Good haul 😀

Yes you are right that I/O card predates IDE, its for MFM stlye drives, also known as ST-506 type that required two ribbon cables.

That M525 motherboard looks interesting- are there cache chips on the motherboard and are they real? A lot of PC-Chips boards had fake cache.
I was reading the link you provided for it and I was wondering what they meant by 'illegal bios'
I found this: http://www.angelfire.com/biz/digibyte/numbers.html
Seems to suggest that the Bios ID numbers 2A59H are not official Award BIOS releases, perhaps the manufacturer didn't pay royalties to Award to use it on their boards or they modified it themselves without consulting Award? Seems to suggest that only 430TX boards are affected.
Either way, pretty standard PC-Chips dodgyness at play 😉

no idea if the cache chips are real, its a just a small card that is seated into the upgrade cache module slot, I have no way of checking without testing the board.

I saw something about an illegal bios but I didn't have any idea what it was either.
I think what I really need to do is buy or find some pentiums for me to use in these boards

I got two Pentiums today and got both boards working eventually,
the older board disliked the Pentium MMX 166 but worked with the Pentium 133 and the newer board worked with either.

Seems strange to me but I'm sure someone else has a better idea then me.
The post screen shows the cpus as 110Mhz and 150Mhz for some reason to.

The RAM I tried was a little disappointing only 4MB sticks oh well its enough for testing stuff.

I'd look for a few jumpers or switches to change. You haven't found the right multiplier yet. I tech'd a bunch of those guys 1995-2005. Only a few were auto or BIOS set. Some MB makers still have files for legacy devices and the jumper list should be in them with a picture ID'ing it all. If not, look very carefully for printed labels on the board. Failing that, change one jumper at a time and record results in paper.

awergh wrote:

I got two Pentiums today and got both boards working eventually, the older board disliked the Pentium MMX 166 but worked with th […]
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I got two Pentiums today and got both boards working eventually,
the older board disliked the Pentium MMX 166 but worked with the Pentium 133 and the newer board worked with either.

Seems strange to me but I'm sure someone else has a better idea then me.
The post screen shows the cpus as 110Mhz and 150Mhz for some reason to.

The RAM I tried was a little disappointing only 4MB sticks oh well its enough for testing stuff.

I have a M525 v1.2. If you need help setting everything up, count me in.

Found some more hardware today 😁

Asus TUSI-M Motherboard with Pentium III 800EB, 128MB PC133, Intel PRO100 (or equivalent)
MSI K7N420 Pro Motherboard

The ASUS board works fine don't know about the MSI board because I don't have any spare DDR and don't have any Socket A CPUs at all because I live very much in Intel land

Actually what I was wondering is what Socket A processor to put in the MSi board since I live in intel land almost exclusively I'm not really sure what is best and I have to be able to find one and a heatsink on ebay or somewhere.

Also Yesterday at uni I found some more hardware 😀
S3 Trio64
Realtek 8029AS (I'm sure this is one of the most common NICs ever)
Netgear NIC (looks like it shud be 100mbps)
AT PSU
Voltage Regulator Interface Card (plugs into a floppy power connector and gives a settable output out of a DC power plug type connector, never seen one of these before maybe they wanted to charge something from the computer instead of the powerpoint no idea though.)

And another socket 7 motherboard although I'm not entirely sure what the board is.
I gather VX Pro is the chipset and apparently its a pretty terrible chipset
The identification I can see is MB-586VX7, theres a V5.1A in the corner as well.
It came with 2x32MB EDO ( yay no 4MB EDO sticks for me this time ) and a Pentium 166 (I assume its MMX but I didn't check, and the fan is pretty noisy)

I saw an IBM PS/2 sitting around at uni somewhere as well but I dunno couldn't seem to justify it to myself taking the effort of brining it home. I think it being a 286 scares me off or something weird like that.

The MSI K7N420 seems to be one of the most modern XP boards, so any Athlon XP could do.
What you need to do is find out what the maximum FSB is this board supports. This will effectively limit what CPU's aren't supported.

Very brief intro to Socket A DDR boards:
Simplified, there are basically 3 speeds SA DDR boards: 266Mhz fsb, 333Mhz fsb and 400Mhz fsb.
The 266Mhz fsb boards are rather limited, the 333Mhz and 400Mhz ones have practically the same limitations regarding what CPU will work in them, since there are only a couple 400Mhz fsb ones around.
Only drawback would be that the 400 ones are easier to overclock and generally are easier to "memory-up".

The VX Pro board was made by PC Chips or one of it's 30 clones. The chipset often are just ali's or VIA's, it's the boards themselves that are crappy.

I had a successful day at uni yesterday again 😀

I got a
GA-5AX Motherboard
AMDK6-2 500 (with an Intel PIII Cooler so I was completely confused when I first looked at it)
3 x 128MB RAM
1 x 64MB RAM
4 x 100Mbps NIC (intel, realtek, admtek, d-link)
PCI S3 Virge/DX (what I assume are extra video ram sockets are all empty)
Intel Desktop Board D815EEA
Pentium III 1Ghz (tualatin I think)

I seem to be accumulating this hardware I don't know what to do with 😀 oh well theres no such thing as too much hardware

awergh wrote:

I had a successful day at uni yesterday again :) […]
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I had a successful day at uni yesterday again 😀

I got a
GA-5AX Motherboard
AMDK6-2 500 (with an Intel PIII Cooler so I was completely confused when I first looked at it)
3 x 128MB RAM
1 x 64MB RAM
4 x 100Mbps NIC (intel, realtek, admtek, d-link)
PCI S3 Virge/DX (what I assume are extra video ram sockets are all empty)
Intel Desktop Board D815EEA
Pentium III 1Ghz (tualatin I think)

I seem to be accumulating this hardware I don't know what to do with 😀 oh well theres no such thing as too much hardware

And if you run into space related problems, we here at Vogons are experts at cramming tons of hardware in places beyond your imagination so you can always ask us for help ;D.

I got both the GA-5AX and the Intel D815EEA in systems, both boards are pretty good (though the intel has that castrated BIOS of course 😜. The board will work, but it's got no balls 😜).

Intel Desktop Board D815EEA
Pentium III 1Ghz (tualatin I think)

I'm pretty sure it's not a Tualatin (I have the same board it only works with coppermines). More likely it's one of those Coppermine-t's, basically a Coppermine but with the IHS exactly the same as the Tualatins. An easy way to check if it's a real Tualatin or the Coppermine with IHS is by looking at the pin-side of the CPU. Tualatins look a lot different and the Coppermine-t and ordinary coppermine look very similar (some of those resistors may be missing etc).

A second way is to look at the part number on the top and only look at the voltage.
If the voltage is around 1.7v --> Coppermine
If the voltage is around 1.4v --> Tualatin
😉

I really like those Coppermine-t's 😀
With the IHS I can even put those very large aluminium heatsinks on there. I've noticed some of those very large aluminium heatsinks (especially the earlier ones) seem to have a hard time to STAY correctly installed. With the Coppermine-t's, that's no longer an issue.

Actually...I almost collect those Coppermine-t's 😁

Edit:
Theres actually some Celeron Coppermines with the IHS!
Hmm...piccy time soon 🤣! First coffee, paying bills, do some more reading and enjoying the sunlight for a little bit 😁

The pics 😉

Pic 1:
3 Intel s370 Pentium 3's together, front view.
The left one is a Tualatin, the middle is a Coppermine-t and the right a Coppermine (to be exact, a 1400, 1000 and 1000).
Notice how from the top the Coppermine-t looks almost the same as the Tualatin.
From the top you can distinguish the Tualatins from the Coppermines by looking at the voltages.
The left one has a voltage of 1.45v while the other 2 have a voltage of 1.75v.

The same chips, but now from the bottom:
Left the 1400 Tualatin, middle the 1000 Coppermine-t and to the right the ordinary Coppermine 1000
Notice how from the bottom the Coppermine-t and Coppermine look very similar while the Tualatin looks profoundly different from the other 2

And just for fun, the same thing exists for Celerons
Next pic, left is a Tualeron 1300, middle is a Celeron-t (for lack of a better name 😜) 900 and the right a normal Celeron 900.

When you put them in your motherboard the difference is obvious, I find installation with the IHS easier then on a bare die. But as soon as your rig is going, the Coppermines and Coppermine-t's perform exactly the same 😉

Interesting yeah I didn't even take off the heatsink I just looked at the size and saw when it booted up that it was 1Ghz and assumed.

I'm wondering if I should take the CPUs out of some of the boards I have lieing around since they could be put on top of each other then I guess. I also seem to be running out of motherboard size antistatic bags. You use special boxes to store all your motherboards right? So far I've discovered that optical drive boxes seem to work alright for expansion cards, I knew there was a reason for keeping all those empty boxes 😀

awergh wrote:

Interesting yeah I didn't even take off the heatsink I just looked at the size and saw when it booted up that it was 1Ghz and assumed.

I'm wondering if I should take the CPUs out of some of the boards I have lieing around since they could be put on top of each other then I guess. I also seem to be running out of motherboard size antistatic bags. You use special boxes to store all your motherboards right? So far I've discovered that optical drive boxes seem to work alright for expansion cards, I knew there was a reason for keeping all those empty boxes 😀

These days I use kiwi fruit boxes because they can stack perfectly on top of eachother. Alas, it seems people aren't eating enough kiwi's these days!! 😠
Haven't seen one new kiwi box in months now, ah well.
I wouldn't lay motherboards on top of eachother, at least not without something in between them. They can scratch quite easily. Either use a sheet of antistatic foam or even a sheet of cardboard or something. Best is of course to give every motherboard it's own box (or put them in computer cases 😜) but alas, that's a luxery many people here on Vogons can't afford 😵

So having antistatic plastic in between isn't enough then hmm. Antistatic foam is the pink stuff that sometimes comes with expansion cards and stuff?