TX97s are quality boards. See if you can put a K6-2+ or 3+ in there. 😉
http://web.inter.nl.net/hcc/J.Steunebrink/k6plus.htm

They should be safe from the badcaps era.

Wow, is that an EDO DIMM in that thing? I've never actually seen one of those in a regular desktop machine before, just in servers and old Macs.

It does look like an EDO DIMM. Those are rare alright. An interesting choice considering it has 72 pin SIMM slots. My guess would be that the IT dept bought a load of EDO DIMMs for servers and just used them in this as well. Maybe these were used as budget servers.

You could be right! All three of the boards have the same module and they'd obviously sat running in one place for a very, very long time. Its good to know I've not picked up junk again!

you'll have to excuse my ignorance... Is there any benifit to keeping the EDO modules rather than using regular SDRAM DIMMS?

Nice find!

In a nutshell, Socket 7 boards are the most flexible Retro boards you can get. Flexible in terms of what speed / performance band you can cover.

Go into BIOS and disable L1 and L2 Cache and you have a 386. Turn L2 on and you have a 486 (The FSB determines which one) and for speed king get a highly clocked AMD K6.

If you get a highly clocked AMD K6 then you can cover a lot of ground. From 386 sensitive games like Wing Commander to 486 sensitive games like Commance to Doom, all the way to SVGA games, 3DFX Voodoo and even W95 / W98SE games!

They are also ATX and have ISA slots. Documentation is usually excellent, the have button batteries, PS/2 ports, use ATX PSUs and so on...

Basically they have all the good stuff 🤣

Machine_1760 wrote:

you'll have to excuse my ignorance... Is there any benifit to keeping the EDO modules rather than using regular SDRAM DIMMS?

EDO DIMMs are just 64-bit wide EDO sticks. They offer the same performance as a pair of EDO SIMMs. Nothing special aside from fitting in a DIMM slot. SDRAM is faster but it isn't tangibly so at PC66 speed.

They are rare because they quickly became pointless as SDRAM prices fell.

Are you sure it's an EDO DIMM? The Intel chipset had suppport for SDRAM as well as EDO. See if a stick of SDRAM fits in one of those slots; EDO DIMMs and SDRAM DIMMs use slightly different slots.

I had the AT variant of this (TX97-E), and it was one of the best boards I ever owned. The memory sticks are most likely normal SDRAM, at least that was what I used in mine.
It suffers from the usual limitations of the Intel 430TX: Maximum "official" FSB is 66 MHz, and the chipset will only cache 64 MB of RAM. Higher FSBs will overclock the PCI bus.
Your version of the board will run any Socket 7 CPU, including K6+ chips (with a patched BIOS).

Unbuffered, 3.3V EDO DIMMs are actually keyed the same as SDRAM DIMMs, and a lot of boards from ~1997 can accept either type in the 168-pin slots. The TX97-E states it specifically in the manual. It's just that most EDO/FPM DIMMs you find are buffered, or 5V, or both, and those are keyed differently.

I got a couple of those EDO DIMMs but most are of the weird keyed variant.

Those boards are definitely keepers!
-> Just keep in mind you probably can't mix EDO and SDRAM. <-
However, I'd suggest you keep those EDO DIMMs if only because those are quite scarce.

You could even upgrade 2 of the boards with some spare SDRAM and upgrade the 3rd board to use 2 of the EDO DIMMs, if only for retro goodness sake! 😉