Obtained something very (supposedly) special: A NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 supposedly used by Cyan Interactive (the developers of the Myst series). Has a bad fan but POSTs fine. Paid $60 for it. Waiting for a new fan from China currently.

pixel_workbench wrote on 2024-05-04, 03:34:

Today I did some mild overclocking on the 2.8ghz P4 Prescott, and using the box cooler and default voltage, it went up to 3.73ghz, P95 and 3dmark2000 stable. System power consumption at load went up by about 20W.

30% MHz for 20% power doesnt add up. Did you measure power at idle?

I don't know if it's retro per say, but my town has a large item/treasure hunt weekend once a year and I was able to find an IBM thinkcentre M92P 2988E2U computer. The thing is 12 years old. It works, has a i7 3770, 8GB DDR3, AMD Radeon 7450 1GB low profile card. Was missing the hard drive, but working on installing Win 8.1 and updates on it as I've never run this O/S before.

Today I went to a local flea-market to try to find some vintage computer stuff but did not find anything interesting. It's not even possible to find a DIN keyboard these days, all the beige keyboards I spotted were PS/2 🙁

Anyway to end the day on a high note I decided to take a closer look at my non-functional Compaq LTE Lite 25 and after a bit of effort I finally managed to bring it back to life.

rasz_pl wrote on 2024-05-04, 13:39:

30% MHz for 20% power doesnt add up. Did you measure power at idle?

I measured both, but I was referring to the load power consumption. These are the total system power measurements before and after the overclock:

Idle: 81W -> 84W
Prime95: 151W -> 175W
7-zip benchmark: 139W -> 159W

The RAM was running slower when the CPU was overclocked, due to the limited dividers available. But those are the numbers I saw.

mtest001 wrote on 2024-05-04, 15:58:

Today I went to a local flea-market to try to find some vintage computer stuff but did not find anything interesting. It's not even possible to find a DIN keyboard these days, all the beige keyboards I spotted were PS/2 🙁

Yeah I struck out today too at the thrifts, saw an EVGA box, which turned out to have a Radeon 7000 in, not the 6200 AGP that was labelled, but I've got enough of those, might have been open to a good 6200 AGP for cheap. Then less retro but could have been useful was an M2 SSD.... box... empty. Dunno if it had something in it when it arrived at the thrift, maybe the smaller one that the 512 replaced, but it was gone. Then usual lots of basic keyboards and monitors. If you went by what you find in thrifts, you'd assume that 10 monitors and keyboards exist for every system unit... kinda used to be the other way when monitors were $400+ and keyboards were $50, you'd keep them through couple or three upgrades.

Reflowed one of my BC PS3s, yet again.

If Frankie modding wasn't expensive as all hell, I'd consider it in an instant. Good thing I have a spare japanese black-trim unit as a backup 😁

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-05-04, 17:40:

mtest001 wrote on 2024-05-04, 15:58:

Today I went to a local flea-market to try to find some vintage computer stuff but did not find anything interesting. It's not even possible to find a DIN keyboard these days, all the beige keyboards I spotted were PS/2 🙁

Yeah I struck out today too at the thrifts, saw an EVGA box, which turned out to have a Radeon 7000 in, not the 6200 AGP that was labelled, but I've got enough of those, might have been open to a good 6200 AGP for cheap. Then less retro but could have been useful was an M2 SSD.... box... empty. Dunno if it had something in it when it arrived at the thrift, maybe the smaller one that the 512 replaced, but it was gone. Then usual lots of basic keyboards and monitors. If you went by what you find in thrifts, you'd assume that 10 monitors and keyboards exist for every system unit... kinda used to be the other way when monitors were $400+ and keyboards were $50, you'd keep them through couple or three upgrades.

Most thrift stores sent all computers and writeable storage medium they receive to recycling for liability reasons. "You sold my computer [that I didn't wipe my data off of] and now my identity has been stolen!!!!". Very few thrift shops are willing to take the risk, or spend the time to remove the hard drives and then deal with customers buying them expecting a working PC that don't know how to install a new HDD. This policy usually covers computers, flash drives, floppy discs, burned CDs, cassettes, etc. I remember one time I found a bunch of big box PC games at a thrift store and found out they had thrown all the actual game disks away because of data liability....

This is the same reason most recyclers won't sell shit to you, and they only resell themselves what stuff they can justify the time to wipe data off of and get to working order.

Stupid people and our lawsuit crazed, personality responsibility averse society really have fucked over retro computing.

EDIT: On top of all that, most thrift stores these days only sell very large, low value items and absolute garbage in their physical store. They usually have an online shop where anything valuable, which they usually receive from free, is sold online to the highest wealthy bidder instead of giving someone in the community a chance to own nice stuff at a fair price. I consider this the theft of wealth from small communities and low cost of living areas where people won't rip their wallet in half in a rush to pay $100+ for the PS1 game or piece of retro tech that was literally someone else's garbage, that you couldn't hardly give away 10 years ago. Goodwill is notorious for this, I've stopped going to my local goodwill because they send everything to the nearest megahub to be sorted through for online resale, and then send literal garbage back to the physical stores. I'm talking destroyed DVDs and worthless paperback novels. In my experience the best thrift stores are the church ran ones that are ran by old women, as they seem to be the only ones not doing this shit.

I found out that the QX9650 I bought for my new setup doesn't work with that motherboard and I bought the wrong CPU. I needed a QX6850--and I thought modern CPU numbering was confusing, Intel seems to be much worse in the past tense.

Painted the worn backplate and added the missing gameport metal cover on a SB16 Value CT2770A.

Started doing more benchmarks on my systems. Today I am running AquaMark 3, Sanctuary, Tropics, Unigine Valley/Heaven, Cinebench 11.5

Continuing my socket 478 P4 experiments...

Overclocked a 3.2ghz Prescott D0 stepping, and it made it to 3.6ghz at stock voltage. My 2.8ghz E0 made it to 3.73ghz.

Then I tried a 2.8ghz Northwood P4C with the D1 stepping, it only made it to 3.2ghz on stock voltage.
Also, clock for clock it's about 5% slower than Prescott, based on a few tests like 3dmark2000 and 7-zip.
But the system power usage was comically lower, about 25w less at idle, and 27-30w less at load.

I recently spotted a bulging cap on my P4P 800 so today I replaced all of the KZG 6.3 volt 1500 microfarad caps with Nichicons.

I'm trying to save an Asus CUBX-E board.

All voltages are OK, even the right Vcore is being used when I insert a Celeron (2.0V) or a P3 850 (1.7V).
Diagnostics / POST card shows 0000, no beeps.
The board won't power on when I short the 'power switch' header. Funny thing is, when I short the RTC crystal oscillator, it powers up!

The Pentium 3 'die' gets warm for a fraction of a second. And cools down again.

shorting RTC is same as giving it half the cycle, so maybe its not oscillating?

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2024-05-04, 20:09:

EDIT: On top of all that, most thrift stores these days only sell very large, low value items and absolute garbage in their physical store. They usually have an online shop where anything valuable, which they usually receive from free, is sold online to the highest wealthy bidder instead of giving someone in the community a chance to own nice stuff at a fair price. I consider this the theft of wealth from small communities and low cost of living areas where people won't rip their wallet in half in a rush to pay $100+ for the PS1 game or piece of retro tech that was literally someone else's garbage, that you couldn't hardly give away 10 years ago. Goodwill is notorious for this, I've stopped going to my local goodwill because they send everything to the nearest megahub to be sorted through for online resale, and then send literal garbage back to the physical stores. I'm talking destroyed DVDs and worthless paperback novels. In my experience the best thrift stores are the church ran ones that are ran by old women, as they seem to be the only ones not doing this shit.

i agree thrift and generally charity type store prices are often strange, hanging onto things at high prices for too long - but when they sell something on ebay for significantly more than they would instore are they not just maximising the revenue for whatever cause they have? wouldn't that result in a transfer from those who have money to those who need charity? the ones who miss out are those who hope to find a really low cost item that would be worth more if enough other people saw it, i totally agree there is something about everyone else in the world seeming to always have the first chance to outbid you that seems to mean you'll never catch a break, but cant see it as actual theft. Church places are relatively amatuer, it may be nicer and seem more like part of a community - but they also raise less per item.

however, in general, i'd think any place that is selling donations would want to sell cheap so they can keep up with the level of donations, sometimes they seem out of step with supply

all that said - as you explained there are hardly ever computers in such places anyway

gerry wrote on 2024-05-06, 15:52:

i agree thrift and generally charity type store prices are often strange, hanging onto things at high prices for too long - but […]
Show full quote

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2024-05-04, 20:09:

EDIT: On top of all that, most thrift stores these days only sell very large, low value items and absolute garbage in their physical store. They usually have an online shop where anything valuable, which they usually receive from free, is sold online to the highest wealthy bidder instead of giving someone in the community a chance to own nice stuff at a fair price. I consider this the theft of wealth from small communities and low cost of living areas where people won't rip their wallet in half in a rush to pay $100+ for the PS1 game or piece of retro tech that was literally someone else's garbage, that you couldn't hardly give away 10 years ago. Goodwill is notorious for this, I've stopped going to my local goodwill because they send everything to the nearest megahub to be sorted through for online resale, and then send literal garbage back to the physical stores. I'm talking destroyed DVDs and worthless paperback novels. In my experience the best thrift stores are the church ran ones that are ran by old women, as they seem to be the only ones not doing this shit.

i agree thrift and generally charity type store prices are often strange, hanging onto things at high prices for too long - but when they sell something on ebay for significantly more than they would instore are they not just maximising the revenue for whatever cause they have? wouldn't that result in a transfer from those who have money to those who need charity? the ones who miss out are those who hope to find a really low cost item that would be worth more if enough other people saw it, i totally agree there is something about everyone else in the world seeming to always have the first chance to outbid you that seems to mean you'll never catch a break, but cant see it as actual theft. Church places are relatively amatuer, it may be nicer and seem more like part of a community - but they also raise less per item.

however, in general, i'd think any place that is selling donations would want to sell cheap so they can keep up with the level of donations, sometimes they seem out of step with supply

all that said - as you explained there are hardly ever computers in such places anyway

My thrift store pet peeve is the scalpers. I often see people scanning the book barcodes and fill up entire shopping carts with them. This really ticks me off because some people shop at thrift stores because they are poor, and these scalpers grab most of the good stuff to make a buck. I doubt that they even make much doing so anyways. They probably would make more money if they got a part time job instead of scalping books.

I've also noticed that a lot of items in the display cases are overpriced. I assume that the store staff just look for the same items on eBay and assume that the listed prices are what the items are worth. That doesn't bother me nearly as much as the scalpers.

Ensign Nemo wrote on 2024-05-06, 16:21:

My thrift store pet peeve is the scalpers. I often see people scanning the book barcodes and fill up entire shopping carts with them. This really ticks me off because some people shop at thrift stores because they are poor, and these scalpers grab most of the good stuff to make a buck. I doubt that they even make much doing so anyways. They probably would make more money if they got a part time job instead of scalping books.

I've also noticed that a lot of items in the display cases are overpriced. I assume that the store staff just look for the same items on eBay and assume that the listed prices are what the items are worth. That doesn't bother me nearly as much as the scalpers.

i agree in that i dont think they make much money on their total take - i.e. they make some on some items, but by chance some won't sell so in total its not great. it suggests though that the prices instore for those items should be higher, though if they were they may not sell at all as the 'buyer' at the higher price wont meet the 'seller' without a suitable intermediary. At the same time, as you point out, prices are often too high for those display cabinet items where it does look like someone looked at ebay for sale not ebay sold.

from the perspective of the store, assuming they just want to make the maximum revenue per time period, they'll like those scalpers because all the stuff they buy sells quickly instead of going one by one. this should be seen as a good thing for the beneficiary of the store - the charity, cause or whatever. from my perspective, whenever i walk in, it just means less choice of unexpectedly cheap things i'd be interested in.

i guess doing the pricing in those stores isnt that easy, they just cant muster the sophistication that large corporations have and so they'll get it wrong often

rasz_pl wrote on 2024-05-06, 15:09:

shorting RTC is same as giving it half the cycle, so maybe its not oscillating?

Tnx, will look into this with the scope!

So today I received a P60 system listed as not working on eBay.

As soon as I plugged the power lead into it, before I even had a chance to switch the system on, the PSU went bang and released a little magic smoke.

Anybody seen this before?