retro games 100 wrote:

"Remove the RAM, remove the CPU, clear the CMOS, and with a speaker attached, boot it up and see what beeps you get back. It should at least POST and indicate no CPU present. Then insert the CPU and it should indicate no RAM present, etc.."

I think I will try this suggestion, although I wonder if I do need a stick of RAM in order to read any POST messages?

I don't think you'd get beep codes without a CPU installed. And in order to output POST screen messages, the board will need at least the CPU, some RAM and a video card.

retro games 100 wrote:

I've just looked through my cupboard of bits 'n' pieces, and I have an A1333. But I looked it up on cpu-world, and it says its bus speed is 266 Mhz. I then checked Gigabyte's website, and it said that this CPU was N/A for this board - in fact, all 266mhz CPUs are, according to Gigabyte's CPU compatibility list for this particular board [GA-7IXE4], N/A. Is this incorrect?

The data is correct, because the AMD 751 chipset only supports 100 MHz FSB, so officially you can only use Athlon versions whose model number ends with a B (e.g.: A1200AMS3B, A1300AMS3B, A1400AMS3B).
In real life, many 100 MHz boards also accept the C versions, but run them with a 33% slower speed, so an Athlon 1333 would only run at 1000 MHz.
It is possible to overclock the FSB a few MHz on this chipset, but that doesn't achieve much and often gets unstable.

@5u3, thanks very much for the information. Do you happen to know of any other boards which have 2 ISA slots, and support Athlon CPUs? I would be interested to compare one or two other boards to this Gigabyte board.

I remember testing a Via Apollo ? board, which had 2 ISA slots, but its CPU support was for an Intel Tualulin. (It also supported PC-133 SDRAM.) However, I'd quite like to stick with Athlons, as my other retro mobos support Pentium 1, 2 & 3 (coppermine), and I want to mess about with something else now. Also, when I tested this Gigabyte board + Athlon 1000, I noticed that some old DOS games were very fast - noticeably faster than my Pentium 3 800mhz slot 1 machine.

Thanks! 😀

PS - regarding temperatures, I removed the noisy "Cooler Master" CPU fan on top of the basic looking heatsink, and replaced it with a rather feeble but ultra quiet 800RPM 12cm case fan, then used the machine for about an hour. Everest home edition reported the CPU temperature as 61C, but the BIOS said 51C. In fact, the BIOS always seemed to be exactly 10C less than Everest's reading. Not too sure who to believe.

so did amd make intel p3 replacements or something or am i skimming the posts to fast?

cdoublejj wrote:

so did amd make intel p3 replacements or something or am i skimming the posts to fast?

If you have to ask if your reading something too fast, then it's likely you are.

I had a GA7-IXE at the times and it worked very well. Compared to other boards of this time it has just a few bugs. Though if you know them it's a stable and working board.
My config back then was a Athlon 650 with GF2 GTS, 768 MB RAM, Maxi Sound 64 Home Studio, GUS, some Network Card, V2 SLI.
You need the right memory timing for Sideband adressing: http://www.heise.de/ct/Speicher-Timing-bei-At … /hotline/129398
Maybe use google translator or similar tool if you don't get it 😉.

The AMD chipset has some additional noise on AGP if you use 2x, but I had no problems with this back then. It will lock up in 3dmark if you got this prob.

Alternative is the ASUS K7M that uses the VIA Southbridge. Only advantage is faster UDMA support.
Disadvatage of the GA7-IX is that IRQ 9 is fixed to SCI ACPI IRQ Handler and can't be used.

@elianda, regarding the ASUS K7M mobo, do they come in different "flavours" - what I mean is, do they come with varying numbers of ISA slots, because I tried an ebay search for ASUS K7M, and the results shown didn't have 2 ISA slots. Thanks for any additional help. 😀

retro games 100 wrote:

@5u3, thanks very much for the information. Do you happen to know of any other boards which have 2 ISA slots, and support Athlon CPUs? I would be interested to compare one or two other boards to this Gigabyte board.

Nope, sorry. I haven't looked much into that since I bought my Socket A board eight years ago. Back then, I considered myself lucky to have one of the last ISA boards available (EP-8KTA3+ Pro).

There is no technical reason why there shouldn't be more Socket A boards with multiple ISA slots, but I think they got phased out because of market demand. ISA slots were becoming a rather uncool feature to have on a mainboard.

retro games 100 wrote:

PS - regarding temperatures, I removed the noisy "Cooler Master" CPU fan on top of the basic looking heatsink, and replaced it with a rather feeble but ultra quiet 800RPM 12cm case fan, then used the machine for about an hour. Everest home edition reported the CPU temperature as 61C, but the BIOS said 51C. In fact, the BIOS always seemed to be exactly 10C less than Everest's reading. Not too sure who to believe.

Consider temperature readings on old boards as very vague estimations, for several reasons:

• CPUs older than Pentium 4/Athlon XP does not have an internal temperature sensor. This means that the CPU temperature is measured by a component on the board, often not even touching the CPU.
• Mainboards are built as cheaply as possible, so the temperature probes and the circuitry that interprets their results are not very accurate.
• Readouts from the hardware monitoring chips are raw values which have to be converted to a temperature (apply coefficients and offsets). This procedure varies between models, and it is not easy to get documentation for all those chips. That's why monitoring software often displays wrong results. It's not uncommon for the BIOS and monitoring software from the same manufacturer reporting different values (e.g: some Asus utilities are notorious for this).

I've just looked through my cupboard of bits 'n' pieces, and I have an A1333. But I looked it up on cpu-world, and it says its bus speed is 266 Mhz. I then checked Gigabyte's website, and it said that this CPU was N/A for this board - in fact, all 266mhz CPUs are, according to Gigabyte's CPU compatibility list for this particular board [GA-7IXE4], N/A. Is this incorrect? Or were you using a different CPU? Or can you use an A1333? Thanks!.

Most likely memory failure [mine] but it may have run at 1000, sorry cant be more help.

5u3 wrote:

There is no technical reason why there shouldn't be more Socket A boards with multiple ISA slots, but I think they got phased out because of market demand. ISA slots were becoming a rather uncool feature to have on a mainboard.

Some time ago, I read this document from around 1999 where Microsoft called upon all mainboard manufacturers to lose the ISA slots, because Microsoft had problems with ISA and announced to drop support in windows ASAP. Can't find it anymore... wait, it is at the bottom of the ISA wikipedia.