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Need to ID motherboard, Quaestions on CPU Config

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First post, by athlon-power

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I recently was lucky enough to purchase a Super Socket 7 tower, alongside a Packard Bell monitor with speakers, a vintage HP DeskJet, and a vintage flatbed scanner for the price of US$5. I also got an external SCSI CD-ROM drive and a couple of vintage cables for US$1.

To say that this was a lucky find would probably be an understatement. I got the computer apart, found that the video card was dead, but that everything else is probably functional. The motherboard POSTs, and not only does it POST, it uses a CR2032 battery, so no nasty leaky batteries or irreplaceable Dallas clock batteries. Anyways, the reason why I need to find out what this motherboard is revolves around the fact that the CPU is apparently configured improperly. It has a Pentium MMX 200MHz in it, but the BIOS has it set using a 150MHz Pentium MMX. The problem here is that there are no jumpers on the motherboard that are filled other than the clear CMOS jumper being set to "normal," and the 5v/3.3v jumper being set to 3.3v. There are no CPU configuration jumpers shorted.

So how the Hell is it getting an MMX 150 out of that? I'm looking for some documentation on it right now to figure out what jumpers I need to short to be able to use the system. All I can tell is that it's likely a PCChips motherboard of some kind. I can't discern anything else from looking it up online. No model numbers, nothing, there's only a revision number of 1.3 on it. Here's some pictures:

20190826_164214.jpg
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20190826_164214.jpg
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The motherboard itself. Not sure what it is.
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20190826_164515.jpg
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20190826_164515.jpg
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The error screen on boot. It's not software set, because I can't press F1 to get into BIOS. It just freezes there.
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Fair use/fair dealing exception

Where am I?

Reply 1 of 4, by dionb

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That's a SiS 5591 chipset, which is pretty unique, even PC Chips only had two boards with it, the M590, with SiS 6326 onboard and no AGP slot, and the M570, which this almost certainly is.

As for the 150MHz, that's either 2.5x 60MHz or 2x 75MHz. Either way you know your P200MMX isn't multiplier-locked.

Oh, and this board has settings for 100MHz FSB, but don't bother, the chipset isn''t stable above 90MHz FSB (which is why you almost never see this one instead of ALi Aladdin V or Via MVP3).

Reply 3 of 4, by athlon-power

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lost77 wrote:

Yes, it looks like a PC Chips M570. It has BIOS options for CPU speed. Here is some info and link to the manual:

http://www.elhvb.com/webhq/models/pcchips/m570.htm

The website is a dead link for me, not sure why. As far as BIOS options go, I could fix it, if it let me go into BIOS, but it doesn't. You can try to press F1 on any number of keyboards, and it'll stay on that screen. I suspected it was a BIOS-set option, but with it blocking me from being able to change any settings, I'm not sure how to proceed from here. That's why I originally thought it might have been jumper-based, rather than software-based.

Where am I?

Reply 4 of 4, by athlon-power

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I managed to get into BIOS, and got the CPU and everything configured, but the HDD LED won't work no matter what I try to do. Not sure what's going on with that. I tested the LED itself in another system, and it works fine, but no matter which position I put it in, it won't work in the PC, and the cables aren't the issue because I tried another LED cable and it still does nothing.

Where am I?

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