foil_fresh wrote:

hi all […]
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hi all

i recently picked up a "lucky-dip" P3 computer I saw on ebay. no info about what it was but i saw it had a Creative CD rom (wanted one for another beige box project) and what seemed to be a socket 370 board.

it came with a Pentium 3 667mhz and the board is a Soyo SY-7VBA. The documentation for this board states it can support up to 866mhz, but can i get any bios update to allow faster CPUs?

this motherboard will replace my Asus P2b 1.10 (P3 550mhz, Voodoo 3, AWE64) which im using to play 3D dos games and Win98 games. would i benefit from a faster cpu than the 667mhz anyway?

i also see there are some seriously jacked up prices for this motherboard on ebay. is it actually good? should i sell it and buy other parts?

Cheers!

SOYO *uking dead, 🤣. (old FTP server) Search BIOS or try russian "BIOS Patcher"

I am in same situation, i have 478 SOYO MOBO (266X/DDR , AGP 3.3V) with 1 bios release(w/o Prescott support).

Any Socket 370 supporting Coppermine at 133 MHz bus should be able to support the PIII up to 1GHz.

With a faster cpu, you can have a hybrid DOS/Windows gaming box, if you'd like that. If not, your current rig should suffice.

Prices on Ebay for older hardware are ridiculously high, especially here in Europe. It's probably part due to the commercial traders just shelving a stock and having the time to wait until a fool comes around to spend the high asking price, and semipro's trying to squeeze every penny out of the renewed interest in "vintage" hardware.

There is no practical reason why, e.g., 486's are so expensive, so it's just business (from the seller's point of view) making a profit on nostalgia (from the buyer).

This is an So370 FC-PGA board, which electrically can support PPGA (Celeron Mendocino) and FC-PGA (P3 & Celeron Coppermine) CPUs. Without modification (of socket and very likely BIOS) it can't support FC-PGA2 Tualatin CPUs. Now, within the Coppermine family you have three potential limitations:
- max FSB supported by motherboard
- max current the VRMs can deliver
- max stepping the BIOS supports

Now, the P3-866EB was a 133MHz FSB CPU, so that's supported (no-brainer with Via ApolloPro133A chipset anyway), was released with the cB0 stepping, so you can be sure BIOS support that stepping. It draws 22.5W in that configuration. So you know that's good too.

The fastest mass-market Coppermine CPU is the P3-1000EB (P3-1100E runs on slower 100MHz FSB and does not perform better than 1000EB, and the P3-1133 was an abortive attempt to trump AMD that backfired when it turnet out not to be stable and had to be recalled). The only challenge is that the P3-1000EB FC-PGA was introduced with cC0 stepping (the only cB0 stepping P3-1000EB was Slot 1).

You can find the stepping of a CPU by searching cpu-world.com or intel.com on the S-Spec of the CPU (i.e. SL4C8).

Theoretically it's possible that this board has a BIOS that refuses to work with cC0 stepping CPUs, but I'd say that's highly unlikely. I'd expect that it says max 866MHz because that was the fastest CPU available at time of writing of documentation. There are several BIOS versions available for this board - can't find release notes, but I'd expect cC0 (and maybe cD0) stepping support would be in one of them: http://www.elhvb.com/supportbios.info/Archive … A133/index.html

As for the board and prices - all prices on eBay are stupidly inflated. This board ticks most of the boxes for a good late P3-system. It just lacks a fast chipset (ApolloPro133A is slow) and Tualatin support, but has ISA, two slots even, and is from a reputable - albeit now defunct - vendor. The ideal So370 system would have an i815EP (or perhaps SiS635T or ApolloPro266, er, or Serverworks IIIHE...) chipset and ISA. Unfortunately this combination ranks as unobtainium, you'll have to compromise somewhere, and no Tualatin support but real ISA slots is very acceptable for a DOS system. Tbh, you won't benefit from the CPU upgrade at all for DOS, but for Win98 (SE I hope) games it will make a noticeable difference. Another motherboard probably won't, I'd keep this unless you hit very specific issues.

flupke11 wrote:

There is no practical reason why, e.g., 486's are so expensive, so it's just business (from the seller's point of view) making a profit on nostalgia (from the buyer).

The same goes for old cars etc. Stuff gets expensive when there are more people asking for it than there is supply. That's not business but market economy.

Also, what is expensive? If you ignore stupid buy-it-now offers, you can easily get a complete 486 PC for way under 100 bucks.

dionb wrote:

This is an So370 FC-PGA board, which electrically can support PPGA (Celeron Mendocino) and FC-PGA (P3 & Celeron Coppermine) CPUs […]
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This is an So370 FC-PGA board, which electrically can support PPGA (Celeron Mendocino) and FC-PGA (P3 & Celeron Coppermine) CPUs. Without modification (of socket and very likely BIOS) it can't support FC-PGA2 Tualatin CPUs. Now, within the Coppermine family you have three potential limitations:
- max FSB supported by motherboard
- max current the VRMs can deliver
- max stepping the BIOS supports

Now, the P3-866EB was a 133MHz FSB CPU, so that's supported (no-brainer with Via ApolloPro133A chipset anyway), was released with the cB0 stepping, so you can be sure BIOS support that stepping. It draws 22.5W in that configuration. So you know that's good too.

The fastest mass-market Coppermine CPU is the P3-1000EB (P3-1100E runs on slower 100MHz FSB and does not perform better than 1000EB, and the P3-1133 was an abortive attempt to trump AMD that backfired when it turnet out not to be stable and had to be recalled). The only challenge is that the P3-1000EB FC-PGA was introduced with cC0 stepping (the only cB0 stepping P3-1000EB was Slot 1).

You can find the stepping of a CPU by searching cpu-world.com or intel.com on the S-Spec of the CPU (i.e. SL4C8).

Theoretically it's possible that this board has a BIOS that refuses to work with cC0 stepping CPUs, but I'd say that's highly unlikely. I'd expect that it says max 866MHz because that was the fastest CPU available at time of writing of documentation. There are several BIOS versions available for this board - can't find release notes, but I'd expect cC0 (and maybe cD0) stepping support would be in one of them: http://www.elhvb.com/supportbios.info/Archive … A133/index.html

As for the board and prices - all prices on eBay are stupidly inflated. This board ticks most of the boxes for a good late P3-system. It just lacks a fast chipset (ApolloPro133A is slow) and Tualatin support, but has ISA, two slots even, and is from a reputable - albeit now defunct - vendor. The ideal So370 system would have an i815EP (or perhaps SiS635T or ApolloPro266, er, or Serverworks IIIHE...) chipset and ISA. Unfortunately this combination ranks as unobtainium, you'll have to compromise somewhere, and no Tualatin support but real ISA slots is very acceptable for a DOS system. Tbh, you won't benefit from the CPU upgrade at all for DOS, but for Win98 (SE I hope) games it will make a noticeable difference. Another motherboard probably won't, I'd keep this unless you hit very specific issues.

man, thanks for the detailed reply.

the tualatin doesnt bother me, but it would have been a cool bonus if it was supported. no problem, i have some faster systems with better video cards for anything that struggles on the p3.

i'm still interested in pushing it a bit further than the 667mhz (i dont fully know what speed it is cos i dont want to take the cooler off of the cpu just yet) but would it be worth finding the 866mhz (i would only get it if it were under 10 bucks aus) and running that instead? i sorta changed my mind, and dont want to flash the bios and brick it accidentally, i never did bios upgrades back in these days.

agreed, those prices are m e n t a l. $1500 aud i saw one's price at.

foil_fresh wrote:

[...] […]
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[...]

man, thanks for the detailed reply.

the tualatin doesnt bother me, but it would have been a cool bonus if it was supported. no problem, i have some faster systems with better video cards for anything that struggles on the p3.

i'm still interested in pushing it a bit further than the 667mhz (i dont fully know what speed it is cos i dont want to take the cooler off of the cpu just yet) but would it be worth finding the 866mhz (i would only get it if it were under 10 bucks aus) and running that instead? i sorta changed my mind, and dont want to flash the bios and brick it accidentally, i never did bios upgrades back in these days.

You can't really brick an old board like this with BIOS stuff - the BIOS EEPROM is socketed, so worst-case you just pop it out and re-flash it elsewhere, using an online service if you really can't do so yourself. In any event you might have to even with an 866MHz CPU: there exist cB0 stepping P3-866EB CPUs, but most will be cC0 or cD0, just like the 1GHz part. Unless you want to mess around finding that rare early-revision 866, just grab whatever you find and upgrade BIOS if necessary. I'd recommend doing it regardless, around the time these boards came out things like HDD size limits and USB compatibility stuff was also being addressed - as a rule you want the latest regardless of CPU.

agreed, those prices are m e n t a l. $1500 aud i saw one's price at.

Most of those extreme prices are from people who have a huge barn/warehouse to hoard stuff and just keep advertising it until someone bites. Not sure what the best place is for local classified ads Down Under, but that's where you'll find much more reasonably priced stuff (I'm guessing that's where you found this board) and with patience you can find really nice things for nice prices. But not exactly that one board right now...

Soyo has made motherboards with very bad capacitors around the year 2000. You go from the Mercedes among the (slot 1) motherboards to a brand that doesn't exist anymore, of which documentation and software can be hard to find and which was severely affected by the capacitor plague. You are better off to keep the Asus P2B in use, install a slot 1 Coppermine and overclock it a bit for W98 games.

foil_fresh wrote:

i also see there are some seriously jacked up prices for this motherboard on ebay. is it actually good? should i sell it and buy other parts?

I'm not sure of what you've seen, but the Asus P2B is a desirable motherboard, which explains slightly higher prices. Late Soyo boards are garbage to me. Unless you get it for free and plan to recap it, I wouldn't even consider the brand. Furthermore a lot of (ebay) sellers don't want to deal with private individuals and penny counters, so they price higher in hope that they can sell to a business. Now that strategy can work for some products, but the majority will sit for a very long time on the shelves or will end up at the recycling center in the end. So what is a ridiculous price? A € 200 20 years old motherboard that won't make the seller more than € 200? You now can buy a run of the mill (renovated but still badly constructed) house from the 1950's for 1.5 million euro in Amsterdam... 🤣