Made some mistakes with what sort of 486 I actually want recently but have been watching this one on ebay for a while.
Won the auction today and cant wait to set it up and see if its alright!
Comes with the original Dell shipping boxes too which is a nice bonus.
That's a nice find. I really hope that the seller packages that system properly and it survives the trip to your house intact.
Me too, the seller is an established ebay seller so hopefully knows what they are doing. And offered to double box the monitor and desktop so that the original shipping boxes will hopefully survive too!
It does sound like you have the only good nforce 2 motherboard on earth though.
EDIT - If you have the time I'd love to see how it does running memtest86 for 2-3 days straight. Literally every nforce 2 board I ever tested over a weekend failed.
I upped motherboard frequency to 200mhz (overclocking the CPU a bit), and tightened timings to 2.5CL
Seems to work fine still on this 12 hour memtest run.
I am pretty sure I would have definitely noticed under windows xp or linux if nforce boards were crashy during the few years I was using them. This is not to discount your experience, but if the nforce 2 chipset was inherently unstable, motherboard manufacturers would have noticed.
My order for a few MX8315PC (486 clock chips) and some Dallas RTC arrived today....
Also: Today Bought a Panasonic DMR-ES40V w/remote in near new condition today, works well. Yes not a computer but is a bit vintage (2005).
Gave a donation of $20 to the Teen Challenge thrift store for it, same store got the NOS 48x12x48 Beige OEM Lite-On IDE CD burner for $5 last week....
Also picked up a few glass insulators last week, one was made prior to 1922 (a Brookfield) been collecting them on and off since my grandad died in 1984,
he was a lineman in Cali about the same time Glen Cambell wrote the song Witchita Lineman.
Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun
canthearuwrote on 2021-01-12, 22:16:I upped motherboard frequency to 200mhz (overclocking the CPU a bit), and tightened timings to 2.5CL […] Show full quote
I upped motherboard frequency to 200mhz (overclocking the CPU a bit), and tightened timings to 2.5CL
nforce2.jpg
Seems to work fine still on this 12 hour memtest run.
I am pretty sure I would have definitely noticed under windows xp or linux if nforce boards were crashy during the few years I was using them. This is not to discount your experience, but if the nforce 2 chipset was inherently unstable, motherboard manufacturers would have noticed.
Frankly I'm amazed it hasn't screwed up (that said every one I've been hands on with fails over the course of a weekend, as in 2-3 days), if you could run the prime95 blend test for a long time I'd like to see if it can survive that too. You definitely have the most reliable nforce2 board I know of.
Found this on Ebay for $30. A freaking reflective GOLD Amiga mouse. Rofl. If is pimp as hell.. Looks like something out of James Bond, except it is The Man with the Golden Mouse. All joking aside, it is super sturdy with some weight to it, tracks extremely well and smooth, and the buttons have a very nice but sturdy click. It doesn't feel cheap at all. Made by Handy Mouse.
wiretapwrote on 2021-01-13, 02:26:Found this on Ebay for $30. A freaking reflective GOLD Amiga mouse. Rofl. If is pimp as hell.. Looks like something out of James […] Show full quote
Found this on Ebay for $30. A freaking reflective GOLD Amiga mouse. Rofl. If is pimp as hell.. Looks like something out of James Bond, except it is The Man with the Golden Mouse. All joking aside, it is super sturdy with some weight to it, tracks extremely well and smooth, and the buttons have a very nice but sturdy click. It doesn't feel cheap at all. Made by Handy Mouse.
I had it running for 10 hours, 5 passes of memtest86, no errors. Do I need to wait forever for it to error out?
hah no.
It does sound like you have the only good nforce 2 motherboard on earth though.
EDIT - If you have the time I'd love to see how it does running memtest86 for 2-3 days straight. Literally every nforce 2 board I ever tested over a weekend failed.
My first ever full self build featured an ABIT NF7-S with nforce2. Not only did it it have memory problems (if trying to run at rated speeds) it also was so unstable running my 2400+ at its correct speed(crashed every time during windows install.) I had to run it at 1800+ speeds for its lifetime just to get it to work. Although overall I look back at it fondly as my first complete build it was serious stress getting it going and stable.
My first ever complete build used the same nForce2 Ultra 400 motherboard, an Abit NF7-S (revision 2). I was amazed at the stability, and I only recall a handful of BSODs over the years it was in use. It not only survived my clumsy maiden building voyage but my first forays into silent pc modding.
All this talk of nforce2 instabilities has me hoping I don't find one in my collection when I get round to testing my socket A chips 😀
See my graphics card database at www.gpuzoo.com
Constantly being worked on. Feel free to message me with any corrections or details of cards you would like me to research and add.
Didn’t find any more 3dfx this time but I bought the following from ewaste again for a few bucks each. MSI MS-4138 is the board.
Also bought a rough looking Omnibook 600c for $15 as well, it doesn't boot unfortunately but I did mainly get it for the PCMCIA and HD tray which my 600ct is missing.
Last edited by mtgmackid on 2021-01-13, 13:38. Edited 4 times in total.
Frankly I'm amazed it hasn't screwed up (that said every one I've been hands on with fails over the course of a weekend, as in 2-3 days), if you could run the prime95 blend test for a long time I'd like to see if it can survive that too. You definitely have the most reliable nforce2 board I know of.
Still going strong, no errors, after 24h. But not dual channel, the screen is wrong. Maybe tomorrow I'll switch over to prime 95, can then boot it into embedded XP using heron's boot cd. Note that this is a random nforce 2 motherboard I pulled out of a system I bought cheap a couple of years back, and I put 3 completely random and different 1gig DDR sticks into it, just to stress the memory controller out as much as possible.
Other things to consider that could cause these ss
a) AGP systems were definitely less stable overall than PCI-e systems. All AGP systems lack the robustness of PCI-e. Sort of like the difference between a 486 VLB and 486 PCI system. VLB is a cantankerous bus that was rapidly designed and deployed because we wanted more system bandwidth but didn't have a good design for it. The follow up PCI systems are better designed and tend to have fewer problems. Likewise, AGP was a stopgap that got added and added to, and pretty much every chip maker sucked at getting it right and performant. PCI-e was a much more mature standard right from the outset, and this resulted in a general uplift in system stability and performance.
b) We were in the middle of the capacitor dark ages, and VRM designs were pushing electrolytic caps to the limit (and beyond). This was not a friend to stability.
c) These high end AMD athlon systems really pushed the 5V rail on power systems pretty intensely. Power supplies were very often not designed to do this well, or even adequately. Power design, from power supplies, to how motherboards power CPUs, has come a long way in the last 15 years.
That is not to say you should run out and buy/use nforce2 systems ... I still feel that you should, by default, be looking for an VIA board for your retro AMD system. But nforce 2 systems are not automatically bad, just less useful for retro gaming because they prefer window XP, and there are plenty of better options for an XP box.
I've been waiting since Friday to post this to make sure it got shipped and trackable first. I bought a 2nd NEC Versa M/75
Nice notebook! I have NEC Versa V/50C. This is a good price for it.
Thanks, I have the sister to the V-series, the E (Versa 40EC) which has a removable screen and provisions for a touch screen (there's a rectangle panel behind the screen that if you remove it's a stylus holder - the E-series was the first to have touch).
Actually, that's one reason for buying the M/75, the case on my other one crumbled, but I still have the Touch-enabled screen for it (That I'm restoring). I also have a P/75 with a working battery it shares with the M/75 that works (and Sb Compatible sound). The M/75 I bought was untested so if it's bad I still have a working M/75 motherboard I can install in it. If the board on the bought one is bad, I'll use that to learn board-level repairs. That's something else I'm starting to learn besides chassis restoration/fabrication/modification.
canthearuwrote on 2021-01-12, 22:16:I upped motherboard frequency to 200mhz (overclocking the CPU a bit), and tightened timings to 2.5CL […] Show full quote
I upped motherboard frequency to 200mhz (overclocking the CPU a bit), and tightened timings to 2.5CL
nforce2.jpg
Seems to work fine still on this 12 hour memtest run.
I am pretty sure I would have definitely noticed under windows xp or linux if nforce boards were crashy during the few years I was using them. This is not to discount your experience, but if the nforce 2 chipset was inherently unstable, motherboard manufacturers would have noticed.
Frankly I'm amazed it hasn't screwed up (that said every one I've been hands on with fails over the course of a weekend, as in 2-3 days), if you could run the prime95 blend test for a long time I'd like to see if it can survive that too. You definitely have the most reliable nforce2 board I know of.
Don't exaggerate... I had a few Ultras back then and I have a few now... they all worked/work great. Maybe you had some memory incompatibility...
Must be slower than Triton. I will compare the VLB graphics performance to OPTi Python.
Sorry for the late answer but now benchmarked 12 motherboards including that one.
The DFI G586VPA Socket 5 VLB/PCI board is about 20% slower than Intel Premiere/PCI II. Although with PCI videocards about 14% faster than OPTi Socket 5 VLB/PCI board (which actually the slowest ones with PCI in the Socket 5/7 platform) but with VLB it is slower than OPTi Socket 5 VLB. However OPTi Socket 5 VLB has lot incompatibility problems with VLB (problems with all Cirrus Logic VLB videocards and 3D Blaster VLB), the DFI G586VPA has no incompatibility problems at all, but gives a late 486 like performance...
