it might be using an EISA connector.

It is NOT an EISA slot !!!

and regarding the IDE speeds... Are you using 40 wire IDE cables or 80 wire ?

The i430VX chipset doesn't support EISA and I'm willing to bet that's an Intel NV430VX motherboard in PB colours (682/683 with S3 Trio64/Virge on it).

That's not EISA, it's PISA. You need a PISA riser. There are much smaller ones. The one you have was probably from one of the Pizza Tower monstrosities, but the 4x4 and 3x3 were much smaller (the latter 3 slots high, iirc 2x PCI and 2x ISA with the middle ones overlapping. Non-PB there are even smaller 2-slot and possibly even 1-slot versions available, but issue there can be that the distance to rear of case is not standard, so your cards might not fit. Then again, it doesn't sound like you're using the original case anyway.

Fastest you can do is probably a Promise SATA150-TX2+ which has both SATA and PATA on it and is bootable - plus it works in old PCI buses (like this one) and there are WIn98SE drivers for it.

Tbh I would keep this board with the case and big riser if you have it - otherwise you end up with a worthless case and a board you need to do something custom with.

They probably used the physical part because it was left over on the shelf. Intel's Slot 1 and AMD's Slot A are mechanically the same slot, so motherboard makers only had to stock the one part, but they are NOT interchangeable.

EISA itself does not work in a way you could just stack PCI and ISA boards like your riser is doing.
A PCI based controller will be your best bet at disk speed.

I don't think you'll end up with disk speed much higher than maybe 15MBps if you're lucky. The PCI bus is probably at 30/33MHz here and it's likely being used to run more than just the one device doing disk access. The CPU also has other tasks to do between disk transfers.
You could try looking at ultra wide SCSI controllers.

dionb is right, don't remove it from it's case or riser because it will become effectively useless.

dionb wrote on 2021-06-06, 22:02:

Tbh I would keep this board with the case and big riser if you have it - otherwise you end up with a worthless case and a board you need to do something custom with.

Yeah unfortunately I just have the motherboard, CPU, RAM, and riser. Not the original case or anything else. That's why I was hoping to find something low profile so that I would have more options for a new enclosure/case.

weedeewee wrote on 2021-06-06, 21:43:

and regarding the IDE speeds... Are you using 40 wire IDE cables or 80 wire ?

Neither. It's one of those CF->IDE adapters that you can plug in directly, like this:

I forgot to add that I believe this particular motherboard is the Packard Bell PB810, which I discovered after an exhaustive search based on chipsets and board layouts because there are no markings on the motherboard itself. The first hit on google describes the slot as an EISA slot, so that's what I was going off of.

I just looked at the PISA bus stuff and from what I can tell, those risers seem to include additional chips whereas mine just has capacitors. Did they make simplified PISA risers like that?

mscdex wrote on 2021-06-07, 01:24:

I forgot to add that I believe this particular motherboard is the Packard Bell PB810, which I discovered after an exhaustive search based on chipsets and board layouts because there are no markings on the motherboard itself. The first hit on google describes the slot as an EISA slot, so that's what I was going off of.

The full text:

One EISA riser slot for ISA and PCI Buses. 66MHz maximum bus speed.

Not the clearest description; mechanically it's an EISA slot, but the actual pinout is nothing of the sort.

I just looked at the PISA bus stuff and from what I can tell, those risers seem to include additional chips whereas mine just has capacitors. Did they make simplified PISA risers like that?

Not sure what sort of risers you were looking at, but first hit on Google image search was this, which is exactly what I was referring to:

Never encountered a PB810 in the wild, I believe that's a US-only board. Looking at it the main challenge is the audio 'paddle'.

dionb wrote on 2021-06-07, 07:53:

Not sure what sort of risers you were looking at, but first hit on Google image search was this, which is exactly what I was referring to:

Ah ok I see it now. Unfortunately that's the only (low profile) PISA riser I can find that's for sale anywhere but it has the opposite orientation, so the PCI slot (or anything plugged into it) may not clear the SDRAM. The SDRAM I have in there now is taller than the original sticks it came with (which were lower capacity), so it may fit with those installed but I prefer having it maxed out at 128MB.

I guess I'm out of luck then since LPX cases that this thing would fit into (with the riser I already have) seem to be quite expensive (I guess there is a community of Packard Bell collectors out there?) and I don't have any real attachment to this PC so I wouldn't be able to justify it.

dionb wrote on 2021-06-07, 07:53:

Never encountered a PB810 in the wild, I believe that's a US-only board. Looking at it the main challenge is the audio 'paddle'.

I have the audio board that plugs into that and verified sound is working, so that's not a problem. The nice thing about the audio support is that it should fit into any kind of case (LPX or otherwise) because it's just a slot bracket with a few audio ports and a ribbon cable.

mscdex wrote on 2021-06-07, 15:00:

dionb wrote on 2021-06-07, 07:53:

Not sure what sort of risers you were looking at, but first hit on Google image search was this, which is exactly what I was referring to:

Ah ok I see it now. Unfortunately that's the only (low profile) PISA riser I can find that's for sale anywhere but it has the opposite orientation, so the PCI slot (or anything plugged into it) may not clear the SDRAM. The SDRAM I have in there now is taller than the original sticks it came with (which were lower capacity), so it may fit with those installed but I prefer having it maxed out at 128MB.

That's probably counterproductive, as the i430VX chipset can only cache 64MB, so everything over that is uncached, and DOS/Win9x have the irritating tendency to start using the uncached bits. It's only faster if the system would otherwise have been thrashing to HDD virtual memory.

Out of interest, exactly which DIMMs are you using? 64MB DIMMs that both work and are fully utilized (as opposed to 1/4) on an i430VX are very rare as it's an ancient and picky chipset (the first to support SDRAM in fact). Could you post both DIMM brand+model/part number and the part number of an individual chip on it?

I guess I'm out of luck then since LPX cases that this thing would fit into (with the riser I already have) seem to be quite expensive (I guess there is a community of Packard Bell collectors out there?) and I don't have any real attachment to this PC so I wouldn't be able to justify it.

It's worse than that: LPX standardizes the motherboard size & shape, but doesn't specifiy exactly where that riser goes. It's entirely possible you could find a case that fit the motherboard, but was a few mm out with the riser. I had that happen to me with an Acer-made IBM OEM board and an actual retail LPX case (first one I ever saw). Didn't fit.

As for Packard Bell collectors, not so many, but almost everything got thrown out by now so what's left is very scarce, which tends to push up prices.

In any event, LPX boards are a pain in the rear end if you don't have the original case or want to build your own from scratch.

I have a few risers that use the EISA connector. I would have to double check to see if all of them go to boards I have.

And who knows if they would even be wired the same as the Packard Bell riser.

PISA is pretty standard in terms of pinout. Never a 100% guarantee (somewhere engineer is bound to have thought the 12V line just *needs* to connect to the pin everyone else uses for something sensitive and low-coltage), but I'd be more worried about distance to rear of case than how it's wired.

dionb wrote on 2021-06-07, 17:36:

Out of interest, exactly which DIMMs are you using? 64MB DIMMs that both work and are fully utilized (as opposed to 1/4) on an i430VX are very rare as it's an ancient and picky chipset (the first to support SDRAM in fact). Could you post both DIMM brand+model/part number and the part number of an individual chip on it?

I just checked and they're actually EDO DIMMs, not SDRAM. The model number though is sm64u32e444-60-sp21. There are 16 "km44v4004cs-6" chips on the back and 16 "km44v4004cs-5" chips on the front. The DIMMs look like:

although mine have stickers on them that include (amongst other things) a date of 9/16/2013, which is quite surprising if that's the date of manufacture. I bought these in November 2020.

mscdex wrote on 2021-06-07, 22:38:

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I just checked and they're actually EDO DIMMs, not SDRAM. The model number though is sm64u32e444-60-sp21. There are 16 "km44v4004cs-6" chips on the back and 16 "km44v4004cs-5" chips on the front. The DIMMs look like:

although mine have stickers on them that include (amongst other things) a date of 9/16/2013, which is quite surprising if that's the date of manufacture. I bought these in November 2020.

OK, that does clear things up. 3.3V unbuffered EDO DIMMs are even rarer. These are 4Mx4 chips, i.e. 16Mbit, so 32 of those make 64MB, in a dual row configuration (4b x 32 = 128b). Basically each one of these is (apart from the voltage) electrically identical to a bank of two matched 32MB double-sided EDO 72p SIMMs, which is perfectly normal and supported by i430VX. So that explans the 128MB. Doesn't change the fact that the chipset can only cache 64MB though, and given lower performance of EDO, it actually increases the impact of uncached memory vs SDRAM.

Why on earth one side has 50ns and the other 60ns chips is another matter. I'm not aware of any benefit of using such mismatched chips on a DIMM. Combined with the late date on the sticker makes me wonder what kind of frankenstein modules these are. Still, they seem to work now, so nothing to be too concerned about.

I would imagine they were throwing whatever parts they had in the bins on the boards and shipping them.

A comment on the "12V needs to be here"...
Routing such complex boards can be a massive pain and as the OEM if the engineers thought it would be easier/cheaper to route the lines a particular way it was absolutely going to be done.

FAMICOMASTER wrote on 2021-06-09, 03:10:

I would imagine they were throwing whatever parts they had in the bins on the boards and shipping them.

Could be a result of PC “recycling “ or reclamation

In some foreign places if there is a penny to be made they will reuse it, lots of strange things like Pentium mmx300mhz come about this way

rmay635703 wrote on 2021-06-09, 03:41:

In some foreign places if there is a penny to be made they will reuse it, lots of strange things like Pentium mmx300mhz come about this way

and some places really just bin it 🙁
Also, i think cpugalaxy did a review of one such cpu's. turns out it was a low voltage laptop cpu stuck to an adapter board, overclocked and overvolted. 😒