best cheap/free scores 1.1

[junktv]

This may help.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...er,2913-7.html

[ChaosLegionnaire]

lol dont assume anything just because it "feels" well built. a well built power supply can still use junk caps. post pictures of the insides in the power supply subforum and we will see.

[momaka]

Originally Posted by ChaosLegionnaire

lol dont assume anything just because it "feels" well built. a well built power supply can still use junk caps.

Most power supplies have junk caps, so this isn't such a big deal. On the other hand, a well-built power supply is good no matter which way you look at it, even if does have junk caps. Just recap and be done with it.

My 250 Watt HiPro tanks are full of Teapo and Asiacon (Hermei) caps. Despite that, I am not the least bit worried that they will fail and kill my hardware with them, because I know they are well-built.

That said, I am pretty sure that the LiteOn PS-5231-3M1-ROHS power supplies that grss1982 got are decent... so yes, I would agree with him that he got a good deal.
And if not, still think of all of the parts you are getting for $3... unlike the cheap PSUs, in which you'd be lucky to find a rectifier rated higher than 20 Amps or any decent input/output filtering parts.

But I agree with you... grss1982 should post pictures so we can see what is inside. I never plug in any PSU in my PC that I haven't opened, checked, and tested for proper function.

[ChaosLegionnaire]

yes true, i agree with you. good point. i have and know of a couple of well-built and well-performing power supplies with junk caps:

one example is the (in)famous (depending on how u wanna look at it) enermax liberty (ELTxxxAWT) power supplies. back when i bought it in 2008, i didnt know this psu was really hot (as in popular) and it was "geekily fashionable" to own one back then in 2006-2007.

anyway, they used jp-ce turd caps and conductive brown glue which eventually shorts out the power supply but from this review by hardware secrets, despite the use of turdy caps, the unit still posts one of the lowest ripple measurements for a power supply out there. guess u'll be saying credit goes to enermax for their engineering ingenuity for designing a power supply that can still have ultra-low ripple with turdy caps. the only other power supply i've seen with even lower ripple than that is the superflower leadex platform which i will talk about next.

take a look at this topic i posted about the superflower leadex silver which uses crapxon caps and still gets 12mv ripple on the minor rails! that is pretty unbelievable and many of us sure will be scowling at the use of crapxons and still getting ultra-low ripple out of those crapxons!

[TechGeek]

Tested an old Sparkle Power 300W PSU from the late 90s(AT and ATX motherboard connectors) and it works! VERY well built(weighs 7lbs. or something like that.) Managed to power my Dell Dimension 2400 just fine.

[momaka]

Found a nice little bike time pump yesterday on the side of the road. I've been meaning to buy one and leave it at my sister's house for a few years now (I have a bike there), but I kept forgetting every time. And now I don't have to buy a bike pump anymore. Just need to remember to bring this one next time I go.

[Topcat]

$26.00 from the goodwill store. HP XW8600 Workstation, off-lease from somewhere (had sticker crud all over the bay covers). No RAM, single 2GHz xeon, no HDD. Case is in great shape, just loaded with dust bunnies. GPU was a PCI (yes PCI, not PCIe) ATI card, not even sure what it is...

I have a spare pair of 3GHz 1600FSB E5472's from a roasted X7DWA and 32gb PC5300F RAM. I was pleasantly surprised to find that theres a LSI RAID controller onboard with native/hardware RAID support, including SAS hard drives. Kind of unusual for onboard, but good.

[momaka]

Small update on my PS3 and Presario V6000 laptop, if anyone cares:

The PS3 works!
I didn't have a controller, but a quick search online suggested you can use a USB keyboard as a basic tool to navigate through the menus. So I did that and was able to test it.

For some reason, though, the PS3 keeps trying to eject disks when it's powered on. So most of the time, it doesn't want to take in any disks. But when it does, it can read them (though, I still need to test that fully).

As for the Presario V6000 laptop:
The big disappointment is that it's NOT an early Core 2 Duo laptop, despite the model number suggesting so. In fact, the CPU is not even a dual-core. It's a single core 2 GHz Turion 64 MK-36.

I was right to suspect a GPU! The laptop has a GeForce Go 6150, and that was the problem, indeed. A quick reflow got it working again. Of course, I wanted to prevent (or at least delay) the laptop from failing again, so I also made a copper shim for the GPU chip. Not sure if that has improved the temperatures from before, or not.

Regardless, both the CPU and GPU seem to run quite hot. Typically I get around 50°C minimum for both the CPU and GPU and 65°C max for the CPU. The GPU max temperature is a bit lower at 55-57°C. But this was when testing in a fairly cool room temperature of 22-23°C. I have a feeling both will overheat in the summer here.

Does anyone else have this laptop or at least this CPU and GPU? I still don't understand why the CPU runs so hot. Perhaps because it's based on an old 90 nm technology? CPU-Z doesn't show it throttling down when idle, either, so I think that may have something to do with it.

Anyways, the HDD works, has zero bad sectors, and even booted to Windows XP Home. Even logged in automatically as the previous owner of this computer. But it looks like the OS was reinstalled, because the laptop has a Windows Vista Home Premium sticker on the bottom with a key. Then again, it's understandable why XP was put on there: with 1 GB of total system RAM, I don't know why anyone would even attempt to put Vista on that PC. I guess leave it to HP to be stupid like that.

That aside, I still can't get the audio to work. The hardware doesn't even appear in Device Manager. Quite a few people mention this problem online, but no one knows why that is. I see this laptop also has a nVidia MCP 430 Southbridge, so I wonder if the MCP 430 need a reflow as well. Does anyone have experience with these? I guess I will make a new thread on that laptop to keep this thread from going too off-topic. But it anyone still has a quick asnwer, I am all ears.

Oh, by the way, the wireless USB stick was working too. It's a LinkSys WUSB600Nv2. USB connector on the front looked really bent, but the contacts inside were alright (I checked). It's a wireless-N device, so it's quite snappy on a good connection.

Originally Posted by Topcat

$26.00 from the goodwill store. HP XW8600 Workstation, off-lease from somewhere (had sticker crud all over the bay covers). No RAM, single 2GHz xeon, no HDD. Case is in great shape, just loaded with dust bunnies.

Nice score, TC!
Good cases cost much more than that. Plus, I am sure the PSU that came with it was from one of the big OEMs (Delta, LiteOn, or HiPro/Chicony).

I myself found a thrift store very nearby. So far, nothing interesting there, though. But they are a good source for various PC and A/V cables, in case I need something on the spot. Grabbed a Molex->SATA adapter cable with a SATA HDD cable for 50 cents (I'm really starved for Molex->SATA adapters) and also a Molex->PCI-E adapter for graphics cards. Again, 50 cents. So for $1, I got two adapters that I actually need. The local computer store would have asked at least $5 for that, and they are almost the same distance from my house.

Originally Posted by Topcat

GPU was a PCI (yes PCI, not PCIe) ATI card, not even sure what it is...

Got a picture of it? I would guess either Radeon X1300 or an oldschool Radeon 9250.

[stj]

look up your cpu specs.
http://www.cpu-world.com/index.html

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Originally Posted by momaka

For some reason, though, the PS3 keeps trying to eject disks when it's powered on. So most of the time, it doesn't want to take in any disks. But when it does, it can read them (though, I still need to test that fully).

sounds like the tray loader may be damaged from too much pushing of the tray to close it rather than using the tray open/close button. looks like some disassembly of the optical drive is in order to check the tray loading gears, belt and mechanism.

if that doesnt work, it may be a weak laser. my mom had a panasonic dvd-ram recorder that had a weak laser and wouldnt recognise discs and kept (r)ejecting them. took quite awhile and many attempts at loading/ejecting the disc until it finally recognised the disc. u might also wanna clean the optical laser lens pickup while u're at it. sometimes something simple like a dirty lens can cause optical drive disc recognition issues and all it needs is just a simple, easy and quick fix: a lens wipe.

Originally Posted by momaka

As for the Presario V6000 laptop:
The big disappointment is that it's NOT an early Core 2 Duo laptop, despite the model number suggesting so. In fact, the CPU is not even a dual-core. It's a single core 2 GHz Turion 64 MK-36.

Does anyone else have this laptop or at least this CPU and GPU? I still don't understand why the CPU runs so hot. Perhaps because it's based on an old 90 nm technology? CPU-Z doesn't show it throttling down when idle, either, so I think that may have something to do with it.

based on this cpu list on wikipedia, that cpu has a tdp of 31w which imo is a bit on the high side for a laptop chip but not that high that u can cook an egg on it!

as for the cpu not throttling down, i heard that on the desktop versions of amd chips, it requires installation of some kind of cool n quiet driver for cpu idle throttling to work and the power scheme must be set to minimal power management. u might wanna check if some kind of amd powernow! driver is installed. powernow! is the laptop version of cool n quiet.

since u said the system appears to have been reformatted, most likely the guy or whoever did that neglected to install the powernow! drivers and configure the system power scheme correctly for cpu idle throttling to work.

Originally Posted by momaka

Regardless, both the CPU and GPU seem to run quite hot. Typically I get around 50°C minimum for both the CPU and GPU and 65°C max for the CPU. The GPU max temperature is a bit lower at 55-57°C. But this was when testing in a fairly cool room temperature of 22-23°C. I have a feeling both will overheat in the summer here.

based on my calculations, assuming a summer ambient of 30°C, they will overheat during the summer. the cpu would run at 72°C+ which is too hot to run an amd cpu. the gpu would run at 63-64°C+ which is over the bumpgate threshold. looks like that laptop will only be a three season spring-autumn-winter laptop.

[robertmaks]

I sorta found it in a dumpster, a Dell T610 server with 12GB of RAM and 2.5TB of enterprise grade hdd 6 of them with one set in RAID 1 and the other in RAID 5. I bought it off the scrap center for $10, which was a rip-off since he paid a guy $0.20 for it; but hey its a 300-400 dollar server on eBay and it has a Windows server 2008 R2 licence, so not a bad find. It luckily only had some scratches and small dents and worked no problem.

[momaka]

Originally Posted by ChaosLegionnaire

sounds like the tray loader may be damaged from too much pushing of the tray to close it rather than using the tray open/close button. looks like some disassembly of the optical drive is in order to check the tray loading gears, belt and mechanism.

Well, I just opened it today, and nothing appeared broken, as I though from the symptoms it had. I manually fed and ejected the disk a few times by spinning the eject motor gears, and everything worked okay. Disk detect switches were also okay. So I decided to assemble the drive with a DVD in there. Then put everything back together and powered on the PS3. Looks like everything is working okay now. Maybe it was just a software bug or something thinking there is a disk stuck in the drive and now with the DVD in there, it got cleared?

Oh well... next item on my list now: The Last of Us. I seriously can't wait to play that game, even though I've watched the play-throughs on YouTube quite a few times (since I never thought I'd buy a PS3 - not even a used one).

Originally Posted by ChaosLegionnaire

if that doesnt work, it may be a weak laser. my mom had a panasonic dvd-ram recorder that had a weak laser and wouldnt recognise discs and kept (r)ejecting them. took quite awhile and many attempts at loading/ejecting the disc until it finally recognised the disc.

No, the problem with this PS3 drive is that it didn't even want to take in the disks (it's got a slot-loading drive, so when you put like 1/3 of the disk in, the drive is supposed to take it in... like VCRs would take a tape). But this one didn't. If I did get it to take in a disk in though, it would read it fine. So definitely not a laser issue. Although I have yet to watch a full Blu-Ray disk to determine that. Maybe I will rent Avatar or something. That ought to give it a good long stress test (it's an almost 3 hour movie ).

Originally Posted by ChaosLegionnaire

based on this cpu list on wikipedia, that cpu has a tdp of 31w which imo is a bit on the high side for a laptop chip but not that high that u can cook an egg on it!

Yes, I saw that too. But I asked anyways, because I wasn't sure if that's how hot a 31 TDP CPU like that is supposed to run. I guess that being based on a 90 nm technology, it probably uses no less than 10-15 Watts idle, so perhaps that's why it runs hot. Oh wait, I just got an idea: time for the Kill-A-Watt meter!

Originally Posted by ChaosLegionnaire

as for the cpu not throttling down, i heard that on the desktop versions of amd chips, it requires installation of some kind of cool n quiet driver for cpu idle throttling to work

Ah, okay, I'll look into that. Though if I recall correctly, I do have that driver on a few desktop AMD Athlon 64 PCs, and it doesn't seem to do anything. No throttling there whatsoever. Only my X2 6000+ socket AM2 throttles. But I haven't seen a s939 Athlon throttle.

Originally Posted by ChaosLegionnaire

since u said the system appears to have been reformatted, most likely the guy or whoever did that neglected to install the powernow! drivers and configure the system power scheme correctly for cpu idle throttling to work.

Oh, you have no idea! Whoever did the install left off nearly half the drivers . When I went into Device Manager, there was more stuff with exclamation marks than there were installed drivers. No video (and a pun for nVidia? ), no LAN, no wireless, no modem, no SB, no sound driver, no USB 2.0, no keyboard shortcut keys... not even the damn CD/DVD drivers!

And the HP website was useless for the drivers (and really everything I tried to do, actually). I had to go to one of those drivers websites, despite not liking them at all.

Originally Posted by ChaosLegionnaire

looks like that laptop will only be a three season spring-autumn-winter laptop.

Yes, it's quite possible. Last week, shortly after I fixed it, I left the assembled laptop running on the carpet in my room. Within half an hour, both the CPU and GPU temperatures were over 60°C in idle. Load made them go as high as mid-70°C. But then I found the culprit: this laptop really needs to be put on a hard flat surface, and preferably elevated underneath where the CPU fan is. My laptop was missing the rubber feet in the back, so that made the cooling even worse. But I'm sure that even with those, the temperature wouldn't have been much better on my carpet. It just has a poorly-designed cooling system (or at least one not well fit for this CPU/GPU combo). As soon as I put the laptop up on one side, the temperatures dropped back to 50°C/60°C idle/load.
...
speaking of which, we had some warm weather the last few days here and it's over 25°C in my room right now. So I'll give the laptop a try and see how it runs now.

[stj]

laptops with intakes under them are stupid.
i hate them. I HOPE YOUR READING THIS - ACER.

my toshiba draws air in through the keyboard!!

[momaka]

Well folks, looks like the "regular" dumpster spot I go to has finally taken notice (either of me or other pickers), because I went there this weekend and I didn't see it. Instead, there were two small, brown, regular-type dumpsters in that area. In front of them were two orange cones with a tag hung between them that read "Private Property" in big red letters.

So I guess no more picking there. But we will see of course. I'll go check that place out again next weekend or so, and see if the sign and small dumpsters are still there. Perhaps this is only temporary.

Anyways, either way I had a good run from that dumpster. From my Gateway GT5656 PC (with Athlon 64 x2 6000+), to many random bits and pieces of scrap electronics boards (2 or 3 CRT TVs, some HVAC stuff with large capacitors, and thick Ni-Chrome heating coils), and a universal AC/DC 240V motor, among other small stuff.

My last finds from there (about two weeks ago) were:
- a 380 V, 7 uF motor run capacitor
- 240 V, 3000 Watt heating coil assembly from some kind of a device.

The heating coil assembly came just in time, as I was really planning on building a PSU load tester soon. Already had the necessary Ni-Chrome wires, but this is even better, because I have to do minimal work to set-up the loads, since each heating coil section has approximately 2 Ohms resistance. There are 10 of these sections to work with, so I could make a pure 12V load tester to draw a total of 10 x 6 Amps, or 60 Amps total (that's 720 Watts!) Also, the metal frame of the assembly will also greatly simplify the work I have to do. Sweet!

I love it when junk stuff comes just at the right time when I need it to fix/make something.

[Compgeke]

My brother brought home an GTCO Calcomp Interwrite 1040 board his school was throwing out. Works fine, even has a giant carrying case. Only downside is the thing's tiny and 4:3 meaning it's a pain to get a projector aligned and focused.

http://i.imgur.com/9bqFE8k.jpg

[joshnz]

Smashed up Dell latitude E6420 only thing that seems to have survived is the mainboard won't know in-till i get a hdmi to dvi adapter.

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Originally Posted by momaka

Well, I just opened it today, and nothing appeared broken, as I though from the symptoms it had. I manually fed and ejected the disk a few times by spinning the eject motor gears, and everything worked okay. Disk detect switches were also okay. So I decided to assemble the drive with a DVD in there. Then put everything back together and powered on the PS3. Looks like everything is working okay now. Maybe it was just a software bug or something thinking there is a disk stuck in the drive and now with the DVD in there, it got cleared?

No, the problem with this PS3 drive is that it didn't even want to take in the disks (it's got a slot-loading drive, so when you put like 1/3 of the disk in, the drive is supposed to take it in... like VCRs would take a tape). But this one didn't. If I did get it to take in a disk in though, it would read it fine. So definitely not a laser issue.

what i meant was that sometimes the tray or slot loading mechanism can sumtimes get fucked up for some reason.

for tray loaders, sometimes the disc isnt properly placed on the tray and the disc gets jammed between the tray and the top bezel of the drive. that happened to me before with my lg dvd burner while i was groping around in the dark working on my pc at night. after that, the drive then kept ejecting discs as soon as the tray closed even though the disc is properly placed on the tray this time. fixed it by opening up the drive and opening and closing the tray by hand on its normal range of movement then put everything back and it worked fine after that.

for slot loaders, maybe the loading mechnism can get messed up if u try to pull/withdraw the disc when the loading mechanism tries to suck/load the disc in. why someone would want to do that? i guess its probably a kid trying to play around with the ps3 dvd drive. if u do that, i guess it messes up the loading mechanism such that it no longer wants to even take a disc in. so by moving the loading mechanism around on its normal range of movement by "manually feeding and ejecting a disc a few times by spinning the eject motor gears" somehow "resets" the mechanism back to its default state and so it works properly once again.

thats how i fixed optical drives with disc loading issues and that was what i was trying to get u to do to try to fix the disc loading issue lol. i understand one needs to separate disc loading (a mechanical issue) and disc recognition (a laser issue) problems. glad that fixed it! lol~!

Originally Posted by momaka

Yes, I saw that too. But I asked anyways, because I wasn't sure if that's how hot a 31 TDP CPU like that is supposed to run. I guess that being based on a 90 nm technology, it probably uses no less than 10-15 Watts idle, so perhaps that's why it runs hot. Oh wait, I just got an idea: time for the Kill-A-Watt meter!

Last week, shortly after I fixed it, I left the assembled laptop running on the carpet in my room. Within half an hour, both the CPU and GPU temperatures were over 60°C in idle. Load made them go as high as mid-70°C. But then I found the culprit: this laptop really needs to be put on a hard flat surface, and preferably elevated underneath where the CPU fan is. My laptop was missing the rubber feet in the back, so that made the cooling even worse. But I'm sure that even with those, the temperature wouldn't have been much better on my carpet. It just has a poorly-designed cooling system (or at least one not well fit for this CPU/GPU combo). As soon as I put the laptop up on one side, the temperatures dropped back to 50°C/60°C idle/load.

i forgot to mention: did u check the cpu/gpu heatsink fin intake to see if it is clogged or blocked off with dust like on my ebay xfx 6800 ultra that ran at 99°C? i know u disassembled the laptop to reflow the mainboard but u didnt say anything about the condition of the heatsink or the clearing off of any of the dust bunnies in the heatsink fin fan intake.

also errr... did u properly reapply the thermal paste for the cpu & gpu or did u get lazy? im going to assume u did it all properly since u did the copper shim for the gpu as most likely the stock thermal paste on the cpu/gpu dried up since its quite an old latop... once again, u didnt get lazy or skip any steps, did u?

[mikay786]

When carboot this morning again after a while, too cold and too dark with too many vultures.

Anyhow did buy a Xbox 360 120GB HDMI model for £5. No controller but I had a couple at home anyway.

Was wrapped in a tacky looking vinyl wrap but easily removed. Surprisingly works perfectly and should be perfect for kids to play with.

[Compgeke]

Stopped at the County Surplus sale and grabbed a $10 Optiplex 780. Core 2 Duo E7500, 4 gigs ram, 250 gig HDD and the original Windows 7 disk.

Also grabbed an Impact Lighting VA903 from a thrift store for $12. Two bulbs are burnt out but it does have the diffuser and reflector. Same light is $190 from B&H Photo.

[Dan81]

Just scored a Pentium III 1GHz (Coppermine core),a QDI/Legend Advance 10F (P6V694X) and a TNT2 M64 32MB GPU.

The only thing which needed work on was the QDI motherboard. CPU caps are 1500uF 6.3v Panasonic CFF (Nichicon HD equivalent?) but every other 1000uF cap was made by Licon,which screams of pure crap. Since I had nothing else handy,I recapped EVERY Licon cap with OST RLPs,and it seems to work fine now. I even actually did this small test setup to see if installing Windows (used 98 first edition) works:

PSU - Premier DR-B300ATX (this is the one that had a blown fuse - fixed by replacing main switching transistors and rectifying diodes)
GPU - 32MB AGP TNT2 M64 32MB
ODD - Hitachi-LG GCR-8481B CD-ROM
MB - QDI Advance 10F/P6V694X
HDD - some 8 GB WDC Protege I had laying around from a dud original Xbox
Sound - Avance Logic ALS4000 PCI - will replace with a true SB16 CT2770 ISA card
RAM - 256MB
CPU- Intel Pentium III 1GHz/256KB L2/133MHz FSB Socket 370, Coppermine core.