Personallyi like the P5A-B more, but I'm kinda in love with super 7. It's a great board and the K6-2 is a nice CPU to go with it. You also may want to try a K6-3 or some K6+ CPU for another leap in performance. It supports AGP 2x and IDE ata33. Fine to go with your average 4-8GB harddrive and even a Geforce 4 mx440. The k6-2 and 3 CPU can be downscaled to be useful for speed sensitive games in Dos. Great for early Win9x and Dos games

Then there's the K7T Turbo2. Also a nice board and faster than the Asus in about every way. When you have your case closed you won't see it. The socket A CPU will outrun every K6-3(+) in performance, support faster IDE ata66 and AGP 4x (like Ti4600). It lacks some possibilities to clock down if you desire that. This board also might need a recap of it had not been done already. Great for W98/XP.

Choose wisely.
Or don't and build two systems 😁

@waterbeestje good idea to build 2 systems actually 😁 For now though, I don't even have a nice case for one of them. I do have some cases but they're all much older, and I'd feel bad putting the Asus in a case that's clearly meant for a 386 or 486. You mention a Geforce 4 mx440. I currently have a GeForce 4 mx4000 in here. No idea if that's any good, but it seems plenty good for the assembly coding I am doing right now 😁 I also found an ATI Rage iic. It works, but I have no idea if it's any good.

wkjagt wrote on 2023-01-15, 00:48:

@waterbeestje good idea to build 2 systems actually 😁 For now though, I don't even have a nice case for one of them. I do have some cases but they're all much older, and I'd feel bad putting the Asus in a case that's clearly meant for a 386 or 486. You mention a Geforce 4 mx440. I currently have a GeForce 4 mx4000 in here. No idea if that's any good, but it seems plenty good for the assembly coding I am doing right now 😁 I also found an ATI Rage iic. It works, but I have no idea if it's any good.

It's not the best.

I'd suggest to keep looking what you have. Once you know what you have in your stash, you should have a better idea of what you want to do with all of it 🙂

The Rage IIc was often a cheap way of getting ok video and performance, but it never was intended to be top end.
The MX4000 is a lot better imho. It is not too different from the MX440 and still has the relatively low power drain the motherboard expects. If you go Geforce 4 Ti it might demand too much power from the motherboard and as such may fry something. It also won't give you much improvement either, so spare the effort (been there)

Both of the Mx cards will perform around Gf2 non-mx level, way better than any TNT bases card. On the other hand, the Mx cards are a few years newer, all but period correct.

I just also found an ATI Rage 128 Pro. Other than that I only found ISA and VLB video cards in my pile (weirdly no PCI).

wkjagt wrote on 2023-01-15, 00:48:

@waterbeestje good idea to build 2 systems actually 😁 For now though, I don't even have a nice case for one of them. I do have some cases but they're all much older, and I'd feel bad putting the Asus in a case that's clearly meant for a 386 or 486. You mention a Geforce 4 mx440. I currently have a GeForce 4 mx4000 in here. No idea if that's any good, but it seems plenty good for the assembly coding I am doing right now 😁 I also found an ATI Rage iic. It works, but I have no idea if it's any good.

Cases are relevant here.

The P5A-B is a baby-AT board that needs a ditto case (which could indeed be anything back to 1985 - sleeper builds are a thing 😉 ), and is one of the last boards for that form factor. The K7T Turbo 2 is an ATX board, so needs an ATX case. Choose a case and you automatically choose the board too.

Couple of caveats:

P5A-B
- has an ALi Aladdin V chipset, one of the first non-Intel AGP chipsets. Compatibility was troublesome to say the least. Both hardware and driver issues were known, particularly in combination with nVidia-based cards. Be sure to install AGP miniport drivers before installing VGA drivers, and be prepared to try multiple versions. The Rage IIC is a much better match, even though it's a slower card than those GeForces, the Rage 128 Pro better still. Programming under DOS does not in any way use the card, so you won't notice difference in compilation speeds.
- early ALi Aladdin V chipsets (rev E and older) had a caching issue where they could only cache 64MB of RAM. Newer revisions (G) can cache all the RAM you can put on the board, but Asus bugged implementation so these newer ones have issues with AMD K6Plus CPUs with cache onboard. With one of those CPUs you want the older boards, if you have a board with new revision chipset you either need to do a little mod, or stick to CPUs without L2 cache onboard.

K7T Turbo 2
- this was a board from the height of the capacitor plague. Assume all the capacitors are dead or dying until proved otherwise.
- if you're not familiar with Socket A Athlon/Duron CPUs, be VERY careful when installing or removing heatsink, or indeed moving the board with heatsink mounted. The CPU core is exposed and can easily be damaged by wobbling the heatsink.
- these SoA CPUs get very hot and have no thermal protection whatsoever. If you turn on the system without heatsink on CPU, or with heatsink incorrectly mounted (so not connecting thermally with the core), it will catastrophically overheat in seconds.

If I had to choose, I'd use the P5A-B, but mainly because it's an Asus board (I like Asus motherboards), but as others have said, the k7T will be faster if the caps are OK or you are confident (and competent) enough to replace them.

What revision is the P5A-B? Mine's a 1.04, so OK for K6+ (I'm going to install a K6-3+/500) but can't make optimal use of more than 64MB (which is OK for my needs on that build, I'll build a different SS7 system to really push things).

Like you, one of my primary uses on much of my older hardware is nasm coding, although I'm going to relearn C/C++ using an older version of gcc for OS coding, which I'm trying to get back into. Only ever got as far as building a borking FAT12 boot sector and CPUID app some years ago for (mainly) 8 to 32-bit CPUs.

dionb wrote on 2023-01-15, 22:57:

Cases are relevant here.

The P5A-B is a baby-AT board that needs a ditto case.

The first (oldest) ATX cases often were able to accommodate baby-AT motherboards, but you'd need a proper io-shield if you don't want a gaping rectangular-shaped hole in the back of your case 😜

Iirc such cases were build for a small number of years and used to be very common (it's probably not as easy to find these anymore though, but many were made).

- early ALi Aladdin V chipsets (rev E and older) had a caching issue where they could only cache 64MB of RAM. Newer revisions (G) can cache all the RAM you can put on the board, but Asus bugged implementation so these newer ones have issues with AMD K6Plus CPUs with cache onboard. With one of those CPUs you want the older boards, if you have a board with new revision chipset you either need to do a little mod, or stick to CPUs without L2 cache onboard.

Iirc these new chipset revision boards did support the non+ K6-3

K7T Turbo 2 - this was a board from the height of the capacitor plague. Assume all the capacitors are dead or dying until proved […]
Show full quote

K7T Turbo 2
- this was a board from the height of the capacitor plague. Assume all the capacitors are dead or dying until proved otherwise.
- if you're not familiar with Socket A Athlon/Duron CPUs, be VERY careful when installing or removing heatsink, or indeed moving the board with heatsink mounted. The CPU core is exposed and can easily be damaged by wobbling the heatsink.
- these SoA CPUs get very hot and have no thermal protection whatsoever. If you turn on the system without heatsink on CPU, or with heatsink incorrectly mounted (so not connecting thermally with the core), it will catastrophically overheat in seconds.

This is true, just don't :'(
If you notice, power off immediately! And I mean flip the power switch and not the 4 second softpower one.

One common mistake is for people to accidentally mount the HSF backwards, which also may damage the CPU. Always check from the side if the HSF is oriented correctly.

wkjagt wrote on 2023-01-15, 22:41:

I just also found an ATI Rage 128 Pro. Other than that I only found ISA and VLB video cards in my pile (weirdly no PCI).

No AGP card either?

But at least the ATi Rage 128 is a start 😜
Would be quite underpowered for the Athlon though.

dionb wrote on 2023-01-15, 22:57:

Cases are relevant here.

The P5A-B is a baby-AT board that needs a ditto case (which could indeed be anything back to 1985 - sleeper builds are a thing 😉 ), and is one of the last boards for that form factor. The K7T Turbo 2 is an ATX board, so needs an ATX case. Choose a case and you automatically choose the board too.

Weird thing is that both boards came in identical cases. I assume they are ATX cases because of the power button, which is a momentary push button. I have some really nice older cases too, some still new in the box. One is a nice black one. Black is nice because it doesn't yellow 😁 But it has a double digit Mhz 7-segment display, so that feels wrong for either of these boards. A nice 386 or 486 would be nice in there. But the Asus would work too.

dionb wrote on 2023-01-15, 22:57:

Couple of caveats: […]
Show full quote

Couple of caveats:

P5A-B
- has an ALi Aladdin V chipset, one of the first non-Intel AGP chipsets. Compatibility was troublesome to say the least. Both hardware and driver issues were known, particularly in combination with nVidia-based cards. Be sure to install AGP miniport drivers before installing VGA drivers, and be prepared to try multiple versions. The Rage IIC is a much better match, even though it's a slower card than those GeForces, the Rage 128 Pro better still. Programming under DOS does not in any way use the card, so you won't notice difference in compilation speeds.
- early ALi Aladdin V chipsets (rev E and older) had a caching issue where they could only cache 64MB of RAM. Newer revisions (G) can cache all the RAM you can put on the board, but Asus bugged implementation so these newer ones have issues with AMD K6Plus CPUs with cache onboard. With one of those CPUs you want the older boards, if you have a board with new revision chipset you either need to do a little mod, or stick to CPUs without L2 cache onboard.

I haven't looked at the revision of the chipset, but the board is a 1.04.

dionb wrote on 2023-01-15, 22:57:

K7T Turbo 2 - this was a board from the height of the capacitor plague. Assume all the capacitors are dead or dying until proved […]
Show full quote

K7T Turbo 2
- this was a board from the height of the capacitor plague. Assume all the capacitors are dead or dying until proved otherwise.
- if you're not familiar with Socket A Athlon/Duron CPUs, be VERY careful when installing or removing heatsink, or indeed moving the board with heatsink mounted. The CPU core is exposed and can easily be damaged by wobbling the heatsink.
- these SoA CPUs get very hot and have no thermal protection whatsoever. If you turn on the system without heatsink on CPU, or with heatsink incorrectly mounted (so not connecting thermally with the core), it will catastrophically overheat in seconds.

I actually did take the cooler off, and put it back on. I wasn't very careful taking it off, but when I saw the shape of the CPU I realized I needed to be more careful, and I was very careful putting it back on. It still works, thankfully!

debs3759 wrote on 2023-01-16, 00:19:

If I had to choose, I'd use the P5A-B, but mainly because it's an Asus board (I like Asus motherboards), but as others have said, the k7T will be faster if the caps are OK or you are confident (and competent) enough to replace them.

I might just replace them anyway then.

debs3759 wrote on 2023-01-16, 00:19:

What revision is the P5A-B? Mine's a 1.04, so OK for K6+ (I'm going to install a K6-3+/500) but can't make optimal use of more than 64MB (which is OK for my needs on that build, I'll build a different SS7 system to really push things).

Like you, one of my primary uses on much of my older hardware is nasm coding, although I'm going to relearn C/C++ using an older version of gcc for OS coding, which I'm trying to get back into. Only ever got as far as building a borking FAT12 boot sector and CPUID app some years ago for (mainly) 8 to 32-bit CPUs.

Mine is a 1.04 also. So I guess that answers the "can I cache more that 64mb" question. For my needs though, that is totally fine, I only use the first couple of MBs anyway, coding small .com files in MS DOS.

The only real reason I started using the Asus instead of my 486 is because NASM is quite slow on the 486. Which seems be to specific to NASM, because the same program assembles almost instantly with TASM (with the syntax adapted to TASM ofcourse, and including tlink). The funny thing is that NASM on the 486 is slow with tiny programs, but doesn't take up much more time if the size of the program grows. I don't want to use TASM though because I don't like the syntax.

Question for you: what editor do you use for NASM coding on these older machines? The nicest I found so far is Aurora. Very fast, very configurable, decent syntax highlighting (but you don't need much for assembly anyway), and very good undo functionality. But I might see if VIM for MS-DOS works ok fast on the Asus. It was too slow on the 486.

Tetrium wrote on 2023-01-16, 11:46:

This is true, just don't :'(
If you notice, power off immediately! And I mean flip the power switch and not the 4 second softpower one.

One common mistake is for people to accidentally mount the HSF backwards, which also may damage the CPU. Always check from the side if the HSF is oriented correctly.

This board is starting to scare me with its exploding capacitors and self destructing CPU 😁 Good old 386 and 486 that didn't need any cooling and just the occasional exploding tantalum. I guess it's the price to pay for a more modern system. By HSF you mean the heat sink fan I guess? By backward you mean blowing in the wrong direction?

Tetrium wrote on 2023-01-16, 11:48:

No AGP card either? […]
Show full quote

wkjagt wrote on 2023-01-15, 22:41:

I just also found an ATI Rage 128 Pro. Other than that I only found ISA and VLB video cards in my pile (weirdly no PCI).

No AGP card either?

But at least the ATi Rage 128 is a start 😜
Would be quite underpowered for the Athlon though.

Sorry I wasn't clear. The GeForce 4 mx4000, and the two ATI rage cards are AGP. Other than that some very standard Trident type ISA cards, and one VLB, which is in my 486. But no PCI at all.

@debs3759 I am too much of a noob on here to send PMs, so I'll do it here even though it's not the topic of the thread (sorry). If you're into NASM coding, I just bought "Programming Boot Sector Games" by Oscar Toledo. Very cool book.

wkjagt wrote on 2023-01-16, 13:17:

[...]

Weird thing is that both boards came in identical cases. I assume they are ATX cases because of the power button, which is a momentary push button.

Are you sure it's a P5A-B? The non -B version of the P5A was ATX.

It's possible to put a baby-AT boards in ATX cases with an AT backplate for one, but given as ATX cases were more expensive and the -B version of P5A was too, it wouldn't make much sense to do it.

I have some really nice older cases too, some still new in the box. One is a nice black one. Black is nice because it doesn't yellow 😁 But it has a double digit Mhz 7-segment display, so that feels wrong for either of these boards. A nice 386 or 486 would be nice in there. But the Asus would work too.

That sounds utterly epic. Although the idea of putting an AT form factor backplane in there with some seriously modern PICMG card also appeals somehow.

[...]

I haven't looked at the revision of the chipset, but the board is a 1.04.

1.04 is E-revision chipset on both the P5A and P5A-B. So only 64MB RAM cacheable by motherboard, but no issues with CPUs that have L2 cache on them.

wkjagt wrote on 2023-01-16, 13:27:

Question for you: what editor do you use for NASM coding on these older machines? The nicest I found so far is Aurora. Very fast, very configurable, decent syntax highlighting (but you don't need much for assembly anyway), and very good undo functionality. But I might see if VIM for MS-DOS works ok fast on the Asus. It was too slow on the 486.

I just use notepad, nothing special. I also heavily comment my code, so it's very easy to follow what is being done.

dionb wrote on 2023-01-16, 14:13:

Are you sure it's a P5A-B? The non -B version of the P5A was ATX. […]
Show full quote

wkjagt wrote on 2023-01-16, 13:17:

[...]

Weird thing is that both boards came in identical cases. I assume they are ATX cases because of the power button, which is a momentary push button.

Are you sure it's a P5A-B? The non -B version of the P5A was ATX.

It's possible to put a baby-AT boards in ATX cases with an AT backplate for one, but given as ATX cases were more expensive and the -B version of P5A was too, it wouldn't make much sense to do it.

I have some really nice older cases too, some still new in the box. One is a nice black one. Black is nice because it doesn't yellow 😁 But it has a double digit Mhz 7-segment display, so that feels wrong for either of these boards. A nice 386 or 486 would be nice in there. But the Asus would work too.

That sounds utterly epic. Although the idea of putting an AT form factor backplane in there with some seriously modern PICMG card also appeals somehow.

[...]

I haven't looked at the revision of the chipset, but the board is a 1.04.

1.04 is E-revision chipset on both the P5A and P5A-B. So only 64MB RAM cacheable by motherboard, but no issues with CPUs that have L2 cache on them.

Here are some pictures of this beautiful board. Definitely a B. Also has the video card in the second picture. I was surprised to see it has S-Video out.

wkjagt wrote on 2023-01-16, 15:07:

https://i.imgur.com/pexJhe9.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/kRd3jfV.jpeg […]
Show full quote

dionb wrote on 2023-01-16, 14:13:

Are you sure it's a P5A-B? The non -B version of the P5A was ATX. […]
Show full quote

wkjagt wrote on 2023-01-16, 13:17:

[...]

Weird thing is that both boards came in identical cases. I assume they are ATX cases because of the power button, which is a momentary push button.

Are you sure it's a P5A-B? The non -B version of the P5A was ATX.

It's possible to put a baby-AT boards in ATX cases with an AT backplate for one, but given as ATX cases were more expensive and the -B version of P5A was too, it wouldn't make much sense to do it.

I have some really nice older cases too, some still new in the box. One is a nice black one. Black is nice because it doesn't yellow 😁 But it has a double digit Mhz 7-segment display, so that feels wrong for either of these boards. A nice 386 or 486 would be nice in there. But the Asus would work too.

That sounds utterly epic. Although the idea of putting an AT form factor backplane in there with some seriously modern PICMG card also appeals somehow.

[...]

I haven't looked at the revision of the chipset, but the board is a 1.04.

1.04 is E-revision chipset on both the P5A and P5A-B. So only 64MB RAM cacheable by motherboard, but no issues with CPUs that have L2 cache on them.

Here are some pictures of this beautiful board. Definitely a B. Also has the video card in the second picture. I was surprised to see it has S-Video out.

Keep in mind that the P5A-B is weird in that it has a mounting hole inside the CPU socket. So don't try to yank it out with force if you think it's stuck inside the case for some reason 😜

That CPU HSF is a very typical Socket 7 HSF.

dionb wrote on 2023-01-16, 14:13:

wkjagt wrote on 2023-01-16, 13:17:

[...]

Weird thing is that both boards came in identical cases. I assume they are ATX cases because of the power button, which is a momentary push button.

Are you sure it's a P5A-B? The non -B version of the P5A was ATX.

It's possible to put a baby-AT boards in ATX cases with an AT backplate for one, but given as ATX cases were more expensive and the -B version of P5A was too, it wouldn't make much sense to do it.

This is actually kinda interesting to think about.
Since both cases came from the same owner, it may be that the previous owner at some point got a good deal for 2 ATX cases and decided to purchase 2 of them? Or perhaps he didn't like the old (AT) case the P5A-B was in before?

Could be that the previous owner originally had an older motherboard inside an AT case and first decided to do an upgrade for which he kept the AT case, then later decided to move the P5A-B to a more modern case to rebuild the original AT system.

It could also have been a collector like us who had a shortage of AT cases and decided to use an AT ss7 board because he was unable to find a (cheap enough?) P5A or other ss7 board?

Your comment about P5a vs P5A-B prices actually made me look for my stack of leaflets I should still have from back in the day (was unable to locate them, they are probably in the attic somewhere, I've been meaning to scan them all in at some point). They were price lists mostly from MyCom during the P2/P3 era and back then MyCom was mostly selling Asus boards.
Personally I think you're right, but would still be interesting to read the actual prices (prices weren't even in Euros but in Guilders 😜 ).