Just arrived on the mail a small lot of pc cards:

A pair of unremarkable pci network cads, a modem, and 2 sound cards for the low price of 18€. The ESS card sounds nice for a 1MB sample rom, the rendition of Monkey island is rather nice. This card is somewhat obscure, and the only reference I can find is to "SIC Wavestar32".

Courtesy of a coworker, a beautiful Olivetti M4-62 Modulo:

It is a 486SX @ 33MHz with 4 MB ram and a 170MB HDD.

Finally, a gorgeous SunFire V250 rescued from the jaws of the recycler:

Xicor wrote on 2024-12-10, 14:41:

Just arrived on the mail a small lot of pc cards: […]
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Just arrived on the mail a small lot of pc cards:

The attachment Cards.jpg is no longer available

A pair of unremarkable pci network cads, a modem, and 2 sound cards for the low price of 18€. The ESS card sounds nice for a 1MB sample rom, the rendition of Monkey island is rather nice. This card is somewhat obscure, and the only reference I can find is to "SIC Wavestar32".

Courtesy of a coworker, a beautiful Olivetti M4-62 Modulo:

The attachment olivetti.jpg is no longer available

It is a 486SX @ 33MHz with 4 MB ram and a 170MB HDD.

Finally, a gorgeous SunFire V250 rescued from the jaws of the recycler:

The attachment Sun_server.jpg is no longer available

Those old Sun Microsystems computers are going to be collectors items
Thats a beauty. Never seen one like that.

Well he's a collector and that's his item, so no "going to be" about it 🤣

Ordered this batch of three motherboards, two are for P4 478 (or Celeron 478), the other from what I see, should be an S.939, I think they arrive soon, I bought them nearby, shipping should be fast.

AGP4LIfe? wrote on 2024-12-09, 18:31:

Ahrle wrote on 2024-12-09, 18:00:

Picked up Saturday. $45 Optiplex GX115 with cute 15" monitor and accessories […]
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Picked up Saturday. $45 Optiplex GX115 with cute 15" monitor and accessories

The attachment 20241208_051318.jpg is no longer available

Uninteresting system as such. Only 2 RAM slots, weak onboard GPU and no AGP. But! My first PC was a PIII-500 of this model. 😁 (With a Nokia monitor weighing like a smaller house)

Gonna throw in an HDD, a bit uncertain about graphics though. With PCI only, guess this thing is bound to be GPU crippled regardless? Best currently in stock, 16MB Matrox...

Very nice! great price for all the accessories included! As far as the video is concerned, nothing a PCI voodoo 2,3, or 5 won' t solve! 😀
Or if you want to go on the cheap side plenty of GF2 MX or GF4MX PCI models to go around.

Thanks for reply and infos! Had no idea those PCI Gf4's existed. Actually regretted the purchase due to an insane 495 mile trip to pick the PC up, but now it might have a chance after all. Rocks a socketed PIII-933 which should have juice for some fun 😃)

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-12-10, 16:56:

Well he's a collector and that's his item, so no "going to be" about it 🤣

Guilty as charged !!!!! 😉

nfraser01 wrote on 2024-12-08, 20:16:

One of those odd MWave DSP modem/sound card combos. Are they as bad as people suggest?

Ah, so you're the person who set back my troll build 😜 I totally lowballed it anyway.

After a long time of being away, I've been getting back into the retro stuff I usually work with. Secured a Soyo SY-5EMA V1.1 mobo. ATX, Super Socket 7.

Okay everyone, contain your excitement please, I realise this is the purchase of the year 2024, but control yourselves...

... yeah okay it's just a couple of shitty cheap PCI RageXLs from eBay.... mildly disappointing ones, I ordered from a seller that appeared to have the Expert98 clones and got the generic ones. However, points gained for getting around the Canada Post stoppage and using alternate courier, so they actually got here...

I pulled the first one out and the ASIC looks real crisp and new and had 0742 date on, and I thought wow, they might be NOS chips, but the second one is just a little shabby around the edges and 0448 so I guess not. All I expect from them is a bit of VGAing so should not be too much to live up to.

I've noticed some memory pins of the geforce 256 are smashed. Maybe thats all I need to repair to fix the card.

Big Pink wrote on 2024-12-10, 22:53:

Ah, so you're the person who set back my troll build 😜 I totally lowballed it anyway.

Apologies. Do share when you finish it though!

Xicor wrote on 2024-12-10, 14:41:

Just arrived on the mail a small lot of pc cards: […]
Show full quote

Just arrived on the mail a small lot of pc cards:

The attachment Cards.jpg is no longer available

A pair of unremarkable pci network cads, a modem, and 2 sound cards for the low price of 18€. The ESS card sounds nice for a 1MB sample rom, the rendition of Monkey island is rather nice. This card is somewhat obscure, and the only reference I can find is to "SIC Wavestar32".

Courtesy of a coworker, a beautiful Olivetti M4-62 Modulo:

The attachment olivetti.jpg is no longer available

It is a 486SX @ 33MHz with 4 MB ram and a 170MB HDD.

Finally, a gorgeous SunFire V250 rescued from the jaws of the recycler:

The attachment Sun_server.jpg is no longer available

That server is such a beauty. Looks like a late 2000's gaming tower (before chassis became 'minimalistic' and downright boring) married to an SGI Indigo.

Also like the very period correct HDD in that 486 😁

Got the aforementioned MSI FX5700 Ultra today.
The card was in pretty tragic condition due to previous unsuccessful repair attempts and shipping in a regular letter envelope...

Two VRM controllers had been (badly) soldered and there were several SMD components missing. One cap and the 3.3/5V (?) Mosfet had been replaced.

I resoldered everything with hot air and flux, borrowed a few parts from a dead 5950U. Voltages to my surprise all present but still no picture.
With the monitor on a second card, I could run Nvidia Mats/Mods though. 5700U still had memory errors.

Another round of hot air and flux later, the card works perfectly again.
I was thinking about adding 4 more ram chips on the back side to make it a 256MB card. For now, I'm happy with it though. Here it is in restored condition:

Which parts did you flux and reflow? Was it always the VRM controller?

I resoldered all 4 memory chips. Just to clarify, "reflowing" means liquid solder and bga flux, everything else is just a warm card. 😉

I only have a cheap hot air station, which is more then enough for most use cases. However, it never gets hot enough to remove BGA memory chips from these huge copper ground plane video cards. Especially when it's ROHS solder. I've given up on trying to repair the faulty memory on my 5900s until I can get a better one.

So I want to buy a K6-2 500MHz CPU, but the seller have two different chips. One is 0016APEW and other one is 0045MPM, is there any difference between the two?

Bought another ancient Olivetti M300-02 PC that has seen better days and is quite battered by life.
A lot of corrosion and dirt inside, so will see. It was very hard to open it without any damage.

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-12-11, 12:58:

I only have a cheap hot air station, which is more then enough for most use cases. However, it never gets hot enough to remove BGA memory chips from these huge copper ground plane video cards. Especially when it's ROHS solder. I've given up on trying to repair the faulty memory on my 5900s until I can get a better one.

Also preheat. It's invaluable to this stuff. I solder all my BGA work at 120-150°C PCB temperature so I can use very low temperatures on my hot air station. Especially important when soldering GPUs, they don't like heat.

dominusprog wrote on 2024-12-11, 13:57:

So I want to buy a K6-2 500MHz CPU, but the seller have two different chips. One is 0016APEW and other one is 0045MPM, is there any difference between the two?

The attachment 27236821_1733697205_046.jpg is no longer available

Should be absolutely no difference... but I always want the later one. Only reason to go for the 0016 really is if you were doing a strict Jun-Nov 2000 build, or it's $5 cheaper or something.