Nice first post!

I had the same issue with entering the BIOS on my Compaq after 10 years. Had to search around to find out it is located on its own partition on the harddrive. Luckily I still had the original drive laying around:)
I would not take the chance of upgrading the BIOS. What do you have to gain? Also do you have a case for the parts?

PSU is propriatery Compaq, but they used the same PSU up until Pentium 3 machines. So it's pretty easy to find a replacement.

I cant really stand the noise from these really old harddrives 😁 thats why I like to update the bios.
The bios I found on the shady driver site is dated over a year later than the one on the board atm so im hoping that it will remove the 8.4 gb limit.
I have a nice and quiet 10gb IBM drive but the bios only sees 8.4gb and even though the diagnostics seem to like the drive just fine I get an error message when booting.

I dont have the case so I will have to mod or build something, at least I kept the tray.

I did some more treasure hunting in my apartment and found more large edo modules so now I think the memory is maxed out
Perhaps a little overkill for a dosbox 😉

Neato! That board has two more SIMM slots than my P2-based Deskpro 4000. Kind of funny to see such a huge HSF on such an old board!

That fan on top of the heatsink seems redundant. A heatsink of that size should be able to keep a Pentium cool without one.

I've never seen a non-server Socket 7 motherboard with 8 SIMM slots. Sweet.

The bios updated without disaster 😁
There were no instructions in the bios package concerning how the bios should be updated and no files exept a flash utility, some sort of bios package, himem.sys and a config.sys which I stupidly diddn't investigate.
I tried to update from dos and it seemed to work, the bios flash utility did a backup of the old bios but when it tried to write the new bios it failed.
The flash utility only worked if you booted from the disk with some special himem settings, after I did that the flash finished without trouble.

I also added a slot in dvd to the build, I would have prefered a cd but I only have 48x and faster and they make more noise than the loud hardrive.
The slot in dvd is as old as dvd drives get and reads cds with perhaps 12x speed or something like that.

Yea the socket a heatsink works just fine without the fan but it doesnt make any noise at all.
Now I only need to find eight 64mb memory modules to see if the board can take 512 mb 😉

Some pics

What chipset does the board have?

I dont know what chipset this board uses. Since I only have dos 6.22 installed at the moment I cant use some clever utility to identify it and the bios is not very helpful
I took a couple of pictures of the large chipset like ICs on the motherboard so perhaps some one with more knowledge about socket 7 chipsets can help us with identifying it

I cant find the name Intel anywhere on the board, I dont know if thats a good sign but then again I cant find the name Via either.

Sorry for the large images
I normally try to stay below 800*600 but here I wanted things to be crisp so you acually can read the names on the ICs
Its first when I look at these pictures I realize that the board is very dirty 😀

One of the chips has the Mitsubishi logo 😁

You can download Speedsys and run it. Should show the chipset information and it requires DOS 😀

I did run speedsys to check that everything was working
The only motherboard information I can remember is vendor name (Compaq) and information about the bios revison
Is there a special command in speedsys to show more information about the system?

[Edit]

I checked again with speedsys, no information about the motherboard exept bios revision.
Also checked a intel board and speedsys showed information about the chipset so speedsys does probobly not know what chipset the compaq deskpro 4000 5133 uses.
I guess that I need to remove the sound card and voodoo II card so we can see the writing on the last two big chipset ICs, the ones mounted close to the cirrus logic video chip.
There is also a litte daughtercard attached to the systembord, you can see it in the pictures in my first post. It does not look like a cache module but perhaps it is?
The ICs on it is monuted on the underside between the motherboard and the little card so its inpossible to look at them without removing it (if thats possible)

I also found this

Memory Upgrades for HP/Compaq Deskpro 4000 5133/1620

Stock Memory
2MB (Non-removable) video memory
16MB (Removable) system memory
32MB (Removable) system memory

Maximum Memory Capacity
8MB video memory
256MB system memory
Available Memory Slots 8 Sockets (4 banks of 2) for system memory 1 Socket for video memory
Max Module Size N/A

CPU & Chipset Intel Pentium 133 MHz

HP/Compaq Model Numbers
247150-003 compaq identification numer for the system
247382-001 compaq identification number for the motherboard

[/Edit]

The build is now updated with a IBM 10gb harddrive which made the system much much quiter
I also installed dos 7.1 instead of 6.22 for the large disk support.
In the dos 7.1 installation program I diddn't get to choose swedish keyboard layout but danish was availible funny enough, not hard to fix though.

I also only found dos 7.1 as a bootable cd and had some hassle installing it (unofficial release but I own more than one win 98 license)
Is there a way to get a deskpro 4000 5133 to boot from a cd? I cound not find a option for boot order in the bios.
Now I had to partition and format the drive with the win 98 rescue disk (the one without ramdrive but with fdisk).
Then boot from the normal win 98 startdisk (the one with ramdrive but no fdisk) to be able to install dos 7.1.

Shameless bump with lots of pictures of naked hardware.

I think today was the final chapter in this fairy tale for a while.
I was running speedsys with diffrent amounts of memory to see if I could spot a diffrence in performance
Since I dont know what chipset the motherboard is using I dont know how much ram it can chache.
The powercord was disconnected for an extended period of time while I was doing other stuff. (It should not matter since its an AT board but who knows with Compaq) After that speedsys would not run, it would just freeze at the year 2k bug test.
I removed all memory exept 2*32 mb, still the same, After that I removed the voodo 2 card and the soundblaster and did a complete reset in the bios, no change.
The system was working normally exept speedsys and the motherboards diagnostic program that hanged on test scsi2.tm or something like that. I think the battery in the real time clock finally gave out but there isnt a clock in the bios so its hard to know for sure..

The motherboard also had a normal 3v button battery so I thought that I might aswell change it for a new one to see if that had any inpact.
The stupid motherboard designer at Compaq obviously thought that beeing able to exchange that battery is unnecessary. It was fixed to the motherboard in a way that made it pretty much impossible to remove without damaging the board.
I managed to remove it leaving only a minor scratch. I dont think I damaged any traces enought to make them lose contact. The worst part, when I checked the battery with my multimeter it read 3.06V and now I have to use the ext battery header and find another way to mount a new 3v battery. And it wont solve the problem with speedsys.

Here are some more large images, perhaps we at least can figure out what chipset the board has.

I diddnt make the damage seen on the battery, Compaq did while mounting it. (ok the small scratches, thats probably me)

Great way to mount a battery, it was "stamped" stuck to the metal pieces you see here and then the whole package was soldered to the motherboard.

It dosnt look like the traces are severed

The cause of the problem?

At least we know what this is.

I think I will use another motherboard for my gaming build and save the Compaq Deskpro for a rainy day

I recently found the acual motherboard I was running from autumn 1997 until mid 1998.
Its a Soyo SY-5EAS and it has been living in a box ever since. The Soyo board has an exchangeable 3v button battery.
I will start a new thread for that build.

A last bump

Here is a picture showing the deskpro board running speedsys before the "year 2k test bug" showed its ugly face.
I deleted all the pictures of the compaq running speedsys since they were not sharp enough for my liking but I managed to restore this one.
The memory speed is not that great with 128 mb edo, but it was not higher with 64 or 256 mb.
The CPU score is hard to read but it shows 150 if I remember correctly.

And here is a picuture of the Soyo sy-5eas running speedsys as a reference.
This was a quick test of the Soyo board to see that it is still working. I put a p166 mmx, 64mb sdram and a voodoo 3 2000 in the board and hit the power switch.
Last time I used the board (15 years ago) I had a p200 mmx overclocked to 250 mhz. The p166 mmx was not multiplier locked and booted without hassle.
The cpu score is hard to see in this picture aswell but it reads 188.57. It is hard to take good pictures of a black screen that reflects every light source.

Perhaps its not fair to compare a pentium mmx running at 3*83=250 mhz with the deskpro running at 200 so I changed the jumper settings so I got 3*66 and ran speedsys again
Now the Soyo board exactly match the results of the deskpro when it comes to cpu score but even running att 66 mhz the sdram seems to get a much higher memory speed index.
The read and write speed is not that diffrent so I guess it is the latency that is much lower on the Soyo board with sdram. The sdram also seem to handle large memory blocks better?
I tried another camera but had to resort to using the flash to get a sharp image.

I am so glad that compaq did away with the setup program on the hard drive. I discovered that when I had my Compaq Deskpro 2000, it would boot from a CD using a Creative MPC 2x IDE cd-rom. Only that drive would allow it to boot from a CD. As that was the only cd-rom I had at the time, the rest were DVD drives, I could not test out any other CD drives or MPC labeled CD drives. Actually it was one of the creative labs that came in a multimedia kit years ago.

I sure do miss that machine, but as I had life threatening choices to make, it went.