xjas wrote:If you look just to the right of the PSU/IDE, there are apparently solder pads for a floppy and even the word 'floppy' already silkscreened onto the board. Any chance I can just solder a pinheader onto this thing and get at least one floppy port?
Doubtful. There's probably more missing than just the pins.
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For whatever it's worth, I was looking for legacy ports when I bought my AM3 motherboard a few years ago, so here's some models of AM3 that I know about:
Gigabyte GA-790XTA-UD4:
AM3, 790X+SB750, 2x PS2, floppy, 1x IDE channel, has a header for a serial port (I've added the bracket and it works), but no parallel.
I still use this board. Later I added a PCI card to get a parallel port, but it's lousy driver caused power management support in WinXP to be disabled. S3 standby never worked anyway, but hibernation does (with the card removed or disabled).
This board can unlock cores.
Alongside that, Gigabyte had a similar board with the more expensive 790FX chipset, and it added a parallel port header.
I've never used that board, and I don't remember the exact model name. I ended up wishing I had bought that one.
Gigabyte GA-MA785GMT-UD2H:
MicroATX AM3, 785G+SB710, 1x PS2, has headers for a serial port, parallel, floppy, 1x IDE channel.
I don't remember if it can unlock cores.
MSI MS-7596 785GM-E51:
MicroATX AM3, 785G+SB710, 1x PS/2, has headers for serial, parallel, floppy (manual mentions 2.88MB), 1x IDE channel.
Cannot unlock cores.
On all these boards, the COM/LPT are just pin headers that you have to add a bracket to actually use.
This was when AM2+ was still on the market and AM3 boards were new. At the time, many boards were starting to drop legacy ports so it needed to be paid attention to, but there were still a good number that had them. Dual PS/2s was more rare than the serial/parallel/floppy ports. The benefit of dual PS/2 is that you can hook up to a PS/2 KVM that is shared with older systems.
