Today's score was a Creative SB PCI 128, CT4700, with a funky chipset reading: "CREATIVE 5507, 5507-0001-01" on the chipset.
Yet another funny relabel of Ensoniq's ES1370/1371.
Still a good card, and I like the inclusion of the TDA7360 and the AKM AK4531AVQ.

Nexxen wrote on 2024-12-22, 01:59:

Bought a broken socket 7 board. Sold as nothing @ power on. Powered it on (edit: after removing and reseating ics) and it was 10 […]
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Bought a broken socket 7 board. Sold as nothing @ power on.
Powered it on (edit: after removing and reseating ics) and it was 100% working.
I am confused. Seller said he tested it with 2 good PSUs. Didn't bother to reseat the socketed chips. He laughed at is haste.
7€, but no fun at troubleshooting. 🙁

Heh, I kinda know what you mean. Over many years I might be up to 20 or so boards previously declared dead, that I found some stupid shit wrong with, and another dozen which I didn't know their status but noticed something little before I tried to power them and hastier people could have declared dead. Then there's a few real buggers that hang around, giving me no clues, though 3 from that pile turned out to be something stupid again, just took me a long time to find it. So yeah I don't know if it's mostly stupid shit you gotta play "Where's Waldo" with, and just sometimes you just don't spot it for hours, or if ever there will be boards with errors that "train" you with a thrilling hunt.

Oh there is another class I forgot, the ones where you suspect you know how to get to the problem or have symptoms that point right to it, but you need to desolder a quarter of the darn board and test a load of components, or other complex half apart testing, and you haven't been in the right mood/state/had-time for the marathon session. Or you've got an information gap to address before you really get stuck in. For instance the first 3 references I looked at for the C&T NEAT failed to mention that the 82C215 was the one that did the memory parity check and also registers in the CTC might be involved. So just recently found that out and can move the 286 R&R along now I hope.

It's also helpful to connect a new CMOS battery for testing as well. Some boards won't power on without it, although this is pretty rare in my experience.

Well, this is a funny one. Technically this is a "Bought this retro hardware..." but it was actually around 5 years ago. I bought a bunch of PCs from someone and then stored them because I was moving at the time. One was really well equipped with a clean Soyo SY-5EMA+ v1.1 ("ETEQ" chipset... actually a Via MVP3) super socket 7 board with no bloated caps, AWE64, two CD drives and a Voodoo 3 3000 AGP. Yesterday I had some time to tinker with my long backlog of projects so I opened it up and looked it over a bit more closely.

First off, I see that one CD drive is a decent looking Samsung 24x10x40 burner, and the other drive is... get this... a Sony CDU928E CADDY LOADING drive, with a caddy in it! In the caddy was an old Easy CD Creator disc that probably came with the Samsung burner. I must have been so distracted by the SS7 board and Voodoo 3 that I didn't notice this at the time since the drive pops up a little plastic shield that says "Caddy Loaded" when... well... when there's a caddy loaded. Anyway, it looks like a closed CD tray at first glance 🤣 . I also see now that there's an ancient Seagate Medalist 10230 hard drive in it... so who knows what's on that. And after pulling the heatsink I see that the processor is a K6-2 500 AFX... nice! 😀

Moving on to the video card... whelp... this one boggled my mind. The Voodoo 3 3000 has 5ns SDRAM! From my experience this is super rare. I have seen 5.5ns (183Mhz) SGRAM on some 2000\3000 cards, but finding higher speed SDRAM is far far less common. 5.5ns SDRAM could be leftover from a 3500.. but I think the only Voodoo 3 that actually needed 5ns SDRAM was clocked at 200Mhz from the factory and was a special 3500 variant sold to Falcon Northwest, at least according to the Dodge Garage. I know that Voodoo 3 3000s with 5ns RAM exist because there have been some posts about them floating around for a while, but this is the first one I've seen out of dozens of Voodoo cards I've come across in my travels.

So yeah... what a crazy score this system was. It has no PSU installed, but I'm tempted to just drop a PSU in it and see if it runs totally as-is.

EDIT: Whaaaaa....? I also just noticed that the label on the bottom of the old Sony says "CD-R Drive" ??? Googling it, I see that the CDU928E is, in fact, a caddy loading CD burner from around 1997! What a crazy drive! It should do 2x write, 8x read speed. 8x for a caddy drive is insane! And from 1997?? What even is this? 🤣

I even found a review of it on good old ixbt: https://www.ixbt.com/storage/cdrsonycdu928e.html

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-23, 09:00:

Well, this is a funny one. Technically this is a "Bought this retro hardware..." but it was actually around 5 years ago. I bough […]
Show full quote

Well, this is a funny one. Technically this is a "Bought this retro hardware..." but it was actually around 5 years ago. I bought a bunch of PCs from someone and then stored them because I was moving at the time. One was really well equipped with a clean Soyo SY-5EMA+ v1.1 ("ETEQ" chipset... actually a Via MVP3) super socket 7 board with no bloated caps, AWE64, two CD drives and a Voodoo 3 3000 AGP. Yesterday I had some time to tinker with my long backlog of projects so I opened it up and looked it over a bit more closely.

First off, I see that one CD drive is a decent looking Samsung 24x10x40 burner, and the other drive is... get this... a Sony CDU928E CADDY LOADING drive, with a caddy in it! In the caddy was an old Easy CD Creator disc that probably came with the Samsung burner. I must have been so distracted by the SS7 board and Voodoo 3 that I didn't notice this at the time since the drive pops up a little plastic shield that says "Caddy Loaded" when... well... when there's a caddy loaded. Anyway, it looks like a closed CD tray at first glance 🤣 . I also see now that there's an ancient Seagate Medalist 10230 hard drive in it... so who knows what's on that. And after pulling the heatsink I see that the processor is a K6-2 500 AFX... nice! 😀

Moving on to the video card... whelp... this one boggled my mind. The Voodoo 3 3000 has 5ns SDRAM! From my experience this is super rare. I have seen 5.5ns (183Mhz) SGRAM on some 2000\3000 cards, but finding higher speed SDRAM is far far less common. 5.5ns SDRAM could be leftover from a 3500.. but I think the only Voodoo 3 that actually needed 5ns SDRAM was clocked at 200Mhz from the factory and was a special 3500 variant sold to Falcon Northwest, at least according to the Dodge Garage. I know that Voodoo 3 3000s with 5ns RAM exist because there have been some posts about them floating around for a while, but this is the first one I've seen out of dozens of Voodoo cards I've come across in my travels.

So yeah... what a crazy score this system was. It has no PSU installed, but I'm tempted to just drop a PSU in it and see if it runs totally as-is.

EDIT: Whaaaaa....? I also just noticed that the label on the bottom of the old Sony says "CD-R Drive" ??? Googling it, I see that the CDU928E is, in fact, a caddy loading CD burner from around 1997! What a crazy drive! It should do 2x write, 8x read speed. 8x for a caddy drive is insane! And from 1997?? What even is this? 🤣

I even found a review of it on good old ixbt: https://www.ixbt.com/storage/cdrsonycdu928e.html

That's all good stuff for sure.

I would suggest sticking a fan on the V3, it's very easy to use the extra mounting holes in the heatsink if it has one of the silver ones. I have one that also seems to have 5NS RAM but it's only stable around 190MHZ.
Voodoo 3 3000 - 5ns ram - Upgraded Cooling!

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-23, 09:00:

Well, this is a funny one. Technically this is a "Bought this retro hardware..." but it was actually around 5 years ago. I bough […]
Show full quote

Well, this is a funny one. Technically this is a "Bought this retro hardware..." but it was actually around 5 years ago. I bought a bunch of PCs from someone and then stored them because I was moving at the time. One was really well equipped with a clean Soyo SY-5EMA+ v1.1 ("ETEQ" chipset... actually a Via MVP3) super socket 7 board with no bloated caps, AWE64, two CD drives and a Voodoo 3 3000 AGP. Yesterday I had some time to tinker with my long backlog of projects so I opened it up and looked it over a bit more closely.

First off, I see that one CD drive is a decent looking Samsung 24x10x40 burner, and the other drive is... get this... a Sony CDU928E CADDY LOADING drive, with a caddy in it! In the caddy was an old Easy CD Creator disc that probably came with the Samsung burner. I must have been so distracted by the SS7 board and Voodoo 3 that I didn't notice this at the time since the drive pops up a little plastic shield that says "Caddy Loaded" when... well... when there's a caddy loaded. Anyway, it looks like a closed CD tray at first glance 🤣 . I also see now that there's an ancient Seagate Medalist 10230 hard drive in it... so who knows what's on that. And after pulling the heatsink I see that the processor is a K6-2 500 AFX... nice! 😀

Moving on to the video card... whelp... this one boggled my mind. The Voodoo 3 3000 has 5ns SDRAM! From my experience this is super rare. I have seen 5.5ns (183Mhz) SGRAM on some 2000\3000 cards, but finding higher speed SDRAM is far far less common. 5.5ns SDRAM could be leftover from a 3500.. but I think the only Voodoo 3 that actually needed 5ns SDRAM was clocked at 200Mhz from the factory and was a special 3500 variant sold to Falcon Northwest, at least according to the Dodge Garage. I know that Voodoo 3 3000s with 5ns RAM exist because there have been some posts about them floating around for a while, but this is the first one I've seen out of dozens of Voodoo cards I've come across in my travels.

So yeah... what a crazy score this system was. It has no PSU installed, but I'm tempted to just drop a PSU in it and see if it runs totally as-is.

EDIT: Whaaaaa....? I also just noticed that the label on the bottom of the old Sony says "CD-R Drive" ??? Googling it, I see that the CDU928E is, in fact, a caddy loading CD burner from around 1997! What a crazy drive! It should do 2x write, 8x read speed. 8x for a caddy drive is insane! And from 1997?? What even is this? 🤣

I even found a review of it on good old ixbt: https://www.ixbt.com/storage/cdrsonycdu928e.html

i came across ONE caddy CD drive with 1x speed, i think it was a Panasonic and the pc was a 486 of a client (ortodoncist). That was in 1999 and i never seen one again

but a CD-R? i didnt even knew they existed

I always thought the idea of a caddy was pretty cool except that having to swap discs around inside the caddy never made any sense to me. If it's meant to protect the disc then why are they allowed to be handled outside the caddy? Buying a separate caddy for each disc was also prohibitively expensive.

The only way I could see it working is if the caddy was standardized and every game or product was shipped in its own caddy, similar to floppy disks.

I'm glad that I told the seller to send the 500MHz version 🙄. Anyway, which one of these AGP cards are you recommend for this K6-2 build?

Got today the BF-6 I bought a week or so ago.
Included a P3/1100 and 2x256MB RAM.
It's been a while since I've seen this decently packed stuff. Came from Hungary.

Now I'm a little torn, the caps look fine, it bosts ok. But they ARE Jackcon and tayeh. And I DO have decent caps that do fit. Hmmmm....

dominusprog wrote on 2024-12-23, 13:37:

I'm glad that I told the seller to send the 500MHz version 🙄. Anyway, which one of these AGP cards are you recommend for this K6 […]
Show full quote

I'm glad that I told the seller to send the 500MHz version 🙄. Anyway, which one of these AGP cards are you recommend for this K6-2 build?

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That S3 works in DOS. Win3x, NT. Win95. Win98, Win2000
And will play 98% of games.
Pair it with a Voodoo-1 card and you are set.

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2024-12-23, 15:29:

That S3 works in DOS. Win3x, NT. Win95. Win98, Win2000 And will play 98% of games. Pair it with a Voodoo-1 card and you are set. […]
Show full quote

dominusprog wrote on 2024-12-23, 13:37:

I'm glad that I told the seller to send the 500MHz version 🙄. Anyway, which one of these AGP cards are you recommend for this K6 […]
Show full quote

I'm glad that I told the seller to send the 500MHz version 🙄. Anyway, which one of these AGP cards are you recommend for this K6-2 build?

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That S3 works in DOS. Win3x, NT. Win95. Win98, Win2000
And will play 98% of games.
Pair it with a Voodoo-1 card and you are set.

Yes, the S3 generally is a very good choice for DOS. But I want to build this super socket 7 for mid to late 90s era 3D games.

What's with the Rage Mobility on that AGP card? That's pretty cool.

If you want a good range for mid to late 90s with excellent overall compatibility between DOS and Windows, you can step between the ATI Mach64, 3D Rage II, Rage Pro Turbo, and the Rage XL all of these are based on the Mach64 core and have working drivers in Windows 3.1. The latest Rage XL also have some decent early DirectX and OpenGL support with the latest drivers. The Rage Pro Turbo and Rage XL are available in both PCI and AGP flavors.

I decided a while ago to pursue this 2 cards for my collection.
I don't overpay for retro hardware, so I knew it would take a while, but I would never had guessed that the ATI 8500 would be the one taking a long time to find at a decent price.

Finally found one at a reasonable price, it was a 8500LE 230/230, but it has the Hynix 3.3ns memory and a DVI port. I immediately flashed a regular 8500 BIOS to it and it's working flawlessly at 275/275Mhz.

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-12-23, 19:08:

What's with the Rage Mobility on that AGP card? That's pretty cool.

If you want a good range for mid to late 90s with excellent overall compatibility between DOS and Windows, you can step between the ATI Mach64, 3D Rage II, Rage Pro Turbo, and the Rage XL all of these are based on the Mach64 core and have working drivers in Windows 3.1. The latest Rage XL also have some decent early DirectX and OpenGL support with the latest drivers. The Rage Pro Turbo and Rage XL are available in both PCI and AGP flavors.

True, but the problem is these two are the only period correct cards I have. I also have a Rage LT Pro, which I believe is the same as the Rage Mobility.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-23, 09:00:

Well, this is a funny one. Technically this is a "Bought this retro hardware..." but it was actually around 5 years ago. I bough […]
Show full quote

Well, this is a funny one. Technically this is a "Bought this retro hardware..." but it was actually around 5 years ago. I bought a bunch of PCs from someone and then stored them because I was moving at the time. One was really well equipped with a clean Soyo SY-5EMA+ v1.1 ("ETEQ" chipset... actually a Via MVP3) super socket 7 board with no bloated caps, AWE64, two CD drives and a Voodoo 3 3000 AGP. Yesterday I had some time to tinker with my long backlog of projects so I opened it up and looked it over a bit more closely.

First off, I see that one CD drive is a decent looking Samsung 24x10x40 burner, and the other drive is... get this... a Sony CDU928E CADDY LOADING drive, with a caddy in it! In the caddy was an old Easy CD Creator disc that probably came with the Samsung burner. I must have been so distracted by the SS7 board and Voodoo 3 that I didn't notice this at the time since the drive pops up a little plastic shield that says "Caddy Loaded" when... well... when there's a caddy loaded. Anyway, it looks like a closed CD tray at first glance 🤣 . I also see now that there's an ancient Seagate Medalist 10230 hard drive in it... so who knows what's on that. And after pulling the heatsink I see that the processor is a K6-2 500 AFX... nice! 😀

Moving on to the video card... whelp... this one boggled my mind. The Voodoo 3 3000 has 5ns SDRAM! From my experience this is super rare. I have seen 5.5ns (183Mhz) SGRAM on some 2000\3000 cards, but finding higher speed SDRAM is far far less common. 5.5ns SDRAM could be leftover from a 3500.. but I think the only Voodoo 3 that actually needed 5ns SDRAM was clocked at 200Mhz from the factory and was a special 3500 variant sold to Falcon Northwest, at least according to the Dodge Garage. I know that Voodoo 3 3000s with 5ns RAM exist because there have been some posts about them floating around for a while, but this is the first one I've seen out of dozens of Voodoo cards I've come across in my travels.

So yeah... what a crazy score this system was. It has no PSU installed, but I'm tempted to just drop a PSU in it and see if it runs totally as-is.

EDIT: Whaaaaa....? I also just noticed that the label on the bottom of the old Sony says "CD-R Drive" ??? Googling it, I see that the CDU928E is, in fact, a caddy loading CD burner from around 1997! What a crazy drive! It should do 2x write, 8x read speed. 8x for a caddy drive is insane! And from 1997?? What even is this? 🤣

I even found a review of it on good old ixbt: https://www.ixbt.com/storage/cdrsonycdu928e.html

What clocks did it end up with on the voodoo3?? Test it out yet?

AGP4LIfe? wrote on 2024-12-24, 17:27:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-23, 09:00:

Well, this is a funny one. Technically this is a "Bought this retro hardware..." but it was actually around 5 years ago. I bough […]
Show full quote

Well, this is a funny one. Technically this is a "Bought this retro hardware..." but it was actually around 5 years ago. I bought a bunch of PCs from someone and then stored them because I was moving at the time. One was really well equipped with a clean Soyo SY-5EMA+ v1.1 ("ETEQ" chipset... actually a Via MVP3) super socket 7 board with no bloated caps, AWE64, two CD drives and a Voodoo 3 3000 AGP. Yesterday I had some time to tinker with my long backlog of projects so I opened it up and looked it over a bit more closely.

First off, I see that one CD drive is a decent looking Samsung 24x10x40 burner, and the other drive is... get this... a Sony CDU928E CADDY LOADING drive, with a caddy in it! In the caddy was an old Easy CD Creator disc that probably came with the Samsung burner. I must have been so distracted by the SS7 board and Voodoo 3 that I didn't notice this at the time since the drive pops up a little plastic shield that says "Caddy Loaded" when... well... when there's a caddy loaded. Anyway, it looks like a closed CD tray at first glance 🤣 . I also see now that there's an ancient Seagate Medalist 10230 hard drive in it... so who knows what's on that. And after pulling the heatsink I see that the processor is a K6-2 500 AFX... nice! 😀

Moving on to the video card... whelp... this one boggled my mind. The Voodoo 3 3000 has 5ns SDRAM! From my experience this is super rare. I have seen 5.5ns (183Mhz) SGRAM on some 2000\3000 cards, but finding higher speed SDRAM is far far less common. 5.5ns SDRAM could be leftover from a 3500.. but I think the only Voodoo 3 that actually needed 5ns SDRAM was clocked at 200Mhz from the factory and was a special 3500 variant sold to Falcon Northwest, at least according to the Dodge Garage. I know that Voodoo 3 3000s with 5ns RAM exist because there have been some posts about them floating around for a while, but this is the first one I've seen out of dozens of Voodoo cards I've come across in my travels.

So yeah... what a crazy score this system was. It has no PSU installed, but I'm tempted to just drop a PSU in it and see if it runs totally as-is.

EDIT: Whaaaaa....? I also just noticed that the label on the bottom of the old Sony says "CD-R Drive" ??? Googling it, I see that the CDU928E is, in fact, a caddy loading CD burner from around 1997! What a crazy drive! It should do 2x write, 8x read speed. 8x for a caddy drive is insane! And from 1997?? What even is this? 🤣

I even found a review of it on good old ixbt: https://www.ixbt.com/storage/cdrsonycdu928e.html

What clocks did it end up with on the voodoo3?? Test it out yet?

I haven't tested it yet. I don't think I've overclocked a Voodoo 3 since I bought a GeForce 2 GTS back in 2000. I am somewhat curious, so I may give it a shot with this one, but I will definitely add some extra cooling before doing so. There are dirt cheap cards that are so much faster than anything 3dfx put out and can run all the same games... I have left the "running 3dfx cards at their ragged edge" to other enthusiasts. 😅

While perusing for socket 478 motherboards on sleazeBay, I found a lot of two mobos that came with boxes and accessories. While the first board of the lot matched the box (MSI PT880 Neo), the second had the wrong look for the era that prompted a closer inspection. Came to find out the second board was an ABIT KT7A-Raid! The boards finally arrived yesterday and are sitting on my workbench for inspection. Super excited to have this board and I'm thinking I'm going to make this into a system as my main win98 machine so my beloved CUV266 gets a rest.

Cypher321 wrote on 2024-12-25, 03:27:

Came to find out the second board was an ABIT KT7A-Raid! The boards finally arrived yesterday and are sitting on my workbench for inspection. Super excited to have this board and I'm thinking I'm going to make this into a system as my main win98 machine so my beloved CUV266 gets a rest.

I sell replacement capacitor kits for these on eBay. Someone just bought a kit the other day. Curious if it was you, since I spotted your post.

dominusprog wrote on 2024-12-23, 13:37:

I'm glad that I told the seller to send the 500MHz version 🙄. Anyway, which one of these AGP cards are you recommend for this K6 […]
Show full quote

I'm glad that I told the seller to send the 500MHz version 🙄. Anyway, which one of these AGP cards are you recommend for this K6-2 build?

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That Mobility card looks sweet.

Divers for the early mobility chips are not the same as normal Rage chips. I'm curious at how they compare between the Rage Pro Turbo and the Rage XL.