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TPU's Nostalgic Hardware Club

That logo started to bug me in the end.
pentium4-side-logo.jpg
 
I like the socket 478 stock heatsink fan mechanism. Its so easy to install and hard to go wrong. Later stock LGA meanwhile, I always forgot which direction the arrow needs to go when you remove the heatsink and needs to watch youtube video :laugh:

I tried to test some of my old hardware. My precious Crosshair II Formula cant boot at all, LED all turned up but when I press the power button....no response :( I have another AM2 motherboard but cant seem to find it. Tried to revive my socket A system, for some reason all the onboard devices are dead, except for USB and HDD controller. Meaning no sound, no LAN. I tried to upgrade my LGA775 platform with C2D CPU replacing Pentium. It booted once, working fine and then next reboot its just refuse to boot to Windows. After a few more fiddling with heatsink and BIOS setting it won't boot anymore. Its just not a good weekend for me. I'm so disappointed I don't took any pictures :(
 
Apocalypsee said:
Tried to revive my socket A system, for some reason all the onboard devices are dead, except for USB and HDD controller. Meaning no sound, no LAN.
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Does the board have leaking capacitors that need replacing?
 
biffzinker said:
Does the board have leaking capacitors that need replacing?
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I don't think so from brief visual inspection, but I'll do detailed checkup on the board when I got time.
 
Apocalypsee said:
I tried to test some of my old hardware. My precious Crosshair II Formula cant boot at all, LED all turned up but when I press the power button....no response
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How about coin cell batteries?
 
Retrorockit said:
How about coin cell batteries?
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Haven't thought of that. Usually I removed the coin battery when I put the board on storage (and I try to turn on without the coin cell), but I think the board will boot regardless whether the batteries is there or not. Or I am wrong there?
 
Apocalypsee said:
I like the socket 478 stock heatsink fan mechanism. Its so easy to install and hard to go wrong. Later stock LGA meanwhile, I always forgot which direction the arrow needs to go when you remove the heatsink and needs to watch youtube video :laugh:

/QUOTE]
I never liked LGA 775 and its successors. I've lost count how many push pins got worn out after repeated removals. 478 on the other hand, was almost foolproof.
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For me it was the opposite, during 478 days I was leaving my PIII behind to rock 462 :) While you were busy wearing out pushpins, I was trying not to crunch the core on my Tbred 2500, and again on my AXP-M 2500. I succeeded most of the time. You'd be surprised how much of a die you can break off and it will still run :twitch:

I loved 939 but hated the pins. Leary on a Ryzen upgrade!

Its also surprising how many pins you can break off and the CPU will still run..

:laugh:

So because I am a bit of a klutz, Conroe was a blessing for me :D
 
I noticed pins on AM4 were a little thinner than I expected...
 
I may be getting a 2600K bundle for my HTPC, that's gonna be a great lightweight gaming PC soon :)

Though it does already run Crysis with C2D E4300 ;)

freeagent said:
You'd be surprised how much of a die you can break off and it will still run :twitch:
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This! I had all four corners round on my Thunderbird AXIA 1GHz and it still ran 24/7 stable @ 1404MHz :toast:

E: got a "new" Thunderbird AXIA 1GHz last year, I've just been too lazy to get a good S462 motherboard.. my Asrock K7VT4A Pro sucks.
 
I sure do miss my NF7. All I have are my old pics and the memories, not to be confused with ram :p

I did find my XP90 cooler with no mounting hardware.
 
lexluthermiester said:
IIRC, that is a custom switchable dual bios socket for testing/using BIOS code mods. Yes?


Same here!
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Kinda..... yes. You can use it for that.
I think the answer he was looking for was 'Bios Savior'.
 
 
freeagent said:
For me it was the opposite, during 478 days I was leaving my PIII behind to rock 462 :) While you were busy wearing out pushpins, I was trying not to crunch the core on my Tbred 2500, and again on my AXP-M 2500. I succeeded most of the time. You'd be surprised how much of a die you can break off and it will still run :twitch:

I loved 939 but hated the pins. Leary on a Ryzen upgrade!

Its also surprising how many pins you can break off and the CPU will still run..

:laugh:

So because I am a bit of a klutz, Conroe was a blessing for me :D
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I've bend some pins when AIO drops to my LGA1150 motherboard. It scared the living hell out of me, I tried for a couple of hours bending it back to as close as I can possible can. It still work till this day, but somehow it became very picky about what memory I put on the board :laugh: Another problem with the mounting, or this may be specifically to ASUS board, they route memory controller neat the mounting hole on the motherboard, I accidentally overtighten the screws and two of the DIMM channel is dead.

The early socketed CPU fit their heatsink mounting on the socket itself, and the clip is extremely strong and very fiddly because the small size of the socket. I don't prefer such mounting mechanism, not only AMD but I still afraid to remove Pentium III heatsink out of their socket. I liked what AMD did with the later sockets (starting from 939/754) putting mounting bracket on the board so the heatsink can clip to those. More space and easier to mount.

I'd rather have pins on the CPU than the motherboard. I guess different people have different opinion about this.
 
For older boards that are wonky try replacing the EEPROM if you can. My A7N8X died years ago but I kept it for nostalgia purposes. 6-7 years ago I found another one on the local Craigslist with a 2600+ in it for $5. The CL board turned out to have non-functional USB ports. Out of curiosity I dug the old A7N8X out and swapped the EEPROM from the one I'd just gotten. I was very happy to find the old one was fully functional again. I went to my CPU stash, found the XP 3200+ Barton and put that in. I then went through my collection of vintage parts and put the best of what I had that'd work into what was to be my "museum" build. An entire PC was created for the grand cost of $5 that the mobo I took the EEPROM from. Since then I've sold off most of my other vintage parts on Ebay for far more than I ever thought they were worth. My mint condition Voodoo 5 5500 sold for $300 last year to somebody in Europe.
 
biffzinker said:
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I kid you not, I owned the "tower" from this setup. If my memory can be trusted it had a Celeron 500 and 256mb pc133 in it. I used it for smart card emulation back in the early days of grey market tv. It looked like I beat some little girl up for it, but it was cool because it was small and quiet, tucked it behind my entertainment stand. Just needed the floppy drive and serial port

:p

Capture.PNG
 
freeagent said:
I kid you not, I owned the "tower" from this setup. If my memory can be trusted it had a Celeron 500 and 256mb pc133 in it. I used it for smart card emulation back in the early days of grey market tv. It looked like I beat some little girl up for it, but it was cool because it was small and quiet, tucked it behind my entertainment stand. Just needed the floppy drive and serial port

:p

View attachment 140238
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There's a video for that PC from LGR.
 
1577169924648.png
 
micropage7 said:
nice, I wonder why there's no new purple motherboard anymore?
this one looks good
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Perhaps RGB has taken over where multi-coloured Playskool boards left off? Oh, and ECS boards, not to mention PC Chips boards, had a nasty habit of dying very suddenly.
You'll need sunglasses for this Gigabyte board :)
fullboard_1.jpg
 
Got few old laptops and damn, there's one with a Mobility Radeon 9700, but it seems to be broken :cry:

Well, grabbed an another one with Mobility Radeon 9200, and upgraded the hell out of it :D From Pentium M 1.4GHz (Banias) & 768MB RAM to Pentium M 1.6GHz (Dothan) & 2GB RAM. Too bad that the 9200 is the 32MB version with 64-bit memory, but I guess it still can run some of the early 2000ish games without problems.

e: Dammit, I'll put a 7200rpm drive there too..
 
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