best cheap/free scores 1.1

[Topcat]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Dirty cheap ebay score of an Asus P2L97-DS. Asus boards of this era were bulletproof. Pretty worthless dual P2 motherboard, LX chipset that only truly supported 66MHz FSB.....but I have a pair of 333/66 CPU's in the junk CPU bin and 1gb of RAM that will work in it...and I got it stupid cheap. It has a few "IQ" caps in it, so we all know what it'll get first. Ohh well....just another nifty dust collector for my kooky PC collection....I just have a soft spot for anything pentium classic through pentium3 era, the more unusual the better (anything SMP).

[Topcat]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

$25.00 ebay score = Supermicro P6DGU dual slot-1 GX chipset motherboard. Been looking for one on and off for a while, I have the dedicated 'RAID port' add-on card for the onboard SCSI that goes to one of these (came in a junk box years ago). I don't know if either works, the motherboard was listed as untested and I've never had a board to test the raidport card....so $25 gamble, I'm not too worried if none of it works, I've gambled a lot more than this on pool & football games.

I got the board yesterday. It had that 'musty' smell like its been sitting in a box in someone's basement for the last 20 years, but was very clean.... It POST'd to BIOS v 1.0....and of course the ARO raidport controller wasn't seen. After several hours of musical firmwares & BIOS updates later, I finally got them all playing nicely together...just to discover that CPU2 slot is dead....if that isn't just enough to piss you off!! I'll have to back burner this one till I can troubleshoot that issue....but its alive & well running a raid0 with the raidport zcr controller.

[Dan81]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Scored some pretty fine stuff today - a ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe that I have to test (had bent heatsink and has a few bad LTEC caps) and a MSI P965 Platinum w/ Pentium D 925 that also has a few bad KZG here and there.

[Dan81]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Quick update to my previous post:

Got both to work! The MSI came back to life and booted up Windows XP from a HDD I had just fine, and so did the ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe after I replaced the bad caps. I didn't replace all the LTEC caps on ASUS and KZGs on the MSI because I don't have enough good caps to replace them (I used a few Rubycons I had for both).

[Topcat]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Hello from an Asus P2L97-DS running 2x P2 333's and 1GB ram. Asus Riva TNT2 32mb GPU and a SB16...on win2k. I can only imagine what someone paid for this back in the day!

I also picked up some old SCSI plextor optical drives. Badly yellowed, I had to mix a batch of my de-yellowing soup....but they work and the yellowing is gone. 4x2x20 burner and a 6plex reader (with 7 caddies), as well as a box full of random adaptec scsi controllers & cables.

[Curious.George]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Half-dozen t610's and a dozen t5740's I'll use them in the design of an inventory control system I'm working on. Would have been nicer had they each had internal power supplies (instead of stupid bricks that I'll have to stash somewhere)

[jiroy]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Lot of free and cheap scores but i'll skip it for lack of precious time ..
I'm now , among tens of repairs , plus , heavily deep in a customer's 4000$ budget desktop , for video editing , and the main problem is , he wants a Mac system , the newest one ...not my expertise field frankly , especially when M.2's and 2 Sli Nvidias are involved ..
Doing many pre-researches is a must .

[stj]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

tell him to go watch some of this:
https://www.youtube.com/user/rossmanngroup/videos

[Dan81]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Got freebies:

2x DVD drives (one LG and one Samsung)

HIS TNT2 M64 32MB - shame the BIOS is on a non-flashable chip, or else

NEC USB PCI card - went into my AMD K6-2 500MHz machine, as the VIA one I had would make the machine not turn on

A bunch of different memory sticks, PC133 and DDR

Mercury PVT800X-L w/ Celeron 2.4GHz Northwood - killed it with a BIOS flash. Might find out how to fix that using a floppy and forcing a BIOS flash through Rainbow's method (shorting two high address pins to force bootblock error) and flash it with a Soyo BIOS

MSI K9N6PGM2-V2 w/ A64 x2 and 1GB RAM - works just fine

56K Modem I have no use for

and a bunch of laptop drives that I have no idea if they work or if I can use them.

[stj]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

56k modem - pull the flash for use later.

[Dan81]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Erm.... there's no flash on it.

[kevin!]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

Yesterday I rescued this board with a pentium g630 and 2GB of ram DDR3, unfortunately, the computer was crushed (the motherboard was curved), I could only save the motherboard, processor, ram, reader dvd, hdd and the rest was crap.
They threw it possibly because the PSU failed, it had an L-LINK (psu junk of 15 dollars) This computer was installed for a closed circuit CCTV, because there was a card installed. Well, installing a PSU of poor quality on a computer that is 24/7 on is a bad choice.
Now I have had it 1 day on another case mounted and not a hang, it goes great, when I can install a cheap Xeon socket 1155. (The red pixels that are seen on the monitor is due to the HDMI cable that is in poor condition.)
I had to remove the damaged DIMM, and I removed it because some pin were cracked and it was unrecoverable, now it only has 1 DIMM.
And 2 weeks ago I recovered a toshiba s2000, working perfect.

[Dan81]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Got another PS2 slim with a XenoPS (made by the same guys behind XenoGC, if anyone owned/owns a modded Gamecube here) with a 8MB memcard and a silver joystick for free.

[stj]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

if you still do cubes, there is an open-source version of xeno - just buy the blank chip.

[Topcat]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

picked up a working 3com 2948 (full gigabit) 48-port baseline switch for 10 bucks. Fans were obnoxiously noisy (bad not fast)....I couldn't take them apart without killing them either. Spent 11 bucks more for a pair of 40mm replacements (top motor)...now its quiet.

This is a managed switch, and someone had a password on it....the procedure to restore defaults (erase passwords) was an interesting stroll down memory lane.....I had to dig out my old console cable!!

[Uranium-235]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

picked up a working 3com 2948 (full gigabit) 48-port baseline switch for 10 bucks. Fans were obnoxiously noisy (bad not fast)....I couldn't take them apart without killing them either. Spent 11 bucks more for a pair of 40mm replacements (top motor)...now its quiet.

This is a managed switch, and someone had a password on it....the procedure to restore defaults (erase passwords) was an interesting stroll down memory lane.....I had to dig out my old console cable!!

check the caps. My SRW2048 had like 22 bad "stone" brand caps

[Topcat]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

check the caps. My SRW2048 had like 22 bad "stone" brand caps

I did. The mainboard had all polymer & tantalum, the PSU was all UCC & Rubycon. I had it apart for the fan replacement.

[Topcat]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

scored 8x 3ware 9500S-4LP controllers for a buck each....with a 128mb RAM module. These are PCI 2.2 complaint, great for use in retro builds, giving them a neat modern twist & performance upgrade....

[ratdude747]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

scored 8x 3ware 9500S-4LP controllers for a buck each....with a 128mb RAM module. These are PCI 2.2 complaint, great for use in retro builds, giving them a neat modern twist & performance upgrade....

Junk... Compared the 9550sx. Somewhere I did a comparison and after I determined that the 9550sx provides a substantial performance benefit. Did they have BBU's?

[Topcat]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Junk... Compared the 9550sx. Somewhere I did a comparison and after I determined that the 9550sx provides a substantial performance benefit. Did they have BBU's?

I think ya missed the point. PCI2.2 compliant. The 9550 isn't. These work in older stuff. Compared to ATA33/66/100, these scream, especially with Velociraptors, and have OS support all the way back to Win2k. These don't even have a BBU option, they're a pretty basic controller (good for what I'm using them for). Has a soDIMM slot on it for it's cache...I remember some of the scsi raid controllers had a full length SDRAM or DDR memory module slot on them.

I've scoured looking for a PCI2.2 complaint SAS controller....sadly, there's no such animal...