First post, by Wilius
Greetings! I'm new here and this is my very first post on this forum. My English is not the best, I apologize, should there be any grammatical errors. This post will be a bit long, I'm sorry for the inconvenience. I'm also not fast in replying to answers, there could be a bit of delay.
I recently got an Socket 7 Motherboard from one of my friends.
It's a PCChips M571. The revision is 3.2a.
The board is equipped with a IBM 6x86mx PR300 CPU and 2x 64MB of PC-100 SDRAM. I already tested the CPU and Ram on a different Board.
Both the RAM and the CPU are in a working condition.
I'd like to use a Dedicated Graphics Card and a Sound Card, because the onboard graphics and onboard sound are quite terrible.
Unfortunately, this board has no AGP port, which means, I can only use PCI Graphics Cards.
The only cards I own right now, is a ATI Rage XL and a Nvidia GeForce FX5200.
I'm certain, the FX5200 is probaly not supported by this board, but I'm not sure if the Rage Xl is supported.
The Sound card is a Creative Sound Blaster PCI128 CT4810.
The problem is that no PCI expansion card is detected on this motherboard, or in other words none of the PCI slots are working.
I tested both the GPU and the sound card on a different socket 7 motherboard. Both the GPU and the Sound Card are working absolutely fine.
I already did some researches and looked for people with similar problems. Sadly, I couldn't find anything related to my problem. I also cheked, if there is any option in the Bios Menu that allows you to change it from onboard to dedicated graphics. There actually is a option, however it can't be changed.
I know there is a jumper on this board, which allows you to set it from onboard to dedicated graphics too, but it also didn't work. It's the same thing with the jumper, which allows you to use a Sound Card.
Talking about jumpers. I made sure, that every jumper is set correctly.
Last but not least, I updated the BIOS to the most recent version, it did absolutely nothing..
I can't tell if there's anything wrong with my board, or if this has something to do with my own stupidety. Anyways, the Board looks fine to me.
Obviously this board is not in the best condition, but let's say, it's in a relatively decent shape.
I also got told to check the capacitors and the power supply unit, but both the Caps and the PSU are looking alright to me.
Despite the fact, that the PSU appears to work, I decided to replace it anyways, sadly nothing has changed, I still have the same problem.
Is there anything, i'm doing wrong, or is something really not right with this board?
Currently i'm out of ideas, but maybe some of you guys can tell me, what else I could try.
Shoutouts from germany and many thanks for your help (and patience).
If you need pictures, i'll make sure to add them in the next post.
