Posted By
crock
on 2011-02-16
19:35:01
 |  Re: Plus/4 C16 diagnostics and TED partial failure modes
The ones from China were socket pulls and they were not cheap by the time I payed shipping and Swiss customs charges. It was a painful business and after swapping emails with someone in CHina with very little English, transferring a not insignificant amount of USD into their Paypal account, I thought there was a very real chance I was throwing my money away. You can imagine how pleased I was that I receieved a parcel from Shenzen via DHL three days later.
I bought their entire stock of 19 chips. Sadly, as they were pulls and they obviously did not even know what they were, let alone be able to test them, only 11 worked, but that still left me with 11 chips. I have used three to repair my duff ones so I now have 8 spare I think. They were good enough to credit my paypal account for the cost of the non-working ones, but the net cost per chip is probably still more than most would be willing to pay, so I'm not going to look to sell them for profit.
Interestingly, I do have a 1490 8501 and it runs noticeably cooler than the others! I swapped a couple of emails with Bil Herd last month and one of his suppositions on the fragility of the cpu's was a hot spot on the design - maybe that was fixed with the later runs?
rob
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