I think vast majority of Socket 5 motherboards should run POD200 (unless they have inadequate power supply or something). It was designed to update old P54C CPUs. I've ran mine in very early pentium motherboards.
Still the HX + Socket 5 combination is somewhat rare as the chipset is from 1996 when Socket 7 was already a thing...
Well, the ECS SiS 500 and Asus SiS 500 board are out of the running now. While the ECS board would POST fine with the K5, I couldn't get the board to boot from a floppy. It would stall during floppy boot up. Its probably some CMOS setting that's not happy because the same thing happened with a Pentium 100 chip. [EDIT: the issue there was one bad SRAM module, which I've since replaced] The ECS board would also not work with my Promise Ultra100 controller (no drives found at ROM boot).
The Asus SiS board simply does not show any signs of life when a Cyrix 6x86 or K5 are installed. Works fine with the Pentium 100, but still no Promise Ultra100 controller. Probably a PCI 2.0 spec issue. Where there any Ultra DMA IDE controllers that work with PCI 2.0? Seems like SCSI always worked, but I'm looking for PCI IDE.
The Asus SiS board did have BIOS options for EDO memory, while the ECS board did not. Although the Asus board didn't have a dirty TAG option, it seems that the 32kx8 TAG + 512K cache was enough cache all 128 MB of RAM in write-back mode, according to CTCM7 anyway.
Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.
Another update, the 430NX board won't work properly with the Cyrix 6x86 and AMD K5 when L2 cache is enabled. Works fine when L2 cache is disabled though. Looks like I'm down to one board, the 430FX, pending any any issues during preliminary testing.
Something else interesting is that the NX board is supposed to accept 512 MB of RAM. I tried using four 128 MB sticks and POST counts only 256 MB. I tried 6x 64 MB modules, but still only 256 MB is counted. Perhaps a BIOS issue, or did the NX not properly work with 512 MB?
Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.
It's probably something to do with the board design and not the chipset.
"Will the highways on the internets become more few?" -Gee Dubya
V'Ger XT|Upgraded AT|Ultimate 386|Super VL/EISA 486|SMP VL/EISA Pentium
You may just need different 128 MB sticks. I'm pretty sure NX does not support dual-bank RAM, which your 128 MB sticks most likely are.
I've moved onto the FX board now. These 1995-1997 Asus boards usually use the same pinout for the PS/2 mouse header, but for some reason, when I plug my mouse into the ps/2 mouse cable, the 125V/3A fuse near the keyboard connector opens. I replaced the fuse and it blew again. Any idea what this is all about? Could they have used different wiring on this board? Asus does not provide the pinouts for this board, but the same cable worked on the Asus SiS 500 series board. Perhaps 3A is not enough?
Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.
3A is a LOT for a mouse. I'd say there's more chance the pinout is off or something's shorting somewhere. You can easily find +5V and GND on the header by testing for continuity vs power connector or anywhere else with one of those voltages. If they don't match, you have an obvious pinout issue. If they do, it's time to look for the short...
Yeah, thought it seemed like a lot too, but when I went digging through my pile of dead motherboards to find fuses, I saw one with an 8a.
I haven't run into one of these 1995-1997 era Asus boards with a different PS/2 mouse pinout, but I guess I'll measure it out to be sure. I only have so many extra fuses to blow.
Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.
Just looked it up, and PS/2 is specced at 275 mA, so something's drawing over 10x max permitted current if you blow a 3A fuse...
Well, it is not just the mouse - the keyboard power goes though this fuse as well. The keyboard and mouse are connected to a KVM, which draws power from the Keyboard connector. Those are the main items. I'm not sure if any other motherboard component is connected to this fuse. But my guess is that the KVM draws enough to, with the mouse itself, and the keyboard itself, to blow the fuse at turn-on currents. Also, when the fuse blows, the feed is cut from the video card, so the screen goes blank as well.
I verified that the mouse clock/data header pins go to the appropriate location on the keyboard controller. Mouse header Vcc and GND also go to Vcc and GND.
The PS/2 enable/disable jumper on the motherboard is labelled correctly on the PCB, but the motherboard has it backwards. This jumper header is 3 positions, with the centre going to pin 36 on the AMI Key-2. Connecting the jumper on this pin either connects pin 36 to unknown location (I suspect floating), or the alternate jumper position, to IRQ 12. Not sure what that pin3 of JP7 goes, but if it goes somewhere it is not supposed to, perhaps this is the issue. I've jumpered it so that the KBC pin36 goes to IRQ12 where it should. This is probably not the issue, but I have two more fuses to test. I don't know the current rating of these desoldered fuses.
For my next test, I will use the keyboard and mouse without the KVM and connect directly to the motherboard.
Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.
Anyone else with one of these Asus PCI/I-P54TP4 motherboards? Can you see if your ps/2 mouse is working?
Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.
I think I've found the problem.
I have three of these PS/2 mouse header cable's that I bought earlier this year, all from the same source. I've attached a photo of two of these cables. The wires are the same colour and go to the same location on the header, but on one of the cables, the wires are flipped on the inside of the housing, which is not accessible unless you cut the assembly off.
So one of these cables, although the wire colours are the same coming out of the assembly, have Vcc and GND flipped. Not much quality control on these it seems. Good thing the motherboard fuse is in place to protect the hardware.
In total, I probably have another 6 of these same cables, bought 10+ years ago, and haven't run into such issue.
Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.
The 128GB IDE BIOS fix for the FX board allows me to properly detect and use an 80 GB UltraATA drive on the motherboard's IDE controller. The online literature suggest that it supports IDE bus mastering, so I am guess this is pre-Ultra DMA, so would it be DMA mode2 at 16.6 MB/s? And would the Promise Ulta100 controller show any noticeable speed benefit when using a K5-PR200 CPU?
Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.
The Asus PCI/I-P54TP4 430FX board has been selected for the socket 5 build. I ran into a snag yesturday as the 2x multiplier jumper only works for P54 chips and not model 1&2 AMD K5 chips. I had to add a BF1 jumper to the motherboard to fix this problem. Made a new post on that mod here: Modifying a socket 5 for multipliers of 2.0 - 3.5x (Asus PCI/I-P54TP4)
Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.
wrote:The 128GB IDE BIOS fix for the FX board allows me to properly detect and use an 80 GB UltraATA drive on the motherboard's IDE controller. The online literature suggest that it supports IDE bus mastering, so I am guess this is pre-Ultra DMA, so would it be DMA mode2 at 16.6 MB/s? And would the Promise Ulta100 controller show any noticeable speed benefit when using a K5-PR200 CPU?
Yeah, I know, I'm supposed to be gone already.
A series of storms has fouled plans and gave me an excuse to stick around.
I've used Promise cards many times to get past slow transfer rates.
Yes, I would expect the speed the improvement to be noticeable.
I've used them on slightly lesser CPUs than you plan and I don't recall any problems over that.
In '97-'98-ish I started with Ultra33 then moved to FastTrak 33 & 66 in RAID1 or plain controller mode.
They were all noticeably faster than stock 16MB/s.
To my understanding the Ultra100 is no different than those functionally. (Except for the RAID option of course).
I recently decided to revisit Promise and have been reading up on them.
I got my hands on some FastTrack100 to play with. A few newer models too.
I want to see which work in DOS without drivers and the manuals for the newer cards don't say.
Promise still has drivers, manuals and such in the 'legacy' part of their support site.
Some have BIOS updates to fix bugs or add 48-bit support and whatnot.
You have the hardware worked out.
Does the intended OS support 80GB drives?
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GRUMPY OLD FART - On Hiatus, sort'a
Mann-Made Global Warming. - We should be more concerned about the Intellectual Climate.
You can teach a man to fish and feed him for life, but if he can't handle sushi you must also teach him to cook.
I plan on making a clone disc of my IBM 5x86c-133 system, which also uses the Promise Ultra100, and runs Win95c and WinNT4.0. It's much faster to get all my software up and running through this means. Both OSes support 80 GB drives. I might try benching the FX's onboard DMA mode-2 IDE controller against the Promise Ultra100 when I'm finished.
The reason for the question is, while I use Promise Ultra100 and Ultra133 PCI cards in many systems which already contain onboard bus mastering Ultra33 and Ultra66 IDE controllers, I have yet bothered to measure the performance benefit of using the Ultra100 over onboard bus mastering IDE controllers. I remember from back in the day that SCSI was considered king before bus mastering Ultra33 controllers became widespread.
Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.
I see.
I've started using Travelstar 20Gb to get around the Scandisk 32GB problem.
I know work-arounds exist but I just don't want to deal with it.
And partly because I got a lot of 16 HTS541020GAT00 cheap. (5400RPM ATA-100)
All but 1 tested good. My luck with sub-30GB 3.5" drives lately is around 50% bad.
I have to get around the 40-44 pin conversion and use 2.5" to 3.5" mount adapters but for me it works out better than sub-30GB 3.5" drives.
Smaller, easier to store, 2 can fit in one 3.5" bay.
The lappy drives are more resistant bumps as well so I think I'm going to standardize to them and unload all my sub-30GB 3.5". (With a few 7200RPM exceptions.)
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GRUMPY OLD FART - On Hiatus, sort'a
Mann-Made Global Warming. - We should be more concerned about the Intellectual Climate.
You can teach a man to fish and feed him for life, but if he can't handle sushi you must also teach him to cook.
I didn't realise there was a 32 GB Scandisk limitation. It can only scan up to 32 GB of data? Which version of Scandisk? I don't think I have any 5400 RPM drives left in any of my systems. All IDE are 7200 rpm and SCSI 10k rpm, with perhaps one or two at 15k rpm. I used a few 5k rpm drives in the 90's and found them slow and unreliable. That's just my limited experience with them. In 2007 a colleague of mine bought the same Lenovo T61 laptop as me, but they ordered it with the 5400 rpm drive while I paid more for the 7200 rpm drive. They were always complaining how slow and noisy the HDD was. No complaints from me and I'm still using that laptop.
Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.
I guess I should have said "various" 32GB problems.
I have to be gone for a medical thing.
I will be back later.
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GRUMPY OLD FART - On Hiatus, sort'a
Mann-Made Global Warming. - We should be more concerned about the Intellectual Climate.
You can teach a man to fish and feed him for life, but if he can't handle sushi you must also teach him to cook.
I apologize for any more than normal typos. Doc gave me some meds and I'm a bit loopy.
When I got to looking there are a lot more limits than I remembered.
I was probably using smaller drives back in the day so I never hit most of the limits personally.
These are some of those I considered when I made my drive choices.
I probably forgot to include some.
https://www.seagate.com/support/kb/the-drive- … -32gb-182079en/
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO-4.html
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO-12.html#verylarge
https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/windows-and … ond-32gb-limit/
Win NT, 2000 and XP (and probably Vista) can’t format FAT-32 partitions over 32 GB, even though they recognize hard disk drives formatted with FAT-32 under Windows ME up to the 2 TB limit.
https://www.hardwaresecrets.com/hard-disk-dri … acity-limits/3/
https://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/Limits.htm#30gb
Win 95 OSR2: This operating system can only access partitions up to 32 GB.
https://www.hardwaresecrets.com/hard-disk-dri … acity-limits/5/
Win 98/98se: The Fdisk command, which is used to create partitions, displays the wrong size for partitions above 64 GB.
The solution is to download a fixed Fdisk.exe file from Microsoft’s website. With this updated Fdisk, however, the maximum partition size that you can enter manually is 99,999 MB, as this utility displays sizes in MB and allows you to enter only up to 5 digits.
https://www.hardwaresecrets.com/hard-disk-dri … acity-limits/5/
Some computer BIOS can not recognize HDDs over about 32GB
https://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/Limits.htm#32_338
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The original (design?? target?? model??) system is for W95.
I have a bazillion floppies that need backed up that lack the media descriptor byte and won't work on anything newer without editing their boot records.
It's too many to edit one by one and W95 would be easier than DOS for me.
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I agree about 7200RPM but those are tough to find under 30GB in quantity without spending a fortune.
Standardizing to the same drive was a goal from the start because I want the backups in RAID-1.
Finding them at reasonable prices in quantity just wasn't happening for me.
I did manage to find 1 set of 3 working 30GB 7200RPM but after duds everything else was singles.
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GRUMPY OLD FART - On Hiatus, sort'a
Mann-Made Global Warming. - We should be more concerned about the Intellectual Climate.
You can teach a man to fish and feed him for life, but if he can't handle sushi you must also teach him to cook.
