Your soldering skills inspire me to get better. I had one of these (though a different revision; from images online it seems to have been a Rev 2.1) and I used a 200 MHz Evergreen Winchip upgrade CPU. Later on I tried a 450 MHz K6-2 (6x66=400) and I used it for a while that way. Blissfully ignorant of the issues with linear voltage regulators, one hot summer evening I heard a loud pop, and the board was dead. I had no idea why at the time, but years later I found out about how linear regulators heat up when run outside of their design specifications and I realized why the board died.
This was in early 2001 and I knew little about computers at the time. When I bought the Evergreen upgrade CPU, the board wouldn't POST with it. Though I had purchased it on Ebay, I sent Evergreen an email, and they answered me right away, recommending a BIOS update. I tried updating it to the latest BIOS Biostar offered, but it still wouldn't POST. They then sent me a BIOS as an email attachment, and that one worked. That happy moment when you hit the power switch and hear the POST beep!
Theres a newer version of Phil's benchmarking suite that includes a Doom bench that's been modified to give you FPS results so you dont have to do the conversion yourself. :)
Nice save! I had to dig out four pins in a Voodoo2 FBI that had broken off flush with the package a few months ago. I usually seal those repairs with some two-part epoxy.
Another great restoration video. I have the same board with some missing components, can you please tell me the values of CT28, CT29, CT20, CT13 and what RAM TAG do you use?
❤Fantastic job! You should use some epoxy on that repair though, moisture/corrosion may work its way up the legs of exposed pins all the way into the chip.
Good Video as always: “Mr Necroware!”, I had a pleasant surprise a few days ago, I popped round my Brother’s as I had left some Old Computer Stuff at his about 25 years ago, I’d completely forgot that I’d left a box of Motherboards round there including 286, 386, 486 & Pentium 2, They were all destined for the Car Boot Sale back then and they had been priced at £2 & £3 each except the 486 which had a Price-Tag on of £8 and the P2 was up for £20, I was chuffed to bit discovering my lost Treasure after all those years, 2 of the 386 Motherboards have suffered from leaky Batteries but I think I’ve caught the 1 just in time and the other one doesn’t look too bad, I’ve been on the hunt for a good 486 Motherboard to replace my Poorly 486 that I’ve got here & I can’t believe it actually has a CR2032 Socket installed on the Motherboard, No signs of any Damage so just hope it will drop into my 486 Chassis without any problems, The only negative is that it doesn’t have any VESA Slots, Oh well, It could be worse I suppose! Anthony - Birmingham/UK 🙂🇬🇧
I have the same motherboard that I used for a Win95 PC build. As you said, the Dallas RTC battery was dead and I solderd a coin cell on the module to make the motherboard boot again. The BIOS on my motherboard have the HDD capacity limitation to 8G and is not Y2K compliant. However, it works ok. The -A in the motherboard name means that the keyboard connector is AT not PS/2 (as I remember to have seen in an old pdf. manual that I found on a old CD with a BIOS upgrade for it). I removed the AT keyboard socket and replaced with a PS/2 connector like your motherboard have, so I can use any regular keyboard without an adapter. It seems to me that your moterboard had the same mod from the factory or made by previous user. Mine is rev 2.1.
Although you mention it as not very special, these boards were one of the most reliant and quite versatile (and fast) boards at the time and at a very small form factor. At the time, there was a lot of crap on the market. Mostly the big brands computers were less interesting. You were better off owning a clone pc with decent components.
In one of your videos you are using hand to find overheated element. Why don't you use a thermal camera? It would be so much easier and much more fun to watch😊
Hi Necroware! Great repair as usual! I made my own bios for motherboards based on sis 85c496/497 chipset. It can run msdos just on L2 cache without ram at all. Sounds crazy but it works. Ping me if you want to try it
The working BIOS images seem to have "-F" at the end of their BIOS string (the leftmost column in the table). Wondering if it corresponds to the UMC I/O chip's designation ending with "F" :)
I love your work. I need to find out if any e waste facilities by me sell "functional" bits. I've been trying to find anything i can at rummage sales but nothing good pops up lately.
The Biostar MB-8500TUC-A is virtually the same board, just with the better i430HX chipset and an extra PCI slot. The only downside compared to your MB-8500TVX-A is that it doesn't support dual-voltage as required by MMX, and as far as I know, no room for a VRM. Ever consider making a VRM like on the one on the PODPMT66X200 ???
This mainboard was used in my first PC, a 1996 „network“ branded (Mediamarkt) Pentium 150, 32MB RAM, a slow & noisy 1.6GB Seagate HDD, a 4MB VGA with a weird Cirrus Logic chipset, totally useless for the upcoming 3D games. Spent 1999 DM for this spec sheet blender 😢
whats your tool to grind the plastic away near the legs? i have a cheap dremel. i need to repair a voodoo 2 in a similar fashion. 3 chips all with fatal pin leg breaks.
how that 16000KB memory comes to be? it should be 16384KB (technically KiB but that is so stupid) as that is 16x1024KB (or if they use the "HDD-type KB" then it would be 16777KB) -- oh, later with the 32Megs it counts to 32384KB so where is the missing 384K?
Don't be disheartened, it's all a question of practice. Keep in mind, that I'm actually a software developer and couldn't solder at all at one point back in time.
Nothing you see on this channel make a lot of sense :) This is just a hobby, however this board gives a good opportunity to experiment with something, what I would like to talk about in the next video.
Looking at all these old boards, it's all mediocre if we compare it to even slightly newer stuff. If something can be repaired and brought back to life for a new use then it's worthwhile in my opinion.
