Ah, the good old pencil trick on the L1 bridges. When I first built my Socket A system in 2001, I couldn't afford more than a Duron 750 and of course I unlocked it, too. But it didn't clock very high, I think something around 800 MHz was the best I could get. Still have this very CPU sitting in the drawer!
However, seems like a nice build, the parts should be a good match.

gex85 wrote on 2020-08-26, 08:22:

Ah, the good old pencil trick on the L1 bridges. When I first built my Socket A system in 2001, I couldn't afford more than a Duron 750 and of course I unlocked it, too. But it didn't clock very high, I think something around 800 MHz was the best I could get. Still have this very CPU sitting in the drawer!
However, seems like a nice build, the parts should be a good match.

Thanks, it is amazing how snappy Win98 is in this platform. My brother inspired my first socket A build with his pencil trick Duron. As I recall, he ended up with two of them and one was capable of 1Ghz. I think I have that chip somewhere. My close friends and I really spent a lot of not quite dispensable income during what I call the PC arms race.

This build got a little more interesting. Determined that video card is actually a modified Hercules 3D Prophet II GTS 32MB. I had acquired this from a good friend of mine that did the mod. Originally I thought it was just a firmware upgrade. However, we chatted a little and he noted that it required much more than that. Fortunately, he was working at a place at the time that had some rather good PCB techs on staff. They had done some work for me as well, enabling me to run my Slot1 Celeron 300A procs together in an Asus P2B-D. Working on this stuff brings back some good memories.

What kind of mod was done?

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2020-09-06, 23:10:

What kind of mod was done?

You have to move a couple resistors around to change the device ID, and if you are feeling fancy then flash the appropriate bios (protip: test before flashing to make sure the card can handle the often faster quadro clocks, especially if we are talking about noname GF2MXes).
https://web.archive.org/web/20040612001256/ht … /G-Quadro-2.htm

Nice. I forgot about people doing mods like that back in the day.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2020-09-07, 23:29:

Nice. I forgot about people doing mods like that back in the day.

Me too 🤣! The only thing that clued me in was after watching one of Phil's videos on the Quadro 2 Pro. Mine was missing the DVI and only reported 32MB on boot. That is when I looked closer at the card and clearly saw Hercules 3D Prophet II GTS 32MB printed on the PCB. Now I am doing a little benchmarking to compare to my GeForce2 Ultra. Nothing special, just Quake and 3Dmark99Max. I might post a summary, but really just doing it for fun as it has already been done better.

Nice! Definitely post your results. How does the system perform with the games you play on it?

Well, no real surprises here. The Leadtek Winfast GeForce2 Ultra 64MB came out on top in Quake. Nothing scientific here. Just one pass of demo1 in each resolution.

1200 Tbird 384MB PC133 GeForce2 Ultra 640x480 16bit Quake 445.3
1200 Tbird 384MB PC133 GeForce2 Ultra 640x480 32bit Quake 420.9
1200 Tbird 384MB PC133 GeForce2 Ultra 800x600 16bit Quake 396.7
1200 Tbird 384MB PC133 GeForce2 Ultra 800x600 32bit Quake 324.6
1200 Tbird 384MB PC133 GeForce2 Ultra 1024x768 16bit Quake 282.6
1200 Tbird 384MB PC133 GeForce2 Ultra 1024x768 32bit Quake 221.6
1200 Tbird 384MB PC133 GeForce2 Ultra 1280x1024 16bit Quake 185.5
1200 Tbird 384MB PC133 GeForce2 Ultra 1280x1024 32bit Quake 144.6

1200 Tbird 384MB PC133 Quadro2 Pro 640x480 16bit Quake 425.5
1200 Tbird 384MB PC133 Quadro2 Pro 640x480 32bit Quake 358.9
1200 Tbird 384MB PC133 Quadro2 Pro 800x600 16bit Quake 335.4
1200 Tbird 384MB PC133 Quadro2 Pro 800x600 32bit Quake 256.8
1200 Tbird 384MB PC133 Quadro2 Pro 1024x768 16bit Quake 228.8
1200 Tbird 384MB PC133 Quadro2 Pro 1024x768 32bit Quake 168.7
1200 Tbird 384MB PC133 Quadro2 Pro 1280x1024 16bit Quake 149.2
1200 Tbird 384MB PC133 Quadro2 Pro 1280x1024 32bit Quake 111.3

SilverHawk wrote on 2020-08-25, 00:42:

This was a rock solid platform for me back in the day. Unlocked and overclocked Duron. Here is the build now. […]
Show full quote

This was a rock solid platform for me back in the day. Unlocked and overclocked Duron. Here is the build now.

Asus A7V133 v1.05
384MB of PC133
Athlon 1200 with obligatory no-name Golden Orb
Quadro2 Pro
120GB Western Digital
Soundblaster Live!
Win98se

Pics pending some clean up.

I remember that board! It used to have quite a fanbase as well!

Could you please tell a bit more about your experiences with the board and especially with how you set her up regarding voltages, BIOS settings and type and placement of the RAM?

With some revisions it was possible to upgrade to a Palomino, but it did require jumping through a couple hoops. Those boards could be very tricky to set up right and have all kinds of weird stability issues but once set up correctly along with getting a very beefy good quality PSU, these systems basically worked flawless. I loved working with these otherwise kinda boring looking boards! 😁
Good memories having spend hours upon hours with these boards 😀

Please feel free to indulge us with some visual pleasure (plz gib us pics lolz 😜 )

Sorry I have not responded. I have been quite busy. I will get you details requested including some pictures. Until then, here is a useful site for all you Asus A7V fans. Unfortunately, my revision 1.05 board cannot run the Palomino, but as this site points out, there are certainly some revisions that can. http://www.a7vtroubleshooting.com/info/cpu/index.htm If only my revision had the trailing period.

Revision 1.05 has official Palomino support. Therefore it can work with any Athlon XP, even if microcode is not included.
Revisions before that will work with some CPUs. Core name doesn't matter, I had experience on unsupported motherboard when Palomino refused to work, but Thoroughbred worked fine.

I can only speak from my experience and I have not had luck getting Palomino to work on my Asus A7V133 "1.05" board. The website I referenced earlier in the thread appears to indicate that official support for Palomino for A7V133 came with the "1.05." My board clearly does not have a dot after the number. The absence of it seems to support my experience. What I can't recall is if it refused to post, or if it simply was not recognized correctly. If I have time I will try to test and report back.

SilverHawk wrote on 2021-03-05, 18:42:

I can only speak from my experience and I have not had luck getting Palomino to work on my Asus A7V133 "1.05" board. The website I referenced earlier in the thread appears to indicate that official support for Palomino for A7V133 came with the "1.05." My board clearly does not have a dot after the number. The absence of it seems to support my experience. What I can't recall is if it refused to post, or if it simply was not recognized correctly. If I have time I will try to test and report back.

Seems my memory is failing. What I can report is that a XP 2200+ Thoroughbred Core does not work with my Asus A7V 133 KT133A version "1.05". What I remembered as a Palomino core, was in fact a T-bred. The jury is still out for me, but I think I will track down an affordable Palomino Athlon XP and find out.