TR Forums

The Egg wrote:

I suppose it depends on what you're intending to power. I see plenty of modern PSUs offering 20-25A on the 3.3 and 5v rails, some good up to a combined 130watts. While that might not be alot, it should get most systems running, provided you take it easy on the drives and add-on cards.

Well sure, you could buy a 750w SeaSonic with 20A on the 5v rail or a 1250w SeaSonic with 25A there + the $15 adapter I showed a picture of*, and have to be careful about not using too much power.

Or you could buy a vintage 70% efficient Antec Smartpower SL350 with 35A for $3 and recap it. Heck, may as well splurge on the SL400 with 38A because it's the same price.


When I didn't have enough Rambus for a dual PIII-s 1400 I used an i-RAM with 4GB of DDR to hold the swapfile, running through a SATA to IDE adapter. It moved 60MB/s on the ATA66 controller, which I suppose was pretty good. We live in an age now when NVMe SSDs have more bandwidth than the main memory of that computer.

*I would prefer an AUX adapter that used a couple SATA power connectors rather than tap the ATX harness, but so many SATA power connectors are missing the 3.3v wire that it often wouldn't work.

bfg-9000 wrote:

The Egg wrote:

I suppose it depends on what you're intending to power. I see plenty of modern PSUs offering 20-25A on the 3.3 and 5v rails, some good up to a combined 130watts. While that might not be alot, it should get most systems running, provided you take it easy on the drives and add-on cards.

Well sure, you could buy a 750w SeaSonic with 20A on the 5v rail or a 1250w SeaSonic with 25A there + the $15 adapter I showed a picture of*, and have to be careful about not using too much power.

Or you could buy a vintage 70% efficient Antec Smartpower SL350 with 35A for $3 and recap it. Heck, may as well splurge on the SL400 with 38A because it's the same price

You don't have to go quite that big. The Seasonic S12II line has 20/20--130 for the 430w model, and 24/24--130 for the 520w model. Both are less than $50.

As for changing out capacitors.....some years back I got lit up by a cap much smaller than what you'd find in a PSU. Lets just say, I now have a considerable amount of respect for them. While I've since learned of ways to check and discharge beforehand, it's still not without risk, and the hit from a PSU cap is probably an order of magnitude larger than what I took (i.e., potentially fatal). To me, even the smallest chance isn't worth it to mess with a 15 year old scrapheap unit. I might pay someone if it was for something critical though.

I for one would like to know more about your collection starfalcon. I have gotten rid of a lot over the years but I also went through a period of mass collecting of old hardware from late 2015 to mid 2016. I have quite a bit of neat old PC stuff now. I'd gladly blabber on about my collection if you'd do the same.

I actually intend to sell a lot of this stuff, but haven't had time to do it in an organized way. I have a rather large 3dfx collection with some pretty sweet rare items in it. Among them would be a few Quantum3D arcade Voodoo 2 cards (no VGA in, only out), PCI and AGP 5500s (both working), Quantum 3D Raven PCI Banshee, a slew of V1, Rush, V2, Banshee, and V3 cards... and a working Quantum 3D Graphite micro ATX desktop PC out of an Arctic Thunder arcade machine from 2000.

I have a bunch of other junk too... And I've gotten rid of a lot.

Yeah I think everyone has motivated me to finally give everyone what they want and give them the big list

Well I have been doing some prelim work, just looking through what I have easily available....this is going to be a lot of work to go through all this stuff. Going to practically need my own vintage part forum for covering everything I have. BTW may want to get on that...old stuff is becoming popular....

I'd never even heard of Deer before now. One of my early DIYs had an Apevia PSU which was shockingly light compared to how heavy most PSUs are. I've used Antec or Thermaltake for most of my builds. Just bought a Seasonic for my forthcoming Ryzen build.

I've started putting my old video cards on display, HD6970, HD4850, Riva TNT2 Ultra. Wish I hadn't given away my Geforce4 Ti4200, that baby overclocked quite nicely.

Edit: found it! http://www.jonnyguru.com/modules.php?na ... ry&reid=79

Starfalcon wrote:

Yeah I think everyone has motivated me to finally give everyone what they want and give them the big list

Even if you can just conjure a basic CPU/MB/MemQty/GPU/Sound list, I think everyone would be interested.

IIRC, I contributed the following to your impressive archive:

- K6-2P 400(?), Fic VA-503+, 64MB(?), Voodoo3 3000 AGP graphics IIRC. Real screamer in year 2000, except I only compiled that complete set some years later
- Dual-PentiumPro-200, Intel something-or-another MB, 32MB EDO(?), S3 Trio-64 graphics(?)

Heh, If I am going to do this, I have to do it right. Plus, I have lost track of what I have at this point...so I proper list will make it much easier for me in the future also...