ChrisK wrote on 2023-02-21, 11:30:

Mine gave me some stupid VGA error beep codes, regardless what VGA card was inserted (AGP, PIC, ISA). Without any VGA card it to […]
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TrashPanda wrote on 2023-02-21, 10:23:

Anyone have much experience with the ASUS K7M ?

Looking at grabbing one for my Athlon 850, the board its on cant do much int he way of overclocking but it seems the K7M can tweak some settings to OC Slot A processors, namely its got a huge range of bus speeds and voltage settings. I wonder if the 850 I have could be pushed to 1Ghz via using a 125Mhz bus speed and a small voltage bump.

AMD-K7850MPR52B A is the model of Athlon being used, one of the Pluto versions IIRC.

Mine gave me some stupid VGA error beep codes, regardless what VGA card was inserted (AGP, PIC, ISA). Without any VGA card it told me RAM was bad.
Either way, it did not want to POST. Had already written off the money for buying it.
What was necessary in the end to bring it back to life was a simple reflash of the BIOS.
Haven't done much more with it other than testing my handful of Athlons for working or not.
But hey, it's an Asus and it supports Thunderbird Slot As. So what can go wrong? 😉

At the least it has more Robust OC features than the board I have currently which is a Biostar M7MKE. ..That said it does have an ISA slot and Universal AGP so its not a bad board just lacking the expanded BIOS feature set of the ASUS board. ACPI also cannot be turned off on this board so can cause issues with Windows 2000, no idea if this ever got patched but might be worth looking into.

Also .. one day I will get me one of them Vapourware 1Ghz Slot A Athlons, till then I gotta fake it.

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-02-21, 11:54:

ChrisK wrote on 2023-02-21, 11:30:

Mine gave me some stupid VGA error beep codes, regardless what VGA card was inserted (AGP, PIC, ISA). Without any VGA card it to […]
Show full quote

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-02-21, 10:23:

Anyone have much experience with the ASUS K7M ?

Looking at grabbing one for my Athlon 850, the board its on cant do much int he way of overclocking but it seems the K7M can tweak some settings to OC Slot A processors, namely its got a huge range of bus speeds and voltage settings. I wonder if the 850 I have could be pushed to 1Ghz via using a 125Mhz bus speed and a small voltage bump.

AMD-K7850MPR52B A is the model of Athlon being used, one of the Pluto versions IIRC.

Mine gave me some stupid VGA error beep codes, regardless what VGA card was inserted (AGP, PIC, ISA). Without any VGA card it told me RAM was bad.
Either way, it did not want to POST. Had already written off the money for buying it.
What was necessary in the end to bring it back to life was a simple reflash of the BIOS.
Haven't done much more with it other than testing my handful of Athlons for working or not.
But hey, it's an Asus and it supports Thunderbird Slot As. So what can go wrong? 😉

At the least it has more Robust OC features than the board I have currently which is a Biostar M7MKE. ..That said it does have an ISA slot and Universal AGP so its not a bad board just lacking the expanded BIOS feature set of the ASUS board. ACPI also cannot be turned off on this board so can cause issues with Windows 2000, no idea if this ever got patched but might be worth looking into.

Also .. one day I will get me one of them Vapourware 1Ghz Slot A Athlons, till then I gotta fake it.

1. K7M. You will be lucky to get more than 110-112Mhz fsb stable.
2. Most Slot-A Athlon CPUs were sold as lower speed than the die was rated at. If you pop the heat spreader plate off an 850, there will most likely be a 900 or 950 under it. Switching the multiplier and cache divider is as easy as moving some 0 ohm resistors. They are tiny though.
The thing about the higher speed Slot-A Athlons is that the cache divider is higher on them and depending on what they were sold as, you may get lower speed cache compared to some of the lower speed Athlons.

Another thing I remember is that it depends on the revision of the northbridge (aka the AMD part of the chipset as the southbridge is from VIA) if it supports that SuperBypass thingi.
I'm not that much into AMD tech from that time but this was something with relatively large impact on memory/overall performance as I've read.
Still I'm not sure if my K7M supports it since I never looked after the revision but as far as I can remember there wasn't an option in BIOS for that so I suppose not.

And keep in mind, GeForce cards are limited to AGP 1x with the Irongate chipset. That's a non-issue for me btw...

Today I received this: I wanted a card to put in the DX2/4 because under your advice it was better to put the Sound Blaster Pro2 in the 386, and after various searches I found it feasible. So I looked for a replacement and it could only be an SB16, just that I didn't want just any, it didn't have to be too modern, one of the very first SB16s for the taste of the very early 90s. Then I wanted it as equipped as possible. And then I found this which in my opinion is the best I could find:

-Real OPL3 (not so common…)
-DSP 4.04 (bye Hanging MIDI Notes Bug)
-Wave Blaster expansion
-CSP (This serves more to give the most complete “first model” flavor without cost cuts)

I love the “Sound Blaster 16” serigraphy without any Value, vibra, cost reduce etc… it will mate perfectly with the retrocomputer prince (DX2). What do you think?

AlessandroB wrote on 2023-02-21, 21:38:

Today I received this: I wanted a card to put in the DX2/4 because under your advice it was better to put the Sound Blaster Pro2 […]
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Today I received this: I wanted a card to put in the DX2/4 because under your advice it was better to put the Sound Blaster Pro2 in the 386, and after various searches I found it feasible. So I looked for a replacement and it could only be an SB16, just that I didn't want just any, it didn't have to be too modern, one of the very first SB16s for the taste of the very early 90s. Then I wanted it as equipped as possible. And then I found this which in my opinion is the best I could find:

-Real OPL3 (not so common…)
-DSP 4.04 (bye Hanging MIDI Notes Bug)
-Wave Blaster expansion
-CSP (This serves more to give the most complete “first model” flavor without cost cuts)

I love the “Sound Blaster 16” serigraphy without any Value, vibra, cost reduce etc… it will mate perfectly with the retrocomputer prince (DX2). What do you think?

Good choice in my opinion. For my future 486-build I'll probably use the same model

Recently I posted about buying this big box of Pentium IIs, well they arrived today and I thought yall might be curious about the models.

-Pentium III 450 SL3CC
-Celeron 333 SL2WN
-Pentium II 350 SL2WZ
-Pentium II 350 SL2U3 x 4
-Pentium II 400 SL357 x 3

The Pentium III 450 is nice to have but other than that nothing much interesting, doesn't look to be any unlocked models, but I also don't have any date codes either. What has me curious is the SL3 part of the code on the 400s .. wouldnt that signify that they are really Pentium III CPUs rebadged as Pentium IIs ?

They are also much cleaner than this picture, I guess the seller tidied them up before mailing them.

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-02-22, 00:38:

[..] What has me curious is the SL3 part of the code on the 400s .. wouldnt that signify that they are really Pentium III CPUs rebadged as Pentium IIs ?

I would say they reached SL2ZZ 😀

AlessandroB wrote on 2023-02-21, 21:38:

I love the “Sound Blaster 16” serigraphy without any Value, vibra, cost reduce etc… it will mate perfectly with the retrocomputer prince (DX2). What do you think?

Yes. Personally I think this is a great card. I have a 1740 in my DX4-100 next to my Ultrasound Classic. Good choice.

pan069 wrote on 2023-02-22, 01:33:

AlessandroB wrote on 2023-02-21, 21:38:

I love the “Sound Blaster 16” serigraphy without any Value, vibra, cost reduce etc… it will mate perfectly with the retrocomputer prince (DX2). What do you think?

Yes. Personally I think this is a great card. I have a 1740 in my DX4-100 next to my Ultrasound Classic. Good choice.

My is next to a Roland ISA card, I have to decide if the roland at this point is not superfluous since the sb16 already has the waveblaster connector.

I bought a small upgrade for my NT 3.1 / Win MME /OS/2 2.x retro rocket.

I ordered a Pentium 4 3.06GHz HT processor (Socket 478) to upgrade the current Pentium 4 2.8GHz. This alone should give the system about 10% higher performance.

I can also test NT 3.1's multi-processor performance (such as it is) by enabling Hyperthreading on the system. I'm pretty excited to give that a try.

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-02-22, 00:38:

Recently I posted about buying this big box of Pentium IIs, well they arrived today and I thought yall might be curious about th […]
Show full quote

Recently I posted about buying this big box of Pentium IIs, well they arrived today and I thought yall might be curious about the models.

Pentium IIs.jpeg

-Pentium III 450 SL3CC
-Celeron 333 SL2WN
-Pentium II 350 SL2WZ
-Pentium II 350 SL2U3 x 4
-Pentium II 400 SL357 x 3

The Pentium III 450 is nice to have but other than that nothing much interesting, doesn't look to be any unlocked models, but I also don't have any date codes either. What has me curious is the SL3 part of the code on the 400s .. wouldnt that signify that they are really Pentium III CPUs rebadged as Pentium IIs ?

They are also much cleaner than this picture, I guess the seller tidied them up before mailing them.

Maybe just for the SECC2 cartridge upgrade, though the S spec numbers were somewhat sequential, so if they ran out in one series they just went on to next.

When you've got a board that does a steady 133, you can torture some 350s at 466 for top speed PII jollies.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-02-22, 04:39:

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-02-22, 00:38:

Recently I posted about buying this big box of Pentium IIs, well they arrived today and I thought yall might be curious about th […]
Show full quote

Recently I posted about buying this big box of Pentium IIs, well they arrived today and I thought yall might be curious about the models.

Pentium IIs.jpeg

-Pentium III 450 SL3CC
-Celeron 333 SL2WN
-Pentium II 350 SL2WZ
-Pentium II 350 SL2U3 x 4
-Pentium II 400 SL357 x 3

The Pentium III 450 is nice to have but other than that nothing much interesting, doesn't look to be any unlocked models, but I also don't have any date codes either. What has me curious is the SL3 part of the code on the 400s .. wouldnt that signify that they are really Pentium III CPUs rebadged as Pentium IIs ?

They are also much cleaner than this picture, I guess the seller tidied them up before mailing them.

Maybe just for the SECC2 cartridge upgrade, though the S spec numbers were somewhat sequential, so if they ran out in one series they just went on to next.

When you've got a board that does a steady 133, you can torture some 350s at 466 for top speed PII jollies.

Well I do have some spare 350s now ..Doubt they would sell and they are not really useful as I have other better options so using them for torture OC might be fun.

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-02-22, 00:38:

Recently I posted about buying this big box of Pentium IIs, well they arrived today and I thought yall might be curious about th […]
Show full quote

Recently I posted about buying this big box of Pentium IIs, well they arrived today and I thought yall might be curious about the models.

Pentium IIs.jpeg

-Pentium III 450 SL3CC
-Celeron 333 SL2WN
-Pentium II 350 SL2WZ
-Pentium II 350 SL2U3 x 4
-Pentium II 400 SL357 x 3

The Pentium III 450 is nice to have but other than that nothing much interesting, doesn't look to be any unlocked models, but I also don't have any date codes either. What has me curious is the SL3 part of the code on the 400s .. wouldnt that signify that they are really Pentium III CPUs rebadged as Pentium IIs ?

They are also much cleaner than this picture, I guess the seller tidied them up before mailing them.

How can you not have any date codes? I'm confused 🤣

H3nrik V! wrote on 2023-02-22, 04:59:

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-02-22, 00:38:

Recently I posted about buying this big box of Pentium IIs, well they arrived today and I thought yall might be curious about th […]
Show full quote

Recently I posted about buying this big box of Pentium IIs, well they arrived today and I thought yall might be curious about the models.

Pentium IIs.jpeg

-Pentium III 450 SL3CC
-Celeron 333 SL2WN
-Pentium II 350 SL2WZ
-Pentium II 350 SL2U3 x 4
-Pentium II 400 SL357 x 3

The Pentium III 450 is nice to have but other than that nothing much interesting, doesn't look to be any unlocked models, but I also don't have any date codes either. What has me curious is the SL3 part of the code on the 400s .. wouldnt that signify that they are really Pentium III CPUs rebadged as Pentium IIs ?

They are also much cleaner than this picture, I guess the seller tidied them up before mailing them.

How can you not have any date codes? I'm confused 🤣

I dont have them because I haven't bothered to write down the numbering for each CPU yet, not that I literally don't have them 😜

When I got the lot I just did a quick check for the CPU sequence ID and what speed/model it was, Ill get around to the date codes later when I have a bit more free time and coffee. Also need to find my magnifying glasses since I cant read the tiny letting eaisly without them ...I blame old age and staring at LCD screens too much.

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-02-22, 05:09:

H3nrik V! wrote on 2023-02-22, 04:59:

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-02-22, 00:38:

Recently I posted about buying this big box of Pentium IIs, well they arrived today and I thought yall might be curious about th […]
Show full quote

Recently I posted about buying this big box of Pentium IIs, well they arrived today and I thought yall might be curious about the models.

Pentium IIs.jpeg

-Pentium III 450 SL3CC
-Celeron 333 SL2WN
-Pentium II 350 SL2WZ
-Pentium II 350 SL2U3 x 4
-Pentium II 400 SL357 x 3

The Pentium III 450 is nice to have but other than that nothing much interesting, doesn't look to be any unlocked models, but I also don't have any date codes either. What has me curious is the SL3 part of the code on the 400s .. wouldnt that signify that they are really Pentium III CPUs rebadged as Pentium IIs ?

They are also much cleaner than this picture, I guess the seller tidied them up before mailing them.

How can you not have any date codes? I'm confused 🤣

I dont have them because I haven't bothered to write down the numbering for each CPU yet, not that I literally don't have them 😜

When I got the lot I just did a quick check for the CPU sequence ID and what speed/model it was, Ill get around to the date codes later when I have a bit more free time and coffee. Also need to find my magnifying glasses since I cant read the tiny letting eaisly without them ...I blame old age and staring at LCD screens too much.

Makes sense, especially the coffee part 😉 in my experience, photos are great magnifying glasses, though 😁

H3nrik V! wrote on 2023-02-22, 05:22:

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-02-22, 05:09:

H3nrik V! wrote on 2023-02-22, 04:59:

How can you not have any date codes? I'm confused 🤣

I dont have them because I haven't bothered to write down the numbering for each CPU yet, not that I literally don't have them 😜

When I got the lot I just did a quick check for the CPU sequence ID and what speed/model it was, Ill get around to the date codes later when I have a bit more free time and coffee. Also need to find my magnifying glasses since I cant read the tiny letting eaisly without them ...I blame old age and staring at LCD screens too much.

Makes sense, especially the coffee part 😉 in my experience, photos are great magnifying glasses, though 😁

I hear steady hands help there too ...now if I could find a pair of them 😁, seriously though the Ihpone has amazing jitter corection damn thing has been a life saver for taking photos in hard to see places. (Where my fat head is too big to get a good sight angle but the phone fits fine 😀)

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-02-22, 00:38:

Recently I posted about buying this big box of Pentium IIs, well they arrived today and I thought yall might be curious about th […]
Show full quote

Recently I posted about buying this big box of Pentium IIs, well they arrived today and I thought yall might be curious about the models.

Pentium IIs.jpeg

-Pentium III 450 SL3CC
-Celeron 333 SL2WN
-Pentium II 350 SL2WZ
-Pentium II 350 SL2U3 x 4
-Pentium II 400 SL357 x 3

The Pentium III 450 is nice to have but other than that nothing much interesting, doesn't look to be any unlocked models, but I also don't have any date codes either. What has me curious is the SL3 part of the code on the 400s .. wouldnt that signify that they are really Pentium III CPUs rebadged as Pentium IIs ?

They are also much cleaner than this picture, I guess the seller tidied them up before mailing them.

Oh cool. I actually need a PII 400 or 450 with a low profile cooler. Looks like you have a few spares now 😁 Where do you live and would you be interested in a trade?

appiah4 wrote on 2023-02-22, 06:19:

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-02-22, 00:38:

Recently I posted about buying this big box of Pentium IIs, well they arrived today and I thought yall might be curious about th […]
Show full quote

Recently I posted about buying this big box of Pentium IIs, well they arrived today and I thought yall might be curious about the models.

Pentium IIs.jpeg

-Pentium III 450 SL3CC
-Celeron 333 SL2WN
-Pentium II 350 SL2WZ
-Pentium II 350 SL2U3 x 4
-Pentium II 400 SL357 x 3

The Pentium III 450 is nice to have but other than that nothing much interesting, doesn't look to be any unlocked models, but I also don't have any date codes either. What has me curious is the SL3 part of the code on the 400s .. wouldnt that signify that they are really Pentium III CPUs rebadged as Pentium IIs ?

They are also much cleaner than this picture, I guess the seller tidied them up before mailing them.

Oh cool. I actually need a PII 400 or 450 with a low profile cooler. Looks like you have a few spares now 😁 Where do you live and would you be interested in a trade?

Rural Australia, expensive to get stuff here and equally expensive to get it out.

Postage would likely be more than you can buy one off Evilbay for.

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-02-22, 09:31:

appiah4 wrote on 2023-02-22, 06:19:

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-02-22, 00:38:

Recently I posted about buying this big box of Pentium IIs, well they arrived today and I thought yall might be curious about th […]
Show full quote

Recently I posted about buying this big box of Pentium IIs, well they arrived today and I thought yall might be curious about the models.

Pentium IIs.jpeg

-Pentium III 450 SL3CC
-Celeron 333 SL2WN
-Pentium II 350 SL2WZ
-Pentium II 350 SL2U3 x 4
-Pentium II 400 SL357 x 3

The Pentium III 450 is nice to have but other than that nothing much interesting, doesn't look to be any unlocked models, but I also don't have any date codes either. What has me curious is the SL3 part of the code on the 400s .. wouldnt that signify that they are really Pentium III CPUs rebadged as Pentium IIs ?

They are also much cleaner than this picture, I guess the seller tidied them up before mailing them.

Oh cool. I actually need a PII 400 or 450 with a low profile cooler. Looks like you have a few spares now 😁 Where do you live and would you be interested in a trade?

Rural Australia, expensive to get stuff here and equally expensive to get it out.

Postage would likely be more than you can buy one off Evilbay for.

Yeah, may as well be on Mars 😀