Arctic, Considering USB, the first thing you need to do is locate GROUND. There are headers with ground by the same side and with ground by opposite sides. Unless you know exactly which pin is ground and which pin is +5V, you have a chance to fry your device or controller.

Considering benchmarks, we have a reference database hosted in this thread: Phil's Ultimate VGA Benchmark Database Project
Most of us have added a lot of systems there, make sure you do the same for the sake of science 😁

btw, you have a really great PC, quite outstanding for a 1997 rig. What games do you play on it?

Intel 430TX was THE chipset to have in 1997 (along with the P166MMX, which just had a massive price reduction). I can see why you would want to keep the VX board in there though, seeing as how it's ATX. VX was more of a 1996 thing though.

I remember my friends father being an early adopter of ATX. He had a P166 classic with Trio64V+ in an Inwin 500 series ATX case. I would guess he got it in early 1996. Must have been one of the first ones available.

@feipoa
I will check and post the results. Does it matter (at least a bit?) if I have 2 x 32MB or 4x 16 MB installed?

@Dropcik
I just want to connect it, because it is there and it was considered state of the Art or Next-Gen in 1997, along with ATX.
I already had a quality USB 2.0 PCI card installed, but it had to go since I needed the PCI Slot for LAN. The second problem is that the PCB date of the USB Controller Card was "06" as in 2006. I don´t want to go back to the future 😁

Your Avatar is awesome by the way 🤣

@raymangold
I will test the card with a PCI diagnosis tool. Maybe there is still somthing alive on that PCB 😒

@RacoonRider
I hope I will find the solution now 😁
Thank you! Building it and finding all the parts took me almost a year 😀

I am still in the Hardware set up phase. So I don´t really play on it yet since I have other PCs that need to get finished.
But when I do play with the P166, I play: Outlaws (3dfx), Shadows of the Empire (D3D), GTA 1 (3dfx), Microsoft Hover, Monkey Island 1+2+3.

@Anonymous Coward
I wish I had a TX Board in there. The Mainboard is almost the only thing left that I am not completely happy with.
Are good TX Boards rare these days?

My first mainboard had AT Power. I wonder if that one could handle 128MB 😁
It's a Shuttle / Spacewalker HOT 555-A
Oh bummer, another 430VX

You can do an AT to ATX conversion pretty cheaply just by getting an adapter cable and metal backplate on ebay.

I haven't been in the market for a TX motherboard, so I'm not sure how hard they are to find. But I do remember some of the good ones. Aopen AP5T, Asus TX97...I believe Asus TXP4 was the ATX version. I use a QDI Titanium 1B+ just because that's what I have lying around. This board was famous for doing all the jumpers via software, but I find it can be unreliable sometimes. Abit, Epox and Gigabyte also made good TX based boards. Infact, I don't really remember any stand out stinkers.

USB headers on VX boards were non-standard and often didn't work even with a correctly wired breakout cable. I had a picofuse light up like a Christmas tree on a VX board once by just connecting a breakout cable by the pin out found in the board's manual, no device was ever plugged into it. The only thing I could figure is that the pinout in the manual was wrong, and the breakout cable I used grounded the USB GND pin to the cable shield (which was likely grounded to the chassis) causing a short. That pin is supposed to be isolated, but this was very early in the world of USB.

@Anonymous Coward
Maybe I will find one. I will just keep my eyes open.

@NJRoadfan
Wow, something similiar happened to me. When I built my first pc with USB, I also created a short.
Luckily my PSU didn't explode. Only the USB frontpanel went up in smoke 🤣
I thought the Floppy Drive was on fire because I saw smoke coming out of it.

I thought about replacing the Matrox Millenium II with a Matrox Mystique and Rainbow Runner module.
Is anyone using it here? What are the best drivers?

Arctic wrote:

@Anonymous Coward
Maybe I will find one. I will just keep my eyes open.

You will be still limited to a 64 MB cacheable limit as imposed by the chipset unless you use a CPU with on-die secondary cache, like the AMD K6-III or K6-II/III+.

So it's a performance loss of about 15% right?
Do I have a drop when my memory usage exceeds 64MB that are cacheable, or constant?

According to this website http://www.pcguide.com/ref/mbsys/chip/pop/g5i.htm
I should be looking for a 430HX board to get around the 64MB limit? 😕

In DOS, your memory performance will drop once you exceed 64 MB. In Windows, your memory performance will be reduced in the 0-64MB range, but will increase once 64 MB is consumed, but if the system is still needed to grab data from the uncacheable memory range (0-64MB), you will still see a memory hit even once 64 MB is consumed. The 430HX board will cache beyond the 64 MB range, and so so will various VIA and ALi boards, depending on how much cache is installed.

For a 1997 build he shouldn't be running more than 64MB anyway.

5u3 wrote:

oerk wrote:

I always wondered, if you had more than 64MB installed, did only the first 64MB get cached, or would that disable the L2 cache completely?

Only the first 64 MB get cached. MS-DOS addresses memory from bottom up, and hardly anything uses more than 64 MB, so this problem is irrelevant under DOS. Windows however addresses memory from top down, so most of the stuff lands in uncached memory, hence the slowdown.

Thank you, that was extremely helpful!

Anonymous Coward wrote:

For a 1997 build he shouldn't be running more than 64MB anyway.

Yep, in 1997 two of our class rooms had P166s with 64 MB, and that was considered an unbelievably huge amount at the time.

The NT server even had 512MB, but using server side profiles for every student wasn't the greatest idea... logging on to a system took 5-20 minutes, not including booting, IIRC...

...

So, sorry to hijack, but I think it fits the topic... since yesterday, I'm finally the proud owner of a Socket 7 system that's pretty similar to the one I had in 1997...
- K6-200 (same as my old system) (I have some Intel chips lying around, including P166 and P200 MMX. Hrm, keep the K6 for nostalgic reasons, or put an Intel chip for better game performance in there?)
- Asus P/I P55T2P4, HX chipset (mine was a Gigabyte with TX chipset)
- 32 MB EDO (mine: 32 MB SDRAM)
- Matrox Millenium 8? MB (mine: S3 Virge DX 4 MB)
- AWE 64 Value (same)

I think I need a Miro Hiscore 3D to go with it 🤣
-

@oerk
It's cool! As long as it doesn't derail the thread 😁
I got it, I am basically stuck with full performance 64MB 😒

If someone has a 440HX board for sale I am all ears 😀

Nice machine. Can you tell us more about the miroSurround, what does it do?

I guess it's supposed to add the ability for surround sound in games or movies.
It can decode Dolby Surround like on VHS tapes.
There is an option in Star Wars: Rogue Squadron to turn on "Surround"

I still need to connect it either internally or externally to the soundcard

Arctic wrote:

@oerk It's cool! As long as it doesn't derail the thread :D I got it, I am basically stuck with full performance 64MB :/ […]
Show full quote

@oerk
It's cool! As long as it doesn't derail the thread 😁
I got it, I am basically stuck with full performance 64MB 😒

If someone has a 440HX board for sale I am all ears 😀

430HX 😀 (440xx are Pentium Pro/II/III chipsets)

I managed to get my machine to run and upgraded it to 128MB (tested all of my PS/2-SIMMs in the process) - good old HX chipset. It's surprisingly fast under Win95, though there's not much difference to 64MB really.

I'm all for the 430HX when it comes to the Socket7 platform. The 430FX, 430VX and 430TX are all great too as long as you don't need large amounts of RAM. Even with K6+ chips to get around the 64MB caching restrictions, the chipset will still limit your maximum ram to 128MB on most of those chipsets. I think even some 430TX boards won't do more than 128MB because of BIOS restrictions.

The surround board is cool, even though I don't suppose there's many titles that support it.
The opening sequence of Second Reality does have Pro Logic surround 😀

Can confirm Asus TXP4 supports 256MB, even a single 256MB SDRAM DIMM.

@bjt
Thanks! I have never run Second Reality. I bet it will be awesome!
Does the Asus TXP4 theoretically also support 256MB of EDO RAM?

So, Arctic asked me to post pictures of my similar 1997 rig. I choose to interpret this as permission to hijack this thread 😉

Turns out I have the same problem, despite having the 430HX chipset - the P55T2P4 can only cache 64 MB RAM without a tag RAM installed:

So, does anyone know how to aquire a tag RAM chip for this board?

Yes, TXP4 supports 4x64MB EDO SIMMS. Only the first 64MB will be cached though, unless you have a K6+.