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Octek Rhino 9 (430HX)

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First post, by oh2ftu

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When we got our family computer in 1999, it wasn't available to take to lan-parties.
My friend had recently gotten CIH on his P200mmx (iirc) and got a completely new computer.
I bought the remains for 300FIM (about 50e on straight conversion). Little did I know about flashing the BIOS. Only thing I knew about CIH was that the motherboard was toast.
What was available, was an Octek Rhino 9 for ~150FIM (25e on straight conversion). And there I had it. My first computer.
That computer had a lot of upgrades. Case, motherboard etc. The next mobo was an Asus TX97 or similar, and I loaded it with more ram (over 64MB) and wondered why it was so slow ... Little did I know back then.

After being bitten by the retro-bug about a year ago, I've gathered this and that. Oldest (atm) being a working 486 and the newest was some AM3 platform that I gave away.

I'm planning on making this about as I would have had it in 1999-2000. Not exactly period correct either, something along those lines.

Anyway.

Again I went to TRW to find that the pictures and manuals are for an older revision and it gets quite hard to set the jumpers without any decent silkscreens or manuals.
My board revision is ver 1.4.
Does anyone have this manual? https://gordogato.com/oscommerce/catalog/prod … products_id=461 or https://woo.gordogato.com/?product=octek-rhin … entium-mmx-1996
The first link luckily had the needed jumper-settings; https://gordogato.com/oscommerce/catalog/imag … o9_manual_2.JPG

Also, as I'm using a 233MMX, and the jumpers are only for 200MHz, setting the multiplier to 1,5x made the CPU take it as 3,5x. Job done!

I'm planning on upgrading the cache (onboard 256kB) with a Coast.
This is what I think I know about the COAST;
- 256K module without TAG ram.
- 3,3V I/O
- Speed 7ns
Maybe COAST 3.0+?
From what I know, this is a deep rabbit hole.

Are there any OSHW coast modules being designed?

Other than that, what are my plans for this?
- Floppy (not gotek, no)
- 10/100M ethernet, if needed with XT-IDE
- An optical drive (maybe DVD?)
- CT3670 (iirc - can't recall the exact model but it DOES have addon memory) OR CT4810? I think I had an SB 64 pci or similar. My memory is a bit vague 😀
- The HDD is still debatable. SSD with an Startech adapter or spinning rust. I do have both "in stock"
- RAM, 128MB, maybe more
- Will have to look what 2D cards I will pair with a Voodoo1. A Voodoo is what I had, but it might have been a Voodoo2. Anyway, it got upgraded to an Banshee at some point so I will be on the lookout for any more powerful PCI GPU's.
- OS Win98 and/or DOS

Reply 3 of 11, by oh2ftu

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majestyk wrote on 2024-04-12, 17:13:

This is the BIOS I´m running on my Rhino 9:
Latest_Eval_Rhino9.7z

I think it´s supposed to be the latest one.

Thanks! is this suitable for rev 1.4?

Reply 4 of 11, by majestyk

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Mine is revision 1.12, I tried several BIOSes that were marked as being for all different revisions, they all worked.
Main difference between the revisions seems to be the VRM section, the voltages you can select and the CPUs that are identified.
Just try it...

Reply 5 of 11, by oh2ftu

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I did some digging last night on the wayback-machine.
Too bad it hasn't mirrored the Octek FTP-site (ftp.octek.com.hk or .com.au).
Found a manual for rev 1.4, and the latest official bios (97017) and a beta bios that seems to be the same @majestyk posted.
Also it seems I've been running that poor 233MMX at 3,3V - fixed. Not very intuitive, lot's of jumpers to set.

The Voltage regulator and it's surroundings run HOT. The small resistor (R55, close to the battery) runs at 70 °C!
I guess the VRM area will need active cooling.

I did however also find MR BIOS that's for this motherboard and tested it - PRESTO, works fine!.

This is going to be a Win98/dos -build with an S3 trio/virge OR MGA 100 + Voodoo 1 for the time being. 15GB HDD is heaps. I Could also use a CF-card - I guess we'll see.
The Matrox has some weird image quality issue that will need to be looked at.

For ethernet I'm going with 3C905B. I do also have many many 10Mbps or 10/100Mbps realteks, Intels .... I guess it should work fine.

I'm a bit at loss with a sound card.
I've got available:
- CT3600, SB 32 with what seems to be 2MB of additional ram
- SB0410, SB Live without a game port - I do not yet have any joysticks
- SB0220, SB Live with a game port

What would be your choice and why?

Reply 6 of 11, by oh2ftu

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Short update. MR BIOS did work to some extent, but very buggy with the CD-ROM and HDD.
That beta-bios didn't have working PS2 (at least not in windows98 installer).
I'm back to 97-017 and a 7,5GB HDD. I will look into XT-IDE, but I didn't plan on using an isa-card for this. The PCI-cards most have a DIP28 socket. I'll have to dig more.

Any experience using RTL8139D with XT-IDE?

Reply 7 of 11, by Chkcpu

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Hi oh2ftu,

I also looked into the BIOSes for your Octek Rhino 9 board and this what I found:

• The latest official 97-017 BIOS does doesn’t have the Int 13h extensions and that is causing the 8GB HDD limit you found.
• The nice April 1998 Evaluation BIOS from majestyk has the Int 13h extensions, but is limited to 32 GiB HDDs. It also adds CPU support for non-Intel models like the WinChip C6, but still lacks WinChip 2 support.
• The MR BIOS for this board is unknown to me so I have no info on that.

If you need support for larger drives or additional CPUs later on, there is a March 2000 Award BIOS Upgrade from Unicore Software for the Rhino 9. This BIOS has full 128GiB HDD support and supports any socket 5/7 CPU ever made, including the WinChip 2, Rise mP6, and AMD K6-2+/K6-III+.
Of course the useability of this extended CPU support will be restricted by the boards VRM and available Vcore, multiplier, and FSB settings.

Filename
2A59FO09.zip
File size
113.12 KiB
Downloads
5 downloads
File comment
Rhino 9 Unicore Upgrade BIOS
File license
Public domain

Regards, Jan

CPU Identification utility
The Unofficial K6-2+ / K6-III+ page

Reply 8 of 11, by oh2ftu

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Chkcpu wrote on 2024-04-13, 16:28:
Hi oh2ftu, […]
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Hi oh2ftu,

I also looked into the BIOSes for your Octek Rhino 9 board and this what I found:

• The latest official 97-017 BIOS does doesn’t have the Int 13h extensions and that is causing the 8GB HDD limit you found.
• The nice April 1998 Evaluation BIOS from majestyk has the Int 13h extensions, but is limited to 32 GiB HDDs. It also adds CPU support for non-Intel models like the WinChip C6, but still lacks WinChip 2 support.
• The MR BIOS for this board is unknown to me so I have no info on that.

If you need support for larger drives or additional CPUs later on, there is a March 2000 Award BIOS Upgrade from Unicore Software for the Rhino 9. This BIOS has full 128GiB HDD support and supports any socket 5/7 CPU ever made, including the WinChip 2, Rise mP6, and AMD K6-2+/K6-III+.
Of course the useability of this extended CPU support will be restricted by the boards VRM and available Vcore, multiplier, and FSB settings.

2A59FO09.zip

Regards, Jan

Hello,
This I didn't find. Much appreciated, this did the trick!
Thank you. This also adds support for USB keyboard, will need to try it out at some point

Reply 9 of 11, by majestyk

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Thanks Jan, I missed this Unicore BIOS somehow. I´m sure it improves the situation for many AMD CPUs.

To get rid of the heat issue, you can always use a better VRM heatsink:

rhino9_cooler.JPG
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rhino9_cooler.JPG
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Last edited by majestyk on 2024-04-13, 17:06. Edited 1 time in total.
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