spacesaver wrote on 2020-05-27, 10:13:

Alright, I gave up on my small form factor obsession and bought a ASUS CUBX-E on eBay. What changed my mind is reading Anandtech's excellent review of 133MHz 440BX motherboards on 6/2/2000. I realized how much I was missing compared to those 2 smaller, older boards: ATA 100, more USB ports, good BIOS support. Plus, I didn't feel like buy the expensive Powerleap adapter and hearing the VRMs might not be as good as the motherboard ones.

I hope that motherboard doesn't have the capacitor plague. Not a big deal since will probably have to replace them with much better polymer caps eventually.

"Regarding the ASUS MEL-B" I never considered MEL-B because it's 66 MHz only. Excuse the typo I made in my 2nd post.

The Asus boards I have from that era have good caps . I hope you get lucky too.

What CPU (Tualatin or not) and adapter (if necessary) will you be using in the end ?

I think most of the boards that have an Award bios can be modded into submission to run these babies if they don't want to at first. At rom.by there's a patcher utility that will add some microcodes and support for higher multipliers if needed be.

evasive wrote on 2020-06-06, 09:52:

I think most of the boards that have an Award bios can be modded into submission to run these babies if they don't want to at first. At rom.by there's a patcher utility that will add some microcodes and support for higher multipliers if needed be.

My impression, from previous experiments, is that Coppermine support may be required from the BIOS beforehand .

EDIT: BIOS Patcher 4.23 does not work with my Asus P3B-F (makes a non bootable BIOS). There are manually patched BIOSes available for yhat board . BIOS Patcher 4.23 did work on my Biostar OEM M6TBD and so did the PowerLeap . Never tried the PowerLeap on the Asus, strangely .

Asus is a bit of an outsider in this. More than once I have seen non-standard behaviour from them. Not entirely surprised to see BP fail on an Asus bios. However, did you try another revision of BP or just partial patching? That sometimes can help.

evasive wrote on 2020-06-06, 19:31:

Asus is a bit of an outsider in this. More than once I have seen non-standard behaviour from them. Not entirely surprised to see BP fail on an Asus bios. However, did you try another revision of BP or just partial patching? That sometimes can help.

I ran BIOS Patcher on it more as an experiment more than anything else , There are already pre-patched BIOSes, so I did not really want to experiment more, especially since I did not have an EEPROM Programmer at the time and hot-flashing is abit of a PITA (and I'm not talking about the flat bread 😀 ).