mine has the solder holes and if -ve dosnt lead to any thing ill leave a discrete wire running on the back of the board. Ill post pics and explain my work.

Attached pics of battery area from a version 1.2 board:

This is very important to me also, as my Acorp 5VX32 motherboard has and ODIN battery and solder holes for the coin battery socket. I would like to remove the ODIN and solder a coin battery socket for convenience.

You will still have to keep the odin as traces run to it.

I just got the coin battery holder today, ill try to get around to soldering it in.

Good NEWS! 😀 - I wish you GOOD LUCK! and keep us posted 😀

Not successful
But here is where I am so far:

pin 22 is also NC, should I hook the positive into that one?

Hmm, I think we are in trouble. This picture shows that this chip doesn't have pins 16 and 20. looks like cutting into the insulation is the only way to do this.

It's missing pins 2 3 16 20 22

so will have to remove it?

I think so, unless you can file away the insulation with the chip in situ. That sucks. I was hoping there was a simple solution to this problem.

ok I got it figured out after hacking away at the odin those two missing pins are folded over bend them down so they are touching the solder spots and you still have to run the one trace. Ill have to clean mine up better, cause it looks like a hack job, but at least my time is staying current now.

hey nice work. Can you take a picture of it?

I also found this: http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/motherboards/M/MI … um-MS-5129.html is it true that this board can run a k6 at 90fsb

Bring those two pins down and solder the one wire on the back to unable the negative trace and you will be able to use the holder solder points

A+++ for your efforts - it is a valuable information.

Keep us updated on how it performs. If the BIOS settings are kept or any other anomaly.

I think I will remove the ODIN entirely so that I can work in peace and put a pin socket for it. I think it is best this way.

Or I'll buy a few ODIN replacements. Unfortunately in my country they arent easily available.

Yes very cool. Since the board has a place for a 3V battery it seems appropriate to use it. I'm wondering if the wire connection to pin 16 is necessary.

^Yes pin 16 is necessary

You have to leave part of the odin, there is chip under all that plastic, also when you start drilling through the odin's plastic you will run into a tiny battery, pull that off. you just have to expose those two pins from the side and bend them down so they make contact with the solder holes.

I wish had a dremel to do this as I was using a dull knife and a drill, carefull how far you go cause you will hit a ceramic chip.

By the way what is the limit to these boaed like what Dimm RAM stick can I use, whats cpu and how big of a HDD?

Could anyone link me to the latest bios?

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

By the way what is the limit to these boaed like what Dimm RAM stick can I use, whats cpu and how big of a HDD?

Could anyone link me to the latest bios?

HDD depends on the BIOS mostly.

430VX does support SDRAM, but only the earliest ones that were basically either 16MB (8 chips on 1 side) or 32MB (16 chips on both sides).

Many boards of that time had warnings to not use SIMM and DIMM at the same time, iirc due to different voltages.
Newer SDRAMs might work, but you'll probably run into the problem that only part of the memory is recognized (like for instance putting in a 64MB stick and only seeing 16MB). I don't know if there may be any problems with using more recent SDRAM (like PC-100 or more recent), SDRAM was still in its infancy.

430VX boards with 2 DIMM slots are nice as that way you could use SDRAM and go up to the maximum cacheable area of 64MB.

430HX sometimes also comes with DIMM slots but the chipset doesn't support SDRAM.

CPU depends mostly on BIOS support (check that Jan Steunebrink page) and the availability of lower voltages. It really depends on the board itself.
Many boards of the time used linear VRMs that generated more heat the lower the CPU voltage went.

Please dont forget to upload the pictures with the finshed battery mod.

Thanks 😁

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

Im pretty sure this is a virge vx series

86C325 means it is the original ViRGE chip 😀