kanecvr wrote:

Dude that Abit AI7 has me drooling... I've been looking for one of those babies for a while with no luck... The Asus p4c800 isn't bad either (if it doesn't decide to stop working for no reason like the P4P800 boards do).

Well, i bought some scrap PCs (5 of them) for 15 € to get more parts and ending finding an Abit AI7 with a 2.8 Ghz Northwood P4 HT on these PCs, all motherboards are working except one which was dead. I currently use the Abit AI7 with a 3.2 Ghz Northwood, 2 GB RAM, Radeon 9600 and a 320 GB IDE HDD. I plan to upgrade the northwood to an Pentium 4 Extreme Edition Gallatin

That Abit was one of the best i865 based Socket 478 P4 mobos i own along with my ASUS P4P800-E Deluxe and my Gigabyte GA-8IPE1000-G

Imperious wrote:

xjas wrote:

http://i185.photobucket.com/albums/x308/jay200mph/AM3/Netburst/DSC01046.jpg […]
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Probably no-one else noticed but I picked up on the Ti99/4a with the NanoPEB at the side. I have the same as well as the F18A VGA card installed. Ti99/4a was my first computer
so I have a soft spot for them. Lots of newer software nowdays so they are a lot more useful than back in the day when I only had a handful of games.

Yep, well spotted! Was wondering if anyone would pick up on it. 😁 You probably can't tell from the pic but that's an editor/assembler cart in there too. I have it there for TOP SECRET REASONS.

It's a really cool machine but is also a good example of one gimped by rushed design & bad choices - the stock BASIC sucked, the RAM configuration is beyond stupid, the bus architecture is just holding (way) back the CPU, etc.

Carlos S. M. wrote:

That Abit was one of the best i865 based Socket 478 P4 mobos i own along with my ASUS P4P800-E Deluxe and my Gigabyte GA-8IPE1000-G

... the P4P800 boards are extremly unreliable due to cheap-ass CPU power circuitry (some late boards don't have this problem - particularly the later SE versions) The mosfets around the CPU socket silently go bad. A year ago I got a new, sealed in box P4P800-X witch died after testing a 3.2Ghz prescott. It also killed the CPU. The GA-8IPE1000 is SLOW - one of the slowest i865 boards I've tested (maybe it's just mine?). MSI 865 Neo2 boards are very fast, but like the Asus boards they're not very reliable. Abit AI7 boards are both fast and reliable, and uGuru is awesome.

chose007 wrote:

Spea Fire

OOOOOOOOOH! nice. daaaamn. All the SPEA cards are sweet.

shame you did not get the propirietary ram expansion board that sits on the dual row of headers near the i860.

kanecvr wrote:

Carlos S. M. wrote:

That Abit was one of the best i865 based Socket 478 P4 mobos i own along with my ASUS P4P800-E Deluxe and my Gigabyte GA-8IPE1000-G

... the P4P800 boards are extremly unreliable due to cheap-ass CPU power circuitry (some late boards don't have this problem - particularly the later SE versions) The mosfets around the CPU socket silently go bad. A year ago I got a new, sealed in box P4P800-X witch died after testing a 3.2Ghz prescott. It also killed the CPU. The GA-8IPE1000 is SLOW - one of the slowest i865 boards I've tested (maybe it's just mine?). MSI 865 Neo2 boards are very fast, but like the Asus boards they're not very reliable. Abit AI7 boards are both fast and reliable, and uGuru is awesome.

Open window and put out all Prescott core cpus. That way to kill all MBs. Iam using only NW or Will. Than no problems with die. I have 10+ Asus 865/875 and 80% working, Abit same. Reason why still buying other and other pieces if good price = I like OC on this setup and to this time kill two boards but by extremly voltage yerking.
Yes GB is slowest, because they dont support ddr400 on 865PE. I was wondering about this but its true.

BloodyCactus wrote:

OOOOOOOOOH! nice. daaaamn. All the SPEA cards are sweet.
shame you did not get the propirietary ram expansion board that sits on the dual row of headers near the i860.

Iam happy that got this card. Upgrade module is pointless ... faster will win billion in lotto than find one 😀

From eBay Australia. It was boxed and has the 2 MB memory upgrade. Not cheap, but I really wanted a PCI Tseng card 😀

So far it doesn't really perform any faster than a Trio 64 V+ 😵

chose007 wrote:

Open window and put out all Prescott core cpus. That way to kill all MBs. Iam using only NW or Will. Than no problems with die. […]
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kanecvr wrote:

Carlos S. M. wrote:

That Abit was one of the best i865 based Socket 478 P4 mobos i own along with my ASUS P4P800-E Deluxe and my Gigabyte GA-8IPE1000-G

... the P4P800 boards are extremly unreliable due to cheap-ass CPU power circuitry (some late boards don't have this problem - particularly the later SE versions) The mosfets around the CPU socket silently go bad. A year ago I got a new, sealed in box P4P800-X witch died after testing a 3.2Ghz prescott. It also killed the CPU. The GA-8IPE1000 is SLOW - one of the slowest i865 boards I've tested (maybe it's just mine?). MSI 865 Neo2 boards are very fast, but like the Asus boards they're not very reliable. Abit AI7 boards are both fast and reliable, and uGuru is awesome.

Open window and put out all Prescott core cpus. That way to kill all MBs. Iam using only NW or Will. Than no problems with die. I have 10+ Asus 865/875 and 80% working, Abit same. Reason why still buying other and other pieces if good price = I like OC on this setup and to this time kill two boards but by extremly voltage yerking.
Yes GB is slowest, because they dont support ddr400 on 865PE. I was wondering about this but its true.

BloodyCactus wrote:

OOOOOOOOOH! nice. daaaamn. All the SPEA cards are sweet.
shame you did not get the propirietary ram expansion board that sits on the dual row of headers near the i860.

Iam happy that got this card. Upgrade module is pointless ... faster will win billion in lotto than find one 😀

I got my P4P800-E Deluxe (an updated version of the P4P800 Deluxe) with a 3.2 Ghz prescott on it, i have that motherboard working currently working with a 3.4 Ghz Prescott and seems that mobo worked fine with prescotts, never tried to overclock it though

I might look futher to my GA-8IPE1000-G

All other i865 mobos i have are just low end/OEM like some Asrock P4i65G, Asrock P4i65GV, ASUS P5PE-VM (that one is LGA 775 with Core 2 Duo Support, planning to put an E4700 there) and the typical OEM system with i865 like my HP D530 or my Optiplex 170L

"58p" - that doesn't sound like it has a particularly high resolution!

Just got a QDI AGP verite2200 8MB vga ... looking forward to see some rendition3d games 😁

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

From eBay Australia. It was boxed and has the 2 MB memory upgrade. Not cheap, but I really wanted a PCI Tseng card 😀

So far it doesn't really perform any faster than a Trio 64 V+ 😵

From what I've read the ET6000 was a bit of a letdown. They probably sold a lot of units based on the reputation of ET4000 alone.

Yea looks like it. Or that the 486 can't take advantage of it? Might be worth testing in a Pentium down the track 😀

Great looking boxed ET6000!
The ET6000 is a fast card but it needs a CPU to scale with.On a 486 you are limited by the CPU. But in a Pentium the ET6000 will outscore the Trio64s card with ease. It also is a capable GUI accelerator. Quite a good card, but not the most compatible with certain DOS games.

Carlos S. M. wrote:

I got my P4P800-E Deluxe (an updated version of the P4P800 Deluxe) with a 3.2 Ghz prescott on it, i have that motherboard working currently working with a 3.4 Ghz Prescott and seems that mobo worked fine with prescotts, never tried to overclock it though

All P4P800 and P4C800 with bad mosfets and bad caps are long ago dead. 😀 Similar to all Radeons X8xx and NVidias 7xxx (leadless soldering).
My current retro PC uses Asus P4P800 SE and works 24/7. Err... around 3 years now. The previous mobo (same model) worked around 6 years until I fried on-board lan connector accidentally. And yes, no Northwoods, Prescotts only (the current CPU is P4 3.2E rev D0).
Imho, all these P4 and Prescott accusations are just bad PR from wanna-be-overclockers.

Honestly, what is the point of running Prescott in s478 board? Northwood just as fast, run cooler, doesn't stress VRM that much... simply better.

havli wrote:

Honestly, what is the point of running Prescott in s478 board? Northwood just as fast, run cooler, doesn't stress VRM that much... simply better.

The later revision of S478 Prescotts are cool and run at lower voltages.

Just for Asus 865/875 boards is best way reduction CT479 with some Mobile CPU.

keenmaster486 wrote:

The mainboard. The CPU is an Intel 286 8 MHz. I also see an Intel 80287 coprocessor. Can somebody identify this for me? How much memory does it have (I assume the standard 640K, but you never know) and how do I upgrade it with more? For instance, if I want XMS or EMS, is there an add-on card for that? Sorry, but I just have never learned this stuff since I've never worked with pre-Pentium stuff before.

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I also had a walk on my former campus, having a look in some E-waste bins, just in case 😊.
Your motherboard looks like it has the same chipset as mine (1 DIP and 4 PLCC Chips & Tech chips, external RTC, PICs, timers and DMA controller).
Did you try to identify your motherboard with the TH99 database? http://www.uncreativelabs.de/th99

Motherboard #1
Intel 286-12MHz with a 287 FPU, Chips & Tech 82C201 chipset (it looks like the generation just before the NEAT chipset), 1MiB of RAM in DIP chips, and luckily, the battery didn't leak on the PCB.

I'm still tying to identify the motherboard. The "Add-X-Systèmes" sticker comes from a defunct French IT company, but it seems that they only did the keyboard controller. The motherboard is "Made in Taiwan", without any brand information.
I tried to boot the system with only a keyboard, an ISA video card and a speaker, but I only get a couple of beeps meaning that the video board fails (the VGA board works on a PII computer). I guess the jumpers are incorrectly set.
I would be very thankful if someone could identify it better than I did.

I will probably try to dump the BIOS ROMs to have some hints about the manufacturer, and then try to get a manual.

Motherboard #2
Socket 2 or 3 LIF (486), SIS 85C471 Chipset, 30-pin SIMM and 72-pin SIMM slots, empty SRAM sockets, VLB bus, the only thing is the missing BIOS chip and no brand information (at least, dumping the BIOS could have helped).

I found only one board that looked like mine on TH99, but it's still far from any conclusion: http://th99.classic-computing.de/src/m/U-Z/32226.htm
Needless to say that it didn't boot with random BIOS chips from various 486 motherboard.

Motherboard #3
Apple 2 ?, MOS6502, a few chips are missing, but all the ROMs are present.

I also got a few old laptops:
Laptop #1
HP Omnibook Xe3, Celeron 750MHz Coppermine, 256MiB of ram, no HDD

Laptop #2
Compaq Contura, the hinges were already fixed with some epoxy, 486SL-25MHz, 8MiB of ram, 120MB HDD, 7~8" RGB LCD display, CR2032 squeezed in place of the original CR2430 battery

Laptop #3
Gateway Colorbook (Sotec "made in Japan" motherboard), 486DX4-75, 8MiB of ram, 250MB HDD, 10" RGB LCD display, CR2032 socketed in place of the original Lithium battery, proprietary power connector replaced by a barrel jack.

Laptop #4
IPC Porta-pro, "chewed" plastics (an acetone bottle was thrown in the E-waste bin...), 486SX-25, 420MB HDD, 4 or 8MiB of RAM, 10" B&W display, soldered DS1287 (probably dead by now)

I didn't take the time to test the last laptop.

Even the batteries were taken apart. For most of them, only one or two cells are dead, so this could easily fit in my cordless drill and a few robotics projects 😀

keenmaster486 wrote:

And this appears to be some kind of DAC. An audio DAC? I looked up those chips and they're supposed to be 16 bit audio DACs, but this obviously isn't a 16 bit card. What on earth is this?

FullSizeRender_7.jpg

The bus width and the signal precision aren't necessary related, there is a wonderful thing called registers.
I'm using some chips with 32-bit data over a 8-bit bus. It only needs 4 cycles to transfer the data.

Your board has 2 PCM54 16-bit parallel DACs, that would normally be wired on a 16-bit bus. But it also has 4 74LS574 (8-bit flipflops array), that would keep 4 bytes while the ISA bus is busy with other chips, and also enable the system to transfer 1 byte at the time to each flipflop array.

chose007 wrote:

FS Celvin, looks like new PC but its K6-2 in it, WIN98SE stick. Nice design for this era. […]
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FS Celvin, looks like new PC but its K6-2 in it, WIN98SE stick. Nice design for this era.

I remember that shit, it was based on recomendations from Microsoft, Intel and Compaq, they want everyone to make computers with funky designs (way before Apple 🤣), to throw away expandability and connect everything by USB, and when the computer was old thrash it, like any other electrodomestic. Fortunately, it doesn't take and is only a forgotten footnote in computer history 🤣.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Yea looks like it. Or that the 486 can't take advantage of it? Might be worth testing in a Pentium down the track 😀

I've got a 32MB TNT2-m64 PCI and that performs the same in benchmarks as my 2MB S3 Trio 64V+ with a dx2-66. I get exactly the same score in Speedsys as well.

Maybe try a AMD 5x86-133 and see if that makes a difference, but yeah, cpu and/or chipset limitation for sure.

Cirrus Logic CL-5440 PCI

Bought cheap.... 16-something US Dollars including shipping, on eBay (of all places)
I simply could not believe my eyes, when I saw that card at that low price.
eBay tend to have these inflated prices, yet sometimes there is luck.

Hopefully this is just as fast, as that Trio64-something from S3 that everyone is talking about.
It should be as DOS-compatible as the S3, according to this: http://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/
And looking at the CL chips, the 5440 is a 5430 with some motion accelration, and the 5430
is a 5429 with some 32bit host interface... And the 5428/29 chips are my favorite.

Had a 5428-VLB back in 1995, and that card allways just worked for me.
Good speed and good compatibility. In other words. Can't wait to try the 5440 out.
I have a couple of 5446 cards (PCI 1mb) and they are fast, yet not 100% DOS-compatible.