I bought 3 beige retro PCs for 30 EUR
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- čas přidán 11. 10. 2021
- So I bought 3 beige PCs and some bags of peripherals for 30 EUR
Not really sure why ... I was in the market for some early 2000 machines, and I always like the idea of buying something where I don't always know what I end up getting. I actually offered 15 EUR, we agreed on 25EUR, but ended up paying 30 EUR because he had no change :)
In this case I did spot a nice Antec tower but other than that these are just 3 random beige PCs.
So let's see what we got for 30 EURs. - Věda a technologie
oo nice! I just got an Athlon XP 1700+ PC for free! was stored in a storage shed for at least 15 years
My favorite thing to do is open and investigate an unknown pc. Love it
Same here ... you never know what you're going to get.
@@RetroSpector78 excellent video man!
I spy with my little eye: a few capacitors are bad on the Asrock motherboard! 😁
I’m almost 100% for certain that the board will boot stable with 2, 3 or even 4 DIMM’s, after you’ve replaced the capacitors. :)
Same for the GPU. One capacitor is really fat :) Replace those bad boys and you should have a working and stable system
Basic
those caps looks to be part of the ram voltage supply. it might be that the stability is barely enough to run with that particular single ram stick, but it was too bad for two sticks. I think recapping it would bring it back to a working order as you've said.
I wonder the brand of the capacitors with cross mark on the top, could it happen to be GSC?
am i wrong? Or should Dual-Channel Sticks put in different colored slots?
There's a bulging cap right next to the RAM slots. I'm pretty sure that cap is used for stabilizing the Vmem power rail. So if the cap is flaky (which it most definitely is), you will get an extremely noisy power supply to the RAM sticks. The ripple will get worse the more power you draw, which explains why the system won't POST at all with more than one stick installed, and flaky with even one stick.
I'm positive that the board would run with all RAM slots populated when the caps are replaced.
Yeah either doing that or overvolting if possible on the ram slots too compensate for it dropping in voltage from aged capacitors.
@@Mini-z1994 The problem is not the voltage dropping, but the voltage not being a stable DC. Without a capacitor to smoothen out the sharp spikes of the switching voltage regulator, the RAM will keep glitching out regardless of the voltage.
The thing is I was able to install windows 98, play games and run benchmarks. Would running the RAM in dual channel be that more demanding ?
@@RetroSpector78 Well, two RAM sticks draw double the power of a single one :)
@@RetroSpector78 Well, 2 sticks of RAM instead of just one means doubled power draw. Also, the bulging capacitors will at some point leak their contents and cause severe damage to the motherboard.
Its the IBM Open Architecture design that has made these computers so resilient, durable, and enduring. That’s why most everyone uses the IBM Standard PC over the other computers. Because they are easy to fix and upgradable. “Right-to-Repair” compliant computers.
Oh yeah IBM really loved having standard stuff. That's why they made microchannel 🙄
Clear the CMOS, you wouldn't believe how many times doing that solved strange problems with these old computers
Flashing the BIOS would probably help it out.
@Lassi Kinnunen 81 EEPROMs don't last forever. The times I've seen it flashing never helps either. The chip actually goes bad. So flashing it the chip is still bad. It's not like the BIOS flags bad sectors or anything. But you can hope a flash fixes it. Everyone tries. I think the problem was more pronounced in older hardware. Chips were just not made as good in the past. The process was poorer. So a greater chance for failure.
Or new battery
and modern ones! My 7 year old laptop had a fan, ram, and wifi chip issue with a cmos clear. (honestly i should probably replace the battery because its happened 3 seperate times)
So that has solved so many problems when it comes to troubleshooting for me.
Two capacitors near de ram slots are also not good anymore. These are near the ram voltage regulators. If I was you, I would replace all three capacitors. And throw away those two power supplies with the 300 and 350 watt mini sticker. Those are very, very bad. I have worked with these power supplies.
Those PSUs are what wasted the motherboard caps. the PSU puts out excessive ripple which in turn hammers the caps on the MB. Takes a bit of time to make the caps fail. Maybe a couple weeks? Happens eventually though.
Nicely hunted retro PCs. Greetings from Karachi, Pakistan.
I think the monitor is key to make for a good deal. 30 euro is not a great sum at all, a working monitor is always something useful to have around, and it, therefore, secures some value. Whatever happens next, you're not going to waste all of the money, and from there on you can just relax and have fun tinkering with those PCs.
Nice to get a bunch of random stuff on the cheap. Earlier this week picked up a NEC Powermate 286, a 486 with a Soundblaster Pro 2 card and a bunch of random isa cards for about $80 AUD. I passed up purchasing a rare computer a Canon AX-1 from 1978. Could have got it cheap but too damn bulky and heavy and virtually no info on the net about it. The biggest enemy of any retro collector is space, theres never enough of it.
Heyyyy! I just built a dual Celeron in that Antec Performance case! Nice little case. Heavy for its size! It’s from back when they were still made with _all_ the metal.
17:25 according to the manual i think that the motherboard wants DDR1/DDR2 at 133MHz in the blue slots OR DDR3/DDR4 at 200 MHz in the black slots. Board refuses to use DDR1/DDR2 in the black slots, refuses DDR3/DDR4 in the blue slots, refuses 200 MHz in the black slots, refuses 133 MHz in the black slots 🤔
I had a desktop that was working just fine. It was placed in storage for 4 years. When I removed it and tried to boot, it wouldn't start. I had to take out the memory modules and clean the contacts, then reinstall before it would boot.
Dlink routers of
that era were horrendous.
One thing I am used to try out on any atx Mainboard featuring a speaker or speaker-port is to provoke bios / uefi fault codes for example by starting them up without any memory installed. This is an easy way to find out if the bios / uefi is even working without installing a POST-Card. If the system is detecting no memory and reporting this fault you could be shure the first bytes of the bios / uefi are working.
After working on a whole lot of PC systems I am confident to say these ASRock-Boards are not the best ones to get. I know them to be budget releases and trade them like what they are.
If these kinds of boards are'nt working, I am used to throw them away because the mostly are a big time waster.
The problem of failing Dual-Channels on DDR I platforms is mostly easy to avoid with forcing the board to interleave the memory by putting the modules in different coloured slots.
i've had older boards do some weird stuff with swollen/popped caps. that asrock board had a few bad caps around the RAM and CPU sockets. they'll cause issues with timings and power delivery and possibly even issues with drive i/o. i'd recap it if you plan on keeping that one. nearly all of the early 2000s boards suffer from the bad cap plague.
Will see ... would be interesting to find out if the failure to boot in dual channel mode is somehow related to the caps.
Bulgy capacitors can definitely cause the motherboard not doing anything. :) They also can cause weird behaviour. Especially if there are many of them, like on the AsRock Socket 939 MoBo.
Don't you love it when people write the drive letter on the optical or floppy drives? Nice buy, I would have grabbed it myself.
Some nice systems for the money. The two optical drives in a computer seems to be a common thing for the time period. My own systems included.
Yeah pretty generic. Was hoping to find a half decent video card somewhere but no such luck unfortunately.
Ive got one - its worth recapping and keeping it - socket 939 AGP boards are getting scarce and fetch a good price on ebay - it also supports 64bit AMD CPUs dual core - mines running a 4800 X2 - so recap it and also set the ram to the 200mhz in the bios - might solve your problem and make sure you clean the ram slots - btw that zalman cooler is pricey on ebay as well
That cap being blown out would definitely cause problems.
I bought that middle case from Antec and used it for years. I built and rebuilt in it many times over. I still think it was the coolest version of the old beige cases that you could get. Great case and it even came with an Antec PSU in the box, which are legendary PSU's. I've been brand loyal to Antec for years now due to this case and their PSU's. /end fanboi/
An AMD 939 ❤️... Great video!
I have almost the same motherboard from the 3rd PC, frankly nice recovery, good video :) !
I had ram issues linked to bulging capacitors
13:30 busted cap on the left... Socket 939 was still during the capacitor plague too. Sometimes it helps to to disable fast boot memory so it gets more time to train the RAM, if they already had that back then.
will try that thx for the tip.
there was some bad capacitor around the ram, wondring how you didnt see them.
one bad cap in red agp vga card.
also check for power supply bad caps if you have that much bad cap in MotherBoard should be some bad caps in PSU.
I think the motherboard manual meant that the black slots were for one memory channel and the blue for the other. So I would recommend putting one DIMM in one of the blue slots and another in the corresponding black slot. From my personal experience the slot farthest from the CPU for each channel gives the best stability.
No. The manual’s diagram showed both blue or both black or all four.
I worked on a PC with that exact same motherboard, and they are extremely picky about when to turn on. In fact, the ASRock boards from that time period tend to be, as I've also had issues with a similar Pentium 4 board. At one point, it literally refused to boot because I'd put in an IDE cable for the hard drive that it didn't like!
The joy of working on computers.
nice find ..
Anything related to old computers I just love. Troubleshooting is just part of it. Any system can run some games and this is cool
Yeah the discovery process and finding out what works and (mostly) what doesn't is pretty interesting
Definitely looking forward to check out the other two machines! Nice video, by the way! 👍👍
I'm confused, was it really so back in the day that Dual RAM setup was done by putting them next to eachother?
Today at least, it's done by having one stick in each channel.
Guess it depends on the type if motherboard and how the wiring is done internally ? Dunno if there is an industry standard for this. In this case according to the manual at least, for dual channel operation they need to be in the same colored slots.
@
RetroSpector78 9:48 Another next to CMOS battery. It's worth to give a shot, replace him and CMOS battery. Sometimes on old MOBOs CMOS battery can cause no post in case when it's completely dead, because it supplies IC for chipset clock singnal...
@12:15 cap blown up on the left, near IDE header
Yep that's the one I also noticed.
I like the idea of those mobile racks, I bought some a few months ago :-)
5:52 is that a Zalman Flower cooler and an attached Zalman fanmate!
i'm most interested in seeing if you do a retrobrite session with all these incredibly yellowed cases!
im using an Athlon 64 for my XP machine. Seems like your going to need another shelf ;-)
Someone who doesn't call an optical drive a disk drive! This seems to be the modern naming of those drives but it's always weirded me out, as the disk drive was always the 3.5" / 5.25" drive (or 8" for the REALLY old viewers)
Totally worth it! Just for the parts alone. Good find...
I have had a lot better hauls. Picked up a 15 eur soundblaster 2.0 the other day. But also like these types of purchases. you never know what you're going to find and 30 eur is not the end of the world.
Thats a lot of old thermal gunk on that cpu!
RAM modules have to be prepared to work in pairs, so checking that they have the same producer and model, even parameters may be not enough.
@
RetroSpector78 8:02 Look, damaged cap close to VGA connector. :O
Don't call it crap. I find it very exciting to open up 20 year old PCs and check them out. But beware the caps. Just because they look good that doesn't mean they're not going to bulge and vent in the very same minute you switch on the PSU. I've seen that myself. I believe caps from that era that were not powered for many years somehow deteriorate more than others.
Look up capacitor reforming or capacitor forming. There is an oxide layer inside the capacitor that breaks down over time and has to be reformed to make the capacitor work again. You do that by slowly bringing the voltage up on the capacitor and then holding it for a period of time. Doesn't always work.
"I can hear you guys thinking, why make such a purchase?"
I suspect your audience are thinking they'd make the same purchase - I know I would!
Not necessarily, I'm not usually interested in post-2000 machines. I've started picking up some parts here and there before it all gets too expensive though, because I know I'll want a GeForce 4 setup one day!
Worth it for the Antec case alone. Everything else is a bonus. I would’ve seriously questioned any retro fan’s sanity for passing this lot up!
I certainly would choose to pay 25 British pounds equivalent for all 3 and extras..except i'm already overloaded with early to mid 2000s towers and cube cases..i've spent a lot more for 3 PCs than this video..but i'm pleased with my collection of about a dozen..
It depends om shelf space and complaining wives. but what the eye doesn't see...
one mobo and case looks the same as another.
...and the Power Suply in the Case with the loose Motherboard is also something that should be used as "for spares" too...
Another Linkworld it seems...
Already jealous from the notification lol. Great find!
30 euros not bad, they are like kinder surprises never know what you will find inside
Hehe exactly :)
that ISA LAN card would go for 1/3 of the price you payed for the entire set :)
I had a full tower version of the Antec... Only changed it for a CoolerMaster Stacker in 2005. I'm still using that case today, believe it or not. It has gone thru like 5 complete upgrades.
The zalman cpu cooler is a classic run so many of these on my rigs back in the day, beings back so many memories
yeah like the look of that one. Those stock AMD coolers were pretty loud if I remember correctly.
@@RetroSpector78 they sure were
Nice haul for the money. I am finding that non-retro-savvy owners getting rid of their stuff have at least understood there's an active market in "beige goods", so prices are going up.
I personally prefer the AOpen case! 😊
I used to have one of those motherboards, and they were very picky about Ram.
30e for all that. yeah a robbery :p
TIP: if a system does not boot /beep...
Then test with only M/B + CPU + Speaker until you get some beep... then add stuff like ram.
I picked up a boxed voodoo 3 3000 agp today for 12 euro.🎉🎉🎉
Wanna trade ? :)
How
É o preço aqui no meu país. Média de 200, 300 reais
Il like the AMD 64 platform. Run such one for a long time, paired with an ATI 9800 Pro.
@Retrospecter78 Had I known that you were looking for this vintage of PC and shipping from the USA wasn't so expensive, I would have offered some of my 50+ Pentium 4s and Athlon 64 systems to you. I really need the space back...
Yeah, that's right. I have over 50 desktop computers to get rid of.
I know the feeling, although my collection is somewhat older. Thanks for the offer, but I try to avoid keeping 10+ p4 , Athlon or Core2Duo systems. If I have one of each than that’s enough. It is so easy to start hoarding them but for me its mostly about making videos, and there isn’t really a market here for that generation of computers. Will probably end up giving them away or selling them for a couple of euros.
@@RetroSpector78 Here's the sad part: the majority of those machines are on consignment. Like you, I enjoy the earlier PCs like the Cisco PIX-520 that I did a case swap on. It's really a Pentium II 350Mhz based computer! lol
Along with the bad cap issues I remember back in that era and even into the core 2 era that not all DIMMS followed the exact Jdec specs and needed a bump in voltage to run at higher speeds and dual channel I used to buy open box return boards for super cheap because the previous owners didn't know to use a jdec spec DIMM to post and adjust the voltage in the bios
I tried lots of ram sticks on this one ... either the board is broken (perhaps the caps) or something else is at play.
Will we be seeing a video where you Recap that board. and then look through the other Two computers ?
Yes !
I'm in for that! 👍👍
Enjoyed the video, would be good to get a BIOS update and replace the caps that others have spotted. 939 was more in the XP era so Win 98 was a bit old for the time. Don’t forget 98 can’t support much memory, I think it’s around 0.5GB without modern workarounds. A little follow up would be nice as well on this.
Another good troubleshooting step is to test a single stick of memory in each slot to at least rule out a bad slot on the motherboard. You can get modern small PC speakers that are handy for diagnostic testing.
Yeah but wanted to see if I could turn this into a very cheap win98 system capable of maxing out games in the 1997 - 2001 era.
@@RetroSpector78 understood, it’s all fun tinkering and getting a the build you want! 939 kept me going to a couple of years into Win 7. I had a DFI Lanparty board with 4GB of DDR 250MHz and an overclock of 2.9GHz on an AMD 3200+ CPU. Was a beast in its day but the single core killed it as multi threaded applications became the norm. Good times.
Try removing the old coin cell battery and clearing the cmos in that Asrock board and put a new battery in. It might work.
I had the exact same computer as that Athlon AMD 64 PC 3200+. Same case but different DVD drives. I think mine had a 160GB hard drive and had Windows XP.
@
RetroSpector78 Look, another in top corner, nex to DIMM slots... This thing has for sure no chance to work. Do whatever u want, but I suggest as I said give a shot, replace that caps and CMOS battery and try one more time, but with other PSU, because that one for sure is shot and has voltage stability issues... I had Shuttle Mobo with no post and damged caps... I replaced them, replaced CMOS battery too and she came back to life...
Great score!!
I had the Antec chassis, really loved it, but wound up donating it because Black in the Norm now. you sure did get a good haul of parts. that will keep you busy for awhile....
I remember that the 939 CPUs were very picky about ram. When you wanted Dual-Channel with 4 sticks you needed 1 pair of single sided Sticks and one pair of double sided. i think back then in a lot of PC Magazines were compatibility list for Ram.
Yeah I remember having to buy uber expensive RAM for my S939 Athlon FX-60. Was extremely picky with ram, I tried 4 different brands before I found one that worked.
please make a video on the other two and then compare them ....but hopefully you can get the videos out quicker...cause your channel is a favorite of mine!
Nice examination, it’s funny how those cases used to be so plain but nowadays I think they’ve got some real retro cachet. Looking forward to seeing the other systems also.
Glad you liked it ... the other ones are coming soon.
You should update the bios to the latest version,that might solve the memory issues.
Will do, although it should work out of the box I assume (as per manual instructions)
The mobo has at least 4 bulging caps even seen on the video, and even your AGP card has bad cap, very clearly seen, bad caps can easily make nothing work normal
on s939 the ram controller is part of the cpu. i know i had issues on my s939 with a 4000+ cpu the A channel would not work at all i could do is put 2 sticks in the B channel but no dual channel. then i got a fx57 chip and once i swapped to that chip i could use both the A and B channel on the same board so i can only guess the A channel memory controller on the cpu was bad and once i swapped that out it worked.
If one capacitor looks bad, most likely the other ones are bad too.
Will try and check them in the next one !
Cpu needs extra power there is a 4 pin power plug up the top left of the motherboard
printed a4 macro-processors, folded into a small space, power similar to e-paper, memory based, instead of transistor based, starting with 8-bit stored instruction results
ion-printer-head 1um-100nm printed
rtfm processors
the small "350" PSU you got in the Box is something you should use as spare parts.
Its not a good one. ANd probably something like Linkworld -> potential to destroy your hardware or worse...
With the 939 motherboard id try too see if you can overvolt the ram slots by 0.2v & then try dual channel.
Windows 98 is kind of an odd choice of an OS for a 64 bit capable chip from 2005...
Perhaps but it was a deliberate one. When I think of win98 i think of late nineties and pentium 2 or 3 based machine. To be period correct you need expensive graphics cards and even then you won’t be able to max out a lot if games from that era. With this you get an extremely cheap hardware platform that remains highly compatible with windows98
@@RetroSpector78 I don't know if I would call it "highly compatible". Driver support would have been hit-or-miss in the late '05-early '07 time frame that this was a viable system, if not yet completely unsupported. This is a socket/chipset that would have been mainstream when Windows Vista was coming out of Beta. So I'd consider it more of a late XP era machine. You can actually install Windows 10 on one of these machines!
I get your point about affordability. Although it kind of boggles my mind that Pentium II/III machines, AGP cards and so forth, which I kind of mentally associate with e-waste, are starting to rise in value as retro-computers.
Thought provoking video. I'm looking forward to seeing the other two machines. I have a version of that Antec case. It's a Beast.
there's one capacitor ready to explode
At 30EUR, it is what I call a deal, and love the thrill of finding the innards of a random clone PC case (and yeah the Antec cases were awesome).
Great one as always. I think those notches on the pin grid are there to differentiate socket from the previous version and to prevent you from inserting older CPUs since they look kinda same. Only the arrow is there to help the orientation. That potentiometer at 13:50 controls the speed of the fan via voltage, not the speed of the CPU, but I believe that is what you meant to say. And last, I believe that DDR1 is already DIMM, not SIMM. I'm not sure if it's not just what you call RAM generally, I'm not splitting hair :D And please correct me if I'm wrong. Thank you. Love your videos!
had my first athlon i built myself inside on one of these cases (the first one) boy did that bring me back
I could see from the sticker on t he Quantum, it is indeed a 840MB Drive! Sometimes you can get lucky on 512 MB Maximum IDE motherboards!
I have similar asrock intel version mobo from the same era and it also refuses to boot in dual channel mode. It will boot with 3 identical sticks but not 4.
i also had ram isues with s939 but it turns out that you need to wiggel it a bit so it sits nicely
Asus and Asrock of that era área know for not works with dual Chanel. Also happens in the same Intel era. 🤷
I even have registered DDR400 2gb sticks
Great🍕
i have the same seagate barracuda 80gb desktop pata drive
30 euros is almost equivalent to 30 dollars... i guess $10 per retro pc is a good deal...if it works.
I have some some gigabyte and asrock boards that won't boot at all if he CMOS battery is empty. And on your Asrock board there are a few bad caps
replaced the coin cell. curious to see if replacing the caps would fix the issue. I did install win98 from scratch and didn't encounter any stability issues.
I pay people 30 Eur to take away 3 of my beige retro PCs. I have too many and I keep finding them.
Hehe … I have a lot of 486 and older but not a whole lot of modern stuff like this :)
@@RetroSpector78 (throws P3 mainboards at you while making sounds like the Cat Lady from Simpsons) :-D
shoulda reset the bios to defaults, someone may have tweaked the memory settings
I did ... set the clear cmos jumper , disconnected power, waited long enough , as per instructions. Also replaced the coin cell.
My dad has that monitor
My current computer will only let me install one stick of ram at a time. lol. Maybe try that?
Update the bios of this Asrock 939A8X-M,the version is 1.60 ,the latest is 2.10!!IT is better to update and maybe You will resolve the problem with the dual chanel
Great find! I cant wait to see those others computers.
Btw, did you tried to populate all 4 ram slots? Also, try to update the BIOS if available?
Not yet, figured if it didn't boot with 2 it wouldn't boot with 4 :) And I didn't need more than 512mb or 1gb in this machine.
Is this motherboard newer from around Mid or late-2000s?
old beige pc epically no name are best to get cause you dont know what will be in them