VOGONS


First post, by GabrielKnight123

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I've been testing motherboard ISA pin voltages for 16 bit ISA on a motherboard that the serial port for the mouse has stopped working, I've compared the problem board with another board and I'm getting different results that makes it seem the serial stopped working because of too low voltage from a bad capacitor or two. My test rig consists of an IDE hard drive for a load with a good quality ATX to AT power adapter that supplies minus 5 volts, no CPU or ram or anything else and the power supply is a Corsair RM550x. For example on pins A14 to A29 the problem board is out putting between 0.020 volts to 0.016 volts and on the presumably good board its 5.01 or 5.02 volts. Can someone show me a link with the normal 16 bit ISA voltage out puts when testing with no CPU, ram, just a hard drive. Both motherboards are socket 3. I didn't research what the max wattage for a power supply should be when using an ATX to AT adapter with an Intel 486DX2 overdrive 66MHz before buying the power supply but is the Corsair RM550x to much (550 watts?).

Problem board is a GA-5486AL Rev 2A (ALI chipset)
Presumed good board is a VL/I-486SV2GX4 Rev 2.0 (SIS chipset)

The power supply when I test it from the P8 and P9 pins connected to the motherboard is:

+5 volts = 5.02 V
-5 volts = -5.10 V
+12 volts = 12.15 V
-12 volts = -12.22 V
Grey wire = 4.95 V
GND = 0.0

Reply 1 of 3, by mkarcher

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A14 to A20 are address pins. During an ISA cycle, they indicate what address is accessed. When no ISA cycle is active, the voltage of those pins doesn't matter, and depends on the mainboard.

The only pins that contain supply voltage are B1 (GND), B3 (+5V), B5 (-5V), B7 (-12V), B9 (+12V), B10 (GND), B29 (+5V) and B31 (GND) on the 8-bit slot, as well as D16 (+5V) and D18 (GND) on the 16-bit slot.

Reply 2 of 3, by GabrielKnight123

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Thanks mkarcher your right I have a printout of the ISA bus with what every pin is and my testing skills are low for this kind of thing I thought they would be consistent across all motherboards so now I have to ask how do I know when it's safe to add valuable cards to the motherboard by testing all ISA buses for example if an address or IRQ pin is not for voltage how can I make sure it's not going to fry a card when one of my motherboards output 0.016 v and another is 5 v

Reply 3 of 3, by mkarcher

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You can not find out whether a board could damage a card by voltage measurement alone. But voltage measurement can raise red flags: The supply pins should all be near their nominal voltage. No pin except for the supply pins is allowed to be below 0V or above 5.1V. The clock and OSC pin must be oscillating, so on a DC meter, some voltage between 1V and 3V should be displayed. Furthermore, when the system is powered off, no pin except for the supply pins may be shorted to ground or +5V.

If a mainboard fulfills these criteria and it boots with some generic (non-valuable) off-the-shelf components, the risk of damaging valuable components is quite low.

Independent of mainboad damage, you should be aware that IRQs are not sharable on the ISA bus. If two cards use the same IRQ, they might fight each other until one of the cards fail. I actually had that happen with two serial ports both configured to IRQ3 (COM2 and COM4). As long as only one of those ports is "enabled" at the same time, this setup is actually OK, becaue a compliant serial port that is not "enabled" does not touch its IRQ line. As soon as both ports are enabled, they might fight each other. I've seen a multi I/O card with a highly integrated I/O chip (possibly some GoldStar prime variant) that was unable to generate IRQs anymore, after having a conflict with a modem on the same IRQ.