I think Asrock made some boards with floppy and IDE around the time AM3+ was still new, but I don't know which ones also have serial/parallel ports and how well everything was implemented.

Back when AM3 was around and Phenom II's was AMD's top CPU, all these old interfaces were being discontinued.

My Phenom II rig has a floppy and an ide dvd drive. I'm using a Gigabyte 790x-ud4 motherboard. it was quite common to have these in the am3 era, but you need to look for ddr2 boards.

Last time I hunted for a motherboard with FDD interface, it was an AMD board from Asrock.

theres tons of core 2 boards that still support parallel + floppy
they usually will go hand in hand.. if it has a parallel on the back connections built in it it will have a floppy port
but theres also some that have both floppy + parallel as headers on the board that at first glance appear to have neither

some of the ones i have to give some ideas:
p5b deluxe (no parallel)
GA-P45T-ES3G
p5gc-mx/1333
p5pe-vm

basically anything between 2006-2011 will have floppy/paralel suport
http://oldschooldaw.com/asus/

Also look at higher end gear or workstation stuff. X58 boards can have IDE and FDD for example.

chrisNova777 wrote:

basically anything between 2006-2011 will have floppy/paralel suport
http://oldschooldaw.com/asus/

It's probably not so clear cut. I have three modern(ish) boards:

Asus P5Q Premium (2008): has serial port, IDE (single port, 2 drives) and floppy (single drive) interfaces, but no parallel port. CPU support is up to Core2 Quad Q9650.
Asus M4A785TD-M EVO (2010): has serial and parallel ports, IDE interface (single port, 2 drives), but no floppy. CPU support is up to Phenom II X6 1090T.
Asus P5G41T-M LX (2011): has serial and parallel ports, IDE interface (single port, 2 drives), but no floppy. CPU support is up to Core2 Quad Q9650.

When I last checked about a year ago, then current mATX boards for HTPC purposes, I remember there were new Asrock mATX AMD boards that had everything.

If you need something even faster, i have Gigabyte GA P55 UD3 mainboard, which has COM, LPT, FDD controller (works even with 5.25 inch, but only one drive at once), PCI and IDE channel. I use it with i7 870, GTX 560 and 12GB RAM. It's my primary everyday use and work computer since 5 years, i am also doing professional video editing on it, and it's fine even with 4K video, I don't need anything better. Don't know if it's still produced, but it has pretty good legacy features (i discovered them after 3 years by accident, when I needed to plug in a programmer device).

chrisNova777 wrote:

theres tons of core 2 boards that still support parallel + floppy they usually will go hand in hand.. if it has a parallel on t […]
Show full quote

theres tons of core 2 boards that still support parallel + floppy
they usually will go hand in hand.. if it has a parallel on the back connections built in it it will have a floppy port
but theres also some that have both floppy + parallel as headers on the board that at first glance appear to have neither

some of the ones i have to give some ideas:
p5b deluxe (no parallel)
GA-P45T-ES3G
p5gc-mx/1333
p5pe-vm

basically anything between 2006-2011 will have floppy/paralel suport
http://oldschooldaw.com/asus/

Maybe someone should compile a list of all the boards which were the last to have some feature that many of us would want and upload it to the Vogons wiki? 😁

usb floppy drive? works fine.

Eh, you can still buy Z170 boards with LPT and serial port headers. Floppy and IDE are long gone though, but for most people USB floppies and PATA-SATA bridges are good enough.

meljor wrote:

usb floppy drive? works fine.

Won't work with my 2.88MB floppy drives (this is the main reason I got my particular MSI AM3 board for my Phenom II build) and also not with 5.25in floppy drives, though the presence of a floppy drive connector on the motherboard doesn't guarantee it will actually support anything but the usual 1.44MB drives.
Mine also has a serial port, but no parallel as I didn't need those anyway. Mine also has IDE btw, which was handy as I could delay purchase of a SATA drive by some years as I could just recycle some old IDE drive I had laying around.

Didn't think about that.... never had a 2.88mb floppy and don't use 5.25in 🤣

meljor wrote:

Didn't think about that.... never had a 2.88mb floppy and don't use 5.25in 🤣

It is possible to kinda create your own external versions by using an external 1.44 floppy drive which is basically an internal unit plugged into an external housing, but the larger 5.25in drives are still a bit more work and the 2.88 drive was dreadfully slow and the external unit I used didn't have any drivers past 9x.

Not sure about USB ones though, this would kinda be ultimate! 😁

There is a Biostar GeForce 6100 board with an Athlon 64 X2 5000+ for sale locally cheap. Is this combo any good? It seems to have all the ports I want (2 IDE channels, floppy, serial, parallel.)

I was more looking for a Core 2 Quad or AMD Phenom X3/X4. I guess the old Athlon64 X2 is less advanced than those, but this one is super cheap & available now. I need to get this rig built, tired of waiting around.

Is the on-board Geforce 6100 decent? Otherwise I have a nice Radeon HD4850 PCIe I could chuck in.

All opinions welcome.

It's a middle of the pack chip on a cheaply made board, but with AM2 the board often doesn't have much impact on stability or performance when new unless it's truly deficient. It'll have a limited number of power phases and the caps might be lower tier and should be watched. The 6100 chipset had heat death / cold solder problems in laptop applications, but this shouldn't affect you.

The onboard GPU is functional but pretty anemic. A 4850 would be a serious performance upgrade as well as allowing DX10 level features.

I was more looking for a Core 2 Quad or AMD Phenom X3/X4. I guess the old Athlon64 X2 is less advanced than those, but this one is super cheap & available now. I need to get this rig built, tired of waiting around.

As suggested, look for an Asrock board. My G41M-S3 runs a C2Q and it has a floppy interface, serial and parrallel

gdjacobs wrote:

It's a middle of the pack chip on a cheaply made board, but with AM2 the board often doesn't have much impact on stability or performance when new unless it's truly deficient. It'll have a limited number of power phases and the caps might be lower tier and should be watched. The 6100 chipset had heat death / cold solder problems in laptop applications, but this shouldn't affect you.

The onboard GPU is functional but pretty anemic. A 4850 would be a serious performance upgrade as well as allowing DX10 level features.

I never heard about this problem with desktops, I had the original C51 version (2 chips) and currently still have the 1 chip version (c61) and it works since 2007 almost every day, it would run really hot originally (like over 80ºc) but I always used it with a fan.

the IGP works for older games, but that's not really what you should use for, it's at beast half a geforce 6200,

depending on the board with it you can run Phenom/II (but the HT clock is limited to the Athlon 64 speed, and PCIE 1.1)

also they even released cheap FX compatible boards (the 630a is largely the same thing as the old 430)

http://www.asrock.com/mb/NVIDIA/N68C-GS%20FX/

seems to have floppy, serial and the pins for lpt1

Most Gigabyte skt 775 boards with Intel chipsets had both Floppy and IDE all the way to the _45 chipsets. Some also had LPT.
Some of the Supermicro C2S series boards do also.
http://www.gigabyte.us/products/list.aspx?s=42&jid=7&p=2&v=7
http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboar … e/index.cfm#775
Probably true of some other manufacturers but I don't look at them for skt 775.

Even if lacking a LPT port PCI add-in cards with parallel ports are usually cheap.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/331049456307
http://www.ebay.com/itm/131691192499
Or PCIe even.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/381434937194

.

Sorry I am late to the party, but Asrock 990fx Extreme4 😉