good old days.

[Brandon]

I have a 75 mhz pent 1 digital starion, an IBM 750 personal, and some other older computers I can't name. they have survived all these years no bad caps, and no repairs ever done... They are built like tanks, literally... Some younger family members have spilt water in the IBM, and another, I've actually dropped a few over the years . Anyone still have these old machines as I do? They won't die, and I just can't get rid of them.
Any comments on these beastly yet slow machines?

[Cprossu]

Re: good old days.

heck, I still have a functional 386, 286, Columbia Data MPC1600 (8088), IBM PC (Original, 8088), IBM XT (8088), 4 working commodore 64's with 8 working power supplies, a literal ton of appleII's, and if that weren't enough, a 1978 Sansui reciever with original caps which has pretty much run 24x7 for 10 years that I know of.
Ever since I started seeing those damn abit motherboards back in the p3c socket 5 and 7 (Pentium MMX) era with the leaky caps, I've been scratching my head wondering how all of our time, research, and knowledge spent manufacturing capacitors (what was it, over 80 years by now?) had gone down the toilet in a single faulty act of reverse engineering!

I mean how can 1 blunder ruin 80+ years of development!?

[Spacedye69]

Re: good old days.

Now thats my kind of comp collection!

[arneson]

Re: good old days.

My take on this may raise some flack but here goes.

There has to be some component that will fail first, wether from design or abuse.
Back in my day it was vacume tubes mostly but blown caps also.
The old tv's had as many as 35 tubes and quite often 4 would be bad or weak, sound familiar?
Difference is, tubes plug in but could cost $5 to $25 bucks, caps have to be forceably removed and resoldered but cost less than a buck.

[kc8adu]

Re: good old days.

to this day the lowly capacitor is the most likely part to fail in any electronic device.
i restore antique radios and tv sets .not unusual to replace every cap in the set but not one tube.
i find the tubes to be the most reliable part in the set.
today there is no excuse to have a cap failure in the useful life of a computer.
the failures we see here are the result of using shoddy parts.

[arneson]

Re: good old days.

t
i find the tubes to be the most reliable part in the set.

Ah ha. I knew this would get your attention.
It's true the tubes in the old sets lasted years but there were almost always 2 of the 6ea8's bad in the round crt color sets.
The 6je6 was almost certainly toast and took the high voltage rectefier tube with it.
Im just sayin.
Or take another example, the GE style 5 tube clock radio. today a collectors item, with bad audio output tube.
Tubes like caps could also be made badly, poor vacume, badly welded screens.

[Rainbow]

Re: good old days.

I don't have complete old computers but many working motherboards - 286, 386, 486, Pentium and newer... Even working Pentium 60 with a board and dual-CPU Pentium Pro board but only 1 CPU

[Cprossu]

Re: good old days.

I don't have complete old computers but many working motherboards

I used to be that way, then I decided that I needed a working model of at least every generation in order to eat up some hobby time- my 386 for an instance is pretty funny with all the gear I have loaded into it- (It's an AMD 386DX-40) (I managed a sound blaster 16 with that awful mitsumi mpc cd-rom drive(caddy loading!), a 1.44mb teac 3 1/2 floppy drive, a 1.2mb teac 1.2mb 5 1/4 floppy drive, a colorado backup 60mb tape drive, 2 network cards, 3 500meg hdd's, an extra parallel port card, a nice old ATI ISA video card, and of course, 16mb of ram (impressive for a 386)) and my 286 hehe


I have a dual proc pentium pro mobo, and 2 200mhz/512kcahe chips to go with it....but it uses this thing called "168pin ECC EDO memory" which I don't have any of, and ontop of it the idiot that sold it to me forgot to send the VRM that goes with it so you can use the other chip-

let's see, I have alot of useless junk hehe

well I wont bore you guys anymore with useless trivia or decked out ancient computers unless asked..

[Rainbow]

Re: good old days.

I have a dual proc pentium pro mobo, and 2 200mhz/512kcahe chips to go with it....but it uses this thing called "168pin ECC EDO memory" which I don't have any of, and ontop of it the idiot that sold it to me forgot to send the VRM that goes with it so you can use the other chip-

Mine is GigaByte GA-686DX. It uses standard 72-pin SIMMs (6 slots) and both VRMs are fortunately integrated on the board It was very cheap because the ATX connector was damaged (burnt 5V pins) - so I replaced it and it works fine.

[linuxguru]

Re: good old days.

> it uses this thing called "168pin ECC EDO memory" which I don't have any of

I believe I have exactly one stick of this with me, but I'm not sure. It's a double-sided, 18-chip 128 MB DIMM with a Compaq sticker. It does not have the SPD EEPROM on it, and it will only work in a couple of boards - an old i440LX Baby-AT board and a Via 82c693a based board. It just might be PC66 ECC SDRAM, but it might also be ECC EDO RAM. Are the pinouts compatible?

(The i440LX was the immediate successor to the i440FX, which was the default chipset for the Pentium Pro - that's one reason why I think it might support EDO, but I may be mistaken).

[Rainbow]

Re: good old days.

both i440LX/EX and i440BX/ZX should support EDO. Maybe something on the board must be wired properly so it can work - but I don't really know.

[linuxguru]

Re: good old days.

i440BX would probably support EDO only at 66 FSB - unless there was some way for the memory controller to run in a different clock-domain from the FSB. AFAIK, the BX doesn't support clocking the memory differently from the FSB.

The i440LX was 66 FSB only, so no problem. In my experience, I can overclock this DIMM to 75 or 83 on the i440LX, but I haven't tried it on a BX at 100 FSB.

[Rainbow]

Re: good old days.

I have 128MB (4x32MB) EDO SIMMs in my Cyrix MII PR300 with i430TX and it runs fine at 2.5x75MHz, memory timings set to fastest.
But EDO will probably not work at all at 100MHz.

[Cprossu]

Re: good old days.

Are the pinouts compatible?

I do not think so. The slot is actually physically different (the first notch in the EDO ram is moved up just a little from where it is on sdram) from a standard 168pin pc66/100 slot.
I have regular (not ECC) EDO 168pin, but it doesn't work in the board-


but either way it doesn't matter as I have way more powerful equipment at hand and I don't have the VRM for that board to enable the 2 cpus to be used.

[PeteS in CA]

Re: good old days.

Two things have converged in the crap caps problem. MB mfrs are constantly cutting costs, both the cost of the part and the shipping costs. Local, no-name suppliers are likely to be cheaper in both aspects. VRMs built into the MB is a relatively new design feature, made necessary by different core voltages and challenging current transient requirements. VRMs are very stressful applications for the lytics. Cheap caps in a stressful application is a recipe for a mess, otherwise known as current reality.

Were it not for the crap caps, the quickest components to fail would probably be the fans.

[stretch0069]

Re: good old days.

Funny you should say that. Our equipment runs 24/7 and in the past week I've had three fans go bad.

Irony....as I sit here just powering up my VP6/Win2K box, I hear a CPU fan about to crap out. Anyone know of a good supply of fans for CoolerMaster heatsinks?????

[Topcat]

Re: good old days.

Last year I retired a dual pentium MMX 233mhz with 256mb of 72-pin EDO ram, all sitting in a Soyo SY-5TH5 motherboard. It was my first web server I ever built, back in 1996, and ran solid as a rock for 8 years. When it finally was retired, it was running as a a gateway. A $5.00 used linkshit router forced it into early retirement. Ohh the memories! That bad boy cost me a small fortune to build, and now I'd be lucky to be able to give it away.

[Chris1992]

Re: good old days.

I have a soyo 5EH5 with a k6-2/350. 64MB EDO SIMMS and 2 badcaps that I may or may not replace. BTW Topcat I do not like your avatar as it encourages self-mutilation practises.

[Rainbow]

Re: good old days.

Fans in many old PSUs are still working fine. Also I haven't seen any bad Intel Box fan (they're made by Sanyo IIRC). So they new ones fail so often because they're crap... And I also noticed that the smaller fan, the sooner it fails.

[Chris1992]

Re: good old days.

yes, intel boxed proc fans are made by Sanyo Denki. Following is a list of my experiences with fans:
Good fans: Aavid, Sanyo, Protechnic, Jamicon, Adda, NMB Minebea, Cooler Master.
Bad: Thermaltake, Yate Loon, generic.
So-so: Delta QuietTek (quiet but vibratey)