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My new crusty socket 7 board

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First post, by retro games 100

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It's a Siemens Nixdorf board, with this code: S26361-D969 written on the PCB. I found the spec for it here -

http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/motherboards/S/SI … um-SYS-303.html

My £1 bid won. I wonder why there wasn't a stampede for it? 😉 I am guessing it doesn't accept MMX CPUs, so I put in a "classic" Pentium 133 instead. The board came with a stick of cache (512kb) and 3 sticks of EDO ram (64mb in total - perhaps the "odd" stick in slot 3 isn't being used?). It's got onboard Cirrus Logic (5446) VGA, and with the help of 2 extra RAM chips on the mobo, it's 2mb.

I'm not sure what that silver thing is - sandwiched between those 2 blue caps, but it's the tallest metal silver thing I've seen. It's about 40mm high! It's an Intel PCIset 82430HX (Triton II) board.

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Last edited by retro games 100 on 2009-11-13, 16:26. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 1 of 23, by Amigaz

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This mobo looks very Compaq'ish or HP'ish 😀

The big shiny thing with cooling fins is the cooling for a voltage regulator

My retro computer stuff: https://lychee.jjserver.net/#16136303902327

Reply 3 of 23, by Old Thrashbarg

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64mb in total - perhaps the "odd" stick in slot 3 isn't being used?

On Pentium boards, you have to install SIMMS in pairs.

The tall metal thing is the heatsink for the voltage regulator. I can't tell for sure from that picture, but if it's the socketed kind, you can probably replace the regulator with a later style to add support for an MMX or other Socket7 chip.

Reply 7 of 23, by Old Thrashbarg

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There's nothing wrong with the built-in video. The Cirrus chipset is decent enough for 2D stuff, and it doesn't take up a PCI slot. Add in a Voodoo card for 3D and you're good to go.

Reply 9 of 23, by bushwack

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My first comp was a Packard Bell with a built in cirrus logic, it was crappy for dos and win95. To add to the headache there was only 1 free PCI slot...

But you have plenty of free pci slots on that board to play with so there is really no problem.

Reply 10 of 23, by elianda

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Might be a nice Board:

How about USB and PS/2 connectors?

How about Tag-RAM? With 12 Bit you can cache up to 512 MB.

Since the voltage regulator has this heatsink, I guess it is a linear regulator, thus max. CPU is probably a P200MMX or P233MMX (depending on one specific resistor close to the Tag-RAM). K6 200 MHz will work, depending on available voltage settings even a 233 Mhz one.

One drawback I can see on this board is that it has only 4 PS/2 SIMM Slots.

And there is ofcourse the common question, what maximum size of HDDs the BIOS supports.
Also you might want to use the Triton Bus Master DMA drivers for the drives. There some available from DOS to NT4 (I think official name is PIIX3 Busmaster drivers).
PIIX3 is the Southbridge. You should have the later SB revision.

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Reply 12 of 23, by elianda

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You might simply try a MMX CPU, usually it requires split voltage, but might also run 0,5 V (3.3 vs. 2.😎 higher.
Problem might be that it doesn't get reset properly, so you might need upto ~15 tries to get the board coldstarted.

Retronn.de - Vintage Hardware Gallery, Drivers, Guides, Videos. Now with file search
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Reply 13 of 23, by retro games 100

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USB - yep it's got 2 - you can see them between the onboard video and parallel port.
PS/2 - yes, these can be seen right of the parallel port.
Tag-RAM - I'm not sure. I would say no, because there's no mention of the word "tag" inside this webpage here -

http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/motherboard...S-303.html

From the webpage above, I believe that the max CPU speed is 200. And there's no "dual voltage" jumpers on the board, so it's probably classic Pentium only - no MMX. That's OK. It's nice to test something old and crusty. (I've got other MMX capable boards.)

I plugged in my 320GB HDD in to it, and vaguely recall that the BIOS "saw" it as 16 GB. Something like that. That's good enough! 😀

I think the SIMM memory is OK, because I could use this for windows 3.1. What's a typical RAM configuration for win3.1 - 64 or 128 mb? (I will put win95 on a slot 1 board.)

Reply 14 of 23, by bushwack

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retro games 100 wrote:

What's a typical RAM configuration for win3.1 - 64 or 128 mb? (I will put win95 on a slot 1 board.)

Sounds kinda outrageous for win3.1 🤣. I would say 8mb is about typical if not good for the time.

Reply 17 of 23, by Silent Loon

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I don't know if this link works:

http://support.ts.fujitsu.com/Download/ShowDe … p?DokuID=202742

(It's the english manual. You have to accept the license agreement - "Ich akzeptiere die Lizenzbedingungen")

If not you can try this link: http://support.ts.fujitsu.com/de/support/downloads.html

Simply paste the pcb number (S26361-D969) into the "search" field. Than you should see some downloads and the option "Weitere Sprachen anzeigen" on the right. Click on this and than choose "Handbücher (3)" - and you should find the english manual for this board.

Btw: This board originally came with a wavetable connector for the build-in Soundblaster 16C Vibra chipset - so does yours?

Reply 18 of 23, by retro games 100

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Thanks! 😀 I was able to DL the English manual. In it, it states:

Features
• ATX system board
• 64-bit processor Intel Pentium with 16 Kbytes internal cache (first-level cache,
8 Kbytes data cache, 8 Kbytes code cache) or
OverDrive processor for Pentium
or
• AMD-K5
• Memory configuration on the system board: 8 to 128 Mbyte (FPM or EDO)
• Error recognition and correction via ECC / Parity
• Second-level cache on the system board: 0, 256 or 512 Kbytes (PBSRAM)
• 256 Kbytes Flash BIOS
• 3 PCI, 2 ISA slots and 1 ISA/PCI slot (shared)
• PCI bus
• IDE hard disk controller connected to PCI bus for up to four IDE drives
(e.g. IDE hard disk drives, ATAPI CD ROM drive)
• Real-time clock/calendar with integrated battery backup
• Floppy disk controller (up to 2.88 Mbytes format)
• Parallel interface (ECP- and EPP-compatible)
• 2 Serial interfaces
• PS/2 mouse port
• PS/2 keyboard port
• Security functions

Optional Component

• Audio controller on ISA-BUS (Creative VIBRA 16C; 16 bit; compatible with
Sound Blaster 16, MPU401, Multimedia PC and Multimedia PC II; Stereo-FM
synthesizer YAMAHA OPL3)

Please notice the above optional component. (I've removed all of the others in that list.) On my board, in the bottom left hand corner, there's quite a large area of solder points, where interesting items have been removed. 🙁 One of them is the waveblaster header. Another is the audio/midi/gameport.

Reply 19 of 23, by retro games 100

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Reading the manual, I see a couple of points of interest:

Page 48: the CPU's top speed is 233mhz (not 200mhz). That's interesting, because on the wikipedia page for Pentiums, the old classic single voltage Pentiums only seem to go up as high as 200mhz. The more modern Pentiums (dual voltage?) CPUs do go as high as 233mhz.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium

Page 51: a flash BIOS exists for this board (but it has been removed on my board.)

I'm always interested in dates for retro IT equipment. I notice that the manual was published in November 1998. That's quite modern for a crusty old Pentium 1 board.