First post, by mothergoose729
I have been scouring ebay for the last couple weeks looking for a socket 7 upgrade.What I want is an ATX form factor with a pin array (instead of dip switches) for controlling bus speed and multiplier. My plan is to buy a bunch of switches and try and mount them to my case with guerrilla glue and a dremel 🤣
I am going to be using a pentium MMX 233 with a Diamond Voodoo 4mb and a cirrus logic 5446 2D card. The goal is to use setmul and multiplier/bus switching to hit every speed point between a 386dx20 and a pentium mmx 233, and I'll be playing mostly DOS games and a few early windows/glide games.
I have found two boards that I really like. The first is an Asus P/I-XP55T2P4, an HX chipset, with an open socket for a TagRam upgrade. It has 3 PCI and 3 ISA, with an additional shared ISA/PCI slot. I can go down to a 50mhz bus and up to a 66mhz bus, which unfortunately means no overclocking, but getting down to a slow 386 shouldn't be a problem. This is basically exactly what I am looking. I prefer intel chipsets because I have had bad experiences with super socket 7 boards and this checks every box.
.. however, I have found an Asus P5A SS7 board for a good price. It is listed as for parts, but the seller says that it POSTs. This particular board is kind of the holy grail of socket 7 boards. I don't plan on running a K6 3+ with a voodoo AGP, but once I have the board it would be temping. Unfortunately, it only goes down to a 60mhz bus speed, so getting down to a slow 386 is going to be a challenge. On the upside, I can overclock to give me self a bit more reach for high resolution DOS and windows games.
The P5A is clearly a better board, but I have a dedicated high performance windows 98 machine and I wasn't planning on a K6 3+ build. Is a 60mhz bus/2x multiplier with setmul slow enough on a mmx for slow 386? Which one should I choose?