Yes, it's an Alpha. And frankly even as an Alpha you're asking a hell of an amount for it in that state, IMVHO.Resurrecting this post as I put my A5000 up for sale on eBay last night and this morning I received a message from someone who very kindly informed me that I have the rarer A5000a model!
Identifiable chiefly by the "35FC" marking on the ARM3.
That's always difficult to tell from any photo -- you need to get to microscope-level, and start continuity-checking the tracks.Does it look fixable?
There's clearly a lot of damage around the CMOS RAM, which is missing completely. That's all reasonably readily repairable though - I've done dozens now. But the damage also covers the IDE pins, which can be much more of a problem to fix, and any fix would almost necessarily look a little grotty and be a little fragile just becuase of where the tracks run - often I think it's best to forget the onboard IDE when it's really bad, and just make do with an IDE podule - they can be faster anyway!
Floppy also gets damage, but is somewhat more repairable as many repairs can be done on the underside of the board - there are only a few traces which route near the CMOS RAM / battery damage.
I'd be confident of a "get it running RISC OS again" repair - nominally just the CMOS RAM to fix. You could even do the grim "CJE thing" and use a plug-in CMOS-RAM replacement 'podule'.
Alphas are nice. This one's a 4MB, which is slightly more unusual. But note that the ONLY unique thing about an Alpha is the 33MHz ARM3 chip, vs the stock 25MHz. It has a socketed MEMC, but that's only relevant if you want to 8MB it, and even then it's not a big task to add a socket. In all other respects, the machine's identical to a standard issue 2 board - same PCB, everything.
Statistics: Posted by IanJeffray — Thu Mar 27, 2025 2:52 pm