best cheap/free scores 1.1

[Dan81]

Compaq EVO D310v case, probably the next days (awaiting confirmation from my friend that he can give it away).

I'm tempted to build either a P4 or go Athlon XP w/ PCChips M810LR recap.

[Topcat]

Had a big dropoff of goodness from a local resort. The pick of the litter is a Precision T7910 dual 2011-3 workstation supporting E5 2xxx v4's. Gonna have some fun with this one.

[Dan81]

Scored some more retro stuff:

2x Jasper 360s
Mercury KOB 730s FSMx - basically PCChips M810LR rev 7.1A, has VIA audio codec instead of C-Media/Realtek (thank god - the one on the green recapped M810 is a nightmare.). Came with a green XP1700, one of the CPUs that first got me into the retro business
MSI K7T266 Pro2-U w/ AXP 2000+, 2x DDR sticks (unknown size)
MS Industrial KY-400ATX - pretty beefy Sun Pro \
genuine PS3 Dualshock 3 - you'd be scared to find out how many fakes are out there.
genuine 360 controller
a cold beer

[Topcat]

Swapped out an Arctic Freezer II 360mm for a client that for some reason wouldn't cool anymore despite the fact the pump was running and it didn't leak (no coolant loss). I built the system for the client back in 2021 or so. Client gave me the old one....so I dissected it to see where the failure was.... Apparent defect from the manufacturer; gasket issue that caused electrolysis to occur. They supplied a replacement cold plate & gasket. Drained all the old coolant, flushed, and installed the new parts & refilled with my own cocktail. Good as new!

[TechGeek]

Probably easier to munch on than a credit card offer envelope or an old CD.

[Topcat]

At least destroying solid-state media is pretty easy, just snap 'em in half and toss the pieces in a bin.

I feed M.2's to my commercial document shredder. It chews them up like they're nothing.

[TechGeek]

At least destroying solid-state media is pretty easy, just snap 'em in half and toss the pieces in a bin.

[Topcat]

Mega score from a medical facility today

Several 11th gen I5 HP Elitebooks, mint condition & working.
A bunch of newer HP smaller laser printers
A box full of M.2 & SSD's ranging from 512gb to 1TB
Bunch of small workstations; pretty shelled out; probably bad motherboards....but I scavenged RAM and a bunch of gen 8~12 I7 and Xeon CPU's.
Of course the usual breeder stuff; cables, keyboards, mice, and broken monitors.

I'm contractually obligated to destroy the drives....kind of a bummer to waste them....but it's what I agreed to do... The rest of the haul will make up for it.

[Dan81]

One 10k SCSI drive wasn't 'nuff for the dual CPU beast. So I yanked out the Raptor. *cue actual velociraptor sounds *

[Dan81]

I had to reoder the PCI cards for one, and remove some of the SDR sticks that tested bad (about two 512s and I think a 256 as well.).

By reordering I meant moving the cards as follows:

- USB card in PCI2 was swapped with the LAN card next to it and viceversa (LAN card is in PCI3)
And that's about it. 4th PCI slot is now populated by an Adaptec 2940UW SCSI card to which I have a Seagate Cheetah 10k ST336607LW connected.

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Good god, getting that Radeon 9600 Pro to get along with the rest of the board was an absolute nightmare.

thats interesting... could u please start a separate thread and elaborate on what where the issues u faced and what u did to rectify them? i'd like to know and i see it will be useful to others too. i also use a radeon 9600 non-pro on my i815ep chipset p3 board and i dont have any problems with it. it just works right away out of the box upon driver installation. so i'd like to see and know if the via chipset boards have issues with their agp functionality.

[Dan81]

And crazy me finally tamed the 694D, as I am bringing a late-nite 3DMark 2001 session



Good god, getting that Radeon 9600 Pro to get along with the rest of the board was an absolute nightmare.

[Dan81]

Oh boy, I now figure I forgot posting the 486!

[Dan81]

New scores for today:

- IBM 4.5GB SCSI 68pin HDD
- Bekom/Gericom 2440XL laptop (mobile Athlon XP 2400+ w/ Radeon 9000)
- PS2 phat, SCPH-39004 with nice DMS4 Pro chip
- 1GB worth of PC133 SDR, bumped up my dual Coppermine's RAM to a beautiful 1.75GB of RAM - still looking for another 512 to make a beautiful round 2GB. And awaiting a nice SCSI drive.
- Galaxy S3 GT-i9305 - unfortunately has strange display glitches and I'm not sure whether the board or the LCD is at fault

[Dan81]

Not until 2000 or so they weren't part of OST, as far as I know. Same goes for G-Luxon - the green/silver LZ were absolute trash, but the black SM series that are post-Teapo merger have been great, at least for me - not as quality as japanese caps, but they do as equally fine as OST RLX do in RAM/PCI filtering. Of course, I wouldn't consider them anywhere near as good as the usual Panasonic/UCC/Rubycon are - but not anywhere as bad as Evercon/GSC/KZG/Tayeh/Jackcon either.

Topcat I'm glad you love it! I have been trying to treat myself most of the nice boards to get out of the ordinary stuff thru 2024.
Loved to fiddle with Cheepo and HoneyX BIOS yet again, as well as having fun reading up on 694D and 440BX dual-CPU madness .

Speaking of which, I have to get back to the BP6 sometimes, to have stable 100FSB operation on it.
I found out there are some caps to install on the back of the BX chipset, and I might have a good source on those SMDs - a old Fujitsu/NEC OEM'd Gigabyte 8SIML (SiS 650, nuff' said ) that surprisingly has had large pads and small SMD caps on the backside of both northbridge and southbridge.

Here's where I found the BX cap tidbit: http://www.finetune.jp/~lyuka/interests/pc/bp6.html

[lti]

The caps in that Compaq are from 1999. I have seen those OST I.Q caps before, but I thought I.Q caps were always made by OST. There was weird stuff going on back then, like all of the Tayeh caps with identical markings to GSC except for the brand logo.

What's worse is the equally old Su'scon caps in that Compaq's power supply.

Windows is showing me the red "low free space" bar under the Seagate drive, so I might have to upgrade soon anyway. I'd like to go to SSDs for speed, but they're expensive and mostly QLC drives once you go over 2TB.

[Dan81]

lti - I suppose the Compaq's caps were before 2001. The ones I had were in OST's trademark blue with brown lettering sleeve - except they had OST and IQ's logo on them. Last time I remember finding them was on some Socket 462 Gigabyte board that had an AMD Northbridge and VIA 686B southbridge, and needless to say they were almost as nasty as GSC or Tayeh.






The only caps left original are a few 100uF 25v caps - I couldn't find any suitable replacements yet.

About running the newer Seagates - I'm ashamed to admit I still run them. It's just way too tedious to clone them, as I have bought some WD Blacks and they sit doing nothing.

I'll get some photos of the OST caps later today, not sure if any of you encountered them.

[lti]

The MSI has arrived. Someone strangely recapped it with not just OSTs. BUT OSTs FROM THE I.Q MERGER! WHY???
Anyways - all went off the board as soon as I could confirm it was running stable (which is surprising given the craptacular caps used.)

My old Compaq is still running I.Q caps 25 years later.

Seagate ST336607LW 36GB Ultra320 HDD - I know some of you will cringe at the thought of using a Seagate of all things

Seagate was considered good back then. It's only some of the newer models that were unreliable... and I have a modern Seagate drive in my main system. ( again)

I'm not a good computer guy, and I still want a dual-CPU system.

[Topcat]

Moar updates!


The MSI has arrived. Someone strangely recapped it with not just OSTs. BUT OSTs FROM THE I.Q MERGER! WHY???
Anyways - all went off the board as soon as I could confirm it was running stable (which is surprising given the craptacular caps used.)
It's now running well with Rubycon pulls off a dead Xbox360, a few Panny FL for the smaller 1000uF RAM caps, and polys in place of the 470uF 16v caps.

Other stuff I received and wait to receive:

- Adaptec AHA-2940UWB SCSI adapter - works, very clean, came from a fellow retro tech collector and has been tested beforehand
- Seagate ST336607LW 36GB Ultra320 HDD - I know some of you will cringe at the thought of using a Seagate of all things- but it's better than nothing, given the Quantum drives are both dead, unfortunately - to add to the unfortunate events - SCSI HDDs are atrociously hard to find in the right format for the card you're using. Will likely be here following Monday or Tuesday.
- 486 kit consisting of: Aquarius MB-4D33/50NR, Trident TVGA9200 VLB GPU, "VLMIO" IDE controller (VLB too!), UMC NIC and 3com NIC - should be here tomorrow
- a whole grab bag of expansion cards, among which another Adaptec 2940UW resides (or at least I suspect it being a 2940UW, judging by the looks of it.) - also should be here tomorrow.

Very nice....Anything dual CPU! Looks like I've rubbed off on you.

[Dan81]

Moar updates!


The MSI has arrived. Someone strangely recapped it with not just OSTs. BUT OSTs FROM THE I.Q MERGER! WHY???
Anyways - all went off the board as soon as I could confirm it was running stable (which is surprising given the craptacular caps used.)
It's now running well with Rubycon pulls off a dead Xbox360, a few Panny FL for the smaller 1000uF RAM caps, and polys in place of the 470uF 16v caps.

Other stuff I received and wait to receive:

- Adaptec AHA-2940UWB SCSI adapter - works, very clean, came from a fellow retro tech collector and has been tested beforehand
- Seagate ST336607LW 36GB Ultra320 HDD - I know some of you will cringe at the thought of using a Seagate of all things- but it's better than nothing, given the Quantum drives are both dead, unfortunately - to add to the unfortunate events - SCSI HDDs are atrociously hard to find in the right format for the card you're using. Will likely be here following Monday or Tuesday.
- 486 kit consisting of: Aquarius MB-4D33/50NR, Trident TVGA9200 VLB GPU, "VLMIO" IDE controller (VLB too!), UMC NIC and 3com NIC - should be here tomorrow
- a whole grab bag of expansion cards, among which another Adaptec 2940UW resides (or at least I suspect it being a 2940UW, judging by the looks of it.) - also should be here tomorrow.