Gered wrote:

gex85 wrote:

Put together my Super Socket 7 build today.
Tyan Trinity 100 AT, K6-2+ 550@600, Voodoo 3 3500 TV, AWE64 Gold, etc.

Not 100% finished, especially the fans are still too loud, but I am already pretty pleased with how it worked out. Will open a dedicated system specs thread for this one later.

Looking forward to seeing your eventual system specs post! I also use a Tyan S1590S Trinity 100 AT motherboard in my Socket 7 build (currently somewhat under-utilized with a Pentium 233MMX). I found the inclusion of an AGP slot on this one to be cool in theory, but useless in practice, because I used a baby AT case which left me little room for all the IDE cables and such and they all just end up blocking the AGP slot. That was fine for me, since I was intending on using a Voodoo2 anyway, but still, annoying. 😐 I guess you probably wouldn't have had that problem (to a certain extent) since your case is a little bit bigger then a baby AT case.

Loved the original Unreal Tournament. Beautiful system to play it on. 😀

Thank you!
I actually made the same experience with the AGP slot. The case is not as roomy as it might look... To make the card fit I had to remove one of the serial port connectors because it collided with some components on the backside of the Voodoo's PCB. Still, it's a really, really tight fit. All the cables for serial and parallel ports, AT power supply, IDE and floppy drives are really cramped in between the Voodoo and the PSU. I mounted an extra 50mm fan to the Voodoo to keep it cool.
Working on this system reminded me why I never really liked working with Baby AT cases and boards. The term "cable management" had not been invented back then, and the cases (even the better ones like this) are a pain to work with. Crappy build quality, sharp edges everywhere, no proper ventilation... but I do love the results. For a SS7 system, choosing the Baby AT form factor somehow just feels like the right thing to do.
Earlier this year I put together a modern system with a Fractal Design case, something I had not done in years (always used laptops), and I was absolutely delighted how clean and easy the cable management was. If you haven't worked on modern system in the last few years, I suggest you try it 😉

Was testing my new (to me) VIA EPIA 800 Mini-ITX motherboard.

It's amazingly DOS friendly and even the built-in Ethernet has a packet driver for DOS.

The built-in VGA is pretty horrible (the picture is a bit blurry and it's not fast) but there is a PCI slot. Curiously, the board didn't want to POST with a GeForce 2MX PCI. It posted with an S3 Trio.

Using SetMul, I was able to easily overclock the CPU to 1 GHz by setting the multiplier to 7.5x. This didn't improve DOS Quake 640x480 score at all which means that it's probably the built-in GPU that is limiting the performance.

At 800 MHz, SpeedSys rating for the CPU is 420 (it's about 630 for AMD K6-III+ at 550 MHz).

Since I finally got the RAM I just had to boot it.

So yeah, dual P3 733 with 8GB of RAM. Now what? Windows 7? 🤣

Vegge wrote:

Since I finally got the RAM I just had to boot it. […]
Show full quote

Since I finally got the RAM I just had to boot it.

IMG_4278s.jpg

IMG_4281s.jpg

So yeah, dual P3 733 with 8GB of RAM. Now what? Windows 7? 🤣

Man, you have some serious dual Slot 1 action at your place. IIRC you also grabbed a NOS dual Slot 1 Supermicro board awhile back. Speaking of which, did you ever repair both of those FIC PN-6210 dual Socket 8 boards? Don't recall if you did or not.

I thought Coppermine could only cache up to 4GB of RAM (or was that just Katmai)?
Tualatin for sure can cache up to 64GB, but it was designed for servers.

liqmat wrote:

Vegge wrote:

Since I finally got the RAM I just had to boot it. […]
Show full quote

Since I finally got the RAM I just had to boot it.

IMG_4278s.jpg

IMG_4281s.jpg

So yeah, dual P3 733 with 8GB of RAM. Now what? Windows 7? 🤣

Man, you have some serious dual Slot 1 action at your place. IIRC you also grabbed a NOS dual Slot 1 Supermicro board awhile back. Speaking of which, did you ever repair both of those FIC PN-6210 dual Socket 8 boards? Don't recall if you did or not.

More like XP. I don't believe 7 can handle this...

Man, I really want to get one of those dual Tyan boards.

ShovelKnight wrote:

Was testing my new (to me) VIA EPIA 800 Mini-ITX motherboard.

It's amazingly DOS friendly and even the built-in Ethernet has a packet driver for DOS.

The built-in VGA is pretty horrible (the picture is a bit blurry and it's not fast) but there is a PCI slot. Curiously, the board didn't want to POST with a GeForce 2MX PCI. It posted with an S3 Trio.

That's interesting, I had the same issue on mine with a GF4 MX4000. I thought it was due to an iffy BIOS flash on my part, but I haven't investigated further.

Vegge wrote:

Since I finally got the RAM I just had to boot
[...]
So yeah, dual P3 733 with 8GB of RAM. Now what? Windows 7? 🤣

That's pretty damn cool. DDR1?
There's an unofficial PAE patch for 32-bit WIn7 to allow it to access more than 4GB RAM if you want to go that route. Otherwise AFAIK Win2K Advance Server should support it, or almost any version of Linux.

liqmat wrote:

Vegge wrote:

Since I finally got the RAM I just had to boot it. […]
Show full quote

Since I finally got the RAM I just had to boot it.

IMG_4278s.jpg

IMG_4281s.jpg

So yeah, dual P3 733 with 8GB of RAM. Now what? Windows 7? 🤣

Man, you have some serious dual Slot 1 action at your place. IIRC you also grabbed a NOS dual Slot 1 Supermicro board awhile back. Speaking of which, did you ever repair both of those FIC PN-6210 dual Socket 8 boards? Don't recall if you did or not.

One of them is working. TBH I haven't even looked at the other one yet. The one with the overheating issue. I've been really busy with my other hobbies. 😀

luckybob wrote:

Man, I really want to get one of those dual Tyan boards.

IKR, I have another older Tyan Dual slot 1 board with 72-pin memory and 66MHz bus. IIRC you have that one to, with suspected broken BIOS?

xjas wrote:

That's pretty damn cool. DDR1?
There's an unofficial PAE patch for 32-bit WIn7 to allow it to access more than 4GB RAM if you want to go that route. Otherwise AFAIK Win2K Advance Server should support it, or almost any version of Linux.

No, good ol 168p SDRAM. Getting 1GB sticks for a reasonable price was just pure luck. Yeah I was thinking WIN7 just for the heck of it. Didn't early XP support PAE? But WIN2KAS seems more fitting.

xjas wrote:

That's interesting, I had the same issue on mine with a GF4 MX4000. I thought it was due to an iffy BIOS flash on my part, but I haven't investigated further.

By the way, I should probably flash the latest BIOS and try again.

derSammler wrote:

But if it's broken, someone must be able to repair it. So even a service partner or Microsoft itself would have to crack-open it for a repair. How stupid is this? It's like having a car with a hood that can not be opened by the owner, because the manufacturer welded it.

Indeed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YVTXG5-8h0

It doesn't actually give UMBs yet (but all the preps for it are done, MSD for example sees the upper memory as RAM now according to how I have confed things) but that will be done tomorrow. And then I'll do more chipsets too when all the bugs get fixed.

That looks pretty stellar.

Trying to troubleshoot a beautiful 486 Soyo VLB motherboard which USED to work. I tried literally everything short of throwing it in the oven. I won't do that, but I am quite sad. It used to work so nicely, and buying an equivalent PCB now would cost a pretty penny (including shipping). I may produce a post somewhere around here, to pool the collective wisdom. Retro computing seems quite saddening to me, at the moment. This is already the 2nd item that used to work, which is now inoperable - the other is a nice 8-bit ISA VGA card. Also quite precious.

Which issue is your board facing?

Today was time for a little upgrade:

And now in my 486 Dell Optiplex 425s/L:

No issues, all working fine. "Compatible speed" mode in the BIOS still brings down performance to that of a 25MHz 386DX - so at least that hasn't changed. I think this is about the last upgrade I'll do for this PC, unless by some miracle I ever come across the VLB riser and/or L2 cache board.

@PTherapist

What system is that? it looks VERY familiar.

luckybob wrote:

@PTherapist

What system is that? it looks VERY familiar.

A pic of it I grabbed off the net:

It's a Dell Optiplex 425s/L (originally equipped with an Intel 486 SX 25MHz CPU, which I initially upgraded to an AMD DX40 running at 33MHz). LPX form factor, with a riser containing 3x ISA slots.

ok, I have a Compaq and its EERILY similar.

bjwil1991 wrote:

Which issue is your board facing?

It's not working at all. I tried it with a Trident ISA card and two different VLB graphics cards. All three graphics cards work, as I tested them on another VLB motherboard. I also tried two different CPUs (Intel DX2 66MHz and AMD Am486 80MHz), both CPUs were also tested as working with the other motherboard. I tried swapping the RAMs, I tried disabling part of the cache, all to no avail. And as I said, the motherboard was stored after I have successfully used it for a while in the very same configuration that now is not working.