Skyscraper wrote:

I solved the issue with all PII CPUs running at 266 MHz on my Intel AL440LX. The motherboard locks the multiplier and the only way to change it is by using the clear BIOS settings jumper. I tried to clear the BIOS multiplier setting by just moving the jumper with the system turned off and when this diddnt work I tried removing the battery and shorting the terminals. If I had RTFM I would have known that I needed to make the system POST and enter the BIOS setup with the BIOS jumper in clear position to allow for the muliplier to be changed.

When you do this you can set the muliplier to what ever speed you want as long as the CPU supports that multiplier as you would expect. The maximum multiplier is 7x so the maximum speed you can choose is 7x66 = 466 MHz but as the PPGA Celerons are fully multiplier locked the 500 and 533 MHz versions probably also work.

Even the later "Intel" branded motherboards for 775 "extreme series" do this too. The bios settings get written to EEPROM chip on it instead of the normal ROM chips. Which means they won't lose their settings if the clock battery dies. Date and time yes, but bios settings, no. It's a nice, and bad feature at the same time. Bad being the only way to change it is like you found, put jumper in to I believe they call it "Diagnostic Mode" or "Service Mode", or something like that. And then boot up and it automatically goes straight to bios. Then you save it, shut down, move jumper, run normally.

This is why everyone says "Intel Extreme" series motherboards are poor overclockers. They do have overclock settings, but not much in the way of options, and it's a pain in the arse to have to jumper move every time you have a failed-POST due to OC settings.

kithylin wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

I solved the issue with all PII CPUs running at 266 MHz on my Intel AL440LX. The motherboard locks the multiplier and the only way to change it is by using the clear BIOS settings jumper. I tried to clear the BIOS multiplier setting by just moving the jumper with the system turned off and when this diddnt work I tried removing the battery and shorting the terminals. If I had RTFM I would have known that I needed to make the system POST and enter the BIOS setup with the BIOS jumper in clear position to allow for the muliplier to be changed.

When you do this you can set the muliplier to what ever speed you want as long as the CPU supports that multiplier as you would expect. The maximum multiplier is 7x so the maximum speed you can choose is 7x66 = 466 MHz but as the PPGA Celerons are fully multiplier locked the 500 and 533 MHz versions probably also work.

Even the later "Intel" branded motherboards for 775 "extreme series" do this too. The bios settings get written to EEPROM chip on it instead of the normal ROM chips. Which means they won't lose their settings if the clock battery dies. Date and time yes, but bios settings, no. It's a nice, and bad feature at the same time. Bad being the only way to change it is like you found, put jumper in to I believe they call it "Diagnostic Mode" or "Service Mode", or something like that. And then boot up and it automatically goes straight to bios. Then you save it, shut down, move jumper, run normally.

This is why everyone says "Intel Extreme" series motherboards are poor overclockers. They do have overclock settings, but not much in the way of options, and it's a pain in the arse to have to jumper move every time you have a failed-POST due to OC settings.

My experience with Intels own motherboards is very limted, my only other Intel branded boards I can think of is a PR440FX dual Socket-8 board and an untested i865 s478 board.

You can change all other BIOS settings on this board by just entering the BIOS setup and changing the settings with the BIOS jumper in normal position just not the multiplier otherwise I would have resorted to reading the manual at an earlier stage. 😁

Just finished gutting this old IBM I had in my spare bedroom, but couldn't get out as it kinda had a stack of other stuff on top of it.

Of course I couldn't get the bloody thing to open (just like any other older IBM I've come across) but after I had finally managed to get that desktop-style thing to budge, I found out it was a bit older than I had previously thought (I had estimated P2/P3, but was viewing it from the side and couldn't turn it around without the danger of the tower on top of it falling 🤣), it was a 1996 Socket 7 with....and now comes the big surprise to me...an Opti Viper chipset! 😲
The board doesn't even seem to have any cache on the board 😵
And that wasn't the only thing that was cheap, almost every part inside it was cheap, except maybe for the PSU (a proprietary one of course) which was build in Italy.
Onboard Trident with 2 memory chips soldered to the board and 2 empty upgrade sockets.
ISA Vibra16S I think, but it does seem to have true OPL, so that wasn't so bad 😀

It has 2 Coast-like slots which were both empty and 6 RAM sockets of which the middle pair wasn't even soldered to the board. The other 4 sockets were all filled with 4MB RAM sticks (maybe 8MB, but all 4 sticks were old) and apparently 2 of the 4 SIMMs had tin connectors while the SIMM sockets were gold-plated.
4x CDROM drive, which is very nice I think, and a 1.44MB floppy drive which actually seems to come with IBM-compatible connectors instead of that weird unified IBM floppy connector that the older IBMs had a lot of in earlier days.
840MB Quantum Trailblazer harddrive which actually looks like new, no scratches!

CPU was a Pentium 75 without the FDIV bug, so nothing special. Had lots of thermal paste between the passive heatsink and the CPU too, but it seemed mandatory in those days.

From what I gather, this rig might have had a memory upgrade at one time since it uses 2 different pairs of SIMMs, but the rest seems like it was never upgraded. Parts came from 95 and 96.

But now I don't know what to do with the carcass. I was gonna trash it since I thought it was newer and I wouldn't have any trouble tossing this one, except for that Viper chipset. I've seen lots and lots of computers in over 10 years and it's the second time ever I saw a Pentium Viper chipset in the flesh, that chipset seems even more rare than Socket 4 boards!

I think I won't toss it right away and I'll keep all other bits of metal, but those pesky black flatbed screws are not really reusable. All components that used 2 screws or more even used 2 slightly different screws, one was very easily damaged and only a very small flatbed screwdriver would fit in there.

Chances are very slim I'll ever get to gut another unknown machine this old and this time I got away without a single scratch 😵

edit:
Btw, I didn't destroy this machine, I merely emptied it of it's useful parts. It could still be put back together again if anyone wanted to do so 😊
I'll have to make up my mind about what to do with this machine, throwing away a Socket 7 Viper chipsetted board is not something to be taken lightly 😜

Installed Vista on a BTX machine. Since BTX is pretty much dead (I hope) and Vista is just shy of a decade old now, this can be considered retro right? Oh also it shipped with a Smithfield Pentium D, has a E6320 Core2duo in it currently.

BTX & Smithfield, smells like a DELL to me 😉

Pulled "project dustbin" out of storage as i needed a DVD/DiVX media machine after selling the Xbox one(sad piece of junk) recently. Celeron D 2.4Ghz, Asus Geforce FX5200 256 MB, I GB RAM, Soundblaster Audigy 2, windows XP, OCZ lan party cube case. The whole lot was rescued from the bin over a few years and actually served as my main PC for a good few months. Not used it for a year or so, but it booted right up, no issues or problems and has been playing videos on the TV all day 😀

Tested a Slot 1 440EX Compaq ATX motherboard. Everything gets power, and gets warm... but I never get any display or POST beeps.

I was bored so I grabbed a mac and installed Adobe Photoshop 2.0.1 with one of my old serials.

Also amused myself by discovering Claris Works' Communications tool lets me set the serial port speed to work with an oddball model of the IBM Selectric typewriter that could be used as a terminal.

BSA Starfire wrote:

BTX & Smithfield, smells like a DELL to me 😉

Close! Actually a HP Pavilion. Oddly enough even with the onboard intel GMA graphics it runs Vista really well.

Fired up the old Laserdisc player and watched The Wrath of Khan.

I did some mpeg1 video compression tests, it seems the old Tmpeg 2.5 encoder still is the best option for making VCDs although it has not been updated in the last 8 years.

This is a screen shot of a PAL VCD 352*288 test clip I made.

Here the picture is resized to 400% size (16x resolution) with MS Paint.

CelGen wrote:

I was bored so I grabbed a mac and installed Adobe Photoshop 2.0.1 with one of my old serials. […]
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I was bored so I grabbed a mac and installed Adobe Photoshop 2.0.1 with one of my old serials.

which mac did u do this on? macintosh plus ?? 😀

Finished testing all arrived goods,result:

Working Compaq Deskpro 2000 and Dell 425S/nP
2x alive pentium3 700mhz coppermine and 500mhz katmai
2x working mendocino celerons with 1 working slotket adapter
1 working pentium2 350mhz
bunch of working simm and sdram sticks
working awe64 value
2x dead slot1 motherboard
dead asus tx97
dead yamaha ymf719e-s
1 heavy damaged and dead 350mhz pentium2
straighten pins on athlon64x2 4200+
finally tested am486-dx2 66

Early 2015 when I was consulting on vintage hardware at a recycling company I took a CD-ROM ISA PCB in lieu of $. I finally got around to connecting it to a Mitsumi CD-ROM last week and got it to work.

I also installed a CR-563B in my Magnavox 286's on a CT1600: works great!

I went through testing a bulk lot of 10x 3.5" floppy drives I bought a couple of weeks ago. They were untested, but turns out all worked except for three of them.

One of the failed ones was a Sony drive that had taken a hit on the IDC connector, and a section of the PCB had snapped off, cutting the 5V supply. The drive was completely dead, but I soldered a wire to bridge the cut connection and got the drive going again. I was able to boot off it without any problems, so that was satisfying.

The other two failed drives were the only Mitsubishi ones in the lot. Neither of them were able to seek. I got one of them going by applying some grease and WD40 to the head mechanism, and after a few full seeks the drive worked like new. However after doing the same to the other drive to unstick the mechanism, it seems to be misaligned as well so that will probably be a challenge for another day (since I don't have an alignment disk.)

Interestingly the only other failed 3.5" floppy I have in my collection is also a Mitsubishi. It seems these drives are perhaps some of the less reliable ones out there!

I did some ffdshow + Media Player 6.4 video decoding performance testing with a Mendocino Celeron 533 and Wndows 98 using the Intel AL440LX system.

The S3 Trio 64V+ 2MB is really a bottleneck but as long as I use 16bit colour mode both PAL DVDs and Xvid 640*480 is fine. With 32bit colour the NTSC DVD playback is just barely OK while PAL DVD drops a few frames here and there. H264 seems fine at 320*240 23.976 FPS, I have not tried higher resolution yet but I doubt anything higher than 352*288 at 25 FPS will be smooth.

I have also figured out how to overclock with the Intel AL440LX! It's supported by SoftFSB and supports more FSB options than most 440LX boards but maxes out at 80 MHz FSB.

Used the Katmai to play some of my Alestorm CDs to test the analog audio connector on the DVD-RW drive that's in there. I can tell because the CPU usage is at dead 0% in taskmgr that it's working the way it should. Funny. This is under Win2K, under 98SE I seem to remember that when it did work there was no end to the stuttering and auditory corruption. Perhaps I just had to reconnect the cable? I also seem to remember that it was a bit loose.

Sedrosken wrote:

Used the Katmai to play some of my Alestorm CDs to test the analog audio connector on the DVD-RW drive that's in there.

Lots of "Yo ho ho!" and drinking of mead then I hope?

Much more interesting than my choice of activity: finding out I have 47 graphics cards of ISA, VLB, PCI, AGP and PCIe varieties, 12 of which I will be disposing of once I have harvested components (trust me, they're of no use to anyone - lots of MX4000 and 9200 LEs. Unless, of course, someone here genuinely wants them). This is the consequence of acquiring batch-loads of card just to get one or two interesting ones.

brassicGamer wrote:

Lots of "Yo ho ho!" and drinking of mead then I hope? […]
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Sedrosken wrote:

Used the Katmai to play some of my Alestorm CDs to test the analog audio connector on the DVD-RW drive that's in there.

Lots of "Yo ho ho!" and drinking of mead then I hope?

Much more interesting than my choice of activity: finding out I have 47 graphics cards of ISA, VLB, PCI, AGP and PCIe varieties, 12 of which I will be disposing of once I have harvested components (trust me, they're of no use to anyone - lots of MX4000 and 9200 LEs. Unless, of course, someone here genuinely wants them). This is the consequence of acquiring batch-loads of card just to get one or two interesting ones.

20160206_225311resize.jpg

MX4000 actually is of some use. 9200LE? Dunno about those, but personally those are basically bottom of the barrel, at least the MX4000 are universal AGP while 9200 tended to be AGP 8x ones (won't work in AGP 2x slot)

Isn't the MX4000 one of the better DX7 cards? Not as fast as a GeForce4 MX460 or MX440 AGP 8x with 128-bit memory bus, and can't use older drivers like those, but they might be better than FX5200 for older machines.