Horun wrote on 2020-02-27, 04:42:

as subject says: What is your favorite ISA/PCI test board ? Please just list your main and maybe an alt board that you use mostl […]
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as subject says: What is your favorite ISA/PCI test board ?
Please just list your main and maybe an alt board that you use mostly for testing vintage ISA, PCI, HD and cdrom parts.
I use a Asus P6NP5 for most of my ISA and PCI card testing as well as all small IDE HD, floppy and IDE cdrom.
What do you use ?

What no one has a favorite Pentium/P.Pro era test board for ISA/PCI stuff ? Why I asked is my socket 7 board died and resulted in using the P.Pro board for recent tests but would like opinions on other good boards cause I want to save the P6NP5 for a good build.

Intel BX440

At this time i dont have any.. Hadnt much time to fiddle with my other boards. ( i have so much trouble shooting and repairs going)

But in general i like these small Nec V20 XT boards very much.. They are very easy to setup. And to the bonus they also have the 384KB high memory area.

Thanks ! I think i will switch to a LX440 board with a 233 or maybe 333 P2 (if I can find one) cpu. The XT board I have is just not up to any type of heavy ISA testing and cannot do PCI.

Given that untested cards of unknown provenance can actually fry the motherboard they are plugged into, I don't use my nice boards for first testing 😮

I do most PCI/AGP testing on a DFI TA64-B board with Slot 1 and So370 FC-PGA, universal AGP 4x as well as PCI and ISA. It's a typical ApolloPro133a slug of a board, but about the most compatible I've seen. If I kill it testing, too bad. I have a HDD install of an old 2003-era Knoppix build which detects and runs pretty much every PnP card out there. For non-PnP ISA/VLB DOS only stuff I tend to use a late Am5x86-on-So3 system. Would be a shame to lose that, but that applies to any working 486-era stuff.

dionb wrote on 2020-02-28, 10:56:

Given that untested cards of unknown provenance can actually fry the motherboard they are plugged into, I don't use my nice boards for first testing 😮

I do most PCI/AGP testing on a DFI TA64-B board with Slot 1 and So370 FC-PGA, universal AGP 4x as well as PCI and ISA. It's a typical ApolloPro133a slug of a board, but about the most compatible I've seen.

Thanks for the info. I was using a soc7 (not a SS7) because it was good for my stuff from 286 thru Slot 1 era (except no AGP) . I think I will look thru my less valuable (440EX or 440LX) Slot 1 boards and hopefully find something usable and easily replaced if needed. Do not have any slot 1 that are 4x AGP, wish I did !

For non-PnP ISA/VLB DOS only stuff I tend to use a late Am5x86-on-So3 system. Would be a shame to lose that, but that applies to any working 486-era stuff.

Understandable, I have only a few good 486 boards and would hate to ruin one because I tested a bad part 😒

I have a bunch of spare boards that I use for testing, from a soldered-on 386SX to PCIe. Most of them get requisitioned for testing RAM, since you kinda need the target platform to do it right, or at all.

For ISA cards, it's usually the HM386-SX board because it's small and has a friendly layout. But honestly, I don't pre-test a lot of ISA cards. I'll usually just install them in whatever system I plan to use them on. Maybe not the most cautious approach, but I guess I see the likelihood of catastrophic failure as around the noise level of general hardware failure anyway.

I will also use that board a lot for testing floppy drives, ZIP drives, things like that.

For PCI, again, it usually just goes wherever it was going to go anyway. I have a big old Gateway tower with a P3 Celeron on a random Lucky Goldstar motherboard, with a recent Gentoo Linux build on the drive. So that would be useful if/when I needed something to test on.

That Gateway used to be my hard disk testing box too, but I moved that chore to a VIA Epia build in a big Lian Li full tower with removable drive bays and 360K / 720K floppy drives for imaging to/from floppy disks. It also has a 250MB ZIP drive and SD card reader. It's basically my conduit between new skool and old skool and really old skool.

SirNickity wrote on 2020-02-29, 01:09:

I have a bunch of spare boards that I use for testing, from a soldered-on 386SX to PCIe. Most of them get requisitioned for testing RAM, since you kinda need the target platform to do it right, or at all.
For ISA cards, it's usually the HM386-SX board because it's small and has a friendly layout.

Thanks ! Ahh yes the micro 386 boards, they are nice but would hate to ruin one.
Have been mostly testing 16bit ISA cards and PCI stuff so have only needed one test board that has both.

The board I use for very basic testing is the FIC VA-503+. I found it because I was looking for something that supported ISA, PCI, AGP, Socket 7, and both FPM/EDO SIMM (72 pin) and DIMM. Finding something that supports both 72 pin SIMMs and AGP is kind of a challenge, as they wasn't a lot of crossover there.

I use a Wintac\Edom W6BXA 440BX slot 1 board. It has served me very very well over the last 3 or 4 years. I've tested hundreds of cards in it and it pretty much works for anything that doesn't have issues in systems of that era. I can even throw in an old Klamath PII 266 and it'll run it at 200Mhz, which has helped in one or two oddly speed sensitive situations. I recently came across a socket 370 PIII 850Mhz with a 100Mhz FSB, so I use that in a basic slotket for testing in that board now. It definitely helps to eliminate any bottlenecks with cards in the Voodoo 3 to Geforce 256 range.

One of these days I'll get around to testing the horde of VLB and ISA VGA cards I have accumulated, but I have yet to put together a 486 test rig. I'll also use that to test a few really really interesting, and some very rare sound cards I have found over the last year. So far the only VLB board I have obtained that isn't horribly damaged is a PC Chips M919, but I don't have the cache module for it (and those little hollow plastic chips aren't helping), so I'm sure it'll be a real dog. I have another nice looking 486 VLB board but the jumpers appear to be completely undocumented and there is no information about them online. I think I posted about it here a few times but I have yet to get a reply.

I was always an AMD guy by nature, but those 440BX boards were rock solid stable. I started going through my ol’ junk boxes about 6 months ago and the first thing I did was pay for a Gateway 440BX board just so I’d have a known good tester. Hard to find the newest bios for those boards from gateway these days, so if price was no object, I’d get an ASUS BX board.

Some EPOX with a sblink header, 2 isa slots, agp, agp, ss7. Not sure it's my favorite but it's what I currently have on the bench.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2020-02-29, 04:44:

I use a Wintac\Edom W6BXA 440BX slot 1 board. It has served me very very well over the last 3 or 4 years. I've tested hundreds of cards in it and it pretty much works for anything that doesn't have issues in systems of that era.
I have another nice looking 486 VLB board but the jumpers appear to be completely undocumented and there is no information about them online. I think I posted about it here a few times but I have yet to get a reply.

Thanks for the info and check your other post, I may have found the jumpers for that AL486 REV. 1.0.