pcmhacking.net

antus wrote:It all depends on the seller. It is a minefield out there, but if delcowizid said hes ordered twice and they worked, I'd believe it. But you never know when the ebay seller is going to change their supplier. Ive bought winbonds, and found they put a real one in the end of the carrier so the first test worked, then the rest only wrote once.

Killin me, you're missing the point I was making, clones, I mentioned it in my 1st and 2nd post, it's mentioned numerous times on the forum here Beware of the clones, yet here we are posting how good our cheap chinese clone is, I'm baffled, and it's pointless me arguing the toss any further.

antus wrote:I bought several batches of these from this seller (pulled the link from a 2016 thread here) https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/230420406366 and they were working chip pulls probably old computer bios chips. They all worked perfectly. viewtopic.php?f=31&t=4540&start=30#p62968

I would trust a genuine second hand chip pulled from wherever over a clone any day..

I bought a small bulk lot of genuine ST 45ns chips as a group buy from here a while ago. I think The1 organized it? Also got machined sockets to match.

Was quite expensive but will last me a life time for my personal projects.

I have 60+ 27c010s here all used pulls out of computers and devices I bought them online they were advertised as erased ready to use they all program and verify but won't run a car they are too slow from being erased for too long I only found this out after sending 10 tunes out and them all not running and had to source 10 memcals to fix the problem talk about outta pocket after that fuck around lol

when i buy chips i buy an extra to sacrifice for testing, run it in the burner on a script of erase and write for 100 cycles, soon find out if there fake or not.

@Ken, I heard you about the clones. The point was that there are now a couple of sellers recommended in this thread which we have had personal success with and we are recommending them so that others can source working chips and avoid the clones.

I bit the bullet and ordered a batch from the link provided. Will know in a month if they are fake I guess

I might have to take back what I said about clone chips.
I proceded to ditch the bag of dead chips earlier on today, then I got to thinking as my hand was poised, holding the bag over the bin ready to drop it in, "did I try flashing them on the old PCB3b I bought forever ago.
Dug out the old thinkpad having the parallel port on it and fired the old programmer up, set the jumpers and switch settings and flashed / erased every single chip 3 times, all without error, dug the GQ4x out (both of them, 1 with firmware 1.3, the other 2.20) both error'd flashing the chips.
Before the erase on the old PCB3b, it states that a particular jumper must be set for 12.5v, then removed for the flashing procedure..
What I'm wondering now is do the GQ4x's actually regulate the voltage accurately enough to do the job.!
I also randomly read and dumped some of them to check the dump against the flash, no bad dumps at all..

Try plugging in the appropriate power adapter to the gq4x. Your PC's usb power might not be enough to power it. A lot of usb ports on pcs can't deliver the current some devices need, eg some phones will not charge on some usb ports etc..

the gq4x has a dc to dc convertor for generating the higher voltages needed by some chips and can do so well over usb 5v power but many pc's and laptops don't give out much more than 300mA or so and the figures vary wildly from 100mA for junk and 5A for good usb controllers.

The power plug on the programmer is for added power when needed. I think it's 12v? it's written on the side and polarity too.

vlad01 wrote:Try plugging in the appropriate power adapter to the gq4x. Your PC's usb power might not be enough to power it.

Yeah that's the first thing I usually try when chips fail to flash, even the old PCB3b needs the boosted voltage on some chips.
The unit I use states it puts out 1 amp..

Last night I got to thinking that I vaguely remember the GQ4x software having a couple of tests you could do, funny how I've used them for years and forget some of the features in front of me every time I use the damn thing.

I ran the test on both of them, the one I bought around 08ish, gave me plenty of grief since it wouldn't program many plcc chips that were supposedly supported, wondered why I wasted the money when the PCB3b was still working fine, I think the time saving feature sold me when I read the speille regarding it's usefulness, then inherited one of the last before they started selling the GQ4x4, from a friend I had buy all the gear from here to start playing with injection, seems it was either too hard or he lost interest, this last one gave me little to no grief, I opened them both up, internally they look identical parts wise, only difference I can see is the firmware running on them..
The early one always throws an error when using the "safely remove hardware" on XP then disconnect it, the other never does.

Running both of them on the same laptop, results below, guess that answers my question about voltage regulation on one of them..