VOGONS


My IBM PC 330

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First post, by fillosaurus

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I had this from a friend several years ago, when she went for an upgrade.
The mainboard is with Intel 430HX chipset and onboard S3 Trio64V+ video.
When I got it, it had a Pentium 133 MHz CPU, 32 MB RAM (one of those rare EDO DIMM's).
I put in a Pentium MMX 233 MHz (works at 200), extra 96 MB RAM (these are EDO SIMM's, 2x16 and 2x32), CD-ROM, 4 GB HDD.
For an unknown reason, the usually good performer Trio64V+ is very slow, so I inserted another video card. For the moment it's a Matrox Millenium with 2 MB.
Soundcard is a Soundblaster 32 with 2 MB RAM. I received the system with a no-name Crystal 4235, SB Pro ans WSS compatible.
I think it's a very good platform for those late DOS games, and even for the early 3d's that didn't need hardware acceleration. Unreal flies, and so are many other games.

Last edited by fillosaurus on 2008-10-10, 19:22. Edited 1 time in total.

Y2K box: AMD Athlon K75 (second generation slot A)@700, ASUS K7M motherboard, 256 MB SDRAM, ATI Radeon 7500+2xVoodoo2 in SLI, SB Live! 5.1, VIA USB 2.0 PCI card, 40 GB Seagate HDD.
WIP: external midi module based on NEC wavetable (Yamaha clone)

Reply 1 of 20, by F2bnp

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Hey dude,yeah neither the Trio64V+ nor the Matrox Milennium do the trick for newer games(1996 or further).You should arm yourself with something badass.I suggest going for a Voodoo 1 or 2 or a TNT 1 even ATI RAGE 128.I think they should boost this system pretty much.Have fun

Reply 2 of 20, by fillosaurus

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The mainboard does not have AGP. So I am limited to PCI videocards, the best of them I have now are the Matrox Milennium and ELSA 2000 AVI (S3 968).

Y2K box: AMD Athlon K75 (second generation slot A)@700, ASUS K7M motherboard, 256 MB SDRAM, ATI Radeon 7500+2xVoodoo2 in SLI, SB Live! 5.1, VIA USB 2.0 PCI card, 40 GB Seagate HDD.
WIP: external midi module based on NEC wavetable (Yamaha clone)

Reply 4 of 20, by fillosaurus

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And the IBM PC 330 is a desktop system with 3 expansion slots available. They are shared ISA/PCI, so I am limited to 1 external video card, 1 audio and 1 Ethernet. No Voodoo for me in that system. Otherwise, good performer. It would acommodate Win98SE without a problem. Like to keep Win95 OSR2.1 on it, though.

Y2K box: AMD Athlon K75 (second generation slot A)@700, ASUS K7M motherboard, 256 MB SDRAM, ATI Radeon 7500+2xVoodoo2 in SLI, SB Live! 5.1, VIA USB 2.0 PCI card, 40 GB Seagate HDD.
WIP: external midi module based on NEC wavetable (Yamaha clone)

Reply 5 of 20, by fillosaurus

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I miss my old miro nVidia RIVA128 PCI, 4 Mb. Several years ago I had an almost similar system, i430TX, 128 Mb SDRAM, Pentium 200MMX and that videocard. It run very well early DirectX games, also very fast in plain DOS 2D acceleration. That card was VESA 3.0 compliant.

Y2K box: AMD Athlon K75 (second generation slot A)@700, ASUS K7M motherboard, 256 MB SDRAM, ATI Radeon 7500+2xVoodoo2 in SLI, SB Live! 5.1, VIA USB 2.0 PCI card, 40 GB Seagate HDD.
WIP: external midi module based on NEC wavetable (Yamaha clone)

Reply 6 of 20, by Spectre

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I would like to say that I also have a IBM PC330 (it came to me from girlfriend when she was upgraded) and I spent some time to upgrade it such as you. 😀

Originally, I had follow configuration: Pentium 133Mhz, RAM 32Mb (16Mb+16Mb SIMM), CD-ROM 4x (Compaq), HDD Seagate 3.2Gb, FDD, internal S3 Trio64V+ with 512Kb memory, GERMAN BIOS (oh...).

After some attempts, I found the latest version of BIOS (English) on a forgotten ftp (IBM has removed all drivers from him ftp). Upgraded HDD to 4.3 Gb (now I want to try a modern HDD 40Gb which limited to 32Gb by jumpers...). I found 4 SIMM 32MB (yeah!) and now I have 128Mb memory which is enough for comfort working Windows 2000SP4 (yes, I have installed it, because don't want to use Win98). Also, I found 2 memory module for internal S3 (1Mb+1Mb) and upgraded it. And for finish, I have overclocked the CPU (using by jumpers) to 166Mhz (on 200Mhz it was working unstable). Yesterday, I had a LAN card (10Mbit) from my friend and now I have Internet access from this PC. 😀 Also, I have SB Vibra (ISA card) which works fine.

As you can see, our way is very similar, because there are not many ways to upgrade this PC. 😉

Now, I want to change the original S3 Trio64V+ to an external video card with 4Mb (I have 19" TFT monitor with 1280x1024 resolution and can't use different one): I'm going to buy Riva TNT or Intel 740 or S3 Savage 4. Also, I wanted to change the CPU, but (as I read before) Socket 7 supports only one power supply (5V), but MMX series need 2 power supplies (3.3V+5V)... Please, describe, how you changed your CPU to 233MMX? Did you use something like Intel OverDrive or your CPU works in Socket 7 without any modifications?

Thanks and good luck with your PC330 😉

Reply 7 of 20, by fillosaurus

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Nothing of the sort. The system is smart enough to autodetect the CPU inserted, and it changes the voltage accordingly. I remember the system had a 20 Gb HDD, of which only 8 were visible. Since I updated the BIOS I have not tested it with a larger than 8 Gb HDD, so I do not know if I fixed the problem.
Anyway, some time ago I had a Pentium mainboard which only saw 8 Gb, and after the BIOS update it went along well with a 40 Gb HDD.

Y2K box: AMD Athlon K75 (second generation slot A)@700, ASUS K7M motherboard, 256 MB SDRAM, ATI Radeon 7500+2xVoodoo2 in SLI, SB Live! 5.1, VIA USB 2.0 PCI card, 40 GB Seagate HDD.
WIP: external midi module based on NEC wavetable (Yamaha clone)

Reply 8 of 20, by Spectre

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About CPU, it's good news for me. I was worry about Socket 7 which (as I read before) must be replaced by Super 7 for support MMX processors (double voltage is the main difference between these sockets). Also, I saw that some enthusiast modified them motherboards for adding double voltage - it was confused me when I was going to buy MMX processor. But now, my confusion has gone away and I will search such CPU.

Thank you for the attention about 8Gb limit, I forgot it (remember only about 32 and 128). However old HDD (8, 20, 40) have almost the same cost and it will not be a big problem. 😉

Reply 9 of 20, by 5u3

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Just to clear up the Socket 7 confusion:

Socket 5 was the one that didn't support split-voltage for MMX CPUs.
Socket 7 always works with MMX processors (at least in theory, apparently there are some crap mainboards without the split-voltage feature).
Super Socket 7 is exactly the same, only with FSB clocks up to 100 MHz and lower voltages for the CPU.

Reply 10 of 20, by fillosaurus

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That is correct. All the Socket 7 mainboards I saw supported dual voltage CPU's.

Y2K box: AMD Athlon K75 (second generation slot A)@700, ASUS K7M motherboard, 256 MB SDRAM, ATI Radeon 7500+2xVoodoo2 in SLI, SB Live! 5.1, VIA USB 2.0 PCI card, 40 GB Seagate HDD.
WIP: external midi module based on NEC wavetable (Yamaha clone)

Reply 11 of 20, by Old Thrashbarg

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I know this is an old thread, but I figured I'd offer my insights, as I own a PC350... the larger variant of the PC330 with five expansion slots versus three. After a bit of research, here's what I found about them:

There were actually several different versions of these machines, under the same model designation. There was the Socket 7 version with a 430HX, which took up to a 200MMX like fillosaurus and Spectre have. I suspect that one would run at the full 233mhz by using the switch settings for a 100mhz CPU.

Then there was a Socket 5 with the 430FX, like I have. Mine only officially supports 100mhz, but runs at 133 with an undocumented switch setting. It seems there was also a later Socket 5 board, one that took up to a 166mhz CPU. I don't know which chipset that one uses. There may have been one or two different Socket 4 models, as well.

As for the one I have, it's a pretty nice machine... the extra expansion slots of the PC350 open a lot more upgrade options than the PC330. It has a Tro64V+ onboard, 1MB soldered in and another 1MB I added in the two empty sockets. No onboard audio, though there is a blank space for it on the motherboard. It doesn't autodetect the CPU voltage, it must be set by jumpers, the two options being VR and VRE settings. The BIOS is surprisingly full-featured for such a machine (at least after I disabled a password protect I didn't know it had).

Reply 12 of 20, by MatthewBrian

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I also had this PC 330, it is one of the most robust systems I've had.
Mine originally came with an Pentium 133, but I've upgraded it to Pentium MMX. I also filled up the EDO rams with 4 x 16MB sticks, added a Ethernet card (Realtek RTL-8139 based). I hasn't changed the HDD, still the old Quantum 1.2GB which is very noisy. It came to me with a Yamaha OPL3 soundcard.

It is now sitting just on the right of my main PC (a Northwood P4 system).

Originally it came with Windows 98 FE on it (and Windows 95 CD, apparently the older owner upgraded it to 98), but now I have upgraded to Windows 2000 - no issues 😀

Now it is used for print server over the network, as a NAS (with ext USB drive), a download manager & torrent slave (I usually download overnight with this system - doesn't get hot easily and consumes only a very few amount of electricity). It is filled with Office 2000 for some little document editing, and some games - GTA 1 (the Windows version) and SimCity 2000 Windows version. It runs incredibly smooth even with the onboard graphics.

Anyone knows how to make this board works with MMX 233Mhz? The jumper only allows me to have 200Mhz on it.

Beside that, anyone knows how to enable the WoL feature? My RTL-8139 card doesn't have any headers for WoL, but it does support WoL.

Reply 13 of 20, by sgt76

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MatthewBrian wrote:

I
Anyone knows how to make this board works with MMX 233Mhz? The jumper only allows me to have 200Mhz on it.

Have you tried the 1.5x setting? The 233MMX inteprets this as a 3.5x multi. Works with my system- an NEC Powermate P 430HX.

Reply 14 of 20, by MatthewBrian

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sgt76 wrote:
MatthewBrian wrote:

I
Anyone knows how to make this board works with MMX 233Mhz? The jumper only allows me to have 200Mhz on it.

Have you tried the 1.5x setting? The 233MMX inteprets this as a 3.5x multi. Works with my system- an NEC Powermate P 430HX.

It doesn't have a multiplier and bus settings, just a single jumper block (with 8 pins, two of them used to control floppies), which has some predefined settings for 60, 75, 90, etc. (I don't really remember because the information sheet is stickered on the inside CPU case).

Do you know which Mhz one is the 1,5x?

Reply 15 of 20, by ratfink

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MatthewBrian wrote:

Beside that, anyone knows how to enable the WoL feature? My RTL-8139 card doesn't have any headers for WoL, but it does support WoL.

Is there a setting in the bios to enable wol? Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-on-LAN#Inte … .2FAMD_based_PC - the intel/amd part.

Reply 16 of 20, by sgt76

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MatthewBrian wrote:
sgt76 wrote:
MatthewBrian wrote:

I
Anyone knows how to make this board works with MMX 233Mhz? The jumper only allows me to have 200Mhz on it.

Have you tried the 1.5x setting? The 233MMX inteprets this as a 3.5x multi. Works with my system- an NEC Powermate P 430HX.

It doesn't have a multiplier and bus settings, just a single jumper block (with 8 pins, two of them used to control floppies), which has some predefined settings for 60, 75, 90, etc. (I don't really remember because the information sheet is stickered on the inside CPU case).

Do you know which Mhz one is the 1,5x?

Apparently your system does not have a specific multi jumper block. Try the 75Mhz jumper setting.... that has been documented to work on 330s.

Reply 17 of 20, by MatthewBrian

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sgt76 wrote:

Apparently your system does not have a specific multi jumper block. Try the 75Mhz jumper setting.... that has been documented to work on 330s.

I have looked at the Wikipedia entry on IBM PC 330 (some of the contents are contributed by me, except for the table). I tried the 75Mhz setting like you and Wikipedia described, but it made my system speed became 180Mhz.

I don't really sure whether my chip is an MMX 233 or 266 one (or maybe another speed?) because I took it from my friend's PC which he doesn't want (I only got the motherboard, processor and processor fan), and he doesn't really know about the speed. Is there any identification to detect whether my processor is which speed? (preferably software-based, because it is quite hard to remove IBM PC 330's processor, because the case is quite complicated).

ratfink wrote:

Is there a setting in the bios to enable wol? Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-on-LAN#Inte … .2FAMD_based_PC - the intel/amd part.

I have enabled the BIOS WoL feature, and beside the power supply there are 3-pin WoL connector, but my RTL8139 doesn't have the headers (but the datasheet stated it supports WoL). The exactly same RTL8139 can do WoL without WoL connector on my Pentium 4 machine, so I think that my 8139 doesn't have the required WoL connector.

Edit: It seems to have the traces and/or holes for the pins, but there are no connectors - just the holes. How to add the connector there?

Reply 19 of 20, by MatthewBrian

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h-a-l-9000 wrote:

There are probably more parts missing than just the connector.

I don't really know about that. I think I would buy another card with WoL slot.

This is my IBM PC 330 setup: http://mbrian.co.cc/2010/07/9/my-home-server/