I bought 3 beige retro PCs for 30 EUR 

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.

oo nice! I just got an Athlon XP 1700+ PC for free! was stored in a storage shed for at least 15 years

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. :)

My favorite thing to do is open and investigate an unknown pc. Love it

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.

Clear the CMOS, you wouldn't believe how many times doing that solved strange problems with these old computers

Definitely looking forward to check out the other two machines! Nice video, by the way! 👍👍

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.

I have almost the same motherboard from the 3rd PC, frankly nice recovery, good video :) !

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.

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.

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.

Already jealous from the notification lol. Great find!

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!

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!

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.

Nicely hunted retro PCs. Greetings from Karachi, Pakistan.

Totally worth it! Just for the parts alone. Good find...

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/

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.

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.

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'm most interested in seeing if you do a retrobrite session with all these incredibly yellowed cases!

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.

Great score!!

Anything related to old computers I just love. Troubleshooting is just part of it. Any system can run some games and this is cool

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 like the idea of those mobile racks, I bought some a few months ago :-)

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 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.

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.

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).

had my first athlon i built myself inside on one of these cases (the first one) boy did that bring me back

nice find ..

An AMD 939 ❤️... Great video!

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

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.

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 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!

The zalman cpu cooler is a classic run so many of these on my rigs back in the day, beings back so many memories

With the 939 motherboard id try too see if you can overvolt the ram slots by 0.2v & then try dual channel.

i also had ram isues with s939 but it turns out that you need to wiggel it a bit so it sits nicely

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.

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.

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 used to have one of those motherboards, and they were very picky about Ram.

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.

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.

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!

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?

I had ram issues linked to bulging capacitors

im using an Athlon 64 for my XP machine. Seems like your going to need another shelf ;-)

You should update the bios to the latest version,that might solve the memory issues.

Il like the AMD 64 platform. Run such one for a long time, paired with an ATI 9800 Pro.

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.

@ 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...

Is this motherboard newer from around Mid or late-2000s?

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.

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.

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.

Wow! Turned out to be a pretty good find! I was curious. Do you keep all the computers you get, or do you sell them on after fixing them up?

Dlink routers of that era were horrendous.

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

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

@ RetroSpector78 8:02 Look, damaged cap close to VGA connector. :O

My current computer will only let me install one stick of ram at a time. lol. Maybe try that?

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!

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 🤔

Did you check the back of the board for scratched traces? That could be causing the stability issues

Will we be seeing a video where you Recap that board. and then look through the other Two computers ?

30 euros not bad, they are like kinder surprises never know what you will find inside

Cpu needs extra power there is a 4 pin power plug up the top left of the motherboard

5:52 is that a Zalman Flower cooler and an attached Zalman fanmate!

Thats a lot of old thermal gunk on that cpu!

Great🍕

...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...

@ 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...

shoulda reset the bios to defaults, someone may have tweaked the memory settings

@12:15 cap blown up on the left, near IDE header

Try removing the old coin cell battery and clearing the cmos in that Asrock board and put a new battery in. It might work.

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)

i have the same seagate barracuda 80gb desktop pata drive

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.

that ISA LAN card would go for 1/3 of the price you payed for the entire set :)

I even have registered DDR400 2gb sticks

Try putting one RAM module into blue slot and another into black slot... for dual channel

That cap being blown out would definitely cause problems.

I picked up a boxed voodoo 3 3000 agp today for 12 euro.🎉🎉🎉

Kan ik je ook wellicht wat hardware sturen? Ik moet wat opruimen hier.

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.

É o preço aqui no meu país. Média de 200, 300 reais

@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.

Lmao at the right one

I think Athlon 64 3000+ only supports single channel with DDR400.

Asus and Asrock of that era área know for not works with dual Chanel. Also happens in the same Intel era. 🤷

My dad has that monitor

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

is Antac eq Chieftec ?

there's one capacitor ready to explode

If one capacitor looks bad, most likely the other ones are bad too.