VOGONS

My Asus Socket 7 Motherboard Collection

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First post, by _tk

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I've been building PC's since about the late 486/early Pentium era....back when you could build one for a few hundred cheaper, with better components, than what you could get premade from a major OEM. For myself, relatives, friends, acquaintances, etc. Some I made a buck or two on, but that was never the drive I suppose. As long as I made enough to fund my upgrades I was happy.

Anyhow, rewind to a couple of months ago and I ran across some of my original PC parts at my parents house that I stored away (from the mid/late 90's era) and completely forgotten about. As it turns out, I was quite the Asus fan (still am I suppose). Random Soltek 440BX board not pictured, but it was the only non-Asus board I found there. These are either new or I've taken them out when doing an upgrade. I probably held onto them because the AMD K6 II/III processors really extended their lives a bit.

One of these I'm going to build into a DOS 6.22/Win95 machine, but not sure which. The TX97-X would be the easiest, but that XP55T2P4 is somewhat speaking to me. Even the smaller board P5S-VM would be kinda neat, but I'm not sure how well it'd do in DOS with the SiS chipset. The normal P55T2P4 would work great as well, but I don't have a lot of the AT related stuff I need for it.

Anyhow, I thought folks might enjoy the story since they haven't seen the light of day for 20 years or so.

Reply 1 of 6, by vetz

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Some nice boards there.

I think the XP55T2P4 is underrated. It's HX chipset based (stability points) and ATX form factor, which is a major convenience for installing in a case. It misses out on the 75mhz FSB option which you can find on the AT modell (P55T2P4), but don't think that should be discouraging anyone.

The TX based TX97-X also works, but has a 64mb RAM cache limit which in my eyes is a serious drawback (we all install more than 64MB RAM if we're gonna use Windows 9x). SDRAM and EDO ram does not give much if any performance increase in reallife applications

3D Accelerated Games List (Proprietary APIs - No 3DFX/Direct3D)
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Reply 2 of 6, by The Serpent Rider

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we all install more than 64MB RAM if we're gonna use Windows 9x

Windows 2000 works just fine with 64 megs, just pair with SSD.

I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.

Reply 3 of 6, by _tk

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I'm just doing win95C and DOS so the 64MB limits don't bother me too much, nor does the 66mhz FSB. No need to overclock these older boards IMO because the "next step up" is cheap at this point.

And anything more than 16MB of RAM when win95 was around was considered *a lot*. I think by '97 I had 32MB in my system and that was the most of anyone I knew. EDO was expensive back then, SD even more so.

Reply 4 of 6, by majestyk

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The T2P4 was ahead of it´s time and survived for many years due to it´s perfect upgradability.

Here´s a pic of one of my older ASUS boards, the CACHE 386, that came with a gigantic cache add on card.

The attachment Asus_Cache_386.JPG is no longer available

Reply 5 of 6, by Horun

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Nice boards ! have a ISA-386C and couple of P55TP4's . Good solid boards !!!

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 6 of 6, by speeddemon

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_tk wrote on 2021-02-06, 22:10:

I'm just doing win95C and DOS so the 64MB limits don't bother me too much, nor does the 66mhz FSB. No need to overclock these older boards IMO because the "next step up" is cheap at this point.

And anything more than 16MB of RAM when win95 was around was considered *a lot*. I think by '97 I had 32MB in my system and that was the most of anyone I knew. EDO was expensive back then, SD even more so.

I know I'm digging up a 6-month old thread, but I'm curious which board you ended up going with?

Also, the TX97-X can be flashed with a BIOS from The Unofficial AMD K6-III+ Page to support for a K6-III+ which in turn enables the TX97-X to support 256MB RAM (512MB supposedly if you use the right DIMMs) and storage up to 128GB. Check out my build post if you want to see a similar config: K6-3+ 500 / Asus TX97-X / Voodoo3 / Orpheus + PCMIDI + WP32 / Win98

PC#1: K6-3+ 500 / Asus TX97-X / Voodoo3 / Orpheus + PCMIDI + WP32 / Win98
PC#2: P4 HT 670 / Asus P5P800 / FX5950U + V2 SLI / Audigy 2ZS + Vortex2 + X2GS / Win98
PC#3: i7-3770K / Asus P8Z77-V Pro / TITAN X / X-Fi / WinXP
PC#4: i9-9900K / Gigabyte Z390M / GTX 1070 / X-Fi Ti HD + SC-88 / Win10

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