darry wrote on 2022-05-14, 17:46:
Got an ECS 865PE-A7 REV 1.0 with some 2.8GHz P4 on it and various other items salvaged from a dirty and rusty (on the outside) case . It might become a project to try to get PC/PCI working by tapping signals from the ICH5 southbridge . No idea if a BIOS mod would be required .
No idea if anything works yet. The caps are OSTs and others from the bad old days, but that system had extensive cooling (fans) and what looked like a fan controller, so it might still work, but even so, it's probably only a matter of time before recapping is unavoidable.
Well, I'm pretty much giving up on this board for now . Not even sure it's worth a recap .
Reasons ?
a) I soldered a pin header to the S-IRQ labelled solder point (which I presumed might be PC/PCI) and was able to, AFAICT, get some traction in the ICH5 patched version of setupds with both a YMF724 and a YMF744 . Specifically, S-IRQ tests succeeds with the sb-link cable connected (and fail without the cable connected), but all the DMA tests fail, no matter the channel (maybe that's the reason the connector is named S-IRQ rather than PC/PCI or SB-LINK ?). The fact that the two pins that should be ground actually are at ground initially gave me hope. I tried playing with ICH5 PC/PCI registers (using ru.exe) to try to get it to work, but came up empty (not fully understanding how PCI BARs are supposed to work may be part of the problem).
b) At least one of the caps is bulging and will need to be replaced, along with all the other electrolytics
c) The bone headed idiot (IMHO) who layed out this board thought it would be a good idea to put what look to be two voltage regulators that both get extremely hot between the AGP slot and the first PCI slot AND to put electrolytic caps around them (see point b). Cooling those regs is practically impossible with an AGP card such as an FX 5900XT installed . Replacing the caps would just delay the inevitable (again IMHO).
d) Likely due to points b and c, the board is somewhat unstable and crashes intermittently, among other things (but not exclusively), when running serren.exe from http://rayer.g6.cz/programm/programe.htm
e) In terms of DOS sound card chipsets compatibility, I have tried an AU8830 (works in Doom, but not in Cubic Player, or example), 2 difference CMI8738 variants (no PCM audio, FM works), an ESSE Maestro 2E (only FM works, but have not played with the card's PCI registers as it is noisy as hell), YMF724 and YMf744 cards (FM works, no PCM audio ), a CS4630 based Turtle Beach Santa Cruz (FM works, PCM works perfectly for a few seconds before hard-locking the machine in Doom, for example), a Fortemedia FM801-AU (PCM seems to work, but a bit glitchy at times in legacy mode 2 and FM works fine and 2 different ALS4000 based cards (FM works, but PCM sound like stuttering crap in WBDMA, which is the only mode that works at all for PCM)
Consequently, I might have gotten a bit drunk before ordering
1) An Asus P5P800 (probably pointless as ICH5 based as well) (I am dumb)
2) A MSI MS-6580 (ICH4 based, so no DDMA either and no PC/PCI) (I can be quite the idiot, it seems)
3) An Asus P4S800-MX (I might have sobered up a bit at this point as this one has an SIS963L southbridge which should support DDMA)
I am also considering getting a Trident 4DWave based card (why the hell not ? I own a an example of practically everything else that is PCI and has legacy DOS support, except an EV1935/ Opti 935)
There goes the discretionary budget for the rest of this Summer . 😉
P.S. I have some spare CPU coolers for socket 478 and I am crazy enough to try mounting a socket 775 one on a socket 478 board .
With a hobby like this, who needs chores ?
