So, some 3 years ago I posted about digging up some old computer parts out of boxes, which resulted on a Pentium 3 with 192MB of RAM that constantly crashed.
This is technically old news, but somewhere in 2012 I ended up getting a nice computer for free (well, nice for a 2nd box for some torrenting and whatnot), a Pentium 4 1.7GHz with 512MB of RAM. (yeah, socket 423 and Rambus, can’t really upgrade it at an acceptable cost for the performance gain)
To be honest it was good enough for most of my late night browsing and xvid movie/anime watching.
That is until the old Radeon 9200 died.
Now I had to find a new graphic card, obvious choice was one the 2 Radeon 9600 I had somewhere, not so obvious choice was an old Diamond Viper V550 (Riva TNT). Other choices were a S3 Trio 3D/2X AGP, a S3 Virge64V2/DX PCI, a S3 Virge/DX PCI and an Alliance Semiconductor ProMotion AT24.
Long story short, some AGP cards were not compatible with the motherboard’s AGP slot, some other cards didn’t work.
Now what?
*looks at a SiS 6326 PCI with 8MB of RAM*
NOOOOOOO!!!!!
Yes…it was, either that or an S3 Virge with even less RAM.
And now (after a year and half with the SiS) that I’m writing about it I’m looking at the Radeon 9200 and I think it’s a blown cap, might go and fix it. (10v 1000µF, I think I have some that I scavenged off old motherboards, I know I have 1000µF ones, I know nearly nothing about electronics but I always scavenge bits and pieces from stuff that’s going to the bin)
That being said I have a really nice Socket 462 motherboard that also died due to a blown cap and…3 years later it’s still in a box. (I have a good excuse, the cap is in a hard to reach place, between 2 PCI slots)
Talking about that motherboard the story of its death is kinda funny, maybe another day… (I could swear I had already posted it, maybe I wrote it down on paper but never ‘digitized’ it)