Shadzilla wrote on 2024-03-12, 08:51:

Bought an Athlon XP 3200+, which turned out to be a fake 🙁

The seller's cool and taking it back, they were none the wiser either. From looking at the bridges and comparing with a reference guide it appears to be an XP-M 2500+, which by itself is a great chip and a good overclocker, and this one runs totally fine at 200x11 (although you have to set that manually).. but it's not the 3200+ I wanted. Frustrating!

Pic attached. L3 bridges 1 and 2 joined, L5 bridges 2 and 3 cut, and L12 bridge 2 joined. Plus all the cut bridges on L6 for the mobile speeds 🤦‍♂️

Not sure how hard they are to find. But i remember i had to buy a complete system to get one.

Same a my core2 extreme.

So probably not so common...

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-03-12, 20:58:

Matrox G400 with Dual Head, its a nice card !

It is but, for the life of me, I can't get mine to work at a higher agp rate, it is stuck at 1x, no matter motherboard is plugged in. I guess I have a faulty one.

acl wrote on 2024-03-13, 06:18:

Not sure how hard they are to find. But i remember i had to buy a complete system to get one. […]
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Shadzilla wrote on 2024-03-12, 08:51:

Bought an Athlon XP 3200+, which turned out to be a fake 🙁

The seller's cool and taking it back, they were none the wiser either. From looking at the bridges and comparing with a reference guide it appears to be an XP-M 2500+, which by itself is a great chip and a good overclocker, and this one runs totally fine at 200x11 (although you have to set that manually).. but it's not the 3200+ I wanted. Frustrating!

Pic attached. L3 bridges 1 and 2 joined, L5 bridges 2 and 3 cut, and L12 bridge 2 joined. Plus all the cut bridges on L6 for the mobile speeds 🤦‍♂️

Not sure how hard they are to find. But i remember i had to buy a complete system to get one.

Same a my core2 extreme.

So probably not so common...

Yes not very common unfortunately. They come up from time to time on eBay, and there are some listed in Germany but too expensive for me to justify. The performance upgrade from the 3000+ I'm using at the moment is very minimal, it's more about collecting the fastest chip 😀

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-03-12, 03:08:

It is missing one of the three caps along the edge of the board. That alone will make it not work. That's an easy fix, but it ma […]
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Minutemanqvs wrote on 2024-03-11, 18:56:

I'm posting this here because it's an almost-bought thing. On a local auction website there is a Voodoo 3 2000 for sale, relativ […]
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I'm posting this here because it's an almost-bought thing. On a local auction website there is a Voodoo 3 2000 for sale, relatively cheap at about 50€ as an auction. The seller's description is "I bought it for my system but when I wanted to install it, I realised I didn't have an AGP slot", yeah.

Then looking at the pictures in detail, this card has clearly been messed with. Signs of screws on the heatsink, and on the back of the die some gunk on the PCB. This card is most probably dead...I will still try to talk to the seller to see at what point he is willing to play his "untested card" game :p

A zoom on the gunk:

It is missing one of the three caps along the edge of the board. That alone will make it not work. That's an easy fix, but it makes it impossible to know whether the card is dead by some other means.

EDIT: Oh! Also, it has an S-Video output blocked off behind the back plate. Sooo... that just raises further questions, because the Voodoo 3 2000 rarely has TV- Out, but the 3000 never has that square black heatsink. So, this is likely pieced together from two or more cards. Perhaps they got a 3000 from a scrap lot missing the heatsink, the back plate and probably that capacitor and then used a back plate and a heatsink from a 2000 as a donor. Or, it could be a 2000 with TV-out (rare, but they seem to exist at least in old pictures) and they simply replaced the back plate with whatever fit the card (looks like a V3 plate... just not the one for a card with TV-out).

If you are good at repairs and don't mind the risk, I'd pay a little for it, but no way would I pay $50.

To give some feedback, the seller actually seems semi-reasonable. After exposing the facts he switched the auction to a starting price of 1€ with a description "for parts". I think he bought it from someone, realised it was a scam and tried to limit his loss.

Have had some fun digging through old parts again and bought some parts to throw in my Tualatin rig I use for file transfer and storage of my retro software.

Grabbed an Internal Zip750 ATAPI drive along with a Fujitsu 2.3Gb ATAPI Magneto Optical drive, the machine has a Zip250 in it and a 630Mb MO drive both of which I can now upgrade and use in another machine. The Zip250 is rather noisy so Im not sure it'll actually last much longer, Zip drives are rather notorious for getting the click of death and just generally being unreliable over time but the 750 has better build quality and parts supposedly.

I love MO drives, such an underrated tech with crazy reliability of both drive and media, shame it was never moved to SATA and developed further, this tech is so reliable the Military, Aerospace and Medical fields still use it for data storage where reliability is paramount.

The drive has a black face but I have a spare white face plate I can swap it with ...(god this sounds so wrong out of context)

Also grabbed this parts bundle as its socket 754 based and I dont yet have a 754 build, aside from being dirty the board looks in good condition, not sure about the other parts but really only interested in the board and CPU. I think the GPU is a Radeon 2400 XT which is ...uhhh not a great GPU I think I had one back in the day to play Stalker on and I remember it being a dog slow GPU.

Last thing I bought is a 100Mhz FSB Cyrix 366GP, I have a soft spot for Cyrix CPUs and didn't have a 100 FSB model.

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-03-13, 12:21:

. I think the GPU is a Radeon 2400 XT which is ...uhhh not a great GPU I think I had one back in the day to play Stalker on and I remember it being a dog slow GPU.

Looks faster than anything I've got AGP. That ICEQ cooler was on 2600XT, 3850 and 4670 cards too.... so might be a keeper.

A Wii balance board!

Charity shop job, a fiver (those right-hand drive, British fivers).

There seems to be no set of scales/balance that can be connected to a computer for less money than a Wii balance board. And at a fiver, I'll have a punt.

First hurdle looks to be the wonders of bluetooth on Linux. Seems I might need to be running less than Bluez 5 for the balance board? This is going to be hardcore Linuxing, because bluez seems to have major overhauls with each major version, and documentation can be contradictory for different versions. And then the Wii-mote interfacing has been done a few different ways, though today there is kernel module for the wii-mote.

Gigabyte GA-686LX3, rev1.8. Specifically bought for the mythical 100FSB selection that's on there - I'll be laughing if this thing manages to run 100FSB stable, poly-recapped or not.

A shame LX can't do SSE - so far any LX mobo I've tried a 566 and 633 on, they all lock up.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-03-13, 14:30:

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-03-13, 12:21:

. I think the GPU is a Radeon 2400 XT which is ...uhhh not a great GPU I think I had one back in the day to play Stalker on and I remember it being a dog slow GPU.

Looks faster than anything I've got AGP. That ICEQ cooler was on 2600XT, 3850 and 4670 cards too.... so might be a keeper.

I was curious myself and sadly the layout of the 4670 and 3850 are a bit different. The picture does match the 2600XT though. Still, not a bad AGP card... I'm not certain (because I have never used an HD2000 series card) but it should be about as fast or sometimes slightly faster than the final AGP offerings from Nvidia, at least in games that work well on ATi cards.

PcBytes wrote on 2024-03-13, 21:42:

Gigabyte GA-686LX3, rev1.8. Specifically bought for the mythical 100FSB selection that's on there - I'll be laughing if this thing manages to run 100FSB stable, poly-recapped or not.

A shame LX can't do SSE - so far any LX mobo I've tried a 566 and 633 on, they all lock up.

The final BIOS update for my ASUS MEL-M suggests that it supports Coppermine on its 440LX chipset. This was pretty wild to me, but it obviously didn't work. A Coppermine 533A does boot, but the system is unstable and locks up, as expected. I do not have a B0 stepping 533A CPU to confirm, but I don't think that it will make a difference. I did try higher frequency B0 stepping processors, but they wouldn't boot at all.

I'm still curious as to what the role the chipset plays in supporting the SSE feature. Isn't it all done on the processor?

https://www.asus.com/supportonly/p2e-m/helpdesk_bios/

MEL-M Beta BIOS ver.1010.004 […]
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MEL-M Beta BIOS ver.1010.004

Add microcode update support for Coppermine B-0 stepping
Added micro-code for stepping D CPU support.(for flash 2M only)
Revised micro-code for stepping B CPU.(for flash 2M only)
Fix for ACPI support failure on 1M flash board
Support IDE hard disk larger than 65G bytes

progman.exe wrote on 2024-03-13, 21:11:

This is going to be hardcore Linuxing, because bluez seems to have major overhauls with each major version, and documentation can be contradictory for different versions.

That seems like normal linuxing these days, major releases break all interesting drivers and they have to be redone.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-03-13, 21:45:

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-03-13, 14:30:

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-03-13, 12:21:

. I think the GPU is a Radeon 2400 XT which is ...uhhh not a great GPU I think I had one back in the day to play Stalker on and I remember it being a dog slow GPU.

Looks faster than anything I've got AGP. That ICEQ cooler was on 2600XT, 3850 and 4670 cards too.... so might be a keeper.

I was curious myself and sadly the layout of the 4670 and 3850 are a bit different. The picture does match the 2600XT though. Still, not a bad AGP card... I'm not certain (because I have never used an HD2000 series card) but it should be about as fast or sometimes slightly faster than the final AGP offerings from Nvidia, at least in games that work well on ATi cards.

I have used the 2600XT and 2900XT in recent builds and neither is particularly fast and nVidia is leagues faster, ATI dropped the ball with the HD2000 series and there was only 4 official models of it with no enthusiast models. It was quickly dropped for the HD3000 series the HD3000 card are essentially the HD2000 cards but with the majority of the issues fixed thanks to a die shrink and some cost cutting to lower production costs. (The memory bus was cut to 256bits)

The main issue aside from very average performance I have experienced was the silly amounts of heat the cards produce, they run very hot and have high wattage for the average performance they provide.

Not terrible GPUs but not great either, I will be keeping the one in this lot assuming it works, Ill give it a good clean with some fresh paste, I do like the looks of the IceQ coolers.

That must be why I never want to use my 2600Pro in anything, PCIe, I look up numbers and I don't even notice it way down the list compared to random other cards.

I think I have a HD2600 based AGP card and the cooler was nothing special. The HD2900 XT was a 200W+TDP (6 pin and 8 pin power connector and massive blower) card that was slower than a Geforce 9600 released half a year later with under 100W TDP.

PcBytes wrote on 2024-03-13, 21:42:

Gigabyte GA-686LX3, rev1.8. Specifically bought for the mythical 100FSB selection that's on there - I'll be laughing if this thi […]
Show full quote

Gigabyte GA-686LX3, rev1.8. Specifically bought for the mythical 100FSB selection that's on there - I'll be laughing if this thing manages to run 100FSB stable, poly-recapped or not.

A shame LX can't do SSE - so far any LX mobo I've tried a 566 and 633 on, they all lock up.

That's an interesting claim for an LX board. I tend to agree with you, that it's not gonna happen. Nice though, that the board is marked with its ability to power off after shutdown from Win95 😎

Yesterday I effectively declared an intent on getting something in the future.

Yeah, with a Model F and a 5151, I'm sealed in to the fate of having a 5150/5160. I really couldn't say no to getting these effectively for free. Of course the place I got them from has utilized my labor, so it isn't truly free.

I also grabbed a Paradise EGA card so that I could test the 5151, which luckily worked well enough to show the previously seen cursor and not much else. Pentium machine doesn't like ISA graphics...

I also grabbed this LCC 286, and the 287 to go with it, and below is the sound blaster 2.0 that rounds off the group. Someday I'll throw it in to the IBM PC, for the sake of it.

Grabbed a Geforce 2 PRO for $1 from my local recycling center. I have several Geforce2MXs, but this is my first GTS / PRO.

Fan is stuck, but it's posting.

Memory is only 5.5ns which would translate to 181Mhz, PRO should be 5ns (200Mhz).

I was reading about it yesterday and back at that time it was a mess with a lot of manufactures launching GTS / PRO hybrid with weird specs.

Pino wrote on 2024-03-14, 13:05:

Grabbed a Geforce 2 PRO for $1 from my local recycling center. I have several Geforce2MXs, but this is my first GTS / PRO. […]
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Grabbed a Geforce 2 PRO for $1 from my local recycling center. I have several Geforce2MXs, but this is my first GTS / PRO.

Fan is stuck, but it's posting.

Memory is only 5.5ns which would translate to 181Mhz, PRO should be 5ns (200Mhz).

I was reading about it yesterday and back at that time it was a mess with a lot of manufactures launching GTS / PRO hybrid with weird specs.

Oh nice 😀 I have one of those and it's a nice GF2 card. Reading the reviews from the time are a bit funny though, it has the worst thermal performance of any GF2 card since the fan is the wrong type and the fins aren't enclosed so the 'blower fan' type thing they were going for doesn't do much of anything. I think I taped or covered over the fins to improve the cooling, not that it gets enough use right now for that to really matter.

Got this nice seemingly new-old-stock Micronics Spitfire EX motherboard - the seller's pictures were atrocious: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/155672682383
But from the picture I could make out that it has a Yamaha OPL3-SAx and the OPL4-ML chip so I've had my eye on it for a long time, then they accepted my offer when I got around to it 😀 It's also got onboard adaptec SCSI but I doubt I'll use that.
The same seller also has another single CPU slot1 Micronics motherboard for sale. A real old one with an FX chipset, looks like a Micronics Stingray.

It is literally immaculate and doesn't seem to be used at all apart from maybe testing in the factory. The box is in rough shape and the seller unfortunately put tape over the serial / part code label so half of that pulled off but it's still legible.
Dunno if I have a case big enough to fit this thing...

Full res pictures if anyone wants them: https://imgur.com/a/V1Uvwg2 - It might be nice to use on the retro web but I'm not signed up on there.

BetaC wrote on 2024-03-14, 07:40:

Yesterday I effectively declared an intent on getting something in the future

Be prepared, a lonely flashing cursor is the only thing you’ll see during the long boot up of a 5150 with full memory! You’re off to a great start. 😀

BetaC wrote on 2024-03-14, 07:40:

Yesterday I effectively declared an intent on getting something in the future

Be prepared, a lonely flashing cursor is the only thing you’ll see during the long boot up of a 5150 with full memory! You’re off to a great start. 😀