Well, the dual Athlon MP board wouldn't really be ideally suited for Win9x, as that had no support for SMP. But perhaps it would be cool as a Win NT4 workstation? Or perhaps OS/2 Warp, as that did indeed support SMP. The Celeron 1.2 might be nice for Win9x system though. It's fun to see how "modern" you can get a Win98se system, in terms for usability, web browsers, java and all that lot.

omg! The MSI board is ~AWESOME~. It was the motherboard I had in my Voodoo5 - Quake 3 rig. It used to be, it would cost you $100 for a pair of 2800+'s but now, it seems that prices have really bottomed out. $20 is a GREAT price for that combo.

That Athlon MP setup is as good as it gets for native 3.3v agp and 3DFX without any mods. For $20 you won't find anything better for a Long time!

Okay so I got around to doing some limited testing and further research.

The MSI appears to be a K7D Master L since it has onboard Ethernet. The red PCB leads me to believe it's a later revision of the chipset that doesn't have the corrupted USB ports from the Southbridge. I haven't went looking through boxes to see if I still have an IDE hard drive so I simply tested it for POST and poked around in the BIOS. Only issues I've seen so far is the Northbridge chipset fan isn't working and seems to be seized, and one of the CPU fans isn't reporting RPM in BIOS.

I also picked up 2 sticks of 256MB SDRAM PC-100 for the 810e board. It also did POST just fine. It says it's an HP board during POST but I'm having trouble trying to identify it any further than that. BIOS version was 3.07 dated 09/07/01 and it looks like an mATX, or perhaps Flex ATX, motherboard with 3 PCI slots as the only expansion. There's some traces that look like they're for an AMR slot, and two set of traces marked for 16Mb DRAM on the side of the one of the PCI slots. Would those be for dedicated memory for the i752? I thought I read somewhere that it did have support for dedicated RAM though it seems most motherboards instead implemented it with shared RAM, which would be a shame since this BIOS only allows for 512Kb or 1Mb of sharing with it.There's traces for speaker, reset switch and something else that didn't have the pins so it is pretty stripped down. The CPU socket isn't right up next to the backplate like a similar looking board that HP used in at least some of their 810e systems of the era. Although I saw some references to an ASUS and that other motherboard's manufacture as the two HP used in some of the models at least. I guess I'll have to keep digging.

Besides that I'm still not sure what to use them for yet. If I can get the 810e board sorted I may very well try to see if 98SE or ME will work on it for some older games even if I do have to resort to a PCI graphics card. Not looking to play anything too demanding on it. Although I still think 440BX would be a more versatile chipset for that idea. The MSI board has drivers available from 95 to XP32 so it looks pretty versatile. And since the system wouldn't be on all the time I'm not too sure I would worry about the second CPU being idle in Win9x or I could just remove it all together. But the 2800+ might cause some issues in any speed sensitive game...oh the joys of retro gaming.

take a picture ( a good one) of the HP board. HP bought most if not all of their motherboards from Asus, and in most cases, you could flash the asus bios over the HP one.

luckybob wrote:

take a picture ( a good one) of the HP board. HP bought most if not all of their motherboards from Asus, and in most cases, you could flash the asus bios over the HP one.

Would you happen to know what board the HP Pavilion A6000N is based on? I would love to flash an ASUS bios to mine.

Okay so I did find out the model of the HP board. It's made by Trigem and HP calls it the FresnoCognac. It was used in Pavilion XT963 systems. So unfortunately no flashing of an ASUS BIOS. 🙁 It was probably a bust as far as something useful to use in the long term. Haven't came across anything else either. Few years ago I would almost always see late 90s or early 2000s systems at thrift stores even though I wasn't in the market for them. Guess that how it goes sometimes.