sf78 wrote:

From another collector/hoarder. 33€ shipped, not too bad. 😊

A Gravis PnP in there too! Sweet haul.

kanecvr wrote:

I'll take the MVP3 over the Aladdin V any day. Belive it or not, I now have 3 ALi V boards - and none of them work properly. One is a Commate witch came with a K6-450 - used to work with everything bu AGP cards, now it throws "Gate A20 error" when trying to load Himem.sys. The second is a EPOX board (also baby AT) - BSODs in win98 with ANY AGP card except for a Voodoo Banshee.

The third is an ATX Asus board - replaced most caps (1000 and 1500uf) and it runs fine but it's slower than my Lucky Tech P5MVP3 in almost all aspects (5-10%) except for AGP performance. Still use it since it's my only ATX Super Seven board, and weirdly enough it's currently the favorite SS7 board in my collection, since it's the only ALi V board I could get running.

I think that you might have had some bad boards when dealing with Ali-V chipset's. My P5A has one of the really late chipset revision.
The GA-5AX wich I bought, are as I remember it, just running fine. It's as fast as any MVP3 boards that I have come across.
Anyway. Yes, it has quirks. Guess it's the age. Because the only issue that I have found, is that the CPU-Fan header is not working.
Not that big a deal, as it runs good with the fan attatched to the PSU instead.
For drivers and such. I have not installed any, other than for the cards installed. The board it self are running with Windows default
drivers, that it picked up when installing Win98SE. Just as I remember the board. Sturdy, good and running slightly slower than MVP3.
Not slower in that sence. It just "feels" somewhat 5% slower.
One thing that I like, is that with an ATA-100 pci controller, the HDD is running like magic. Without the ATA controller, the board
has none of those small periods of 1/10 of a second, where it "freezes" (when copying from cd to HDD).
You know... Those little quirkies, that followed with computers of that time.

PeterLI wrote:

I drove to rural SC this evening and picked up PS/2s with a CT5320 and CT5330. 😀 For a fair price.

Nice. Still love those old IBM case design. They have allways stood as a somewhat engineer's way of designing stuff.
They are like the computerworlds answer to early 90's NAD amplifier design. (Wich I really adore)

On the MVP3 and ALi: That is interesting to know, maybe I'll have to play with one some day. For the time being then, it looks like having the MVP3 as my go-to SS7 chip is good enough. For what it's worth, I favor the Chaintech 5AGM2, I change the CPU often, but it mostly uses a K6-2-500 at 550MHz.

HighTreason wrote:

On the MVP3 and ALi: That is interesting to know, maybe I'll have to play with one some day. For the time being then, it looks like having the MVP3 as my go-to SS7 chip is good enough. For what it's worth, I favor the Chaintech 5AGM2, I change the CPU often, but it mostly uses a K6-2-500 at 550MHz.

If you happens to stumble upon an Epox MVP3-C, then try it out.
It's Baby-AT and has both AT and ATX power connector.
It's got AGP, ISA and PCI as well. It ran an K6-2 500 and P133 well.
I have it in my AT case with the P133 as of now.

I've a GA-5AX that I got as a whole system. What I find cool about it is the fact that it had the capability of taking a 256mb stick of ram (and therefore presumably it could take three 256mb's) bringing the total max to 768mb. Quite substantial over the 384mb of competitor boards at the time!!

Still really overkill for Win98 though. 512 is nice and possible what you need.
Over 512 is more a NT thing or server thing back in the late 90's.
Yeah... +512 is so cool to have, if the chipset allows caching of that amount.

386_junkie wrote:

brostenen wrote:

I finally have that motherboard, wich I have searched for since I sold it in 2004. (deeply regret selling my first) I had this b […]
Show full quote

I finally have that motherboard, wich I have searched for since I sold it in 2004. (deeply regret selling my first)
I had this board in my main-rig from 1998 or something like that until we parted ways.
And the reason for me, having so much retro gear, is actually in the search of this perticulair board.
So... Now I have all what I need in terms of SS7-Platform. My collection of SS7-Mobo's are mostly done.

The best part of it all are, that it happens to be the exact same revision.
In my parts collection, I just happens to have the exact same CPU (K6-2-500) and the exact same mem-modules,
from the exact same computer-shop. Wich I had back then. GFX and Soundcards are not the exact models. (yet close)
What an coinsident. I feel lucky, to be able to rebuild my old machine as complete as I possible can.

Yet again. 1.000.000.000 times thanks to the previous owner for letting me buy this board. 😀

Nice board, i'm a big fan of ALI chipsets and have many 386 / 486 boards with chipset of theirs in my collection.... though I didn't realise they were still around for the socket 7 days, quick research shows their Aladdin line went upto P3, socket 478 and then went one further with Magik, sockets A, 940, 754.

But it all began with the M1429... this is my favourite. 😀

Can confirm; the Toshiba Satellite 1800-712 laptop I had used an ALi chipset with its 1.1 GHz Intel Celeron (which was clearly a desktop chip, because there was never a 100 MHz FSB Mobile Celeron at that speed).

PeterLI wrote:

I drove to rural SC this evening and picked up PS/2s with a CT5320 and CT5330. 😀 For a fair price.

2,88MB drive?

Just got this yesterday. Albatron K8X800 Pro II with an Athlon 64 3000+. Need to get a HSF retention bracket and HSF for it.

brostenen wrote:

I think that you might have had some bad boards when dealing with Ali-V chipset's. My P5A has one of the really late chipset rev […]
Show full quote

I think that you might have had some bad boards when dealing with Ali-V chipset's. My P5A has one of the really late chipset revision.
The GA-5AX wich I bought, are as I remember it, just running fine. It's as fast as any MVP3 boards that I have come across.
Anyway. Yes, it has quirks. Guess it's the age. Because the only issue that I have found, is that the CPU-Fan header is not working.
Not that big a deal, as it runs good with the fan attatched to the PSU instead.
For drivers and such. I have not installed any, other than for the cards installed. The board it self are running with Windows default
drivers, that it picked up when installing Win98SE. Just as I remember the board. Sturdy, good and running slightly slower than MVP3.
Not slower in that sence. It just "feels" somewhat 5% slower.

Bad boards - I know. I have a long history of headaches when dealing with the ALi V chipset - that's why I value my Asus P5A - unlike 90% of the Aladdin V boards I've had to deal with, this one is now trouble-free (after recapping). The other two have also undergone recapping, but to no avail (it actually made the Commate board worse). Seems like the chipset doesn't age as well as the MVP3.

The first ALi V board I had to deal with was either a Commate or a Lucky Tech baby-AT job - it was my cousin's first computer. The thing had a K6-2 550Mhz CPU installed and it would hang constantly in windows. The only fix I could find is running the CPU at 450MHz. It would not be stable at it's rated frequency regardless of voltage. Of course I tried swapping in my 450MHz K6 witch happily ran in my PC at 500 - same deal.

brostenen wrote:

One thing that I like, is that with an ATA-100 pci controller, the HDD is running like magic. Without the ATA controller, the board
has none of those small periods of 1/10 of a second, where it "freezes" (when copying from cd to HDD).
You know... Those little quirkies, that followed with computers of that time.

I know the feeling. One of my MVP3 boards has a 686 sb with the shitty ATA33 controller. The other one has an early 686B with the ATA66 controller - much smoother - P5MVP3-99T sept 99 I belive. The other two have the VT82C686B with ATA100 and 80 pin ribbon cable support - a thing of beauty - they support IDE HDDs up to 120gb and are quite snappy. Version is Lucky Tech P5MVP3-99X - feb 01 if I remember correctly (yes, Lucky Tech still made socket 7 boards in 2001). These I found new, unused, shiny and dust-free, in their original boxes at a local computer shop that went out of business a few years back. Paid 20$ for both.

Yes: with ED FDD. I need to test them. May
Take a few weeks/months to get around to it. I am still in the middle of moving.

Well, got lucky today, again 😀

Saw this little beast lying in the corridor at work. It was used until recently to drive a specific kind of film scanner, but it had to be retired because of the Windows 2000 on it (just cannot be maintained in a hospital environment).

It's a HP Vectra VL400, PIII 1000MHz, Intel i815 chipset. Came with 512MB SDRAM, Matrox G450 videocard. http://www.hp.com/ecomcat/hpcatalog/specs/P4151T.htm

Can someone remind me what the extended PCI slot is again please (1st PCI slot)?

Cyrix200+ wrote:

It's a HP Vectra VL400, PIII 1000MHz, Intel i810 chipset. Came with 512MB SDRAM, Matrox G450 videocard. http://www.hp.com/ecomcat/hpcatalog/specs/P4151T.htm

Can someone remind me what the extende PCI slot is again please (1st PCI slot)?

I don't know if this extension is anything standard. The technical reference manual doesn't say anything. just "PCI Slot 1 (DT + MT), or Riser card slot (SFF)". DT probably refers to the desktop model you found.
Looks like a nice machine, AGP slot, onboard audio (which can be switched off). Should be good for somewhat later Win9x stuff, maybe some later DOS stuff (though you'd probably need a PCI Audio card with decent Sound Blaster emulation). I'd probably replace the video card, though.

It seems that an ISA slot extension exists, that would be totally cool.

Blurredman wrote:

I've a GA-5AX that I got as a whole system. What I find cool about it is the fact that it had the capability of taking a 256mb stick of ram (and therefore presumably it could take three 256mb's) bringing the total max to 768mb. Quite substantial over the 384mb of competitor boards at the time!!

According to
http://www.k6plus.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2125
or
http://www.planet3dnow.de/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=383205
even 1.5GB are possible with the correct modules and chipset Revision E. But I agree that this is not actually useful.

I run a Windows 98 system (And XP) on a 440GX with 2GB of RAM... Believe me, it is more trouble than it's worth.

HighTreason wrote:

I run a Windows 98 system (And XP) on a 440GX with 2GB of RAM... Believe me, it is more trouble than it's worth.

Well, 98 and 2GB always causes fun and games anyway. 440GX should be very stable with 1GB though.

I only allow Windows to see 512MB. The remaining 1536MB are mapped to a ram drive which contains the Windows swap file. The system is exceptionally stable, but if I try doing silly things with the RAM drive it can lock up, rarely though, do I even come close to using even the 512MB of RAM, in fact, barely exceed the first 64MB most of the time.

For more demanding tasks I switch to XP, it's a dual processor rig and I'd rather not lose the RAM, which was why I came up with a creative way of negating the problem.

Cyrix200+ wrote:

Can someone remind me what the extende PCI slot is again please (1st PCI slot)?

Looks non-standard. Probably supports some HP-specific add-in card for RAID or networking or remote management/instrumentation or something. It certainly is not PCI-X, but thankfully it looks like it would be out of the way for conventional PCI cards. Overall a neat little machine - I've had a few Slot 1 Vectras over the years, and they're generally very easy to work with.

Working on (and may work up a trade for) the ultimate Windows xp AGP setup. 3.4ghz Pentium 4, 4gb of OCZ DDR400, Lian-li case, Gainward 7800GS and a really nice ATX Asus 875P motherboard.