I have one of those boards and have no idea where it came from. It just appeared in my drawer one day; I never bought or remember sourcing it. I haven't tested the board, but I'll be interested in what your test results come up with for supported CPUs.

For my dual slot 1 (100 MHz FSB), I use a Dell Precision Workstation 410 w/440BX chipset. This board works with dual PIII-850's very well and is the most stable slot 1 board I've had. It will take dual PIII-1000's, but every so often I get some memory errors, so I replaced it with the 850's and never had a problem. 1 GB of buffered PC100 RAM works fine, as well as the NVIDIA FX5200 and MX440 I've had in there at various times.

If my Dell board ever dies, I'll probably replace it with the Tyan. The Dell has been powered on nearly 24/7 since Dec. 1998, so it must have some damn good hardware. I'd be very interested if the Tyan works with dual PIII-1GHz/100 CPUs.

http://www.tyan.com/archive/support/html/cpu_ … ii_celeron.html

Looks like it caps at the 850mhz slot 1 P3. that being said, start there, then see if a new bios will let you go faster. I know they made a 1ghz with a 100fsb.

As for power supply, It shouldnt matter. As long as it isnt some cheap unit. you shouldnt have any issues.

Just received the board. It's a revision B, so it'll only take 600mhz Katmais. Any way to get this board to accept 850s on slotkets? I know some of these support SMP and have onboard voltage regs.

m1919 wrote:

Just received the board. It's a revision B, so it'll only take 600mhz Katmais. Any way to get this board to accept 850s on slotkets? I know some of these support SMP and have onboard voltage regs.

these would probably work fine:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/150788882697

However I would hold out and get a pair of these:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/170812122261

Seller only has one, but it has a LOT better support and wont wobble. I'd bet $5 that the first pair does NOT come with the little black plastic holders.

Heh, I live in Canukistan, they're only shipping US on that second adapter. 🙁

I wonder what aspect of the pre-Rev.F boards will not work with the coppermines? Is it the voltage regulator? If so, have you looked into changing out the voltage regulator's set voltage resistor for the lower coppermine voltages? That is easy enough to do.

Perhaps the Rev.F+ boards use an IC potentiometers (I2C or SPI), i.e. AD5204 or DS1803, to vary the set regulator resistance via the BIOS.

Click the PDF at the bottom of this link for a pictoral guide to modifying your onboard voltage regulator. This is for single voltage CPUs, but for dual voltage CPUs, you'll want to modify the regulator which controls the CORE CPU voltage, not the I/O CPU voltage.
Modifying your motherboard's voltage regulator for overclocking

9 times out of 10. if the board only supports pentium 3's up to 600mhz. it is because of the cache structure. 600's and lower had 512kb of half speed cache. 600+ had 256kb of full speed. SOME motherboard manufacturers released bios mods that let the new coppermines work. some diddnt or couldn't.

It sounds like the best test then is to update your pre-Rev.F board with a post-Rev.F board BIOS, then plunk a coppermine in there just to see if it can boot into DOS and run a quick benchmark. I'd also check the BIOS for voltage options. If BIOS voltage options don't exist for the coppermine's voltage, then you can mod. the voltage regulator's set resistor. You'd probably want to have a backup BIOS ready incase your trash your BIOS with the flash attempt. I'll be very interested to know your findings.

On my Dell Precision Workstation 410 dual slot 1 motherboard, it was produced before the coppermines came out, but has been working 6 years with coppermines installed.

luckybob wrote:

9 times out of 10. if the board only supports pentium 3's up to 600mhz. it is because of the cache structure. 600's and lower had 512kb of half speed cache. 600+ had 256kb of full speed. SOME motherboard manufacturers released bios mods that let the new coppermines work. some diddnt or couldn't.

Some OEMs set their BIOS to only work with certain speeds to prevent you from upgrading to faster processors when they became available. Dell did this in my GX1's when they released the A08 version of the BIOS. Prior to that you could have used any 66 or 100mhz fsb PII/PIII/or Celeron because the higher multipliers weren't locked out.

Current specs on this build are:

Tyan S1832D Rev. B
Dual PIII 600Mhz SL3JT
4x 256mb Kingston PC-100 Unbuffered
Nvidia GeForce4 MX440
Voodoo2 12mb (Diamond Monster 3D)
Sound Blaster Live!
4GB Fujitsu
80GB WD Caviar
Antec Earthwatts 380
Anteck NSK-4482B

I'm planning on getting another Voodoo2 12mb in the future for this build. Haven't done much other than a tabletop test with the mobo and a few key components, I'll be putting this together sometime this month. Probably going to dual-boot with Windows 98SE and 2000 Pro. Might play around with some form of Linux install at some point as well.

Is the Voodoo2 pass through cable just a standard VGA male-female? The card did not have one and I'm wondering if I'll be able to sub in a standard VGA with a male-female adapter instead.

On another note, does anyone have any experience with BIOS modding? I've got an MS440GX and a pair of 700Mhz 1Mb PIII Xeons for another build, and it turns out that this board is a Gateway OEM, which is a problem. The board boots up and recognizes these as "400Mhz" Pentium Pros, but disables the onboard cache. I'd like to max this board out if possible, there's a guy selling Quantum3D Obsidian2 SBi's for a pretty decent price on ebay, and I'd love to get one for this build.

I've been looking for an ASUS XG-DLS, or one of the Supermicro boards, but this board was the only one I found that actually came with the retention bracket.

m1919 wrote:

Is the Voodoo2 pass through cable just a standard VGA male-female? The card did not have one and I'm wondering if I'll be able to sub in a standard VGA with a male-female adapter instead.

from what i have read you can use a regular vga extension cable, but make sure its got good shielding and as best of quality as you can get.

I have an XG-DLS, complete with 2gb of ram, mounting hardware, and 900/2m processors. Runs like a RAPED APE. I used to use it as my home router, but I dont have proper heatsinks for the processors, which causes them to overheat. That being said, the HARDEST thing about finding the xg-dls is finding one WITH the motherboard supports and cpu clips. You never see it, but the board mounts to its own backplate that covers the entire board. The cpu mounts to this plate. Sure you can jury-rig cpu mounts but your results may vary. There is a xg-dls on ebay, but it doesnt have the cpu supports. I was lucky when I found mine a year ago. I was looking for one for almost 5 years prior.

As for your gateway board, I would just flash it with the intel bios. You might have to find a "pro" bios flashing utility. Meaning one that will write whatever you want to the chip with no safety measures. If you save the original bios first you have something to go back to. Even if you fubar the bios flash, if you have a spare 3com nic with a open socket, you can use it to flash the bios. I've done it before.

luckybob wrote:

I have an XG-DLS, complete with 2gb of ram, mounting hardware, and 900/2m processors. Runs like a RAPED APE. I used to use it as my home router, but I dont have proper heatsinks for the processors, which causes them to overheat. That being said, the HARDEST thing about finding the xg-dls is finding one WITH the motherboard supports and cpu clips. You never see it, but the board mounts to its own backplate that covers the entire board. The cpu mounts to this plate. Sure you can jury-rig cpu mounts but your results may vary. There is a xg-dls on ebay, but it doesnt have the cpu supports. I was lucky when I found mine a year ago. I was looking for one for almost 5 years prior.

As for your gateway board, I would just flash it with the intel bios. You might have to find a "pro" bios flashing utility. Meaning one that will write whatever you want to the chip with no safety measures. If you save the original bios first you have something to go back to. Even if you fubar the bios flash, if you have a spare 3com nic with a open socket, you can use it to flash the bios. I've done it before.

Yep, flashing to an intel bios is what I'm going to try first. The only issue I have with that is that the Gateway board lacks onboard sound and video. I'm not sure how that Intel bios would handle that.

On the XG-DLS, I've actually considered getting that board on ebay. I have considered some custom mounting options, and I believe I could likely get those processors mounted up nice and securely, but I'd have to shop around for suitable materials. I had considered at one point modifying a pair of fairly easy to find brackets from a Dell Poweredge, but that would require some pretty substantial reworking.

m1919 wrote:

Yep, flashing to an intel bios is what I'm going to try first. The only issue I have with that is that the Gateway board lacks onboard sound and video. I'm not sure how that Intel bios would handle that.

On the XG-DLS, I've actually considered getting that board on ebay. I have considered some custom mounting options, and I believe I could likely get those processors mounted up nice and securely, but I'd have to shop around for suitable materials. I had considered at one point modifying a pair of fairly easy to find brackets from a Dell Poweredge, but that would require some pretty substantial reworking.

umm, the intel board has onboard sound. the one I have does. (its a bad board) The video should have its own bios chip. as for onboard sound, it should act as if it was a real card. The bios shouldn't care if it was there at all.

As far as the xg-dls goes, the main purpose of the back plate is to act as a adapter, it makes the processor supports mount to the chassis. So if you were to fab your own, that's what it is for. If you want, I can take pictures of mine.

luckybob wrote:

umm, the intel board has onboard sound. the one I have does. (its a bad board) The video should have its own bios chip. as for onboard sound, it should act as if it was a real card. The bios shouldn't care if it was there at all.

As far as the xg-dls goes, the main purpose of the back plate is to act as a adapter, it makes the processor supports mount to the chassis. So if you were to fab your own, that's what it is for. If you want, I can take pictures of mine.

That would be helpful, I'd appreciate it.

Heh, for some reason I kept posting onboard video, the OEM board lacks onboard ethernet and sound.

I flashed to the latest BIOS I was able to find for this board, but it looks like Intel only added support for up to 550mhz processors. 😒

m1919 wrote:

I flashed to the latest BIOS I was able to find for this board, but it looks like Intel only added support for up to 550mhz processors. 😒

that sucks... I havent forgotten about taking pictures of my xg-dls. Its just that diablo 3 came out yesterday, and the best way to describe the last 48 hours is;

"distracted"

😅

How hard would it be to add the microcode for my processors to the bios?

m1919 wrote:

How hard would it be to add the microcode for my processors to the bios?

Try searching around a bit first. Someone may have already created a hacked BIOS that does what you want it to.