First post, by Paul_V
- Rank
- Newbie
Hi, everyone.
Just got my hands on one this motherboard from aliexpress. It is labeled simply "ISA855" and I managed to find a manual for it.
It is marketed as an industrial motherboard mATX and it's specs vary from one production batch to another as follows:
1) Celeron-M or Penrium-M cpu (pre-soldered or socketed, varies. Mine is with 533Mhz bus)
2) 256\512MB RAM (no sockets, all RAM IC's are soldered)
3) 852\855GM + ICH4M Chipsets (I believe the main difference is the GPU clock speed)
4) IT8888 PCI-ISA bridge (This may differ also, but I haven't found any with another IC model)
The Pentium-M variant is of the most interest, because it's able to downclock through SpeedStep.
ISA soundcard DMA is working without any issues (Haven't got time to test thoroughly, though. Some components are prone to issues while downclocking)
USB support is wonky, so PS/2 is a way to go. Moreover, CPU throttling makes USB inoperable at some state.
Resolutions for VGA in BIOS setup are mostly 16:9 ratios (up to 1920x1080). Kind of a bummer, as my main pc monitor is 16:10, and my retro rig has a 5:4 LP2065
CF card slot pin quality is poor. Pins tend to bend and pop out from another side of the slot while inserting the card.
Stock CPU fan is quite loud, needs replacement.
Proprietary 12V power input (I believe it's a 3.96mm 2-pin JST or similar) or 4-pin 12v ATX molex
So, here it is. A lovely piece of a versatile retro hardware in a small (so-to-speak) package. It has all the advantages of a laptop Pentium-M CPU\Chipset and throttling speed is fluid.
But getting the one with the specs you want is a gamble.
UPD:
And here I thought running something other than DOS would be a breeze compared to Vortex boards.
This motherboard has some serious issues booting from any USB stick. The screen just freezes on "Verifying DMI Pool Data".
IDE SSD DOM freezes the system on BIOS screen.
What makes it even hilarious - there's no LAN ROM in BIOS to boot from, despite the boot option being present
UPD2:
Yup, USB flash boot is non-working. Even after adding plop boot manager rom to the BIOS. It also freezes trying to boot from USB.
USB CD-ROM works OK, though.