So after winning a boxed voodoo3000 I'm on a quest to remake my childhood gaming PC. My now passed father bought the PC from a local shop back in 99.
The motherboard was that it was a AMD Athlon board. Rather big, 2 maybe 3 ISA slots, a few pci and a agp slot. other than that I can't recall what it was.
Luckily I found some of the receipts for the PC but nothing for the mother board yet.
If it had multiple ISA slots and was an Athlon board, it was probably a Slot-A board so that narrows it down quite a bit.
That's not a lot to go on. Things you might still be able to recall:
- Athlon slot A or socket A?
- PCB colour?
2 or 3 ISA is a *lot* for Athlon, and 1999 means one of the very first Athlon systems (sure that's not 2000?), so my bet would be on Gigabyte GA-7IX (SlA) or Gigabyte GA-7IXE4 (SoA)
The system was from 99 so slot A
Indeed, Thunderbird and socket A came out in mid 2000, so an Athlon system in 1999 could only be slot A. Not sure if there were any consumer slot A boards with 3 ISA slots released. Most manufacturers had already switched to a single ISA slot by then. With 2 ISA slots, I can think of MSI MS-6167 and the already mentioned Gigabyte GA-7IX. The two look very similar, so probably not much help to OP for telling them apart, if they don't remember anything more specific about their board.
edit: I checked some old reviews from that time and came across another 2 ISA slot board, the Soyo K7AIA. That one might be easier for OP to recognise, as it was green 😀
Soyo always stuck their 'green globe' logo stickers over the southbridge. So: did your board have a sticker on the soutbridge? Then Soyo.
If no sticker, then there are two sort of visible differences between the Gigabyte and MSI boards (other than the silkscreened model name of course):
- IDE connectors. Black & white on the MSI, blue & white on the Gigabyte.
- MOSFETs behind the slot. Heatsinks on the MSI, no heatsinks on the Gigabyte.
2 ISA, lots of PCI and AGP narrowed down the search to Soyo K7AIA, Gigabyte 7IXE and the MSI MS-6167.
I may be wrong, but wasn't 3x ISA a Intel 440BX thing mostly?
"Enter at your own peril, past the bolted door..."
Main PC: i5 3470, GB B75M-D3H, 16GB RAM, 2x1TB
98SE : P3 650, Soyo SY-6BA+IV, 384MB RAM, 80GB
If the shop had a website maybe you can find it on archive.org and see if they leaned toward a particular brand. For example, on near me was AOpen for everything.
PcBytes wrote on 2020-12-05, 21:26:2 ISA, lots of PCI and AGP narrowed down the search to Soyo K7AIA, Gigabyte 7IXE and the MSI MS-6167.
I may be wrong, but wasn't 3x ISA a Intel 440BX thing mostly?
Biostar M7MKA also has 2 ISA slots.
The only board I am finding with 3 ISA slots is this prototype board:
Name this motherboard!
..or maybe the BCM QS750
Thanks everyone for your help, the bord was bigger than anything posted so far.
Bigger? As in full size standard ATX; 12 × 9.6 in / 305 × 244 mm?
i386 16 ⇒ i486 DX4 100 ⇒ Pentium MMX 200 ⇒ Athlon Orion 700 | TB 1000 ⇒ AthlonXP 1700+ ⇒ Opteron 165 ⇒ Dual Opteron 856
There's only so many Slot A boards in 1999. If it's larger than anything posted before I can only think of the FIC SD-11 but that has got only one ISA slot.
The Digicom Pro-2000 is also a large Slot A board but again with only one ISA slot and I'm not even sure it was released (in 99 or at all).
There is a picture of a prototype DFI AK70 with three ISA slots here but the release version had no ISA slots.
The Shuttle A161 is also fairly large but without any ISA slots.
If you could share the date on the existing receipts we might be able to narrow it down further btw.
Doornkaat wrote on 2020-12-06, 18:01:If you could share the date on the existing receipts we might be able to narrow it down further btw.
The invoice for the system is dated oct 99.
It could had been a sd11 and I'm recalling thing differently, but I could have sworn it had latest 2 ISA slots
October 99 is still pretty early in regards to board manufacturers' adaption of the original Athlon. Initially I believe the only boards avaliable to consumers were the Gigabite GA-7IX, the FIC SD11 and MSI 6167.
I believe in late October the Asus K7M and Biostar M7MKA had appeared on the market but that should be about it. I don't think there are any other K7 boards you could have bought in the store in October 1999.
The only board that's significantly larger than the others is the SD11 with one ISA slot.
The K7M is about as large as the others and has only got one ISA slot.
The only board with three ISA slots is AMD's own Fester board that was not avaliable to the general public.
The GA-7IX MS-6167 and M7MKA are about the same size and have two ISA slots each.
I think the SD11 was often pretty unstable. (Probably due to shortcomings on the VRM section.) Could it be you weren't satisfied and had your board changed for another model and you're mixing them both up?
