vetz wrote:

JidaiGeki wrote:

W Gruffydd wrote:

I'm still trying to find a Canopus Spectra 2500 for a Witchdoctor setup, but I recently acquired these:

DSCN5473a.jpg

Nice! I have all three cards for a Witchdoctor setup, but no cables. Internal long SLI cable should be easy to make, but the Spectra<->Pure 3D II cable is an unknown for me. Do you have the cables too?

The internal cable is easy to make with parts from Ebay. I did so for my setup.

I'm not sure if it's against Vogons rules to link an ebay auction, so I'll PM you the link of what I purchased to use for the internal pass-through cable. It's not remotely vintage. It was under the title "2Pcs 2mm Pitch 2x7 Pin 14 Pin 14 Wire IDC Flat Ribbon Cable Length 20CM."

Caveat emptor, this cable was an impulse buy after only a cursory examination of the the specs. I don't know whether it will work, let alone whether it will damage anything when used.

amadeus777999 wrote:

PTherapist wrote:

Managed to get hold of a DELL Optiplex 486 motherboard quite cheaply on eBay, which surprised me actually! […]
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Managed to get hold of a DELL Optiplex 486 motherboard quite cheaply on eBay, which surprised me actually!

Picture is from the trader on eBay, so is about the best quality I currently have until I actually receive it.

The motherboard in my DELL has a non-working PC Speaker and instead of trying to fix and risk damaging my only 486 machine, I thought I may as well just replace the motherboard since this was so cheap.

The physical dimensions of this board are practically a match for my DELL, but this is not the same motherboard I currently have (that too was available on eBay, but at a higher price) as this appears to have some kind VLSI chipset, whereas the one in mine seems to have chips marked Headland, with Tseng Labs ET 4000 onboard graphics. No idea what graphics are on this until I get it, the pic is much too blurry.

When it arrives the first thing I'm going to do is run some comparison benchmarks between the 2 boards. All being well, I'll install this inside my Optiplex and then set about reinstalling Windows 95 & NT 4.

Looking forward to the benchmarks - I guess the board may have a Cirrus Logic unit on board. At least this was the case with these "OEM" pentium boards which either sported Tseng or Cirrus gfx-chipsets.

Received the board this morning. It has Western Digital WD90C31-LR 1MB onboard graphics. 😎

Great, the used to make some fast VGA parts if I remember correctly.

@liqmat I wonder what value ESR those non-Sanyo capacitors have.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalent_series_resistance Any idea how new old stock that motherboard is?

xjas wrote:

What was it marketed as?

You're going to love this. The driver CD says Banana Digital which Luckybob likes to call it Banana Delight. The BIOS at post read "MA5000 v2.0". Another thing I noticed in the Pheonix BIOS is the fan speeds are not being registered so some corners are being cut on this board at least with the sensors.

The good news is my Tualatin 1.4GHz CPU came right up, but the current Windows 98SE installation was having a fit so I am in the middle of a reinstall. Going slowly.

SpectriaForce wrote:

@liqmat I wonder what value ESR those non-Sanyo capacitors have.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalent_series_resistance Any idea how new old stock that motherboard is?

Have no idea. The only time stamp I see is at post and the BIOS is dated 6/26/2010. I will try and see if I can see any timestamps on the board itself otherwise I'll ask the seller if he knows.

Here is the board on Alibaba. You will notice the game port is pictured, but as you can see on my board it is missing which is no big deal since I have a Sound Blaster Live Platinum 5.1 setup on this machine which has that port. Also, the seller goes by "Joker" which doesn't instill confidence in anyone buying with a name like that, but like I said he delivered super fast and as promised. I would highly suggest you make an account at Alibaba and start a message with him through their system since that will protect you somewhat from what I understand. I might add I had to pay $50 for one board so the price is a bit misleading on the link, but for a new Socket 370 I was fine with that. Of course the $30 shipping was steep, but it was overnighted and that was the only option. He accepts PayPal payments and is how I paid.

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Wholes … .438a3e5fu5rzlT

I think am really pushing Vongon's rules to the limit here, but it is not often you run across almost 20 year old hardware still being manufactured so I thought I would give everyone a heads up it's legit. My final verdict will be after I get Windows 98SE running with some games and benchmarks.

Have 3 more rackmount industrial PCI/ISA backplane based computers on the way. Pretty sure they all have S423 SBCs in them.

Shipping was kinda horrible, but I did get 50% off the prices of the computers themselves.

Guessing I should be able to see the usb dongles and any add-in cards to make back at least what I paid for everything all together provided they don't get destroyed in transit.

I really need to get a nice 4-post rack to be able to mount all these in. I think I am going to use racks to hold all my retro machines at some point. Should take up a lot less room and be a whole lot more tidy. Racks with wheels are sweet. So much easier than lifting everything to move it around.

All 3 are the same from what I can tell so no need to post seller pics of all 3. One is missing the top cover.. that is how I was able to tell what type of CPU was in it.

^^ Nice, I have one a lot like that. I love the looks of those old 4U rack modules. Is 'lab gear chic' a thing?

liqmat wrote:

... I will try and see if I can see any timestamps on the board itself otherwise I'll ask the seller if he knows.

I can make out a date code of 2004 3rd week on that VIA southbridge in the photo (second line, 0403).

liqmat wrote:

... His direct business contact he gave me was:

You might want to not straight up publish his email address? Poor guy might get lots of spam to that account now.

SW-SSG wrote:

You might want to not straight up publish his email address? Poor guy might get lots of spam to that account now.

Good point. Took care of it. You can contact him by inquiring about the motherboard on Alibaba. That should be good enough.

So good news. The board is very stable, fast and I am completely happy with the product. So consider this a good source for a new Socket 370 motherboard and as I said, it comes with a driver CD and a backplate. Tried the drivers from the CD and everything works perfectly in Windows 98SE. The drivers on the CD seem to be current since this isn't exactly a new chipset. The only other branding with this motherboard is the driver CD itself. The driver CD has a volume label of: hongtengjiayuan. This is basically what xjas and luckybob were saying, a complete rip from other board designs from the past and a reliable design at that. Sounds good to me. Banana Digital it is. 🤣

Anyway, I replaced my AOpen AX34 Pro II Socket 370 board which had a P-III 1000/133/256 with this board with the new Tualatin 1400/133/256 and had an increase in 3DMark01 from 6800ish to 9100ish. That's good enough for me and I am basically now completely done with my Windows 98SE build which I use for testing hardware and imaging old software. Hope this helps someone and I probably will be ordering a couple more in the near future.

Oh... and the motherboard is just loosely in the case in the photo. No way would I leave the cables that messy. Still testing for the next few days before I screw anything down.

Wow. Amazing quality board and video card as well. Is that an ATI card?

NVidia Geforce FX 5950 Ultra is the video card. I was worried that it might only support one floppy drive as some of the later Socket 370 boards did. Luckily it does support two floppy drives in the BIOS so I wont need a separate floppy controller.

So I just ordered this board that I have been watching for a couple months at least. I finally caved. Not sure why nobody had picked it up yet.

Listing said the CPUs are PIII-500, but they are obviously 800s. The jumpers indicate that the board was set to 66Mhz fsb instead of 100Mhz fsb, so maybe that is why they thought they were 500s.

It is v3.0 which apparently works fine at the 133Mhz fsb setting from what I could find about the board. Hoping to get a couple 1.3 Celerons and run them at 1.73Ghz which seems easily doable. I already bought some slockets that will work with them, so we shall see what happens.

The board does have one bulging cap near the first PCI slot so I will be replacing that.

Guessing this board will smoke my dually Tualatin 1.4 setup which doesn't have an AGP slot, but who knows.

if you need to replace one cap, bite the bullet and do them all.

The tualeron SMP won't work. And from experience, a P3-S would smoke the OCed tualeron anyways. Looks like a nice board, though!

liqmat wrote:

Don't know if this helps. Here are some closeups of the three most common caps on the board. […]
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xjas wrote:

Yours has a few more caps (hope they're not GSC, heh) but there are blank solder pads in those locations on the Gigabyte.

Don't know if this helps. Here are some closeups of the three most common caps on the board.

caps1.JPG

caps2.JPG

caps3.JPG

The non-Sanyo are junk and the Sanyo may be fake.
Sanyo is a very popular cap to counterfeit and some of the fakes are very well done.
I sent some suspect ones into Sanyo for validation. Yup, they were fakes.

Legitimate Sanyo branded electrolytics have not been manufactured since April 2009.
The subsidiary (Sun Electric) bought themselves out from Sanyo and since then the legitimate caps have been branded Suncon.
.

Bought this system last week for 10 euro, it's pentium socket 7 166mhz with 32mb ram

I think it's a Intel Advanced/AS motherboard as far as i can see, with a onboard sound card and ati graphic card, i only wonder what kind of bracket/connector do i need to hook up a monitor on it, the system came with a Creative CT6760 Voodoo Banshee card which i think it's a overkill.

It even have the cache pipeline.

Bj0rn83 wrote:

Bought this system last week for 10 euro, it's pentium socket 7 166mhz with 32mb ram […]
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Bought this system last week for 10 euro, it's pentium socket 7 166mhz with 32mb ram

I think it's a Intel Advanced/AS motherboard as far as i can see, with a onboard sound card and ati graphic card, i only wonder what kind of bracket/connector do i need to hook up a monitor on it, the system came with a Creative CT6760 Voodoo Banshee card which i think it's a overkill.

It even have the cache pipeline.

Wow! Blast from the past with that case of yours. I bought that exact case in the mid 90s to house a new DX4/100 build. Hard to believe that was 25 years ago. That was a solid minimalistic case if I recall correctly. Could you take a wider shot of it possibly so I can see the entire front?

liqmat wrote:

Bj0rn83 wrote:

Bought this system last week for 10 euro, it's pentium socket 7 166mhz with 32mb ram […]
Show full quote

Bought this system last week for 10 euro, it's pentium socket 7 166mhz with 32mb ram

I think it's a Intel Advanced/AS motherboard as far as i can see, with a onboard sound card and ati graphic card, i only wonder what kind of bracket/connector do i need to hook up a monitor on it, the system came with a Creative CT6760 Voodoo Banshee card which i think it's a overkill.

It even have the cache pipeline.

Wow! Blast from the past with that case of yours. I bought that exact case in the mid 90s to house a new DX4/100 build. Hard to believe that was 25 years ago. That was a solid minimalistic case if I recall correctly. Could you take a wider shot of it possibly so I can see the entire front?

Here it is.

Only the HDD was broken, but i replaced it with a old quantum fireball 2.5gb, and i changed the btc cd-rom as it was a bit unreliable.

Interesting. Same design, but mine was a full tower version of this with, I believe, four or five 5¼" drive bays. Thanks for the photo.