Nice, congrats on the retro purchase!

Not sure if that's how the picture came out or what, but the tall electrolytic cap at the top side of the parallel port looks a little bulged. Curious what brand and series it is. The purple ones close to the CPU slot look like Sanyo OSCON solid polymers... but are they? I'd check on those too. Other than that, it looks like a nice and simple board that should be plenty reliable. The only thing I wish those slot A boards had was an ISA slot.

I'm Jealous, My Slot A is stuck at 600 Mhz, I just cant justify the price jump for 900 or above and anything less seems a bit pointless.
As a coincidence my slot A has an AGP Banshee installed, seemed a good match (It came with a PCI V3 2000 which I'll use in a PC without AGP port)

momaka wrote on 2024-11-07, 00:55:

Nice, congrats on the retro purchase!

Not sure if that's how the picture came out or what, but the tall electrolytic cap at the top side of the parallel port looks a little bulged. Curious what brand and series it is. The purple ones close to the CPU slot look like Sanyo OSCON solid polymers... but are they? I'd check on those too. Other than that, it looks like a nice and simple board that should be plenty reliable. The only thing I wish those slot A boards had was an ISA slot.

Tayeh on VRM high, AGP and 3rd DIMM are Teapo, 4th and 5th PCI slot is Hermei. Purples are OSCON.

Sorry for the late reply!

momaka wrote on 2024-11-07, 00:55:

Nice, congrats on the retro purchase!

Not sure if that's how the picture came out or what, but the tall electrolytic cap at the top side of the parallel port looks a little bulged. Curious what brand and series it is. The purple ones close to the CPU slot look like Sanyo OSCON solid polymers... but are they? I'd check on those too. Other than that, it looks like a nice and simple board that should be plenty reliable. The only thing I wish those slot A boards had was an ISA slot.

The cap looks fine but it a little bent so guess the light reflected a bit odd.

About ISA... for me it's like with the higher S.370/Tualatin boards: do I *really* want an ISA card there? I don't know... sometimes I feel it's more of an obssession than a real convenience, I mean for games where an ISA card is a must older systems are a better fit and these "fast" system should take more advantage of newer PCI sound cards.
Also, if I was able to use a ISA card here then where would I ever use all these other nice PCI card I got already!? 🤣
It's like ISA nulls everything else.

Yes, I know, I can have both installed. But ,really, if I'm not bulding a broad "from-DOS-to-mid-win98" system I am not sure an ISA card is a must in builds of this era.

Of course all of this is not going to stop me from getting one if I ever come across such piece!

chinny22 wrote on 2024-11-07, 01:07:

I'm Jealous, My Slot A is stuck at 600 Mhz, I just cant justify the price jump for 900 or above and anything less seems a bit pointless.

I'll take that compliment Chinny, thanks! I'll admit that I can relate a lot to your comment about letting a rare piece go by and regretting in the minute after, so that was a factor too.

chinny22 wrote on 2024-11-07, 01:07:

As a coincidence my slot A has an AGP Banshee installed, seemed a good match

The Banshee I had actually "passed" on that one already. I wasn't looking for any Voodoo and the ad (same seller) had disappeared after a while so I thought it was sold.

When reading about how Slot A board get along with Voodoos much better than any other card I started to think that "uhmm... if I end up needing one here that Banshee I let go could have been appropriate for a lower system originally planned with a V3", and suddenly the ad came back!

I tell you man, this guy is reading this forum right now and placing an expensive ad for every rusty component is deemed slightly worthy around here!

Anyways, the Banshee might end up here or in some SS7 or Slot 1 build, I'll have to figure that out yet.

Then again, sames as with ISA, I need a place for other nice cards, it can't be all Voodoos and ISAs!!

chinny22 wrote on 2024-11-07, 01:07:

It came with a PCI V3 2000 which I'll use in a PC without AGP port

You got an PCI V3!? You can have you jealousy back then, that must be pretty rare by now.
I've only seen two V2 PCIs being sold around here, one was about a 18 months ago, the other one last week and the asking price is 200 USD, which would be 25% of an average monthly salary.

AngryByDefault wrote on 2024-11-13, 11:03:

[...]

When reading about how Slot A board get along with Voodoos much better than any other card I started to think that "uhmm... if I end up needing one here that Banshee I let go could have been appropriate for a lower system originally planned with a V3", and suddenly the ad came back!

Don't get phased by FUD about a whole platform because of specific issues with specific chips or (in the case of GeForce vs Irongate) specific revisions of specific chips.

Figure out exactly what is relevant to your situation and judge and act accordingly.

The whole "Slot A vs Thunderbird" thing is specific to the Via KX133 chipset, which is theoretically incompatible with Thunderbird, although a number of motherboard vendors released hardware workarounds to get it to run. With an AMD 750 Irongate, this is not relevant.

As for the "Slot A vs GeForce" stuff, aside from generic people not realizing you need to install chipset drivers before GPU drivers (please, do that in any case. Fact that Windows had i440BX drivers installed by default made people lazy/ignorant), there's the issue that there's an AGP strobing bug in the first steppings of the AMD 751 northbridge. This results in AGP 2x not being stable. To work around this, nVidia GeForce Detonator drivers from 3.62 onward will disable AGP 2x mode if an Irongate chipset is detected. However AMD fixed this bug in stepping 5 of the 751 northbridge. That's the same stepping they introduced SuperBypass as well. So if your board supports SuperBypass in BIOS, you don't have the AGP strobing bug and can safely enable AGP 2x via a registry hack. If not, just make sure you have at least Detonator 3.62 and you should be OK. Apparently further optimizations were applied in 5.22, improving stability.

So, figure out your AMD 751 stepping and you know the situation.

dionb wrote on 2024-11-13, 11:44:

Don't get phased by FUD about a whole platform because of specific issues with specific chips or (in the case of GeForce vs Irongate) specific revisions of specific chips.

yeah, I was aware of the Via KX133 / Irongate differences related to AGP (at least as far a reading a few hours about it can be called "aware") and I didn't mean to imply that I was leaving any non-voodoo out of the equation, and actually I have other cards that I'd prefer to use here and I intend to try first.

Since the Banshee was not so expensive I got it to cover all of my bases.

dionb wrote on 2024-11-13, 11:44:

However AMD fixed this bug in stepping 5 of the 751 northbridge. That's the same stepping they introduced SuperBypass as well. So if your board supports SuperBypass in BIOS, you don't have the AGP strobing bug and can safely enable AGP 2x via a registry hack. If not, just make sure you have at least Detonator 3.62 and you should be OK. Apparently further optimizations were applied in 5.22, improving stability.

That's a superuseful tip! I'm sure you just saved me many hours of frustrated head scratching 👍

dionb wrote on 2024-11-13, 11:44:

So, figure out your AMD 751 stepping and you know the situation.

Solid advice. I try to make that my basic approach to, well, everything I can.

Chipset vendor AMD
Device AMD-751 "Irongate" AGPSet
Revision: C, Stepping 4

I have stepping 4 and it only works in dos somehow with SuperBypass enabled, at Windows 9x system hangs. 🙁