We paid $1000 for a 25 year old OS?!

[mariushm]

My 2 cents ...

At that level of markup, they can buy new old stock motherboards and replace the electrolytic capacitors with solid/polymer ones and warranty them for decades. 

There's IDE SSDs still made, using MLC or TLC memory ... for example Transcend makes them. No reason to go through sata-ide adapters which aren't always 100% reliable. 

You can still buy NEW (sealed, in box) IDE dvd drives, and there's plenty of places that refurbish computers which pull such drives from office computers that barely got any use.

The power supply.... meh, it's average OEM power supply, it does have a -5v rail, but let's be honest here...  it's not rocket science to splice a  12v or 5v to -5v dc-dc converter that costs 1-2$ in quantity, and can even be hidden inside the power supply.

The case is bad as well... they could have used a more solid case at that price point.

I can give them some bonus points for managing to source black floppy drives and black optical drives I guess. 

 

Basically, everywhere I look I see shortcuts, cutting corners, kind of typical of American mentality. 

[Needfuldoer]

3 hours ago, sub68 said:

I am always amazed on how much the world runs on windows XP.

It was supported for the better part of two decades...

 

(Mainstream XP went out of support in 2014, and "Windows Embedded POSready 2009" got updates for another 5 years on top of that.)

[maplepants]

On 8/28/2022 at 12:58 AM, papajo said:

You just showed the EXACT same motherboard from the "shady" seller at aliexpress for $100!! if I resell this for $500 (especially taking into account that due to having a bulk order of them I probably will get a better price than $100 per piece )as they do I surely can afford to give 1 year warranty on them lol

Assuming most of the boards are good, yes. But the whole thing with a shady aliexpress reseller is that "assuming most of the boards are good" is a big leap.

 

The other thing is that these machines need to have as little downtime as possible. The weigh station can't go down for a few days every couple of weeks because you got a bad batch from your reseller.

 

You have to remember that the envirnoments these are being deployed to are extremely fragile. That's why these companies are willing to shell out big bucks for these systems. Even slight changes have the potential to cause major issues. So "most of these motherboards are probably okay" isn't an inventory strategy that'll keep these customers around.

[papajo]

On 8/30/2022 at 11:18 AM, maplepants said:

Assuming most of the boards are good, yes. But the whole thing with a shady aliexpress reseller is that "assuming most of the boards are good" is a big leap.

 

Maybe it did not get through clearly in my post, that means that these guys buy from those shady aliexpress sellers and resell them, they dont offer different products compared to the "shady" aliexpress listings, these are the same exact boards they offer and I 100% doubt they manufacture motherboard in house

[maplepants]

9 hours ago, papajo said:

Maybe it did not get through clearly in my post, that means that these guys buy from those shady aliexpress sellers and resell them, they dont offer different products compared to the "shady" aliexpress listings, these are the same exact boards they offer and I 100% doubt they manufacture motherboard in house

They do offer a very different compared to the aliexpress listing (according to them). Their quality control on these motherboards and the entire systems is their product.

 

The difference in price is, at least partly, paying for "This has been tested and waranteed" vs "I sure hope this works". That's why a business would be willing to pay so much for these boards, even though aliexpress technically has shady sellers with the same product. If one of these things is going to run your commercial or government weigh station, up time is much more important than price.

[Rex Hite]

I use W98 every day in my business. It runs my cash register and if it were to fail things would get very inconvenient for my business.

[papajo]

9 hours ago, maplepants said:

They do offer a very different compared to the aliexpress listing (according to them).

Well obviously they would say such a thing the bottom line is that ALL the motherboards (you can even see the multi PCI offering in the bottom right of the aliexpress screenshot I already posted ) are IDENTICAL to the aliexpress one in layout components specs and even board color and cooler collor/shape etc. 

That means only one thing:even if they don't get from AliExpress they get from the same source as the guy from aliexpress does which means (in case they dont get them from an AliExpress guy) they are even cheaper since they bypass the profit of the aliexpress middleman. 

There is an other scenario ofcourse, them manufacturing exactly same boards inhouse in the US or canada or where they are based but I find this close to impossible 

[papajo]

9 hours ago, maplepants said:

The difference in price is, at least partly, paying for "This has been tested and waranteed" vs "I sure hope this works".

Obviously these boards work (at least on reasonable statistics) one can simply buy 1 board for $100 (instead of $500) and if it doesnt work then he buys an other one and RMAs the first one. 

If he cant afford to wait he still can buy like 4 boards (for $400) and even ship them in 2 or 4 different packages (to decrease the chance of damage during delivery) and still save $100 and have 4 boards wich I highly doubt will be all faulty. (I highly doubt even 1 board will but I am just entertaining the argument here hence I mention the 4 board scenario) 

[maplepants]

14 hours ago, papajo said:

That means only one thing:even if they don't get from AliExpress they get from the same source as the guy from aliexpress does which means (in case they dont get them from an AliExpress guy) they are even cheaper since they bypass the profit of the aliexpress middleman.

Ahh, okay I think this is where we're not seeing eye to eye. Your starting assumption is that the shady aliexpress seller has the same source as the BC company. That shady seller definitely wants us to *think* they do, but I'm not taking that for granted.

 

The whole gamble with shady aliexpress sellers is maybe they have a hookup to some wearhouse that you don't have and that's why their stuff is so cheap, or maybe they're just lying about what they got or how they got it. In this case, maybe they have the same supplier or maybe they have a refurb/RMA supply, or maybe they harvest these boards out of machines where one of the other components has died. 

 

If you're right the aliexpress seller, then the rest of your points are right too. But not every company wants to bet on that if.

[papajo]

1 hour ago, maplepants said:

Ahh, okay I think this is where we're not seeing eye to eye. Your starting assumption is that the shady aliexpress seller has the same source as the BC company. That shady seller definitely wants us to *think* they do, but I'm not taking that for granted.

Dear friend have you heard about occam's razor?




Socket 478 motherboards are not officially manufactured by any big brand since decades and surely intel doesnt license them anymore, that means that such motherboards are definitely 1000% manufactured in china (probably using salvaged north/southbridge chips from older boards which then are soldered to the otherwise brand new board they make in said chinese factory.)  

Besides that, this is not a first, the are many chinese mobos for quite a few older sockets as well e.g the much more popular x79 chipset e.g (e.g https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4001117187332.html?spm=a2g0o.productlist.0.0.67f14d04wx7dZg&algo_pvid=11caeb1e-9cd6-4580-955f-59ec37c4a55e&algo_exp_id=11caeb1e-9cd6-4580-955f-59ec37c4a55e-47&pdp_ext_f={"sku_id"%3A"12000022283984618"}&pdp_npi=2%40dis!EUR!194.65!73.97!!!!!%402100bb4a16621120899577750eab67!12000022283984618!sea&curPageLogUid=clBMRqnmCaGm)  which a couple of years back (and still today but to a lesser degree) were extremely popular choices for budget gaming and productivity minded people that couldnt afford to buy brand new zen2/intel PCs 

Here is a video of a guy testing these boards

Even Level1 has some videos using these chinese boards with 12core xeons on them etc. 

Also the demand for socket 478 (although good enough I presume to have a niece like nixsys with a few hundreds of clients or a small number of thusand of order per year globally -so not just nixsys- ) is very small to incentivize the need for more than 1 factory to make such boards. 

So the source must be in chine which means all the resellers including nixsys must be common and I bet that's how nixsys  (lol punny name btw since they sell nix and get $$$ )  got into the market of assembling retro PCs they were fixing old ones and searching online for parts and then they at some point they found brand new ones from some alibaba/aliexpress listing and went through with it, I highly doubt they flew to china to meet some corporate factory owners in a skyscraper highballer meeting to contract them for a huge order etc lol I mean think about it. 

Also I would like to emphasize here that I used the word "shady" just to entertain the shill coverage of the sponsored video by ltt I mean surely there are things to be aware of when buying from aliexpress but for most sensible stuff (so no too good to be true deals, sells with feedback etc ) aliexpress sellers are quite all right and you get what you buy and even get reimbursed if it doesnt work. 
 

[Akima]

There is valid argument to suggest that a lot of legacy hardware is still available on the Intel Embedded Roadmap. In the industrial sector, you have the likes of AAEON, Advantech, Axiomtek, etc, that build devices with a 15-20 year availability.

 

There's still plenty of these IPC manufacturers that have boards/system with 1st generation Intel Atom CPUs, even AMD Geode! There is a huge market for legacy hardware. 

[papajo]

I had to edit my previous post because upon pasting the video I deleted half of it and did not notice that upon submitting it (incase you are interested to read it) 

 

4 minutes ago, Akima said:

There is valid argument to suggest that a lot of legacy hardware is still available on the Intel Embedded Roadmap. In the industrial sector, you have the likes of AAEON, Advantech, Axiomtek, etc, that build devices with a 15-20 year availability.

 

There's still plenty of these IPC manufacturers that have boards/system with 1st generation Intel Atom CPUs, even AMD Geode! There is a huge market for legacy hardware. 

Yea I doubt that they are making 20 year old boards (furthest back I could find was 7th gen intel LGA CPUs so ~5 years back, socket 478 is literraly 22 years old and again look at their product list none of their motherboards look like the ones nixsys sells yet they are 100% identical with the alibaba ones. 

 

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

On 8/27/2022 at 10:16 PM, Needfuldoer said:

At 3:14 the on-screen text says "RS-323", it's RS-232.

That's correct. RS232 is a venerable and still used standard! It takes few enough transistors that even the cheapest 8bit microcontroller can have at least one UART, and from there you are one transceiver away from RS232. Those days I use USB-UART adapters like the FTDI. it's a virtual serial port that is seen like the real thing by windows, again very easy to program and use. You can do a whooping 250Kb/s! (you can "overclock" it to go faster, but it becomes non standard)

Those poor MAX232 chip are so prone to dying ^^' (below one of my old motor control boards) In old 56Kb/s modem they are easy to recognize because they have a DIL16 socket. When that modem wasn't workeing, chances are you can just replace that chip without even checking and it starts working again.



Anthony also talks about longer range bus like RS422 and RS485. They go a lot longer distances, but require a different transceiver than the one mounted on that motherboard. I prefer them for my robots because they have no voltage pump and are more reliable and more resilient to noise.

[AlexisAV]

Anthony, at 10:24 you said no AGP card would boot. Did you check the primary video option in BIOS? And why didn't you try a Voodoo 2?

At 11:16 you said you wanted to play the 3DMark2001 monster truck demo. You can! It's playable with the (now freeware) pro version. Keys at https://benchmarks.ul.com/legacy-benchmarks have fun!

  

On 8/28/2022 at 7:42 PM, GodAtum said:

Did I miss what CPU this had?

It was never mentioned. Based on the 3DMark footage it's an Intel 845 family chipset, so Pentium 4-class.

On 8/29/2022 at 4:51 AM, Spotty said:

Anthony discussed the older power supply used in the system, and while he is right that older systems were heavier on the 5V rail than modern systems, that likely wouldn't have been the reason for using it. That PSU actually features -5V which was removed as a requirement for ATX power supplies with ATX 1.2 in 2002. -5V is used for ISA and most power supplies dropped it once it was no longer required since systems were no longer using ISA by that time. Very few power supplies released in the last 20 years have -5v so they'll need to use those older power supplies to be able to support the ISA cards.

As it's a Pentium 4-class machine the CPU actually uses the 12V rail. In a Pentium 3-class machine they'd likely use a different power supply.

 

I'd sort of expect a new industrial mainboard with ISA slots to incorporate the components needed to generate -5V to remove the need for an older PSU. Couldn't an LM337 (less than $1) generate -5V from -12V? Not the most power efficient solution, but the power draw from -5V is tiny anyway.

 

Anthony says at 7:12 it provides 150W combined on the 5V+3.3V rails. It's only 105W actually, but reading the label upside-down is hard.

 

On 9/1/2022 at 7:31 PM, papajo said:

Well obviously they would say such a thing the bottom line is that ALL the motherboards (you can even see the multi PCI offering in the bottom right of the aliexpress screenshot I already posted ) are IDENTICAL to the aliexpress one in layout components specs and even board color and cooler collor/shape etc. 

That means only one thing:even if they don't get from AliExpress they get from the same source as the guy from aliexpress does which means (in case they dont get them from an AliExpress guy) they are even cheaper since they bypass the profit of the aliexpress middleman. 

There is an other scenario ofcourse, them manufacturing exactly same boards inhouse in the US or canada or where they are based but I find this close to impossible 

This is not quite guaranteed. Yes, it could be the same supplier. But even leaving out the (already mentioned) possibility of a seller peddling rejects/refurbished product: China copies everything. So I wouldn't be surprised if there are multiple companies producing mainboards based on the same blueprint that seem identical at first glance, but cheaping out on capacitors, having worse soldering jobs, etc.