What retro things have you done today?

Caporegime
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Yep, I’m not going to attempt to do anymore. I found a guy locally who says he can replace the rest for me. My equipment is too poor and my hands are too shaky.

I wanted to test the board to make sure I hadn’t cocked it up - it works perfectly fine without the single 1500uf 6.3v capacitor that was next to the northbridge. I assume this acted as a filter or something for it? I guess long term it’s not sensible to use it without the capacitor in place - but it is working without it :eek::D
It’s likely a rail smoothing cap, it won’t be required for operation, but could lead to unintended voltage fluctuation, so I wouldn’t personally run it until you’ve had it fixed.
 
Soldato
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North Essex
Convinced it was not possible for me not to have some sort of intel stock cooler after all my years of PC work I went on a mad hunt in my loft and eventually returned with... One of my original coolermaster coolers from a long time ago! I still have the fan for it too but that is in my storage so for now a random fan+rubber band will do.
So now I will have on of my old cpu coolers and my old case as part of this build which is nice.
The board from @paradigm fits nicely in here :) I can now start getting the software set up while I await the cpu and gpu to arrive.

This PSU only has a 6pin and the gpu needs an 8 and 6 pin. It does have 36A on the 12v rail combined so I hope thats enough to power the 3870x2 with some molex adapters!

 
Soldato
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Aquilonem Londinensi
Guys, I think this is beyond me LOL. I’ve just tried to remove one but it essentially fell out and has left two tiny legs in the board. I’ve tried heating them up, applying new solder, everything. Can’t get them to budge. Might have to pay someone who actually knows what they are doing to help me out as I can see me cocking this board up otherwise. Eeeeek!!

What iron do you have? Sounds like lack of thermal mass. Got flux and good 60/40 solder?

E: my recent retro stuff, started playing Quake for the eleventith dozen times, this time with Quakespasm, now I've played Quake on every platform I've owned up to 3700X :cool:
 
Soldato
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Sussex
It’s just a cheap 60w iron, I don’t think it or me are up to the task. I’ve found a TV repair chap who said he can happily replace motherboard capacitors and he isn’t too far from me (20 minutes driving) so going to take it to him. I don’t fancy making a mess of it any further.
 
Soldato
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Aquilonem Londinensi
It’s just a cheap 60w iron, I don’t think it or me are up to the task. I’ve found a TV repair chap who said he can happily replace motherboard capacitors and he isn’t too far from me (20 minutes driving) so going to take it to him. I don’t fancy making a mess of it any further.

Fair play, reworking old PCBs *is* a science, but there's art in there too! I'm not exactly a master of the art, what I know has been hard fought with experience :p When all the covid nonsense subsides, maybe see if you can get some broken/untested electronics from your local tip to practice on. Mine let's (or used to) people take electronics other people have dumped. I got my 5.1 speakers there (~£200 worth), all it needed was a potentiometer for the volume wheel
 
Soldato
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Just spend ~ 9hours getting windows XP installed. I wanted to use a pre made image instead of my hard copy of XP as it is only SP1. I dont have any CDRs so USB it was... What a mission that turned out to be.

Got there eventually! Also lucky to find motherboard drivers on archive.org as I swear asus took them down this week!
 
Caporegime
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Leafy Cheshire
Just spend ~ 9hours getting windows XP installed. I wanted to use a pre made image instead of my hard copy of XP as it is only SP1. I dont have any CDRs so USB it was... What a mission that turned out to be.

Got there eventually! Also lucky to find motherboard drivers on archive.org as I swear asus took them down this week!
Madness, there were drivers on Asus’ website when I tested the board!
 
Caporegime
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Leafy Cheshire
Do they have an FTP site? Might be worth someone grabbing a mirror
Looks like both their Taiwanese and German FTP sites are gone.

Seems really odd that right in the middle of a retro renaissance they have chosen to kill all their legacy downloads.

It was only a few months ago I was downloading their drivers for a Baby-AT Super Socket 7 board!
 
Soldato
Joined
6 May 2009
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19,885
@Guest2 that brings back memories! I had the lot of them.. Do you remember when kellogs where literally giving them away on cereal boxes?
I do! :)

I'm sure I got one of the varients on a kellogs box - Rave eJay or Techno eJay maybe. Its actually still great fun to use and before i knew it had spent 30 mins making a short track
 
Soldato
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30 Jul 2005
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Midlands
Nice machine @cee-S-dee and an utter bargain that. Trying to assemble that off eBay would have been much more expensive!

Good to see it be used. Iv had it behind my bed for years saying one day id use it lol.
Hurt a lot to see it go for so little but atleast it wasnt scalped and sold off for mega profit on ebay.
Id say its still a capable machine since using something like a athlon xp cant even do web browsing property and YouTube is a struggle too.

Still feel that the 560ti would have fetched good wonga on its own these days hahahah.
 

kar

kar

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6 Aug 2005
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884
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Surrey
Thanks to @Scott C and @IndigoGorilla was able to fire this very odd duck up.

A8YWbdB.jpg

It's an Asrock 4CoreDualSata2, which is along with its cousin the 4CoreDual-VSTA, just about the best you can get that still sports an AGP port.
Uof9tCb.jpg

I have a Radeon HD3850 I'm going to put through its paces without and threat of CPU limits :)

So far made do with a junk Radeon 9200SE to do an initial test
th4UBJC.jpg
 
Associate
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The 80's
Nice board. I used to own one of those. I'm sure I had it running win98 with a ess solo-1 sound card. Very versatile board. It's reminded me I need to recap my Asrock 939 board!
 

kar

kar

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Nice board. I used to own one of those. I'm sure I had it running win98 with a ess solo-1 sound card. Very versatile board. It's reminded me I need to recap my Asrock 939 board!

Yeah I kinda got obsessed with this and the VSTA when trying to figure out how to max out the 3850 which is comically CPU limited on 2003-4 era platforms. Managed to find one cheap on the bay as these otherwise sell for 100+ quid now. Ironic considering they were thought to be junk at the time they were on the market.

Stretching what is considered retro with it though, pci-ex, ddr2, 64 bit, multi core, none of these have business in a retro rig. But running w98 with few compromises on this sort of platform is going to be amusing.
 
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