintage3d.org/sis.php#sthash.iL8eGN0X.dpbs Anyone have any idea what type of motherboard these would work in? Super 7?
Finally I found out that one of my recent roadkill pickups (Socket 370 1GHz Celeron) had a burned out VRM and seems to have taken out the hard drive and memory, and probably the CPU as well. Gives me a spare ATX case but I can't trust the power supply now. I've salvaged what I can from the motherboard, but wondered - does anyone take caps or other soldered on parts off dead motherboards for reuse?
And the postage gods smiled on me today - I sold a V2 8MB card and sent it Cash On Delivery last year. There was no tracking information because the post office stuffed up and didn't enter it into their system, and the buyer claimed never to have received a delivery card in three months. I lodged a dispute with our postal system, who told me that they couldn't find it. Today it returned in the mail, but the post office said because the buyer didn't pickup I needed to pay $22 in fees to get it back! After pointing out the problem of them not recording it in the system, and my dispute, they gave it back to me for free. Maybe I will just use it instead of selling it. Moral of the story - never send anything COD!!!