SaxxonPike wrote:I looked for a micro-ATX 875P motherboard to play around with. That is a very limiting restriction, and it turns out that they e […]
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I looked for a micro-ATX 875P motherboard to play around with. That is a very limiting restriction, and it turns out that they end up typically being industrial boards. But I found a "P4CMX-01" motherboard. Information for this thing is rather scarce aside from the Corvalent source themselves, but the eBay seller claims it's new. Based on the contents of the guide, it should have an ICH5 southbridge, which will suit my requirements nicely.
This is the listing:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/222221573050
This is the PDF guide:
ftp://support.corvalent.com/P4CAX-P4CMX/Docs/MN-P4CMX-01.pdf
I'll report my findings.
Alright, got the P4CMX board, tried working with it for a couple days. I got Win98 installed on it, but it was hard to get POSTing in the first place. The BIOS may be toast on it. But wow, what a BIOS. There's a huge number of features. I think I want to replace the BIOS chip in it (it is socketed) but I'm not sure the process. I'd be willing to pay someone for their time to help with this one.
Options it did not come with: GPIO, second NIC.
It appears to be a board that was special ordered for a health tech company (I googled the company that shows up as the boot logo.) It actually came with a 3.0/1M/800 P4 in it and 512 MB non-ECC RAM (even though the board itself supports ECC.)
Running the Yamaha setup program showed that there were no provisions for DMA on this board anyway. A real shame. I'm convinced there's something in the BIOS I need to enable, but I can't get that far most tries, so I gave up (for now.)
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As a failsafe, I also had a Dell Dimension 4600 motherboard in transit. I wanted to get a cheap mATX 865 or 875 board, and this looked like a good option. Research showed that it used a couple custom headers (Dell, go figure.) I had to uh.. "modify" the CPU fan header. This turned out to work. They have a custom header for the front panel, which I'm probably going to put together a custom cable for since I have another Dimension computer that I can gut.
The Dimension 4600 motherboard does work with DSSETUP and shows DMA, and under Windows the YMF724 card I got supports legacy FM on the SB port and wavetable on the MIDI port. I really appreciate having both options available.
The BIOS on the Dell is awful even after flashing A12, but it now recognizes a 3.4/1/800 P4 at least (before, it was on A02, and only recognized it as a 1.6/1/800 P4.) I miss the fully equipped Phoenix BIOS from the 875P board mentioned above.
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I snagged a 5700 FX to see the difference in how it plays some games I have, both in DOS and stuff with palettized textures (Extreme-G 2 comes to mind).
I also happened to receive an ATi Rage Pro Turbo (the one with the RAM slots, and they're populated too!) That was a mistake; the seller was supposed to send me something else. They're sending me what I bid on, and I get to keep the card. What do I do with something like this...?
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So yeah, coming back to that BIOS, if anyone has the know-how and equipment, feel free to get in touch and we can work something out.