Skyscraper wrote:

Often with Super Socket 7 boards I treat the AGP port as a 66 MHz PCI slot and thus I do not install any AGP drivers.
I imagine that this saves some headache in many cases.

Yeah, tried that as well - no dice. And none of my MVP3 boards have issues with Via Hyperion drivers installed, so I think the NB is damaged or something. Replaced all caps with new ones and both mosfets - nothing. Plus the cpu voltage thing is weird. Why won't it post at 2.2v?

Nahkri wrote:

What os are u using?

Tried both 95 and 98. Both work fine with PCI VGA, win98 BSODS with an AGP card (with or without AGP drivers installed) and 95 hangs on startup.

On windows 95 before installing agp driver u need to obstall the 2usb updates, they bring agp support to the os.
But win 98 should work without any aditional stuff .
Have u tried different agp cards, I had a board once that would not run stable and bsod with voodoo 3 agp, but work fine with tnt 2 or savage 4, voodoo was drawing more power then the other 2.

Yes I have. I ran it with everything from a Matrox G200 AGP to GF 3 Ti 200 - same issue with all of them. The only card it won't BSOD with is my AGP banshee, but that's basically a PCI card in a AGP slot - still, it hangs in any 3D app (DX, Ogl or Glide)

Hi there. The S7AX was the board of the first PC I bought back in 1999. (And then spent 2001 through 2012 on laptops exclusively.) The board and its fellows survived a couple of close encounters with the trashcan throughout the years.

Fortunately! 😀 Because after seeing, just this week, how Windows XP made a real racer out of an Athlon 64 which before was suffering from a sluggish and demanding Linux desktop (Mint, Unity), I decided to reassemble the '99 stuff from my "obsolete PC parts" box.

Commate S7AX
AMD K6-2 450 MHz
384 MB RAM
Nvidia Vanta LT (SiS 6326 and GeForce2 MX400 also waiting for their turn, all AGP)
Crystal CX4235-XQ3 ISA sound card
Dlink DFE-530TX Ethernet PCI card
NEC 4 port USB 2.0 PCI card
IBM Deskstar DTLA-305030 (30 GB)
CD-ROM (and another CD burner as a backup)
3.5" Floppy
Linkworld LP6 Baby AT 150W PSU

Windows 98 installed very smoothly, except for one moment where it prompted me for a "Windows 98 Startdiskette", and I had to go looking for the floppy drive, and the cable didn't fit, and which way, but then the start diskette didn't seem to be needed and it continued from CD ROM.

I haven't yet checked all the details, but the basic thing works. So now I'm running (again) Window 98 Zweite Ausagabe - that's Second Edition in German. 😀 On a trusty old '99 vintage 17" CRT at 1280x1024. 😀

I think it's a pretty respectable system! 😉 I was surprised how fast it boots and how smoothly it runs!

There's a couple of issues which I hope to resolve, as a Win98 noob, by reading through the community documentation.

For example, the Windows 98 currently consumes around 60 W, whereas when booting Knoppix (a Linux boot CD), it's only 40 W, making me think that Windows 98 doesn't use the K6-2 power management features.

My main (and pretty much only) hardware dissatisfaction is the small 50x50 mm heatsink crowned by a noisy 50 mm fan. I resoldered the fan on the PSU to 5V instead of 12V, making it very calm and still sufficiently cooling the PSU. Without a fan the PSU gets warm and starts smelling funny. The K6-2 does need the fan, though, at least on that small heatsink. With a larger heatsink and an 80 mm fan the system can be reasonably noiseless.

Another concern more of an aesthetic sort is that the Baby AT casing is ugly, maybe I can come up with something nicer. Or maybe just paint it nicely? In Windows 98 blue-green? With a fat Windows 98 logo on the side? 😀

Let me know if I can provide any information that might help you get your board running as desired.

If you still have it, I would love to get scans of the motherboard manual. That's the one thing I couldn't find. There's some jumpers on the board to set FSB speed and other stuff, but I've never been into overclocking so I don't want to risk any undocumented/blindfold experiments.

My board is a goner. I took it to a friend who specializes in electronics and after some testing he told me there is a problem with the board's chipset - specifically the memory controller. It works fine when you turn it on at first, but after 5-6 minutes it will hang, and after rebooting it will display "Gate A20 Error" when attempting to load himem.sys. I have to more ALi boards with the same exact symptoms.

Reduce your RAM Size..
This Board is incombatible with many RAM Modules @ 100Mhz FSB, i only found one 256Mb Module operating fine.
Smaller one's also work fine. Also certain 128Mb Modules are incombatible.

More then 256Mb crashes, and is unstable.