kithylin wrote:

Richo wrote:

Jumper settings was the first thing I checked and need to change them once I start using edo ram. The FIC ftp is still up, downloaded the manual and bios updates from there.
Also replaced cmos and reset de bios (forgot to mention). The only difference with my other broken va503+ (need to replace din 5 for keyboard) is the cache used otherwise the are the same(revision of this one is lower though as cache is lower and also has no ATX psu connector) Going to ponder about this in the afternoon (first up is replacing the speaker so I may discover what beep code is bugging me).

The POST card should come in handy anyway, never read about them here 😲

If I remember right, these motherboards have a "dual" voltage regulator selectable by a jumper. One side for Intel, the other side for AMD. Make sure you get that one part more than anything. And AMD K6-III's have two voltages printed on top of em.. the lower one is the v-core, not the higher one. Both of these things used to trip me up configuring this board. Also it's really, -REALLY- picky about it's ram. I would say also try different ram if you can't get it to POST. At the bare minimum 1 x PC-133 CL2 SDRAM stick @ 128 MB. These boards were already really tight on their ram strappings via bios and like to only run at all with the fastest ram.

I'll check out the jumper settings again , Tnx! Got working ram from my other fic mobo which is waiting a new midi jack.

Kadath wrote:

cyclone3d wrote:

I think you will find that the E5520 does not really draw 80w, at least 95% of the time. The TDP is 80w. It will only approach that when running full tilt.

I may have a few slightly faster Quad E55xx CPUs if you want them for the price of shipping. I'll have to double check the exact model when I get home.I replaced them with X5675s in a couple of Dell dual CPU servers I have and have no use for the quads.

You're really kind - please let me know about these models, thanks again! Maybe, waiting for those extra 6-cores models, I can do some little clock upgrade.

Ok, so I just checked and they are E5530. I have 4 of them if you want them.

Just PM me with your address and I will give you the shipping cost.

2.4Ghz/8M/5.86

Hard drive inventory time:

I've been accumulating this lot for some time so it was a simple case of ensuring each one could be read / partitioned. I threw away about 5 or 6 drives that either weren't recognised by the BIOS, stopped the OS loading or something else critical. None had the oh-so-common click of death. Smallest / oldest drive is a Connor 20MB model. How do other people decide which drives to keep and which to get rid of? Clearly I don't need this many bloody drives and I'm certainly not doing a bad sector check on all of them to find out which ones are not worth keeping.

That is very tricky question. It depends on what do you usually need the harddrives for. If you play with old stuff, modern ones are not worth and vice versa.

But from the position of "hard drive fetishist" ( 😁 ) I can't tell you, I keep every single harddrive I come around 😁

Which remindes me, what is the best way to store harddrives? I have stacked them on left side from the connector, but I am not sure if it is OK. What I know is that it is bad to store them laying on top of each other in piles higher then 4 drives, because the bottom one usually go bad and that makes me sad... 🙁

Got around to finally replacing a barrel battery on my 486 system with a NiMh cordless phone battery 😁

appiah4 wrote:

Got around to finally replacing a barrel battery on my 486 system with a NiMh cordless phone battery :D […]
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Got around to finally replacing a barrel battery on my 486 system with a NiMh cordless phone battery 😁

Didn't know those would work, good to know!

appiah4 wrote:

Got around to finally replacing a barrel battery on my 486 system with a NiMh cordless phone battery 😁

That's my choice as well: exact same voltage, officially NiCd replacements, huge capacity so once charged the PC can stay unused for a long time without loosing settings. Not to mention that they already come with a connector.
Drawback (there's always one): good/known brands cost ~10euros which is not cheap at all if you want to replace batteries in your collection of 20 PCs, but still affordable to keep those 1-2 you love operational.

appiah4 wrote:

Got around to finally replacing a barrel battery on my 486 system with a NiMh cordless phone battery :D […]
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Got around to finally replacing a barrel battery on my 486 system with a NiMh cordless phone battery 😁

Wow. Guess you just stripped the old NiCd battery off the connectors, and used a wiring connection (ex: power LED) harness to hook up said battery to the system without soldering?

I'm planning on soldering leads on my Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 Plus to hook up my redneck CR2032 external battery to the one spot the original clock battery (BR1225) was at, but I need to buy a de-soldering iron, some leads, wiring harness from either a bad PC speaker or from eBay.

Currently, I'm using a CR2032 battery as an external battery which thankfully, there's a jumper that allows hooking up an external battery in place of the internal clock battery, or just only for the internal battery (if present and installed) to either keep or remove the BIOS settings.

Bought a few more 5.25" 3.5" Drive bay Mobile Racks for my other RetroBoxen on Monday, and swapped the one in the 486 yesterday. Looks like Redmond's Computer Surplus is running out of retro-equipment now so I may have to stick to RE-PC, AMIBAY, and E-BAY from now on. They did quite a cleanout, the CRT that was there - gone. Was stempted to ask about the 486 and the AT Pentium (missing side cover) they had but considering the guy at the shop was once again asking me "what are you doing with that 20 year old technology" again, I just decided to buy my parts and head out - cleared out all the old IDE Mobile Racks that were compaitible with one of the sleds I already have. The black one is going in my Tandy 1000.

For the 486, this is what was done...

New Beige 5.25" Mobile Bay Rack thingy had it's keylock disabled. I can't use one of these unless I have the keys, NONE of mine have the keys, the way to disable the keylock on these is to pull the connectors from the pins on the keylock, and short them together with wire or something else so that the power-line for the Hard Disk is connected and the drive fires up. I'm doing this to all of them before I install for this very reason (will show how to do it on my site eventually).

Then the rack was installed in the 486 (and the black one taken out - it's going into my Tandy). That was pretty quick. But I decided to try 128MB of RAM again, even under 96MB I get a parity error and boot problems. Might just want to stick with 64MB for now. I may order the Non-PARITY RAM for the 486-PVT later this year and see if it's any better.

I also moved the 15GB Drive with my Windows For Workgroups 3.11/DOS 6.22 install on it from the black drive sled to one of the beige ones that matches up to the new mobile drive bay rack. This will just ease the headaches because the internal centronics connectors are all different, don't connect right all the time using other sleds, and whatnot. I'd rather just install the newer one in the Tandy because it actually matches that compute r(black 360K Floppy), and it makes hard disk replacement on the Tandy easier (which is the whole idea of using these things).

I also have started preparing my other hard disks. I'm setting up a 40GB for Windows 98 SE, and I have an 80GB That I'm not quite sure what to do with. I did find out that these drives dont' work properly under MAXBLAST EZ-BIOS like my 15 and 20GB Western Digital drives do - the 40GB comes up as a 126GB HDD (!!!!), and the 80GB does not come up at all to the program. So I used the WD Utility for it. I've got the 40 cut into 4 FAT-32 Partitions already, but I need to take some time to make some new boot disks and whatnot before installing the O/S. One thing I'll say about WD Data Lifeguard utilities on t a 486 - this utility runs a HELL of a lot better on a DX4-100 than it does a DX2-66, It's actually quite a joy to use, when I ran it last time (when my CPU was a 486 DX2-66) it was so slow and clunky it was extremely grating to use (hence trying to use maxblast) - I also may need to learn a thing or two about using the floppy drive to boot from CD, or how that CD works, might be handy for installing Windows.

An odd side note - my 486 tops out at a 2.1GB HDD. I love late era VLB motherboards.

I also plan to test out the 7.2GB Maxtor that supposedly failed and make sure it failed because it's been working fine under USB for awhile, and I was able to recover all my old stuff from the previous DOS/WFWG install I had on it. I also have 2 2.1GB Dirves that will probably be used as "spares" for the Tandy 1000 if they test good. I really don't need an 8GB Drive in my Tandy 1000, I can barely use up 200MB for games alone.

Might break out the Pentium for awhile with one of these racks in it as well, so that I can trick Direct X8 to install on the drives for the 486. Yes, I have used DX8 with a 486 before - and it worked great (IBM PC-330 100DX4). Basically, I'm pulling every trick in the book to build quite a capable system. I'm toying with making some crazy attempts at XP or 2000 Pro as well - IIRC, 2K was always a problem on 486's because 2K does not like Serial mice, and XP requires a 133MHz Pentium.....hehe, but I might find a way around that.

Here's a pic of my (messy) setup.....

Im today Full of hate. My ati x1650pro agp decided to die. the system is not posting at all. fu.... And the best part is when i take the replacement the geforce7600gs it gives artefacts random. But i think its driver problem because it happens only in 3d and only on certain surfaces. I have the last ones for winxp.So my question is what is the best driver for 7600gs for windows xp?

Got an Optiplex GX1 and an IBM NetVista, both PIII era machines. Cleaned them up and the Optiplex was FILTHY (even worse than the pictures) but look what an air compressor, magic eraser, and sand paper can do! http://imgur.com/a/Do1Jk

oeuvre wrote:

Got an Optiplex GX1 and an IBM NetVista, both PIII era machines. Cleaned them up and the Optiplex was FILTHY (even worse than the pictures) but look what an air compressor, magic eraser, and sand paper can do! http://imgur.com/a/Do1Jk

Wow! Great work on the Dell in particular - it looked particularly grubby. I had the single-bay PII version and the PSU died 🙁 I also had the chance to rescue a NetVista from a dumpster but I'm not a fan of post-SS7 IBM systems. Semi-regretting it now. I did rescue the i740 graphics card though!

Hi, do you have the manual for this motherboard tester? I bought it but the seller did not provide any. After messaged the seller, it was a painful headache going no where to get the manual from him.
So I cannot resolve the post codes and the led on the motherboard. Canyou help email me the manual?

creepingnet wrote:

Still continuing my major PITA with the FIC 486-PVT..... […]
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Still continuing my major PITA with the FIC 486-PVT.....

Now I'm searching around for more FIC boards to get that 0 Ohm Resistor network part, particularly another 486 PVT if possible so I can have a backup/spare while I fix the other one (put an ad up on Amibay for that).

Tried my staple change last night, and seems I can't get either chip to work, starting to wonder maybe if enabling Cache or fast RAM timing blew something small like RAM or whatever. Removing the video card and the network card is not giving me much....maybe this Resistor network is faulty. It's got me thinking there is something more going on with the board than what I originally thought. I'm just hoping it's not a broken trace somewhere or some other problem related to swapping parts out on it so often - my 128MB of RAM is supposed to come in today and I have a 512MB Cache coming in as well in early March from China. I may try swapping the RAM just in case the old 70ns Fast Page blew under the stresses of the AMD DX4.

I tried pulling everything, RAM, Video Card, it powers on, the keyboard lights flash, just no POST, no beeps (listening via SoundBlaster passthrough as that's all I have), got me wondering what part of the POST before RAM or Video it's getting hung up on. May need to try the oven-reflow trick one day if it keeps going this way.

Testing continuity on the motherboard and the old broken 0 Ohm 8P4R Resistor Network, I am finding the readings to be 100% the same if I use the staples between the contacts exactly as they work inside the resistor (around 0.0003 Ohms if I use the 200 Ohm scale on my Multitester). So I'm starting to think it's not that. Did i also mention the staples are EXACTLY the right size to fit the holes and not short each other. So things should be working. I'm just hoping I did not have a bad DX4-100 CPU, but my DX2-66 won't POST Either.

I found that one of the P8/P9 connectors were hung up on one side when "fully connected" not sure what's going on there....

Oh well, bought one of these this morning to aid in my board level repairs - http://www.ebay.com/itm/380831560767?_trksid= … K%3AMEBIDX%3AIT - maybe if I get good I could start buying up some of those Bulgarian/Hungarian/Turkish/Whatever 486 boards that are going for 30-something bucks as well, I also kind of need this thing for work anyway too, might help to tell the OEM what's actually going WRONG with their stuff rather than "we swapped out a bunch of parts and determined it's this one just because all these other parts removed did not remove/reproduce the symptom". I always loved that I had one of these built into my ABIT AW9D board on my Pentium D machine.

Still I'm a tad ...uhh....aggravated because now the DX2 chip does not boot either using correct jumper settings, and I found out I had been using it on 4 volts instead of 5......odd.

Just hoping I can get this thing finished eventually and working so I can button it up and not bother with it again. I'm starting to miss having a working 486 on my desk and getting getting a bit annoyed with having this thing open in "breadboarding mode" next to me every day to try more insane things in hopes it will eventually POST.

Finally had a chance to test that PC-Chips M575 motherboard. And it is working. I had no problems or errors.
I have just put my Unisys 486 machine on the table, in order to take it apart for inspection and cleaning.

...dont have any real retro hardware anymore, so i try to tweak the audio setup of Dosbox ECE in regards to MT-32/Sounblaster/General Midi emulation. Finding and testing/comparing soundfonts against youtube videos is a time consuming thing...
😀

Does this count? 😉

Messed around some more with my Shuttle HOT-553 (430hx). After the BIOS upgrade the thing does not boot anymore, it has issues with the disk controller. Luckily I saved the old one, but that seems to have the 8gb limit. Tried a tekram scsi card, and booted with a via sata/ide controller. Enough for today, I'm in no hurry 😀

benn wrote:

Hi, do you have the manual for this motherboard tester? I bought it but the seller did not provide any. After messaged the seller, it was a painful headache going no where to get the manual from him.
So I cannot resolve the post codes and the led on the motherboard. Canyou help email me the manual?

Yes, I have the manual for mine. It also directs to this website - http://www.bioscentral.com/postcodes/amibios.htm

You can also pull the codes from there. Just need to know the brand of the BIOS.

Was playing around with an old iMac G3 333MHz, trying out some spare RAM chips I had. At one point I thought it's PSU had died as it point blank refused to power on - luckily however it was just the CPU/RAM card that wasn't reseated correctly after I swapped out the chips.

Wow those early G3 iMacs were horrible, a pain in the backside to upgrade and also extremely picky about the RAM chips they will accept. I put 2x 256MB PC100/133 SODIMM chips in and it only recognised half the RAM and was unstable. Think I'll have to settle for 192MB that I had before. Whilst it was running though I did give it a brief test playing Tomb Raider The Last Revelation whilst booted into Mac OS 9.1 and it ran ok but not really spectacular.

Also got around to installing a new OS on my Coppermine Pentium III 1.0GHz system, with Geforce 4 MX 440 AGP 8x. Funnily, the PC boasts stickers such as "designed for Windows 98" and yet I've found Windows XP seems to run much better so far - definitely something I'm going to have to look into (could possibly be because I have 768MB RAM installed, so will investigate further and actually I just remembered I hadn't tried installing the Via 4-in-1 drivers yet). For instance I used the PC version of Tomb Raider The Last Revelation as a test and despite being designed in the 9x era, I could only get it working somewhat okish in XP (has Graphics glitches that I've seen on several PCs), whereas 98 refused to go above 640x480 16-bit without crashing.

PTherapist wrote:

Was playing around with an old iMac G3 333MHz, trying out some spare RAM chips I had. At one point I thought it's PSU had died as it point blank refused to power on - luckily however it was just the CPU/RAM card that wasn't reseated correctly after I swapped out the chips.

Wow those early G3 iMacs were horrible, a pain in the backside to upgrade and also extremely picky about the RAM chips they will accept. I put 2x 256MB PC100/133 SODIMM chips in and it only recognised half the RAM and was unstable. Think I'll have to settle for 192MB that I had before. Whilst it was running though I did give it a brief test playing Tomb Raider The Last Revelation whilst booted into Mac OS 9.1 and it ran ok but not really spectacular.

Also got around to installing a new OS on my Coppermine Pentium III 1.0GHz system, with Geforce 4 MX 440 AGP 8x. Funnily, the PC boasts stickers such as "designed for Windows 98" and yet I've found Windows XP seems to run much better so far - definitely something I'm going to have to look into (could possibly be because I have 768MB RAM installed, so will investigate further and actually I just remembered I hadn't tried installing the Via 4-in-1 drivers yet). For instance I used the PC version of Tomb Raider The Last Revelation as a test and despite being designed in the 9x era, I could only get it working somewhat okish in XP (has Graphics glitches that I've seen on several PCs), whereas 98 refused to go above 640x480 16-bit without crashing.

For your imac G3/333: are you using Apple RAM, or non-Apple RAM? I'm planning on upgrading my iMac G3/600 Graphite with 1GB RAM, or at least 512MB, but IDK if the PC RAM would work with it or not. It's running Mac OS X 10.4.11

brassicGamer wrote:

oeuvre wrote:

Got an Optiplex GX1 and an IBM NetVista, both PIII era machines. Cleaned them up and the Optiplex was FILTHY (even worse than the pictures) but look what an air compressor, magic eraser, and sand paper can do! http://imgur.com/a/Do1Jk

Wow! Great work on the Dell in particular - it looked particularly grubby. I had the single-bay PII version and the PSU died 🙁 I also had the chance to rescue a NetVista from a dumpster but I'm not a fan of post-SS7 IBM systems. Semi-regretting it now. I did rescue the i740 graphics card though!

Thanks! I'm liking the NetVista so far, pleasant surprise it has 8MB onboard VRAM