Terrabyte's retro worklog

Hey everyone,

Decided I'd make a thread incase anyone was interested in looking at the crap I've collected and seeing what I do with it.

As some people now, I have a penchant for collecting things. However, sammiboy recently posted a wtb for some old SD-RAM and it got me digging which then got me reminiscing. So I finally decided to start sorting through my stuff, organising, trying to fix what's broken and collecting more stuff along the way! This thread will also hopefully help me keep track of some of my crap!

Let me know if there's anything you'd like more info/details/pics of.

I'll try and add where I got each item from and a rough price. I won't name any members I purchased stuff from, unless you give me permission

Also feel free to offer any retro hardware or pieces you see me missing, always on the hunt for the museum.


edit: this thread is going to get very messy I suspect but if I keep it up there should be enough content that it doesn't really matter what order it's looked at.

Stay tuned for more posts with Soltek, Epox, Abit, DFI and other now defunct brands!

 

Socket 7

30/3/25

Picked this board up as part of a big package deal. For the life of me I can't find a manufacturer or model # though. I've found a number of boards that come close but not this exact one. Anyone have any ideas?



Running an intel PCISET NB and SB (Intel 430VX I believe) 3 PCI slots, not 4 like I saw on a lot of them. 4 EDO slots and 1 SD ram slot. Has a coin cell battery holder rather than the Dallas RTC which is good (I'll have to brush up on how to replace those though with some of the other boards coming up).

 

Slot 1/Slot A

1/2/25 - Tested my first slot 1 board from the stash. Bought this guy from fleabay overseas. Paid a little too much for it but not terrible.
Intel MU440EX board:



No AGP but onboard vga (ATI Rage XL) and audio (Yamaha). I didn't do my research thoroughly enough though and CPU support is actually pretty limited. Turns out it only supports a 66mhz FSB . So alright for smellerons on a slocket adapter and a handful of a P2 models. Tried a P3 and it detects it as a Pentium pro at a much lower clock speed. Still working though so not going to complain too much. Also had some RAM come with it which was nice and they appear to be testing ok so far.

8-4-25

Next board out of the cupboard. A Jetway J-7ZXAN. ZX440 chipset, fitted with a slocket and a smeleron 400. But playing around with a slot 1 P3 550 atm. Tested the 3dfx voodoo 3 3000 in there, but no dice either.

 

Socket 370

28/1/25

After playing with the first 2 socket A boards. The next one to pull out of the shelf was a socket 370 MATX board. Purchased from OCAU. Came with a P3 1000B and 2x 512 MB sticks of PC133 SD-RAM.

The board in question an SL-65MIV


Had one puffy cap near the AGP slot:



Changed that guy out for a very tall new one :


I guessed the SL was for Soltek, and after a search that was correct! This board uses a VIA PM133 chipset and has a universal AGP 4x slot as well as having onboard VGA and audio. This board also takes 512mb SDRAM sticks for a maximum of 1.5gb. Unfortunately after running a quick memtest the 2 512mb sticks this one came with are showing errors. Will need more diagnosis as I ran out of time today.

2-2-25 - Unfortunately both those 512mb sticks that came with the soltek boards are testing bad . Not having much luck with memory atm! Ran it with a known good 128mb stick and board and CPU are passing memtest now.

Dug this guy out:



A Gigabyte GA6VXC7-4X. Kindly donated by a member of OCAU. Back part of the AGP slot is cracked but still working great.

Originally thought it was dead as I couldn't get it to boot at all. It had a celeron 700 already fitted to it and was labelled as such. However after digging through online stuff about this board (thank god for retroweb) I found 2 problems.

Here's the multi switch guide from Gigabyte's own user manual:



Here's the multi they say to use for a celeron 667 on the next page. 4 ONs:



The keen eye might notice that's not even a multiplier listed in their own manual. It should be a 10x multi which is OFF ON OFF OFF. However let's go to the Celeron 700 which this has running:



Funny, if we look at the multiplier table, that value of OFF ON ON ON corresponds to a 9.5 multi. But a celeron 700 with a 66mhz fsb has a 10.5 multi. Good to know that they've always been "gigashit".

However, no matter what multi I picked no dice. Looked at a bit more of the retroweb stuff and it mentions in the notes that:



No guesses for which revision this board is :/. Looks like the Celeron was just put in this board but never actually run. Absolutely no idea why just V3 of this board of 5 revisions doesn't support an entire model lineup of CPUs (As i mentioned earlier, typical gigashit).

Dropped in a P3 866, set the multi to 6.5 (which does have a correct example in the manual) and left the FSB at Auto. Booted straight up!

 

Socket A/462

28-1-25
Moving here second from my RAM post as the board I got out to test the RAM was next:

An MSI MS-6378X-L board. I picked it up from the flea markets for $5 a year or 2 ago with box! Had one slightly bulgy cap and fitted with a Duron 1300. Also the onboard VGA was great just for testing RAM. Shame it has no AGP. This board uses a VIA KL133A chipset I believe





One slightly bulgy cap:


Replaced with a nichicon:


Getting this board up and running fueled the fire a bit, so the next one I pulled off the shelf was a purchase from OCAU:


An MSI KT2 combo with an Athlon XP 1600+ fitted. Via KT266A running on this guy and supports much newer CPUs than the board above. Supports both DDR and SD-RAM (not at the same time though) and has an amazing red colour scheme. One of my favorite socket A boards.


No bulgy caps or repairs required on this guy and it booted up straight away with no issues. Helped me double check with some of my testing of the 512mb PC133 ECC/REG sticks as they had no trouble booting on this board either.

I did however need a GPU as there's no onboard VGA, so I used an AGP Asus magic V7100. See the GPU post for more details!


28-1-25 post #2

Moving back to socket A, the next item I pulled out of the cupboard was a complete desktop I purchased at the fleamarkets last weekend for the princely sum of $10.

A Compaq Presario S3260AN. According to the specs on the side fitted with an Athlon XP 2800+, 256mb RAM, 120gb HDD and a geforce 4 MX440 128mb.

I noticed it had a very decent amount of corrosion on the backside, but I took a gamble and figured hopefully I could scavenge a few parts out of it at least.





First thing I did was plug it in and see if it booted, which I knew was a terrible idea considering the corrosion and crust. Half expecting a bang, it powered up fine. Unfortunately no boot, but better than I anticipated. I tried the CD drive but it was completely unresponsive... not a great sign!

Stripped it down ready for testing, pulled the CD drive out and found out why it wasn't working. Not a great start if I want to salvage anything from this box:



One of the other things I noticed though was the board is actually an Asus A7N8X-VM. A very, very nice MATX nforce 2 motherboard with an IGP. I was really hoping I could get it working.

However, after pulling it out it had a couple of sections that looked to be water damage. Above the firewire header and above the IO header. Looked like it could possibly be bridging capacitors amongst other things.





Cleaned everything up with a toothbrush, contact cleaner, isopropyl and a couple of scraper tools.

Board still wouldn't boot, no beep codes either which wasn't a great sign.

Pulled both sticks of RAM out and I got beep codes! Signs of life!

Swapped sticks around a few times and found one of the sticks stops the board booting and also doesn't generate any boot codes which was a bit unusual. Possibly a reason the machine got retired however many years ago!

A very nice, no fuss powerhouse of a board:




2-2-25 - Had a bit of an issue when retesting the A7N8X-VM. It would power on immediately when the power supply was plugged in, and would boot for a couple of seconds before powering off. Almost like the power button was being held in.

Pulled the front IO connector off the board and found some uncleaned water damage.



Cleaned it all up and reassembled but was still having the same issue. So found some wiring diagrams and started testing the circuit. Resistance looked normal and would short at the PSU connector as normal. Desoldered part of the circuit to double check but still couldn't';t work out where the fault was:



Put everything back together and finally worked out what the fault was... I was using a different PSU to the one I was using originally. This POS Antec HCG 900 seems to hate some of these older boards. It shows the 5v across the power on pins but over a few seconds drops to zero and powers off. And it won't power back on until it's unplugged and reset. Put the board back on my corsair 1500 and it's working as expected! So that was a giant waste of time!

Anyway onto another board, the legendary NF7-S!!



Bought from here with an Athlon XP 2200+ and some ram, everything tested well.

Then moved onto this bad boy! Another legend, an Athlon XP 2500+. Bought from here and came in the greatest packaging.



Thought it was begging for some 400FSB 3200+ speeds in the NF7-S just like it was 2005. Unfortunately, not to be. No matter what I did, can't get it to boot in the NF7-S. Thought the CPU may have been faulty but it boots fine in the Asus board. The Abit is running a custom D23 3dfire bios, which should be able to run the 2500+ fine I thought, but will have to flash something else on it and see how we go. A journey for another day though!


9-2-25

Back to the compaq machine so I can start having a few "complete" boxes.

Repasted CPU, gave the case a good vacuum, tried to clear bits of corrosion as best I could. Floppy drive and CD drive are toast though:


Inspected the PSU and it was all good. Worked a bit on the front IO





All done! Unfortunately even though it's an Nforce2 board it has no SATA . So refitted the Samsung 120gb PATA that it came with originally.



24-2-24

Dug this little dude out, a Gigabyte GA-7VRXP. First board I've found with PATA raid in the collection.



Chucked in a duron CPU i bought from here and some RAM and away she went:





This board's a little limited as it's only a KT333 chipset and my memory failed me as I thought that might have meant it supported 333 FSB chips. No dice, only 333mhz DDR speeds. So it'll still take everything but the top end Thoroughbred and Barton chips at least.

 

Socket 478

9-2-25

This here is a HP pavilion t560a:



Found it on the side of the road last year waiting for a council cleanup. Glad I saved it!

Little bit of corrosion here and there, and missing the HDD (mount still there though). Specs are:
P4 2.8ghz, 512mb DDR, FX5100 GPU







Pulled the board out to start testing:



After a bit of research it's a variant of an Asus P4SD-LA. Springdale 865 chipset, very nice bit of kit!

Wouldn't boot to begin with, powered on but nothing, no beep codes or anything.

Tried reseating the ram and turns out that's all it needed! Running with no issue. Completed a few rounds of memtest with no errors.

I then pulled the PSU to reuse it but it's got a few issues. See the Power supply section for more details.

Cleaned up the case with a wire wheel, gave it a really good vacuum and replaced the PSU with one that mostly fits



Pulled the heatsink to repaste and found HP skimped a bit, it's a 2.8/512/400 northwood P4. But still not complaining for a freebie!!



Put it all back together with a 128gb SSD fitted this time (board has 2x SATA)



24-2-25

Couple of other S478 boards and setups now:

How about this classic rig, complete with carry handle! Was gifted to me from a generous OCAU member:









It's an intel 850 board with a P4 1.8. Didn't try and boot it yet as some of the caps are in a bad way.



Stay tuned for that one's recapping and see if it boots

Next up. Found this board in the pile of parts.

A Gigabyte 8ig1000mk. First board I've found that doesn't have an entry on retroweb!

It is nearly identical to a gigabyte 8ig1000mf just with a different model NIC.

I thought for sure this one might be dead. I don't recall where I got it from, it was missing bios battery, CPU ram and wasn't even in antistatic bag.



Parts installed and once I worked out the right jumper combo it booted straight up!



Ran a few memtests with no issues, so call that a win! Will do some more thorough testing later but for now that's a pretty nice matx 478 board to have around.

20-3-25

Parts arrived for the intel 850 board above.





Some shiny new caps!

Also found this board, a nice MSI SIS chipset Socket 478 board. With some very very crusty caps. Despite the label stuck on it, it's actually a P4 2.4/800 fitted. Will need to check FSB settings etc.







All replaced:



30-3-25

Started testing the boards that were recapped. Had a bit of trouble with a couple.

The intel 850 booted up after a few CMOS resets and power cycles. Been a while since I've seen this splash screen:



The MSI board wouldn't boot to begin with. Have a look at this flex without being mounted in a case too:





Played around with it for a bit and then decided to check the CPU and check some of the settings out. It looks like this chipset doesn't even support 800mhz fsb chips like this one. But I pulled it out and was greeted with this:



Gotta cool those caps somehow! Swapped the P4 1.8A from the intel 850 board into and it booted straight away, phew! Will clean up the original P4 chip and test it in another board when I get some time.

This guy is one of my most recent purchases from OCAU. I thought I was buying a socket 423 board as that was what was in my WTB thread, but my fault for not checking the model number. It's an ASUS P4B-MX





I went to mount a heatsink on to get ready to test and found 3/4 of the mounting bracket corners snapped off . A little disappointing.



Fortunately a couple of people on thingiverse have uploaded models for 478 retention brackets, so I printed one out.



Working great so far, no idea how it will hold long term but it got me by for testing.

 

Socket 754 & 939.

28-1-25 - While I had the soldering iron out I dug around to find a board I purchased from OCAU in need of repair.

A legendary DFI LANPARTY nF4. Socket 939 board with an Nforce 4 chipset.Sold with an Athlon 64 4000+ in there.



2 bloated caps next to the CPU. Both 1500UF:


Replaced:


Now this guy was purchased as a non-runner and I was hoping it may have been the caps causing the issues.

No dice to begin with though after they were replaced. Tried to get it to boot and would immediately fail with memory issues. Played around with slots and sticks and eventually got it to move on from there. Then it was hanging on GPU. Tried a few different cards and a number of them would cause the board to stop powering up properly. It would start for < a second and shut off. I recall that being the main fault when I purchased the board.

After some fiddling found if you swapped the graphics card you had to power the board off at the PSU and leave it for a bit before trying again. This still didn't fix the boot issue hanging on the GPU.

Worked out it just seems to hate a number of my newer GPU's. Dug out a Radeon 5570, powered it off at the wall, left it for a bit, tried again and tada! I also remembered to plug in the extra molex power input on the board which may have helped.



Very happy with that. Currently a couple of hours into a memtest with some basic DDR memory to verify some stability.

 

Socket 775 & newer

 

RAM

28/1/25 -
I'll start with RAM as that's what got me motivated to start testing my hardware. sammy_b0i, posted a wtb looking for 4x512mb sticks of ecc. I knew I had some from a server pull down 15+ years ago and I dug them out:


2x512mb PC133 Registered ECC and 2x 1gb PC133 registered ECC. The ICs on the 1gb sticks are double stacked which I thought was pretty cool.


4x 512mb PC133 Registered ECC


But of course then I needed a way to test them. As it turns out back in at least the SD-RAM days as far as I can tell northbridges didn't care if your ram was ECC or fully buffered. If it couldn't use the functionality it just ran them as standard sticks!

First board I found that took SD and had a CPU heatsink fitted was this an MSI MS-6378X-L - See the Socket A post for more details.

Had to dig out a PATA CD drive so I could load good old UBCD and run memtest.

So I started testing the sticks.

Unfortunately I ended up with issues with 3 of the 512mb sticks. One wouldn't post, one wouldn't show up more than 6mb available and one errored out in memtest.

Not really a screen I like to see:


Spent a while troubleshooting and ended up getting the stick that wouldn't post to finally show up after many reseats. Unfortunately it also showed errors in memtest.

Decided to take a calculated risk and see if I could fix the stick that kept showing an error in memtest as it was only coming up at the same spot (324MB).

The stick that only had 6mb showing appeared to have identical ICs. All text on it was the same. So I thought maybe it could be a donor for the first stick as that seemed to be the easier of the two to fix.

I had a bit of a guess where the faulty IC may be on the first stick. The stick has 18 memory chips in total, 2 are for the buffer, leaving 16 for storage. 512mb / 16 = 32mb. So I had another guess which might be IC #1 and started counting from there. Ended up on chip #11.

Pulled out my hot air station and got to work:

Prepped with flux:


Chip off:


Chip off donor board:


installed on the stick:


And......

Didn't post after the IC swap :/. Swapped the IC's back and the chip posted again but same issue at the same spot in memtest. So I give up on that one for now.

However, there was some good news. I decided to look closer at the other stick showing memtest errors. I noticed 2 legs on neighbouring ICs that looked to possibly have a poor connection once I got it under a magnifying glass.

The possible poor connections:



After solder:



And..... it went through a pass of memtest! Obviously needs a more thorough go, but it definitely couldn't do one pass before the work was done to it.

So ended up with 6 of the 8 sticks working and the 2 that have issues are from the same pair.


2-2-25 - Spending a lot of time testing memory so far, just to get a baseline for what's working and what's not.

Getting an awful lot of this at the moment unfortunately!



So far we're down 5 sticks of SD-RAM and 2 sticks of DDR. with many more casualties to come I'm sure.

Got these cool guys out of the cupboard that were bought from here:



1gb set of Mushkins and 2gb set of mushkins. So far the 1GB pair are testing well in the DFI board after a number of reseats. Haven't got up to the 2gb pair yet.

Also dug these out. I've held onto these for a very long time and I believe they were in my first socket 754 board.




I wish I still had my BH5's from my early days. Does anyone remember the group buy on here in around 05/06? Was a computer shop in WA and it was a pair of Mushkin BH5's. As I recall all the Mushkin sticks got sent out but none of them were booting, Mushkin blamed the scanners at the airport for wiping the timings on their sticks (which sounded pretty sus to me). Then TEAM came in and saved everyone if I remember rightly by sending out their own sticks as replacements. My friends and I ran those Team BH5 sticks for many years. I still like buying team memory to this day because of that.


24-2-25 -

Still doing lots of memory testing. Finding a very decent number of sticks that won't post or fail memtest.



Haven't tested these yet but hoping they're still good. Will look really nice in the right board (Maybe I'll try and find a soltek board in gold to match??)

 

GPU

28/1/25 - Following on from my socket A post as I needed a GPU to post the MSI KT2 combo board.

Asus magic V7100 AGP. Bought this dude from eBay about a year ago for $50. A little pricey but I was buying a few other things from the same seller at the time. It's a Geforce 2 MX200 32mb card. I always wanted a Geforce 2 as I never actually owned a 1 or a 2 when I was younger, my first cards were hand me down TNT's and the such and when I was old enough to afford my own hardware a Geforce 3 was my first purchase.

No hardware issues with this card that I could see and booted immediately on the MSI KT2 combo board!



I kind of miss the gold/brown PCB. I also noticed the model stickers on the card referring to it being called a "PURE" as well as "MAGIC". After some digging they look to be essentially the same thing, Asus' model naming for these geforce 2's looks a little convoluted.

28/1/25 post #2:

After stripping the compaq presario desktop and getting the board working I moved onto it's GPU. It was filthy and took a number of reinsertions of the VGA plug due to the amount of rust/corrosion but eventually it booted. A nice little Geforce 4 MX 440 128mb AGP 8x card.

This particular card is an Asus V8170 with TV out (S-Video and RCA). Compaq fitted some pretty decent components to this box:



While I had the soldering iron out I remembered another GPU I purchased from OCAU that needed some love. 2 caps bloated on this Geforce 4 MX 440 64mb low profile card.






Caps replaced. Card booted up fine and I really like the red PCB purple heatsink as well




While digging that card out I unwrapped another purchase from OCAU. One of my favourite lines of GPU's a leadtek geforce 4.



This particular one is an Leadtek Winfast A250 LE which is a Geforce 4 Ti4200 128mb AGP 8x card. Absolutely loved the wraparound heatsinks on these. This particular model is the Myvivo variant as well, which has a header for video inputs to record footage on your PC. I remember having a Radeon 9600Pro MyVivo model as a kid so we could move videos from the VCR onto the home PC for editing.

Anywho, I checked the card over and noticed an interesting repair someone's made. 2 of the caps have been replaced with a new single one. I assume both the caps were in series, will see if I can do some research and find out why it may have been done this way.




A bit of a teaser for a coming post:



2-2-25 - Haven't gotten up to testing some of the cards above yet, hopefully soon. Pulled this out of the cupboard:



A nice black Aopen Aoelus Ti4200 AGP 8x card. Unfortunately it doesn't boot and looks to have had some smd caps resoldered in the past. However it was sold to me as non working I believe so no problem. Will look at this one when I've got some more time.

This guy I have held on to for a while:



Voodoo 3 3000 AGP. Unfortunately, it's not booting in any of the boards, will need to do some more diagnostics.

24-2-25 -

Going through some of the other basic AGP cards. Rescued this survivor with some decent corrosion.





Scraped it back pretty harshly. (It got cleaned up better than this though) and to my surprise the card runs again. Haven't done any thorough testing so will need to do that at some point.



An XFX 6600GT AGP I found in the trash. Unfortunately no boot and I haven't found any obvious faults yet, but I'll have a better look later as I'd really like to save it.



I needed some decent PCI cards to fit out some systems without AGP. First one to arrive was this, an ATI 9250 PCI:



Bought from ebay and sold as faulty/parts. I thought I found the fault straight away in the images on ebay (notice the crooked transistor):



However once I got the card it looks like it's actually been soldered that way. I'm no electronics expert so I thought I'd try and do some more research about why it might be setup like that, however I found what may be the actual fault on the back of the card. At least 2 broken off and missing resistors.





I haven't had any luck finding a circuit diagram (no surprise there) so I'm just going to give it a shot replacing them with common resistor sizes around those areas. Which happen to be mostly 56 ohm ones. Have ordered replacements and they should be here soon.

20-3-25

56 ohm resistors arrived and soldered a couple to the broken 9250 PCI above. Also re-soldered the transistor on the front of the card:



(pic coming soon of new resistors)

And she lives!!!



Haven't done any full testing but booting is a good start!

Purchased a PCI FX 5500 off ebay. One of the chinese remanufactured cards. Wanted something to run in some of my "newer" boards that are missing AGP.



Unfortunately, it's completely dead :/. I already knew they were quite picky about boards but I've now tried it in 7 different boards and absolutely nothing but VGA errors. Pretty dissapointing! Have reached out to the ebay seller with videos showing my other PCI cards working great but this new one spitting the dummy.

30/3/25

After a lot of discussion with the ebay seller, I got sent a new FX5500 PCI. This one actually works which is nice! As expected they're not a great performer though, but still better then some of the onboard solutions.



In comparison this is a Ti4200 with the same drivers.

 

Other hardware, power supplies, Sound cards etc.

28-1-25 - Pulled this little nugget out of the Compaq Presario box. Someone had upgraded from the onboard audio at some point in it's life. Always makes you wonder who loved this PC once upon a time.



Soundblaster CT4810, I may already have one and I have other higher end sound blaster models but still a very useful addition to the collection.

2-2-25 - Found this picture from last year when I found some of my gaming collection from eons ago.



9-2-25

Inspected the Hipro power supply that came with the Compaq socket A machine. Everything looked decent enough aside from a very decent amount of cobwebs and bits of bugs. So gave it a vacuum and back into service



Not so lucky with the power supply in the HP 2.8 machine though:

Pulled the main caps and inspected them and they weren't terrible (the brown crap is just glue/dampener).



Found one crispy resistor and pulled it to prepare ordering a new one. But upon further inspection kept finding more and more damaged resistors. No longer worth salvaging . Pulled a few caps and the fan and scrapped the rest.







24-4-25 -

Pretty nice soundblaster live 5.1. Should go well in one of the more recent builds.

 

Macintosh's

2-2-25 Excuse the crappy pic, can't find the original at the moment. But this is Max and Macs:



Started a little mini-museum of Macintosh's. Still have a couple of other machines not up there yet, need to reorganise the shelves. Some bought from FB some came from fleamarkets and others just appeared. There's a mac 512k, iMac G4, powermac G3 & G5, emac, couple of different coloured imac G3's and a Performa 5200CD.

8/4/25

Picked this up a couple of weeks ago from OCAU. A powerbook G3!

 

Laptops

 

I'm keen to see what you've been doing and I am jealous of your equipment and skillz.

 

Alrighty that's probably enough for today. Will add some more motherboards and some pics of the Mac collection in the coming days.

 

Smallish update to some of the sections, slow going, mostly doing memory testing atm.

 

Woops, forgot to add my first gigabyte board (and you'll see my bias come out) and first voodoo card

 

Worked on these 2 beauties today. I paid $10 between the 2.



I've added some details to the socket A, socket 478 and PSU sections today.

I've also created a WTB thread to feed my addiction: https://forums.overclockers.com.au/threads/terrabytes-retro-wtb-thread.1351124

 

Man I still remember my parents buying one the exact same as the HP on the left!

 

Small update on a couple of the posts. Working on some of the cars atm. As well as refurbishing a couple of laptops for people.

New DC barrel jack and trackpad port:







Also any excuse to get out the mini spot welder, excuse the crappy electrical tape it was made much neater after I finished: