momaka wrote on 2025-02-27, 20:32:

shamino wrote on 2025-02-27, 01:41:

The front bezel is completely open, and it has a real power supply providing 12V+5V, (not just USB powered), so my hope was that I can swap a DVD drive into this enclosure.

In regards to the power supply / power adapter: if it has screws, open it and check it inside. I don't know who Memorex used as the manufacturer in particular, but I do know that in the mid-2000's, there were a rash of these dual-output (5V, 12V) power adapters that were terrible for developing bad caps and doing awful things to the attached hardware. So I always try to check. If you want to do that before opening, see if the adapter has a UL number or if the model number reveals who the manufacturer is. If it's Delta, LiteON, or some other similar known OEM, I wouldn't worry.

Good point. I'll crack it open and see what cap(s) are in it. The manufacturer calls themselves "Asian Power Devices" who I've never heard of. I'll probably end up recapping it.

Anyways, nice find! Those external drives are pretty handy to have, especially if you have a modern PC without an optical drive (not my case, most of my PCs are decade+ old.)

Thanks. Lately I've been ripping a lot of DVDs to store on a file server. The machine I have most handy for this is a modern super-small Dell thing with no drive bays. This is now the 2nd external DVD drive it has attached. The first is a laptop style which is tedious to deal with, because the tray doesn't fully eject and you have to snap the discs onto a spindle. I like this older enclosure which uses a desktop style 5.25" drive. It's faster too.

Only wrinkle is that the drive I attached is too deep to reassemble the enclosure. It needs the shallow depth that's more common with SATA drives. I think I have one IDE DVD drive that should fit, which I had other plans for, but I might change those plans.

shamino wrote on 2025-02-28, 01:42:

Good point. I'll crack it open and see what cap(s) are in it. The manufacturer calls themselves "Asian Power Devices" who I've never heard of. I'll probably end up recapping it.

Might as well anyways.
I don't remember if I've seen Asian Power Devices, but I have seen "ADP" quite a few times before, and that one was pretty OK. IIRC, I have a few industrial "open-frame" PSUs from them. Not quite on-level with Mean Well, but respectable still.

shamino wrote on 2025-02-28, 01:42:

I like this older enclosure which uses a desktop style 5.25" drive. It's faster too.

It might also last longer. 😀
The difference comes from the bearings on the spindle motor - with desktop style drives, the motor is large and also has larger bearings, which generally can take more use/abuse. In contrast, laptop drives have smaller spindle motors with smaller bearings, so they will wear faster. Of course, laptop drives do run at a lower speed, so that does help them a little (and also helps make them more quiet too.)
But yeah, for convenience, especially if planning to use optical media a lot, desktop drives are the way to go.

shamino wrote on 2025-02-28, 01:42:

Only wrinkle is that the drive I attached is too deep to reassemble the enclosure. It needs the shallow depth that's more common with SATA drives. I think I have one IDE DVD drive that should fit, which I had other plans for, but I might change those plans.

Most late IDE drives should be pretty short, especially any LG ones.
I have regularly been finding them at my local flee market for typically $0.50 to $1 a pop, so I've finally caught up on my hoard with those.
The most irritating part about that flea market is that there is one guy who takes apart whole computers and only sells the mobo's out of them. Everything else he scraps. Buy if you ask him to buy any of the scrap (even if for a price that's better than what he would get from the metal recycler), he refuses unless you give him close to retail price of a new drive, which is really silly! Essentially, he's one of those "I'm either going to make a killing worth of money... or starve as usual" type of people. I mention him here, because he always seems to pull a stack-ton of those very late LG IDE optical drives. And guess what he does with them - rips them apart and only takes their main PCB to give to the recycler for "precious metals inside"... which are like $0.20-0.50 per board absolute max. I offered him $2 per drive, higher than what everyone else is selling on the market, and he still refuses.

Today's flea market pick up ps:

Asus V8200 Deluxe GeForce 3 AGP 64Mb

MSI 694D Pro ver 1.0 with a P3 1GHz

I'm unfortunately down with a (rather severe) cold but hopefully I'm getting one of the 2 job lots from my scrapper the following weeks.

I also saved an ad on the bay for Xeon P3s (550/100/512 I think?) for one of the boards - an XG-DLS. I have absolutely ZERO (both physically and in knowledge) of those Slot 2 beasts yet I'm not giving up on getting it working.

Bought a "appears new" Netgear 8 port switch FS108 v2 in box, $4 from a thrift store. I like having a few older 10/100 switches laying around.... have had issues with old 10Mbit ethernet on newer gigabit switches....
Saw a "NOS" ISA 33.6k modem, still shrink wrapped, for $2. Any one want it ? Am sure it will be there for a while 🤣

I went to the local electronics recycler the other day, and found this ASUS P3B-F with an odd RAM configuration, a Celeron 500 with a 66 MHz bus, and most important of all a working Socket 378 to Slot 1 converter! I was able to buy a Socket 370 PIII-700 for $22 CAD shipped last night, and this board will probably end up replacing my trusty QDI Brilliant-1 440BX board that I've had since 1998. The QDI board only supports up to a PIII-550 (which I have), while this will theoretically support up to a PIII-900 with the official BIOS and I am sure that someone has made a hacked BIOS for this ASUS board.

Scored this for free today:

Cracked it open and discovered an ASUS P3B-F w/P3 450, 3COM 3C509B NIC and some other goodies!

OVERK|LL wrote on 2025-03-01, 21:24:

Scored this for free today: […]
Show full quote

Scored this for free today:

The attachment F363726A-02D8-4016-8F9B-D981E5050697_4_5005_c.jpeg is no longer available

Cracked it open and discovered an ASUS P3B-F w/P3 450, 3COM 3C509B NIC and some other goodies!

The attachment IMG_6794.jpeg is no longer available

The attachment IMG_6795.jpeg is no longer available

Love it! From the CPU to the motherboard to the case itself! Beautiful set!

Picked up an AMD Athlon XP 3000+ (462) for my Win98SE build I'm working on, as well as a proper cooler for it. 😀

Managed to get the 3000+ for $15 and cooler for $23. Not bad I guess. It's crazy what some of these processors are going for these days. I had initially looked at a 3200+, but my god, they go for $70+. So, I figured, the 3000+ is still a great CPU for Win98SE, and vastly cheaper, normally going for around $35 it seems.

Sucks living in an area where I'm limited to what I can find online. 😠

OVERK|LL wrote on 2025-03-01, 21:24:

Scored this for free today:

Cracked it open and discovered an ASUS P3B-F w/P3 450, 3COM 3C509B NIC and some other goodies!

Very nice! Love that case!

That's a nice board too, at least in my opinion. Love the boards that support AGP, PCI, and ISA. 😀

OVERK|LL wrote on 2025-03-01, 21:24:

Scored this for free today: […]
Show full quote

Scored this for free today:

The attachment F363726A-02D8-4016-8F9B-D981E5050697_4_5005_c.jpeg is no longer available

Cracked it open and discovered an ASUS P3B-F w/P3 450, 3COM 3C509B NIC and some other goodies!

The attachment IMG_6794.jpeg is no longer available

The attachment IMG_6795.jpeg is no longer available

Dang, I just dropped $100 CAD on my P3B-F motherboard/CPU/RAM combo that I posted, and it only had a Celeron! Great find, and now we can be P3B-F buddies! 😉

MadMac_5 wrote on 2025-03-01, 20:30:

I went to the local electronics recycler the other day, and found this ASUS P3B-F with an odd RAM configuration

What's odd about it? 4 slots?

OVERK|LL wrote on 2025-03-01, 21:24:

Scored this for free today: […]
Show full quote

Scored this for free today:

The attachment F363726A-02D8-4016-8F9B-D981E5050697_4_5005_c.jpeg is no longer available

Cracked it open and discovered an ASUS P3B-F w/P3 450, 3COM 3C509B NIC and some other goodies!

The attachment IMG_6794.jpeg is no longer available

The attachment IMG_6795.jpeg is no longer available

Cool find! I have the same case. It's an IN-WIN, not 100% sure which model specifically but it's close to the IW-B500. The main difference seems to be the number of drive bays.

https://web.archive.org/web/20011106002116/ht … e/ino_b500.html

MadMac_5 wrote on 2025-03-01, 23:42:

OVERK|LL wrote on 2025-03-01, 21:24:

Scored this for free today: […]
Show full quote

Scored this for free today:

The attachment F363726A-02D8-4016-8F9B-D981E5050697_4_5005_c.jpeg is no longer available

Cracked it open and discovered an ASUS P3B-F w/P3 450, 3COM 3C509B NIC and some other goodies!

The attachment IMG_6794.jpeg is no longer available

The attachment IMG_6795.jpeg is no longer available

Dang, I just dropped $100 CAD on my P3B-F motherboard/CPU/RAM combo that I posted, and it only had a Celeron! Great find, and now we can be P3B-F buddies! 😉

Hilariously, I was shopping E-Bay for one last week, but then went basement shopping and found this 😁 There's also an old IBM desktop (may be a P4, may be a PIII) at another client's I am going to grab this week. Will be interesting to see what that is.

pan069 wrote on 2025-03-02, 00:27:

OVERK|LL wrote on 2025-03-01, 21:24:

Scored this for free today: […]
Show full quote

Scored this for free today:

The attachment F363726A-02D8-4016-8F9B-D981E5050697_4_5005_c.jpeg is no longer available

Cracked it open and discovered an ASUS P3B-F w/P3 450, 3COM 3C509B NIC and some other goodies!

The attachment IMG_6794.jpeg is no longer available

The attachment IMG_6795.jpeg is no longer available

Cool find! I have the same case. It's an IN-WIN, not 100% sure which model specifically but it's close to the IW-B500. The main difference seems to be the number of drive bays.

https://web.archive.org/web/20011106002116/ht … e/ino_b500.html

Thanks for the additional info! Yeah, I'm happy with the case, just need to find a monitor that's somewhat period correct now too.

momaka wrote on 2025-02-27, 20:32:

PD2JK wrote on 2025-02-25, 18:40:

So I decided to take part of the Radeon R3x0 lottery. Guess how this 9800 Pro is behaving. Bumped my nose again.

The attachment DSC_3310.JPG is no longer available

Maybe a little heat to the RAM chips will suffice...

No, it's the GPU chip that goes faulty on these, so reflow that instead. Don't even need to go to the full reflow temp - 160-180C will do about most of the time. If card is stubborn, do the reflow again.... and again.... 'till something burns. That said don't protect the RAM chips from the heat either, as they will be fine.
Oh, and after the 1st reflow, you can try popping out the metal shim on the GPU chip. The heat will make its glue easier to remove. Once that is gone, also get rid of the stock cooler and put something much bigger on there (Zalman VF700CU as minimum or other dual slot cooler preferred.) With some luck, that should help keep the reflown GPU working longer.

Thanks for the advice, I will take another shot at it. Let's hope it'll work!

RetroPCCupboard wrote on 2025-02-25, 19:36:

Lostdotfish wrote on 2025-02-25, 18:43:

Ok who got it? I was too slow....

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/405581548716?mkcid … emis&media=COPY

Wish I saw that. Bargain if the SLI Voodoos work.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/146424148067?mkcid … emis&media=COPY

The Voodoo 2s have surfaced back on eBay....

Today I picked up some MORE broken 5.25" drives. One is good parts unit for one I have that needed parts. The others... look OK, but I guess I'll find out. About to have a whole week of floppy repair soon.

I also snagged another Goldfinch (with a Dell P/n, what kind of Dell is it from?) and a few PCI VGA cards.

I'm going to be grabbing three "mystery computers" later today, too, one "guaranteed" to be interesting. I'll judge it when I see it...

The "Mystery Machines" are two Dells, a Dimension L733R(s370, no AGP) and an Optiplex GX300 (dual slot 1)

The "interesting" PC is definitely that. It was loaded with coolness.

Huea Yaw Co .PSU, never seen one before. Time bomb, perhaps? Says it's 230W (doubt). Need to open it before testing it.
Whole thing needs a good cleaning. Looks OK. (was untested)

Lostdotfish wrote on 2025-03-02, 18:22:

The Voodoo 2s have surfaced back on eBay....

What makes you think its the same ones?

RetroPCCupboard wrote on 2025-03-03, 07:16:

Lostdotfish wrote on 2025-03-02, 18:22:

The Voodoo 2s have surfaced back on eBay....

What makes you think its the same ones?

These are 8Mb cards ...not sure I would pay 199 quid for the 8Mb models even if it was a pair of them.

I do question that memory however as the ones from STB had 12Mb on one side so its possible the seller has them miss identified here, if thats the actual case then its still too damn expensive but about right for a pair of 12Mb cards.

Not sure why they assume its the same ones either.