Even though the BIOS "could" change the multiplier, the only P4 chips I know that will actually not be locked are engineering samples.
Also, if your board is one of those industrial boards, I suppose they are bad for overclocking (unless you are somekind of BIOS file editing guru 😜 ).

I remember Vogons user Aleksej has an industrial P4 mobo, and he has an AWE64 and a Live in it! The post about it is here. I think these iBase mobos are quite expensive. It's just possible that the Phoenix ATX-G mobo is cheap because it doesn't implement NMI, and therefore doesn't have much worth to the retro gamer.

Yeah, I've been thinking the same thing. Will get a proper hdd and a new psu and report back if I have any better luck with it.

So, I now have a new psu and having reset the bios to default values I've been able to install 98se.

Disabling everythung I can in the bios doesn't free up much, but disabling usb and a few other bits in 98se device manager means I can get an aztech isa sound card running without conflicts.... only it doesn't actually produce any sound. 😵

retro games 100 wrote:

I remember Vogons user Aleksej has an industrial P4 mobo, and he has an AWE64 and a Live in it! The post about it is here. I think these iBase mobos are quite expensive. It's just possible that the Phoenix ATX-G mobo is cheap because it doesn't implement NMI, and therefore doesn't have much worth to the retro gamer.

I have the same one as Aleksej uses (MB800H). It took a bit of fiddling in the BIOS turning various things off to free up interrupts and dma channels, but after that it works fine - I have the MM401, SB16 and GUS Max running in the three ISA slots.

But yes, they're not especially cheap. They do work though.

You can see my thread on my industrial mobo adventure. Never got my awe64g working with the board and ended up jumping ship 🙁

Played around wih this board some more, though it's now running Debian. According to the manual [assuming I have the right one] the boot up sequence includes enabling or disabling nmi, depending on set up though I see nothing on this in the bios [or bios manual pages] unless it just means enabling the moon isa device [to allow isa cards to work]. Suggesting nmi ought to work. It has ich4 southbridge which also looks like the board should isa sound cards run ok.

Installing isa soundcards in linux - they get detected and modules are loaded but the best I can get on sound test is a slight buzz before test sounds should play. Sounds like the card picking up noise from the mainboard rather than attempting to play anything, I wonder if this indicates its a resource conflict problem. But maybe I don't have linux set up right - havent used it for a while, I recall sound cards being intractable sometimes. Not sure what resources to reserve as the only cards I had to hand didnt have jumpers, but maybe that doesnt matter [at least one was pnp].

On the bright side it's ok for linux, at least now I have inserted my mighty PNY 128mb FX5200 AGP for graphics, which is a massive improvement on the IGP this board had, both for clarity and speed, even without loading the nvidia driver package.

[meant to add this to previous post but now i can't delete this one anyway]

Ok, some progress here on the Windows 98 side of things - I now have an SW60xg working fine in this board so I have xg midi playback in windows, and GM in heretic. If I can find it I will try my awe64g next.

Unfortunately I can't get a voodoo 2 working in 98se, I get a startup error _glideinitenvironment: glide2x.dll requires a Voodoo^2 not found etc. Fresh install and latest drivers from falconfly.de.

ratfink wrote:

Ok, some progress here on the Windows 98 side of things - I now have an SW60xg working fine in this board so I have xg midi playback in windows, and GM in heretic. If I can find it I will try my awe64g next.

Unfortunately I can't get a voodoo 2 working in 98se, I get a startup error _glideinitenvironment: glide2x.dll requires a Voodoo^2 not found etc. Fresh install and latest drivers from falconfly.de.

These are all strange...would it be likely that these industrial boards have somekind of incompatibility problems with "regular" hardware? I find it odd a standard Voodoo card won't work properly in it, could the problem be somewhere else like a BIOS setting or something?

And about the bridged ISA slot, I'd expect bridged ISA slots to have at least some sort of compatibility problems.

The v2 I've concluded is defective, as I've since found other V2s of the same model work in the board. And it's running a voodoo rush just fine right now 🤣.

I wonder if the sb16 I had issues with [mentioned in another post] was also defective, but I can't find any of my other sb's at present. In this board I got sound but no fm music from it. Edit That SB16 was actually a Media Forte, not a creative card, so it was probably a driver problem I was having.

Edit: Found my ct1740 and installed it. Works fine - get fm music in dos games I tried, music and sound effects in heretic. Guess the other sb16 may have been defective, though there's always a chance it's a jumper wrong or something. Unfortunately it's not on stason.

Another edit: Failed to get my Santa Cruz to get on with this board. Last time I got this weirdness with a Cruz it seemed to have ended up defective, so I've given up before I end up busting it 🤣 just in case it's me. By contrast, an SB Live! installed fine alongside the SB16 CT1740 and Yamaha SW60XG. Also got a P4 ES processor now, soI can vary the speed. Next up will be seeing if I can add V2 SLI.

Yet another edit Now set up V2 so here's the final system:

mainboard:
Phoenix P4GAX motherboard with 512mb ram
cpu:
Pentium 4 QRG4 ES processor able to run 1.06ghz-2.8ghz at least
soundcards:
Sound Blaster 16 - Yamaha SW60XG - Sound Blaster Live!
graphics cards:
Wildcat VP870 - Voodoo 2 SLI
operating system:
Windows 98SE

megatron-uk wrote:

I have the same one as Aleksej uses (MB800H). ... But yes, they're not especially cheap. They do work though. […]
Show full quote

retro games 100 wrote:

I remember Vogons user Aleksej has an industrial P4 mobo, and he has an AWE64 and a Live in it! The post about it is here. I think these iBase mobos are quite expensive. It's just possible that the Phoenix ATX-G mobo is cheap because it doesn't implement NMI, and therefore doesn't have much worth to the retro gamer.

I have the same one as Aleksej uses (MB800H).
...
But yes, they're not especially cheap. They do work though.

+

ratfink wrote:

... mainboard: Phoenix P4GAX motherboard with 512mb ram cpu: Pentium 4 QRG4 ES processor able to run 1.06ghz-2.8ghz at least […]
Show full quote

...
mainboard:
Phoenix P4GAX motherboard with 512mb ram
cpu:
Pentium 4 QRG4 ES processor able to run 1.06ghz-2.8ghz at least

I'm very interested in learning how fast these industrial P4 ISA based mobos are. Are you willing to run some benchmarks on it, please? For example, 3DMark 99, 2000, 2001. And anything else, if you can..

Re: industrial ISA P4 mobos. Does anyone know anything about this mobo: Soyo SY-P4I845PEISA. They can be found on ebay, here. I wonder if it supports NMI?

I bought one recently, but havent used it, just got it as a spare. But iirc someone on this forum uses one... Kreshna maybe?

Ah, here's what I was thinking of, looks like riboflavin has a similar model too:

Feedback wanted on a 440BX motherboard I'm thinking of getting

As to benchmarking: I'm happy to do some when I have a moment but it won't be soon I'm afraid, maybe others can help sooner. Do you have any links for downloading those packages?

I wouldn't expect these boards to be especially fast as I'd imagine they are built primarily for stability and/or what a home user might view as specialised or esoteric features. Some of these boards stay in production for many years after all, having guaranteed production runs of 10 years or whatever, to support the target customers.

By the way as you're in the UK you might be interested in this link:

http://www.bressner.co.uk/produkt.php?x=2&y=197&catID=197

Might be cheaper than importing such a board. And look at the last one listed - a 5 ISA slot MMX board, last in stock!

Thanks a lot for the info! Hmmm, I may have to get one of these Soyo boards. Perhaps in October, when I can afford one! 😉 Re: testing. You could just start off with 3DMark 2001, please. Here is the main overview download link page. Thanks.

retro games 100 wrote:

Re: industrial ISA P4 mobos. Does anyone know anything about this mobo: Soyo SY-P4I845PEISA. They can be found on ebay, here. I wonder if it supports NMI?

Omg 150 dollars! That's expensive. Still the board looks impressive 😁
I'm wondering how boards with ISA bridge chips work with ISA cards btw. Anyone have any 1st hand experience?

I think I ran 3dmark on my setup. I will fire it up today.

Sorry, just turned the machine on and it looks like the psu is just about shot. took several attempts to stay on long enough to pass the BIOS - it shuts off as son as the first demo in 3dmark 2001 starts. I don't have any spare atx power supplies at the moment so it will have to wait, unfortunately.

retro games 100 wrote:

I may have to get one of these Soyo boards. Perhaps in October, when I can afford one! 😉

There's a 478 isa board on ebay uk at the moment, it comes with cpu and ram. 865 chipset, dunno how suitable it might be.