assasincz wrote on 2021-01-08, 21:23:

Got this tired poor old barn mare,

After some testing and fiddling, what I got functioning from it are the CPU (Celeron 300MHz), Mainboard (BX98-3D), two sticks of SDRAM, Rage Pro AGP graphics card with RAM upgrade, a 4.2GB HDD, a floppy and a CD-ROM drive, so basically a functioning system. Nice

assasincz wrote on 2021-01-09, 16:19:

assasincz wrote on 2021-01-08, 21:23:

Got this tired poor old barn mare,

After some testing and fiddling, what I got functioning from it are the CPU (Celeron 300MHz), Mainboard (BX98-3D), two sticks of SDRAM, Rage Pro AGP graphics card with RAM upgrade, a 4.2GB HDD, a floppy and a CD-ROM drive, so basically a functioning system. Nice

That's really awesome you were able to recover all of that. Is the case salvageable or just a lost cause?

My PCIe PhysX card for my 8800GTX SLI rig came today. I didn't expect to get the boomerang edition. Sellers really need to understand they can't just stuff things like this in a 5x8" bubble mailer..

wiretap wrote on 2021-01-09, 19:32:

My PCIe PhysX card for my 8800GTX SLI rig came today. I didn't expect to get the boomerang edition. Sellers really need to understand they can't just stuff things like this in a 5x8" bubble mailer..

I hope you get a refund for that.

Honestly, as fucked up as that card is, even a box would not have helped. That was deliberately destroyed by the mail system.

Agreed, you need quite some force to accomplish this unholyness.

Bought IBM 300PL, but sadly with some damages on the case. However it works fine. I also got one Pentium 3 and one Celeron 3 complete systems. After a few beeps I got both systems booting fine. The cases frome Pentium 3 and Celeron 3 systems were pretty damaged and jellowed, so I decided not to keep them. I am running critical with storage space too. I removed everything from the casses, I even kept the plastic front of the cases. All that was left was metal chassis. Other components on the photo were in the systems. In the price I also managed to bargain a Radeon 9800 pro, which I hadn't had a chance to test it. Hope it works.

wiretap wrote on 2021-01-09, 19:32:

My PCIe PhysX card for my 8800GTX SLI rig came today. I didn't expect to get the boomerang edition. Sellers really need to under […]
Show full quote

My PCIe PhysX card for my 8800GTX SLI rig came today. I didn't expect to get the boomerang edition. Sellers really need to understand they can't just stuff things like this in a 5x8" bubble mailer..

Plug it into a sacrificial motherboard and see if it works!

PD2JK wrote on 2021-01-09, 21:35:

Agreed, you need quite some force to accomplish this unholyness.

I agree that it looks worse than would normally be expected, but there's no way that it would have been as bad in a box unless the box was as soft as a bubble mailer. It looks like it got wrapped around something or crushed over the corner of a box or some part of the sorting system. This wouldn't have happened to a box.

People can be really dumb with the way they pack things. Miscalculating the durability of a box or packing material and having something get damaged is an honest mistake. Thinking that an irregularly shaped circuit board will survive through any shipping service in a soft bubble mailer shows either completed ignorance of how physics works or a total disregard for the item being shipped (and the recipient).

Recently, a guy I bought something from shipped a heavy video card in a beat up amazon box LOOSE with two air bubbles... the ones you use to pack light things, that pop and are useless. No antistatic bag, no bubble wrap, nothing. When it arrived it was loose in the box and only one air pillow still had air in it. Hilariously, he told me he worked for amazon and knew how to package things. I believe him, because this *is* how Amazon packs things. Except they don't sell loose circuit boards! Especially ones that often sell for $300-$400.

wiretap wrote on 2021-01-09, 19:32:

My PCIe PhysX card for my 8800GTX SLI rig came today. I didn't expect to get the boomerang edition. Sellers really need to under […]
Show full quote

My PCIe PhysX card for my 8800GTX SLI rig came today. I didn't expect to get the boomerang edition. Sellers really need to understand they can't just stuff things like this in a 5x8" bubble mailer..

Holy crap that poor PhysX card it didn't deserve that. Was the delivery guy trying to wrap the card around a pipe or something.

Probably a round mailbox.

Christmas season shopping in USA.

Nvidia Riva TNT cards ( For my WIn-98 Builds )
Nvidia GeForce-4 Ti-4200 card ( For my Win-98 builds )
Complete Sound Blaster Pro 2.0 sound card with MIDI kit. ( For my 386/486 builds )

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2021-01-09, 04:57:

This made me curious, as I have an overclocked Abit NF7-S 2.0 system that has been used, in some capacity, almost constantly since I built it 2003. I just ran memtest on it for the first time since I last tweaked it about 8 years ago. It ran for 50 minutes, long enough to do a full pass, plus some. No errors detected. I don't do anything super critical on it, so I didn't feel like running it for a 24 hour test, but I've never had stability problems with it.

I sold computers for over 15 years (owner/operator of a retail store, sold new computers and repaired old computers) , all kinds of junk will pass memtest for an hour. I used to think a single full pass of memtest86 was sufficient and then I started getting people calling me saying their new Athlon XP/nforce 2 computers were bluescreening. Ultimately I threw out at least 90% of the nforce 2 MSI and Asus boards I sold, I took almost all of them back from clients (only exceptions were people I could not reach) and replaced them with VIA boards. I took a bath on that trash!

When those boards started causing clients problems I came to the conclusion they sucked when every single one couldn't pass memtest (or the microsoft memory diagnostic program in extended mode) over a mere weekend, I'd start running memtest at 5pm friday and come in Monday morning and they would always have errors. This was with every damn kind of ram I could order from distributors! Kingston, Crucial, Corsair, OCZ (fuck them for other reasons), etc.

Maybe Abit somehow made their boards better, none of my suppliers carried their boards when I was in business so I never got to be hands on with an abit nforce 2 board.

Oh also I always found the nforce 2 boards I had access to were more stable (but still eventually failed memtest every damn time) with 1 stick of memory in that third slot that was spaced away from the 2 meant for dual channel.

pete8475 wrote on 2021-01-10, 06:08:

I sold computers for over 15 years (owner/operator of a retail store, sold new computers and repaired old computers) , all kinds […]
Show full quote

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2021-01-09, 04:57:

This made me curious, as I have an overclocked Abit NF7-S 2.0 system that has been used, in some capacity, almost constantly since I built it 2003. I just ran memtest on it for the first time since I last tweaked it about 8 years ago. It ran for 50 minutes, long enough to do a full pass, plus some. No errors detected. I don't do anything super critical on it, so I didn't feel like running it for a 24 hour test, but I've never had stability problems with it.

I sold computers for over 15 years (owner/operator of a retail store, sold new computers and repaired old computers) , all kinds of junk will pass memtest for an hour. I used to think a single full pass of memtest86 was sufficient and then I started getting people calling me saying their new Athlon XP/nforce 2 computers were bluescreening. Ultimately I threw out at least 90% of the nforce 2 MSI and Asus boards I sold, I took almost all of them back from clients (only exceptions were people I could not reach) and replaced them with VIA boards. I took a bath on that trash!

When those boards started causing clients problems I came to the conclusion they sucked when every single one couldn't pass memtest (or the microsoft memory diagnostic program in extended mode) over a mere weekend, I'd start running memtest at 5pm friday and come in Monday morning and they would always have errors. This was with every damn kind of ram I could order from distributors! Kingston, Crucial, Corsair, OCZ (fuck them for other reasons), etc.

Maybe Abit somehow made their boards better, none of my suppliers carried their boards when I was in business so I never got to be hands on with an abit nforce 2 board.

Oh also I always found the nforce 2 boards I had access to were more stable (but still eventually failed memtest every damn time) with 1 stick of memory in that third slot that was spaced away from the 2 meant for dual channel.

That's pretty bad. I'm very glad that hasn't been my experience, though obviously mine is only one.

I do think it's funny if you go back to motherboard reviews of the late 90s and early 2000s some sites (like Anandtech) actually comment on how many crashes they experienced compared to other boards. Those were certainly crappy times for hardware stability when it was "not bad" for a board to crash maybe once every 6 hours. I'm surprised anyone even noticed there was a problem. I don't think any of my systems were that bad (if I stayed away from DOS games and crappy DOS sound card drivers).

I know that running memtest for more than one pass is important for stability testing. I run memtest on my primary machines for several hours after making RAM changes, but I've never really run into stability problems on most machines that warranted running memtest that much. I did a few times over the years, but it was always RAM.

A few humble cards unearthed in a junk shop today. I have an XP build in the pipeline, so the Audigy will be good for that.

Has anyone ever seen an Audigy SB0090 with a sticker on the chip like that? I'm not finding any via google image search.

saw a reasonably priced vibra 16 ct2260 with a ymf262 chip onboard so i snatched it up to go in my 486 when the parts show up in the next week or 2. i have been curious to see how these sound. hope its not too noisy!

For $30.00 and a long drive, I purchased four motherboards, two cases, and three video cards. Two Aopen boards, both of which are interesting; one is a Pentium M board, the other is a Pentium 4 775 AGP board. And a pair of industrial Pentium 4 boards. I've tested three of the four boards so far and they have all POSTed. And the video cards are PCI Radeon 7000 64 meg DDR cards. The one P4 board has a 3.0 with hyperthreading CPU, and I'm guessing the other does as well. The only auctions I could find on Ebay for the Socket 478 boards were ridiculously overpriced. And the Pentium M MATX board is apparently so rare that I couldn't find a listing to give me any idea of what it might be worth.

Not bought but given.
A Quantum Fireball ST 6.4GB and a WD Caviar 4GB. Both working wonderfully.

Those 478 boards with ISA are indeed worth a lot and are very hard to come by. Nice find!

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2021-01-11, 01:47:

Those 478 boards with ISA are indeed worth a lot and are very hard to come by. Nice find!

I must be living right, I just tested the second 478 board, and it also POSTed with no issue.