Wow you bought these for 7 pound with ram and cpu's on them thats a steal.
The last one is a hx chipset one with upgrade possibility to add tag ram for 512MB cachable area.

Nice haul! Keep one or two and sell the rest. Not only are these boards appreciating in value but I know there are tons of folks (on VOGONS and elsewhere) trying to get their foot in the door with SS7 builds.

All of those boards are keepers, people don't know what they got till it is gone and those are some Good boards!. Any thing SS7 is becoming a premium now days and expensive. S5/5 not so much but supplies are slowly drying up for the good stuff except for the cheap generic crap that hardly no one wants.

Those Baby AT boards will easily fit in modern cases once the hard work modding the board tray is done. If anything you could make 50-200 pounds off the lot after the highway robbery fees.

I think the same, dont sell them.. I dont know how much he is in vintage computer? Maybe he just need the parts to stick a system together and sell that parts he wont use anymore.. I think you will get regred if the board he is using and cant replace it anymore because these vintage parts getting dried out. And the prices are sky high on the market. All of my usable parts i using keep them in my own environment. I keep them on my own stock.. So i dont have to confidence whats happening on the todays market.

i am not a big fan of at boards, but you can keep them all as others said, they are getting rarer to find these days. if you got to trash some of them for some reason, i suggest to trash in this order:
ecs mvp3
soyo vpx
epox tx
luckystar vx
freetech ali5
dtk hx
fic mvp3.

noshutdown wrote:

i am not a big fan of at boards, but you can keep them all as others said, they are getting rarer to find these days. if you got […]
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i am not a big fan of at boards, but you can keep them all as others said, they are getting rarer to find these days. if you got to trash some of them for some reason, i suggest to trash in this order:
ecs mvp3
soyo vpx
epox tx
luckystar vx
freetech ali5
dtk hx
fic mvp3.

Trashing = trowing away money

Seen rich people do this with all sorts of things even expensive boats, use them a year or two then abandon them at the dock to rot for years till the fees build up. Never throw away vintage gear even when it is worthless now as it won't be in the future. Imagine those who threw away their broken Amigas 😢

If he want to trash it then he could better sell it so he would make another one happy with. I think that youll need to take care with this older stuff in times these things are scares.

I'd test them and either bag and tag them or sell them 😀

Of course! What the heck are you smoking?

JaNoZ wrote:

Wow you bought these for 7 pound with ram and cpu's on them thats a steal.
The last one is a hx chipset one with upgrade possibility to add tag ram for 512MB cachable area.

No freakin' $hit! I honestly cannot believe they're AT form factor to top it off.

Also the MVP3 boards have ATX connectors,so those boards can be used like a normal ATX board,instead of having a AT PSU with switch.

VA-503 is an awesome board and works with a K6-3+ too. Throw any back on eBay with a decent photo/description.

I'd certainly keep the 430HX board.

I'd keep all that work.
Would not part with working socket 7 boards myself 🤣 .

If anything goes on the ebay, please let us know to look for it 😉
Before we get to know there already sold.
I would like a nice revG ALI chipset.
I would even buy all just to have the ram.

Btw Please try them all to see if they post and how much cache there is installed.

I went through this just a couple of weeks ago.
I trashed an Epox MVP3 but decided to keep a tyan 1598.
Reason for choosing? The Epox had Tayeh capacitors on it 🙁

Keep them. Socket 7 boards make the best overall retro builds. If you don't wanna keep all of them, sell the ones that interest you the less.

ncmark wrote:

The Epox had Tayeh capacitors on it 🙁

You can easily replace the capacitors, even the Tyan get old. replace them if you love your hardware.
If the caps are bad the rest of it is still ok, and deserve a 2nd life.
If the Epox is really gone just because of the Tayeh is just such a shame... caps can be replaced and by everyone that can hold a solder iron.

JaNoZ wrote:

You can easily replace the capacitors, even the Tyan get old. replace them if you love your hardware. If the caps are bad the re […]
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ncmark wrote:

The Epox had Tayeh capacitors on it 🙁

You can easily replace the capacitors, even the Tyan get old. replace them if you love your hardware.
If the caps are bad the rest of it is still ok, and deserve a 2nd life.
If the Epox is really gone just because of the Tayeh is just such a shame... caps can be replaced and by everyone that can hold a solder iron.

Yep, replacing capacitors is easy. Very low learning curve with the right tools. I'm glad someone spotted the Tayehs; a lot of folks think running boards with [low quality] or [vintage] capacitors is fine. There will be problems, eventually.

You also have the benefits of being able to [improve] circuits, such as adding bipolars where needed, increasing uF where needed, adding specialized filter caps where needed, etc. OEMs will often underspec uF to save money.

I had recapped some of my 486 boards with Panasonic FM FR series caps, but was not needed.
The ESR digital meter gave a really good ESR value for some 25yr old caps, so there was no need to change them in the end. probably the small 10uF ones are the ones that need most care, since they can run out of spec easily and give you a bad behaving mobo.
I would only replace the whole board caps when i see one bad cap bulging or leaking (smelly) or when it runs like shit.
My old Asus TX97E was ok till last year, and when i picked it up from the attic last year all caps were bulging and showing crap like older Socket A mobo's did, so i replaced all with good low ESR Sanyo caps, the shiny green caps look great. and there are only like 8-10 pcs of 1000uF caps on older boards.