best cheap/free scores 1.1

[Topcat]

Y'know why

I have a sneaking suspicion...

[Dan81]

Heh, it's nice to hear the whir of that SCSI Seagate once in a while

Meanwhile, it's a nForce 2 party most of the time. That "Golden Flame" Soltek looks gorgeous with the red LED fan and ADATA Vitesta sticks, and the NF7 v2.0 besides me is stomping stuff with a 210FSB overclock.

A shame I couldn't find any working 9800s. The more I find locally, the more they turn out dead
Guess X1xxx/HD series it is. I think I found a HD2600XT somewhere once, for a rather accessible price (around the same as 9800 Pro.)

[Topcat]

Today's megascore is a Supermicro C7X99-OCE-F. Bought from one of the gazillion R2 resellers on ebay as "non functional, won't boot" for $25 shipped, in original box with accessories. Ok, that's worth the gamble, these are ~$200 boards working.

Arrived today, and of course the first thing is to check the 'usual suspects; such as damaged pins in the sockets, and other physical damage to the board, RAM slots, etc....none found. Next, in the oven with a CPU & RAM...and no post... Looking at status codes and current draws, it would roll through until '9C'....I was never able to find out what that status code exactly is, but the google says "machine check exception"....whatever the frack that is....

Next step is to get the manual and study all jumper & switch settings after pulling the CMOS battery and make sure everything is cleared out of it.... I noticed a switch was in BIOS recovery mode for some reason....ok, red flag... Hoping maybe someone did that accidentally, I set it to normal and tried again...same result, no POST and status code 9C. Hmmm.....so what the hell, try the supermicro BIOS recovery (can be tricky)....but nothing to lose, so switched it back to recovery mode. Grabbed the latest BIOS, renamed it to 'super.rom', put in the root of a USB drive, powered up and pressed CRTL+HOME....and held the keys and my breath....well Sonofabitch, it POST'd and went through the recovery process....rebooted when done and here we are!!





Box & goodies...

[Dan81]

Apart from the US gems (hehehe), I have a 7800GS AGP that has to show up Tuesday, as well as a whole mystery build that has an I/O shield for my Soltek

Fingers crossed that the 7800GS arrives intact and working. I already have a zombie 6600 AGP running and god knows for how long... a 7800GS wouldn't hurt an Athlon XP, would it?

[TechGeek]

9C was probably the CPU tossing an MCE and shutting down because it got put into an invalid/corrupt state by the faulty BIOS.

[stj]

cheap DMR radio
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006317647277.html
it was even cheaper, i paid £32 uk.

[Dan81]

These came yesterday:

- ASUS CUSL2 + P3 1GHz, 512MB SDR (2x128MB + 1x256)
- 2x ASUS K53S (K53SV and K53SD I think... one of them has a i7), X553M (scrapped X553M due to bad MB)
- Pine Tech/XFX GF2 MX400 64MB
- PS3 CECHL03
- Xbox 360 Falcon
- PS2 SCPH-50004a w/ roaches

[ChaosLegionnaire]

And gee, I totally forgot to put up a pic of the LG Studioworks CRT!

umm... why does the top one-third of the monitor screen appear darker and the lower two-thirds appear lighter? is this a screen defect with the monitor or a photography issue with the camera?

- custom build - C2D E6600, Gigabyte P35-DS3

ah! i've heard u've been trying to get your hands on one of those gigabyte p35 chipset boards. well, u got one finally! so gratz!

- ASUS A9550GE 256MB - some sort of "souped up" 9550 w/ Infineon RAM (standard package, not BGA) and likely 9600XT clocks?

nah, prolly just a slightly overclocked gpu. the stock 9550 clocks are 275 mhz. this one maybe overclocked to 300 mhz? the 9600 non-pros are clocked at 325 mhz.

A shame I couldn't find any working 9800s. The more I find locally, the more they turn out dead

yes, the stock cooler on those 9800 series cards are absolutely crap and run the gpu at 80-90°C. to add insult to injury, the fan also fails after a while. so no surprises there why those cards dont last. i think many are dead by now and looking on ebay those 9800 cards are going the way of the gf4 ti cards. over 50 to 80 bucks for one. i think be happy with your 9700 cards which i think u have some and be done with it! i have a couple of 9700 series cards and both overclock to 9800 pro speeds and more! so i think i'll use those first and save the 9800 cards for a rainy day...

Today's megascore is a Supermicro C7X99-OCE-F.

beautiful revival of that mobo! such a quick, simple and easy fix! i wouldnt think of reflashing the bios using a thumbdrive or optical drive using that method! i always think u need to use a flash rom programmer and either pry out the bios chip from the socket or desolder it if its soldered.

[Topcat]

Good drop off today!!

Two complete Nintendo systems; a NES classic and a Super NES. Yes, the mario bros 3 game is unopened.



A Cobra 86XLR Base station with classic D104 Mic



A bunch of other audio & radio gear.

[Dan81]

Not much activity here:

- CUSL2 + P3 1000EB run great - gotta love the flexibility of the AGP Pro slot, allowing me to change between a V3 3000 and a Geforce 6600 whenever I want
- 7800GS unfortunately turned up dead
- the ASUS lappies are pretty much troopers. Sandy Bridge was one of the few last Intel chips (along Ivy and Haswell, as Broadwell was the first to switch to all soldered BS) that were great for laptops. GPU wise, i5 got a GT540M, i7 does with a 610M. Both have 2GB worth of VRAM.
- PS2 cleaned off well, received new case and parts
- PS3 works fine, got to check Syscon logs

[jiroy]

Been busy like ever last weeks , repairing 7 I7 Desktops for one of my clients . When he offered as gratitude for me 5 Dual Cpus intel Xeon desktops , cause he thinks they're outdated , was too exhausted to even give an answer

Maybe when i have more spare time ..

[Topcat]

Got these the other day, 2x HPE Proliant Servers....a DL360 and a DL380 GEN9's.

The DL360 1U



DL380 2U



Updated the firmwares on both....which is a real treat in itself if you don't have a HPE 'service contract'....but I found the binaries.



Considering the DL360 1U for a NVR replacement....wanted to see how it would behave with a real GPU (has a 16x slot)....but sometimes servers and expansion GPU's don't play nice...but these you can disable the onboard. The NVR software doesn't require mega GPU power, but it would need more than the onboard turd (G200) could provide. Tested with a Quadro K620.



Perfect!




Now for the alpha testing of the DL380. I've been wanting to upgrade to a more efficient NAS; the DL380 would be a great one. I've also wanted to retire the dual motherboard case NAS I've been using and do a full rack build for all servers & network gear.... Hint: That fully enclosed beige rack that ratdude dropped by with....but anyway;

Server 2016 installed. I used a 128mb micro SD card to load the OS to.... Works, but it's a bit laggy compared to a SAS SSD in the SAS cage. One drawback of the 2.5" SAS cage, there's no large drives in that form factor....and anything 2TB+ is stupid expensive....so it's bunches of 1.2TB's in a RAID5 if you want large capacity....but it can be done!!




Both of these are dual skt2011 suppoting E5-2600 v3 & v4 CPU's; DDR4 RAM.

[Dan81]

Trashpicked this a few days ago:

- ECS K7VTA3/333
- K-Mex PX-450 PSU
- 160GB WDC HDD
- Sparkle Riva TNT2 M64 32MB
- 256MB DDR333
- Athlon XP 1700+
- Realtek RTL8139C+ NIC

Surprisingly used for topography purposes. The ECS mobo doesn't seem shabby at all, given LITE-ON of all people rebranded it!

[stj]

ECS boards are often used in industrial applications, they can build good stuff.
a lot of arcade equipment has ECS mobo's in them.

[dmill89]

ECS boards are often used in industrial applications, they can build good stuff.
a lot of arcade equipment has ECS mobo's in them.

X2, I've had good luck with even of their "consumer grade" boards. They may have had a higher than average DOA/early failure rate "back in the day" (not sure if any actual stats support that, or if it was just forum hear-say), but if they were good to begin with, they seem to hold up fairly well. I've got several 15-20 year old ECS boards that still work fine, even with their original OST caps which while not the best still seem to hold up better than the "plague-era" Chemi-Con KZG/KZJ or Nichicon HM/HN with the "bad" production dates (I've seen many supposedly "better" boards from this era failed due to bad KJG/KZJ or HM/HN caps).

[Dan81]

Ya got me sold on ECS. For whatever reason their OST caps held right up there with Ruby MBZ and Panasonic FL/FJ/FR.
Not counting the pre-Teapo merger G-Luxon riddled models which required recaps almost always.

Man, I wish I'd find a K7S6A these days. Their K7S5A is already a goldmine in itself

[Topcat]

Man, I wish I'd find a K7S6A these days. Their K7S5A is already a goldmine in itself

I ebay'd one of those a year or so ago....boggled my mind why it went for so much...

I remember gazillions of ECS nForce boards back around 2005 with bad chipsets.... Had an arcade owner client that would send me boxes of these at a time with bad caps. The survival/success rate was under 50%.

[Dan81]

Today's scores:

- custom built 775 w/ P35-DS3 (rev1.0, yay), Geforce GT320 1GB DDR3 (PCPartner/Sapphire OEM, GT215 core), 500GB Seagate Pipeline HDD (ew, why.), C2D E8400, 2x2GB DDR2
- ASUS P5QL Pro w/ E7300 - dead, burnt PCB near one of the USB headers. CPU untested.
- Quadro4 750 XGL - dead, GPU quite literally fused with heatsink and got ripped off when removing the heatsink
- Winfast A340 - kinda dead? No POST on my ABIT NF7, have yet to test on other mobos.
- Kobian N620 - Riva TNT2 M64 32MB - works fine
- bunch of random RAM sticks
- eVGA 8600GT - surprisingly the only GPU among the other two (Quadro and A340) to POST but has missing SMDs so it only runs on x8 slots. No artefacts, which is surprising for a G84 card
- Xbox 360 Zephyr - works, repasted and recased into Elite shell