The MSI /Fujitsu board with one visually bad cap by the AGP slot.

The visually bad cap was really bad but I desoldered a few more of the same type and they all seemed fine, back on the board they went!

In this case I diddn't use an ultra low ESR cap as replacement but some cheap Panasonic FR series cap, I figured it would be "good enough".

Did the Geforce4 ti4600 and the MSI/Fujitu motherboard work after the cap replacements? Yes of course they did!

PTherapist wrote on 2021-01-09, 15:10:

What spec is that, 8088 or 286 or later?

286. It has 3 x ISA (half-size cards) for expansion.

RetroLizard wrote on 2021-01-09, 03:05:

Noted. I'll keep that in mind.

I'll post here, since I can't send PMs.
Good source would be eBay, amibay forum or local market.
Basically, you look for:
* Zalman VF700 (It may cost you on eBay, especially all-copper one. Also, it may be cheaper to buy whole other card with cooler on it.)
* Zalman VF900
* Arctic Cooling ATI silencer 1
* Arctic Cooling Accelero S2

There are also passive solutions from Zalman (ZM80C-HP and ZM80D-HP), but you'll need good ventilation for them.
All are period-correct except Accelero S2. This is the only one I didn't use on 9xxx serises (I used it on HD4670).
You'll need hair dryer (or heat gun) to remove original cooler, and nitro paint thinner to remove residue from core.

Replaced the ODIN/DALLAS RTC on my ABIT AB-PT5 I've got last month.
Desoldered the ODIN chip, soldered a socket to the board, recovered two DALLAS chips from two access control units. The whole process took me like 3 hours. I really need to practice my soldering/desoldering skills.
The "new" DALLAS chips are from 2011 and 2013 and bouth are working fine.
Here is the result:

The board works fine, another one saved from the scrap 😀

Skyscraper wrote on 2021-01-10, 10:07:

The MSI /Fujitsu board with one visually bad cap by the AGP slot. […]
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The MSI /Fujitsu board with one visually bad cap by the AGP slot.

MSI 845 Ultra (fujitsu version) with a bad cap by the AGP-slot.jpg

The visually bad cap was really bad but I desoldered a few more of the same type and they all seemed fine, back on the board they went!

Bad cap.jpg

In this case I diddn't use an ultra low ESR cap as replacement but some cheap Panasonic FR series cap, I figured it would be "good enough".

MSI 845 Ultra (fujitsu version) with the bad cap replaced.jpg

Did the Geforce4 ti4600 and the MSI/Fujitu motherboard work after the cap replacements? Yes of course they did!

MSI 845 Ultra (fujitsu version) and Geforce4 ti4600 after repcap.jpg

Focus on ESR. This is most important part as this indicates how capable the capacitor is to source sufficient current during short time transits spikes. Capacity of uF determines storage long enough to bridge largest voltage dips. But too much capacity of too few takes too long to react due to insufficient parallelism resistance hence, multiple capacitors in parallel.

Cheers,

I was poking in old storage room and found some motherboard manuals.
10MHz Turbo is the only "lost-in-action" board. Other ones have somehow salvaged and running now.
Older ones seems to be pretty simple manuals, but if someone needs a copy I can scan some...

pentiumspeed wrote on 2021-01-10, 16:38:

Focus on ESR. This is most important part as this indicates how capable the capacitor is to source sufficient current during short time transits spikes. Capacity of uF determines storage long enough to bridge largest voltage dips. But too much capacity of too few takes too long to react due to insufficient parallelism resistance hence, multiple capacitors in parallel.

Cheers,

Well the Panasonic FR series caps are low ESR, just not ultra low. The 1000uf 6.3v cap I used closly matched the 20 year old caps (of the same type as the one I replaced) still on the board when it comes to ESR so if it isn't good enough they all have to go.

It was good enough though and that's great as there is no chance I would waste 16 Nichicon HZ 1000uf 6.3V caps on that board. I guess poly modding could have been a last resort but I have only electrolytics at hand.

I was even tempted to use Panasonic FR series on the Geforce4 ti4600 but I read that it diddn't work for one person who tried while others said they used even worse caps ESR-wise when recapping GF4 without issues. At least the ti4600 has some real value but using expensive good quality ultra low ESR caps on stuff that has no (monetary) value at all dosn't make much sense and in such cases where scores of ultra low ESR caps are really needed I just keep the hardware in a box somewhere without fixing it.

I did some retro activity for the time in a month or so. My main PC has had some issues so my retro area has been used for general computing with an i7 860 system whilst I sort out my main PC. But that's all fixed so I put together a retro PC.

It's a 3.4GHz Pentium 4 with 1GB of DDR 400 RAM and a 7600GS. I couldn't be bothered swapping out the case, PSU or SATA drives so it's got a 750GB SATA3 SSD, which XP installed onto just fine! As a bonus it's got 3 120mm fans working just fine too, not that I anticipating that helping to keep the P4 cool that much...

Interestingly I couldn't be bothered finding a Sata to Molex adapter to power the 7600GS on the modern PSU but it posted without this additional power. Does an 8X AGP slot deliver more power than 4x?

When I install the drivers I assume it'll pop up with a "low power mode" or something.

Actually what I meant focus on ESR for health of the capacitors being checked, your tool has this feature. Do not worry about farads.

Polymer capacitors has very low ESR allows them to work even the farads is less than the normal electrolyte low ESR types.

Cheers,

Almoststew1990 wrote on 2021-01-10, 20:41:

I did some retro activity for the time in a month or so. My main PC has had some issues so my retro area has been used for gener […]
Show full quote

I did some retro activity for the time in a month or so. My main PC has had some issues so my retro area has been used for general computing with an i7 860 system whilst I sort out my main PC. But that's all fixed so I put together a retro PC.

It's a 3.4GHz Pentium 4 with 1GB of DDR 400 RAM and a 7600GS. I couldn't be bothered swapping out the case, PSU or SATA drives so it's got a 750GB SATA3 SSD, which XP installed onto just fine! As a bonus it's got 3 120mm fans working just fine too, not that I anticipating that helping to keep the P4 cool that much...

Interestingly I couldn't be bothered finding a Sata to Molex adapter to power the 7600GS on the modern PSU but it posted without this additional power. Does an 8X AGP slot deliver more power than 4x?

When I install the drivers I assume it'll pop up with a "low power mode" or something.

All AGP slot 1x, 2x, 4x and 8x are rated same watts max due to limited number of contacts for power find the power adapter and do this correctly, if card needs external power plug, plug that in. AGP *PRO* has bit more watts due to more contacts.

Cheers,

@pentiumspeed yes when I installed the drivers it said it was in low power mode so I dug out my SATA to Molex adapter. I usually set it up properly I was just being lazy.

However I've reached the point where most of my DDR1 is dead and I might actually have to buy some; I'm used to having a never ending pile of DDR1 as it finds you rather than you finding it! I'm down to 1x 512Mb stick and doing just browsing to this forum was painful. Hopefully it's still throw-away money on eBay.

Spent the weekend getting the twins setup after almost two years in storage. In Win A500 ATX mid tower case in the middle for scale.

What on earth why no information on these twin computers? Are they intel-made servers?

Have some time taking these pictures and describe them in detail what are they? Web search is thin and your extra information will help big time.

Cheers,

pentiumspeed wrote on 2021-01-10, 23:21:

What on earth why no information on these twin computers? Are they intel-made servers?

Have some time taking these pictures and describe them in detail what are they? Web search is thin and your extra information will help big time.

Cheers,

Journey of a Unisys Aquanta HS/6, aka ALR Revolution 6x6

Frustrating day. I want the impossible, and surprise surprise: it turned out to be impossible 😉

What? a 2000s era Knoppix Linux install with hardware detection and enough useful software for a lot of diagnostics, on a HDD smaller than the 2GB BIOS limit. Nope. Knoppix 5.1.1 at least requires 512MB swap if <128MB of RAM (likely), and install is about 1.5GB. It *just* fits onto a 2.1GB HDD, but that HDD is >2GB and so fails to be correctly recognized in the sort of early Pentium system I want to use it on. 1.6GB HDD is detected fine, but it doesn't fit.

Booting Knoppix from CD isn't an option due to lack of CD boot support. However SCSI might be an option, so that will be my next approach.

Also ordered 35 64k x 8 SRAM DIPs to boost some boards to 512kB/1MB of cache.

dionb wrote on 2021-01-10, 23:36:

Frustrating day. I want the impossible, and surprise surprise: it turned out to be impossible ;) […]
Show full quote

Frustrating day. I want the impossible, and surprise surprise: it turned out to be impossible 😉

What? a 2000s era Knoppix Linux install with hardware detection and enough useful software for a lot of diagnostics, on a HDD smaller than the 2GB BIOS limit. Nope. Knoppix 5.1.1 at least requires 512MB swap if <128MB of RAM (likely), and install is about 1.5GB. It *just* fits onto a 2.1GB HDD, but that HDD is >2GB and so fails to be correctly recognized in the sort of early Pentium system I want to use it on. 1.6GB HDD is detected fine, but it doesn't fit.

Booting Knoppix from CD isn't an option due to lack of CD boot support. However SCSI might be an option, so that will be my next approach.

Also ordered 35 64k x 8 SRAM DIPs to boost some boards to 512kB/1MB of cache.

Use plop from a floppy disk to boot the cd... or a lighter linux cd such as Damn Small Linux or similar.

Caluser2000 wrote on 2021-01-11, 08:41:

[...]

Use plop from a floppy disk to boot the cd... or a lighter linux cd such as Damn Small Linux or similar.

I suppose that would do the trick, it just combines two things I hate (floppy & CDs).

That's one of my other little projects - using a RaSCSI Raspberry Pi SCSI emulator to basically do a Gotek-for-CDs. Managed to get it working for HDD images, but not (yet) CD images. Given that it was designed for FM Towns/X68000, then adapted to vintage Mac systems, it's hardly aimed at bootable PC CDRoms, but I'd be very happy if I could get it working. Still, no time to dig around any more for the next few weeks :'(

But for this purpuse plain old SCSI HDD would do the trick and be less fiddly than a Pi needing an extra USB power supply etc. Except of course all my suitable drives have SCA connectors, so need fiddly adapters after all...

dionb wrote on 2021-01-10, 23:36:

Frustrating day. I want the impossible, and surprise surprise: it turned out to be impossible ;) […]
Show full quote

Frustrating day. I want the impossible, and surprise surprise: it turned out to be impossible 😉

What? a 2000s era Knoppix Linux install with hardware detection and enough useful software for a lot of diagnostics, on a HDD smaller than the 2GB BIOS limit. Nope. Knoppix 5.1.1 at least requires 512MB swap if <128MB of RAM (likely), and install is about 1.5GB. It *just* fits onto a 2.1GB HDD, but that HDD is >2GB and so fails to be correctly recognized in the sort of early Pentium system I want to use it on. 1.6GB HDD is detected fine, but it doesn't fit.

Booting Knoppix from CD isn't an option due to lack of CD boot support. However SCSI might be an option, so that will be my next approach.

Also ordered 35 64k x 8 SRAM DIPs to boost some boards to 512kB/1MB of cache.

If you have at least 64MB RAM in the PC you can just use Puppy Linux Retro 4.1.3 and even install it onto a hard drive. Granted, it works a million times better with 128MB RAM.

dionb wrote on 2021-01-11, 09:20:

Caluser2000 wrote on 2021-01-11, 08:41:

[...]

Use plop from a floppy disk to boot the cd... or a lighter linux cd such as Damn Small Linux or similar.

I suppose that would do the trick, it just combines two things I hate (floppy & CDs).

You rearly need to get over that when dealing with old kit and doing something they were never designed to do.

A friend of mine gave me a Goodfellas DVD, and I finally watched it last night (after hearing about it for all of these years)as I was disassembling my cousin's laptop for repair. I watched it on my AT system: TXP4, K6-3+ 450 @ 500, FX 5200, 64 megs of RAM, Win98 with an old version of Power DVD.