I purchased an Intel i486DX2-66 and a heatsink fan combo on eBay for my Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 Plus in place of the SX2-50 as an upgrade, and it has 24MB RAM installed (4MB on-board, 20MB SIMM-72).

I can't wait until I get the processor and heatsink fan combo in the mail.

Worked yesterday on performance tuning on my newly overclocked "5 Ghz Windows 98 Beast" based on a 100% vanilla win98 install with pci-express and 5 Ghz P4. Struggled yesterday with getting sound working in windows 98.. going to try all day today and struggle with it again.. probably have a solution soon.

More info on the thread on it is over here: ...

kithylin wrote:

Worked yesterday on performance tuning on my newly overclocked "5 Ghz Windows 98 Beast" based on a 100% vanilla win98 install with pci-express and 5 Ghz P4. Struggled yesterday with getting sound working in windows 98.. going to try all day today and struggle with it again.. probably have a solution soon.

More info on the thread on it is over here: ...

Nice. As for the sound card, what kind is it that you have installed?

bjwil1991 wrote:

kithylin wrote:

Worked yesterday on performance tuning on my newly overclocked "5 Ghz Windows 98 Beast" based on a 100% vanilla win98 install with pci-express and 5 Ghz P4. Struggled yesterday with getting sound working in windows 98.. going to try all day today and struggle with it again.. probably have a solution soon.

More info on the thread on it is over here: ...

Nice. As for the sound card, what kind is it that you have installed?

Trying all sorts of creative cards I own. Audigy, live.. Settled on a Live! 5.1 card I have. I think they're all OEM cards though, and so finding working drivers has been a real pain in the ass (Can't use vanilla creative drivers). Failed driver installs result in unstable systems.. cards not working, in general being annoying, led to so far 2 completely hosed win98 installs... 3rd time's the charm? I think I'll get it all correct this time with no errors.

Doing some testing on my 'new' P4 Retro Rig.

Replacing the GeForce 3 with a fx5950 in my dual P3. Don't have anything else to put it in! Kicking myself for giving away all my 1gb ecc pc133 chips to my neighbor running a 1.4 dual P3 blade server. Oh well 2gb is more than enough!

Powered up my dual lga771 Xeon 5080 system for the first time today. This system runs hot.
I bet when it's done satin will steal it to prevent hell from ever freezing over.

Oddly (in the bios) the cpus don't run all that hot, but the ram and northbrige run supper hot. Even with an 80mm fan the ram it runs around 55-60c. I think I'll pull heat sinks off some old corsair ram or something.

Jade Falcon wrote:

Powered up my dual lga771 Xeon 5080 system for the first time today. This system runs hot.
I bet when it's done satin will steal it to prevent hell from ever freezing over.

Oddly (in the bios) the cpus don't run all that hot, but the ram and northbrige run supper hot. Even with an 80mm fan the ram it runs around 55-60c. I think I'll pull heat sinks off some old corsair ram or something.

also, 🤣 @ satin.

Fully buffered ram runs like 3x the heat as regular ram, so it gets warm quick.

Started arranging the parts I had for a planned 486 build.. only to remember that old 486 boards like the one I have are very barebanes and have no IO controllers.. So I am now short of ISA IDE and I/O controllers with pretty much no local supply of these ancient things.

Time to suffer outrageous eBay prices and shipping I suppse 🙁

This is borderline retro, but anyway 😜 Completely rebuilt my Thinkpad T61p. New motherboard (since the older T61p has Nvidia chips die due to manufactoring error), new Core 2 Extreme CPU, new BIOS, new SSD and faster WI-FI. Full cleanup as well 😀 Its better than new!

luckybob wrote:

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Jade Falcon wrote:

Powered up my dual lga771 Xeon 5080 system for the first time today. This system runs hot.
I bet when it's done satin will steal it to prevent hell from ever freezing over.

Oddly (in the bios) the cpus don't run all that hot, but the ram and northbrige run supper hot. Even with an 80mm fan the ram it runs around 55-60c. I think I'll pull heat sinks off some old corsair ram or something.

also, 🤣 @ satin.

Fully buffered ram runs like 3x the heat as regular ram, so it gets warm quick.

I know, but I'm surprised more so how the ram is running hotter then the 5080s

appiah4 wrote:

Started arranging the parts I had for a planned 486 build.. only to remember that old 486 boards like the one I have are very barebanes and have no IO controllers.. So I am now short of ISA IDE and I/O controllers with pretty much no local supply of these ancient things.

Time to suffer outrageous eBay prices and shipping I suppse 🙁

The ISA I/O cards tend to be fairly cheap on eBay. Shipping just depends on where you are located. Shipping is NOT set by eBay, but by the sellers.

Here is a brand new all-in-one controller card for $19 + shipping.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/ISA-Controller-IDE-HD … ooAAOSwUfNXSQGp

Spring is coming with the energy of train running to your face while your legs are stuck to the railbed, so I had to clean some mess in my basement workshop. When I started to collect retro stuff, I gave myself a restriction that I will keep only 8 towers. Well, now I have more like 25 of them and I am running out of space very quickly, so I something must go.

I started with this guy. It was an AMD Athlon XP 2500+ build with 512 MB of RAM, integrated graphics chip, 40 GB Barracuda drive. Two DVD drives (like I don't have a boatload of them now 😁 ) and a floppy drive. Decided to disassemble this and throw away the case because it is utterly stupid. If you want to disassemble it, the top panel slides to back and lifts and then you open side panels by flipping them out while the hinge is on the bottom. So it takes incredibly giant space. And because the top panel is not holding it in place at all (it is just cosmetic), one time happened to me that the side came loose due to vibrations of the HDD and smacked me into my fingers. Also I don't like the PSU next to the mainboard instead of being on top of the case. And lastly it was previously owned by some girl and apparently she was impatient so the reset button was all scuffed up and blue from pens. And that stuff never wants to come off.

Next on the list was this one. I got it scrapped from one company, frankly, I have NO idea why I took it. Generic and very common case is mangled pretty badly, side panel was not holding in place and it was yellowed like hell. Also it was already scavenged by somebody. Well, apparently I had some brainless moment... 😁

Then I tackled down desktop Dell GX260. It was from other company, came from event where everything in the building was struck by lightning. I was having hopes about this one, but it is worthless. Crappy case, bent from monitor standing on it, mainboard dead (only amber light), proprietary PSU was lost in the process of moving it, I never saw it running. To the dumpster you go (didn't even managed to take a photo of that). I kept just side panel with Windows 98 serial number just because. 😁

Next I went through the IBM NetVista desktop. I had that one for years, it came from dumpster, had shot onboard S3 TRIO GPU chip. It ran with other GPU, managed to boot it into Windows XP years ago. The case was trashed, it wouldn't even close, harddrive bays were missing, so you know it's destiny. Also, I have other one that is in a little bit better shape, so I will keep that one for now.

I had time only for one more. This bugger gave me a lot of hassles. When I got it from school years ago, I tried to power it up. It managed to boot Windows XP from harddrive, it was clean installation, but I noticed that GPU had some artefacts. Then the filtering capacitor in power supply decided to went kamikaze and blew up. It destroyed the PSU case (bent it out), so I just threw away the PSU, pulled out the GPU to my GPU pile and stuffed it into corner of my storage room. Today I decided to throw it away so I pulled it out on my bench. Now with some expirence I immidietely noticed that the motherboard layout is very weird for Windows XP machine.

I looked further and saw the IO shield. Only AT keyboard. So I quickly pulled it out and found out that it is this beauty:

Are you flipping kidding me? I am searching for Super Socket 7 board for YEARS now and I had one right under my nose ALL THE YEARS? Jeez... Well, it is 233MHz Cyrix MII-300GP with 66MHz Bus speed. I don't know how valuable this board is, but it is freakin' SS7 board! OMG!! 😁

The case is also very stupid, it is a little bit sturdier then the other ones, but to open it you need to pull the front off and then the panels moves towards you. I can imagine that the posts which are holding the front panel in place will break off, also the PSU placement is stupid again, bye bye. Also I am having a lot of proprietary cases, which I don't like. I love those "beige boxes", they looks soooo nice 😁. So, now the hunt for baby AT case begins 😁

I still have all the cases, the big dumpster will come next Friday, so until then feel free to tell me that I am stupid and some case that I am going to throw out is worth a lot, but I doubt it. Everything is just mangled too much.

(BTW. I am pretty sure you noticed that I love Futurama too much 😁 )

Been playing around with my salvaged Dell Optiplex 425s/L. Upgraded the CPU slightly from an Intel 486SX 25MHz to an AMD Am486 DX-40. Have it clocked at 33MHz for now, as the 40 setting put the speed down to 20MHz.

Front case LEDs were dead, so dug out some spare LEDs and connected them up for Power & HDD activity. Have them slotted in with electrical tape & elastic bands at the moment, will hot glue them into place at the weekend. The front Reset button needs replacing (was broke internally), but I'm not too bothered by that at the moment.

Installed an Aztech Sound Galaxy II sound card and configured both DOS 6.22/Win 3.11 & Windows 95. The only problem with this PC is that it's PC Speaker doesn't work, so any games that primarily use it are silent. I don't think I'll risk desoldering the current PC Speaker to put a new one in and the PC Speaker terminal on the board has no pins and didn't seem to work when I tried connecting a speaker via bare wires, so I will just have to put up with it. 🙁

Finally, I installed some Windows 95 updates, followed by a web browser and used it to come here and post this - I hasten to say, not something I intend to do often on a 486! 🤣

Been playing around with my 771 setup.
chose to re do the thermal compound on the ram so I pulled the heat sinks off all but two sticks and started cleaning the old crap off. Will be useing mx4 as a replacement. The other two stocks will be a base line will be used temporary until I get the two tubes of mx4 I bought.
I also put some new compound on the 295 in the system. When with cool labs liquid copper. Aside from being VERY conductive it's probably the best thermal compound ever. God price, cleans far better then anything, leaving scuff marks like icd7 and preforms grate. I'd used it on my ram, buts it's far to conducive to risk it.

I also ordered the hdds for the system. I bought 2 32gb intel ssds and 4 older 74gb WD raptor hdds. The ssds will be ran in ether 1 or 0 for the OS and the raptors will likely be ran in raid 10.

I upgraded my Packard Bell's processor from the SX2-50 to the Intel i486DX2-66, applied thermal paste to the processor, installed the heatsink with the fan, changed only 1 jumper, and it works out of the blue.

Even the games I have installed for both MS-DOS and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 run faster and better and some of the programs that require a coprocessor works as well.

I also purchased an iMac G3/600 M5521 Summer, 2001 which could either need a fresh OS installation or a new HDD (luckily, I have a spare) since it has Mac OS X installed, it takes forever to load (possibly because it was never shut off properly), but the other one loaded fine that had Mac OS 9.2 installed on it, but too pricey ($10 more than the one I got). Although, I don't have the keyboard or mouse, so I'll improvise by using a wireless keyboard and mouse combo (non-Apple).

Per request from Kreshna, I wrote a gaming "tavern tale" on Baldur's Gate, which I've been playing for the past month or so. It does take a lot of work, so I'm not sure how many more I'll write, but it was fun. Baldur's Gate is a long game though, I may do another one or two by the time I finish the game.

I dumped a trunk full of SUN microsystsems stuff off at Goodwill and a 17 inch ViewSonic value series crt. Never going to get used and take up far to much space. Although the 10k scsi and dual CPU sparq station was pretty neat

Found an external BIOS battery for my surviving 486 system, it had been in a drawer for the past 10 years and looked in good condition. I wasn't sure it was even working but thought I'd give it a try and to my surprise it was indeed working fine. 😎

Also had a look over an old Socket 5-based PC that's just been sitting there unloved for over 10 years. It's got an IDT Winchip C6 200MHz installed, with 72MB RAM and 640MB IDE Hard Drive. There's apparently no OS on the HDD and it appears that the motherboard's Floppy Disk Controller may be faulty, as it wouldn't recognise several Floppy Drives I tried with it (along with several different cables - would access the drive, but wouldn't read any disks). So I'm going to have another play with that this week and will probably end up putting it's HDD into another of my PCs to make it bootable and add the OS installation files. I'll probably install Windows 98 SE on it and maybe add in a PCI Graphics Card. Back in the day I actually had Windows XP running on this thing - not something I'm going to attempt again though.

Making a video for my new Youtube Channel - The Creeping Network - got a let's play and a PC review/overview for the 486 in the works.