neat! I honestly like the purple pcb, I'm also going to say that ECS catches a lot of flack it doesn't really deserve. Yes they are technically a 2nd rate board maker, but they filled a niche in the computer market for people that wanted a computer and didn't have the money for high end parts. That means they did weird things. I have a baby-AT board that accepts socket 370 chips to 1ghz. I also think ECS was the company that made those frankenstein boards with agp and pci-e and both kinds of ddr.

luckybob wrote:

I also think ECS was the company that made those frankenstein boards with agp and pci-e and both kinds of ddr.

ASRock did that as well on several socket 775 boards..

You forgot the ancestor of all "WtF they do with this motherboard?" - Zida technology.
AT+ATX power connectors and DIN+PS/2 keyboard connectors on 1 motherboard...

This board has both DDR and SDR sockets.
Made some good progress on the build, glad I build it outside the box to start with because it's been a challenge to get it stable.
The Vortex 2 seems to be causing crashes in 3DMark. I'm running the official Diamond drivers, will try some reference Aureal drivers next.

First off the Voodoo5 has bad RAM 🙁 What a shame.

The 300GB HDD was also bad so I'm using an older drive for now.

Sparkle GeForce3 Ti200 128MB and a Diamond MX300.

On the testbench running 3DMark2000. Pioneer DVD-R and a Mitsubishi LS-120 as drive A:

Looks like that voodoo5 is a prime candidate to get upgraded to 128mb of ram!

http://www.falconfly.de/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1223002040

Do eet!

Installed the 2041 Aureal drivers which fixed the crashes in 3DMark. Also downgraded to the 4072 Detonators which added a few hundred to the score. Shaping up to be a nice little system now. I have a stick of DDR on the way and a larger HDD (current one is only 13GB), then it'll be put into a nice beige MATX case 😎 Also have a MPU-401 card coming for my Socket 7 machine so the DB50XG from there will be transferred to the MX300.

The Athlon does run hot though! Indicated ~55C under load. I haven't installed the AMD processor driver because I read the stop grant/frequency stuff stresses the MB more.

Yeah they do run hot, I remember having a Thermalright SK6 with a 7k Delta screaming on my 1Ghz AXIA Thunderbird @ 1.33Ghz.

The Geforce 3 should be a nice match for the CPU, I had a 64mb G-Force 2 GTS Pro at the time which ran well. Watch benchmarks you getting?

Gamecollector wrote:

You forgot the ancestor of all "WtF they do with this motherboard?" - Zida technology.
AT+ATX power connectors and DIN+PS/2 keyboard connectors on 1 motherboard...

I had a Matsonic Super 7 board like that. AT form factor with both AT and ATX mounting holes, AT and ATX power, AT keyboard plus a bracket that had PS2 mouse and keyboard ports PLUS two USB ports.

I ran that board for years.

misterjones wrote:

Gamecollector wrote:

You forgot the ancestor of all "WtF they do with this motherboard?" - Zida technology.
AT+ATX power connectors and DIN+PS/2 keyboard connectors on 1 motherboard...

I had a Matsonic Super 7 board like that. AT form factor with both AT and ATX mounting holes, AT and ATX power, AT keyboard plus a bracket that had PS2 mouse and keyboard ports PLUS two USB ports.

I ran that board for years.

I remember that at a point I had a MSI MS-5146 (SiS chipset)motherboard which had PS/2 and KB ports instead of DIN.

It was one of the best Socket 7 boards I ever owned (next to the Luckytech P5MVP3 motherboard).I still remember most of the configuration:

96MB EDO RAM
8.4GB Samsung HDD (dead now)
BTC IDE5224 CD-RW
Cirrus Logic 5446 PCI video card (2 or 4MB)
Realtek 8139 PCI NIC (just for fun)
Sound Blaster 16 Value CT2770 ISA sound card (I first had a Sound Blaster 128 PCI sound card,but I came across the ISA card through my boxes of parts and gave it a run on the system)
Pentium MMX 200MHz (at a later point I swapped it for a MMX 233,as a the K6-2 I had was reporting 50MHz 🤣 )
Windows 2000 Professional (very sure of that as I remember it would first open with the light blue screen then change to a neon-style wallpaper I had)
200 or 250W Silverstar AT PSU

and that's the configuration.I didn't had a case back then so I had the whole system set up next to the monitor,with the HDD,PSU and CD-ROM sitting on my speakers.
Despite being sightly slow,it ran perfectly anything I'd throw at it,even Windows ME ran without even a SINGLE BSOD.Same for 98SE and 95,and 2000 Pro.

Swapped the DDR in and got the following 3DMark scores:

3DMark 2000: 8305
3DMark 2001: 5978

No idea if these are any good 😎

Found it.

Matsonic MS6260S

Completely forgot that it came with a sound bracket too (i/o+joystick).

Played some Blood and System Shock 2 on this last night. The Vortex DOS emulation works surprisingly well, although I had to move it manually to IRQ 7 to avoid a crash caused by conflicts with the onboard USB at IRQ 5. Also had to upgrade the Detonators back to a 45.x series driver as I was getting a bluescreen when selecting a VESA mode in Blood. Teething troubles 😒

misterjones wrote:

Found it. […]
Show full quote

Found it.

Matsonic MS6260S

Completely forgot that it came with a sound bracket too (i/o+joystick).

I still have the brackets for sound,and for USB.However,my USB bracket was just 2 USB ports with a "USB 2.0"sticker next to them,without the PS/2 ports.
Looking at the board,I'd say this was one of PCChips more stable and solid boards,along with the M577 (I had one and it was real stable).
If you still have the motherboard in the picture (I know the pic isn't yours)then try finding a update for K6-2+ and K6-III CPUs.

luckybob wrote:

That means they did weird things.

LMAO. That's funny how you put that. I think ECS had good mobos provided you didn't get one of those really cheap boards that couldn't overclock whatsoever (think some mobos had gimped amount of layers?).

I find the small size and purple PCB to be the coolest thing about your mobo. AMD was at their finest during Duron to Athlon64-xp days (barton xp3200 with nforce2 and dual channel ddr was like a Pentium 4 @ 3ghz, despite running @ 2.2ghz. Athlon 64 just blew away the pentium 4.). Maybe AMD will have stuff like that again some day.

I think ram goes bad a lot of times because people usually touch the chips or lay them on cotton or wool. It's really unfortunate people buy old hardware and improperly handle them (you ever see those guys repairing xbox 360s with towels and ovens?). Also don't understand how some folks with kids have time to be around computers. Unless their a web developer of some sort and that is their primary income, that makes no sense to me whatsoever.

Awwww....and here I was hoping it would be a Slot A build.

Yeah that would be cool 😀 I've never come across one.

Got hold of a Deskstar 7k160 in PATA which is working like a champ. Single 127GB partition is massive for this build. Also went back to the last 30 series Detonators to fix a weird screen corruption in DOS VESA modes. Really not appreciating the driver roulette but ATI was no better!

Will get it in a case this week and post some final pics.

sliderider wrote:

Awwww....and here I was hoping it would be a Slot A build.

Seconded.

Getting there...

m1919 wrote:

sliderider wrote:

Awwww....and here I was hoping it would be a Slot A build.

Seconded.

Thirded. Eh, btw, what's the fastest slot A T-bird (not classic) you've ever seen? Were they even released in GHz models?

And bjt, what's the PSU you're using? I can't see it from the pics.