Must have been an unbranded cacheless 25mhz 386DX mobo I had a while ago....every now and then it didn't post or games and software loocked up randomly but sometimes it could work for days without a hitch 😜

My K6 machine was acting weird as hell also before I found SDRAM sticks it liked, it looked up randombly, didn't boot or suddenly showed half of ram during post

Other than that I've been quite lucky, I think it's because I try and do alot of research about the hardware I'm using....to use the right "bits n pieces" when i built a system and set it up properly

Super 7 mobos. 😀

Errr, well maybe put 486 PCI mobos in there instead. They are usually a pain in the rear and slow at the same time cuz of lame shortcuts taken with the PCI bus.

486's with PCI.
Anything Cyrix
VIA KT133 with 686B 😜
SB PnP cards when used for DOS

The best thing about retro gaming - hindsight is 20/20. Why anyone picks the problematic crap a second time around is beyond me.

Vintage PC things I hate:

-Most things from PCChips
-double sided 72-pin SIMMs
-proprietary CD-ROM drives
-Super 7 motherboards (but more specifically anything from VIA)
-Most board with OPTi chipset
-Trident Graphics cards
-Anything Plug 'n' Play
-Creative Labs cards based on "vibra"
-software based dial up modems
-Packard Hell
-cheap-ass Taiwanese power supplies
-Connectix Quickcam VC
-Iomega Zip Plus
-Western Digital and Connor hard drives
-most VLB SCSI controllers
-ATi Mach 8
-Barrel type and Dallas CMOS batteries
-RLL hard drives
-Seagate ST01/02 SCSI controller

...plus a lot more

Some excellent suggestions - thanks a lot people! 😀

Hehe, I see that "good old" PC Chips is at the top of Anonymous Coward's list.

Regarding super socket 7 boards, I spotted some "suckage" coming out of the AGP port. When my MS-DOS game was onscreen, inside a win98 dos box, the image kept flickering strangely. (It was OK in "pure DOS" however.) Also, if I set the CD-ROM DMA's BIOS setting to "turbo", all hell breaks loose!

I've gone for the inferior PCI-based 486s over the superior (but a bit more awkward to deal with) VLB-based 486 mobos because I favour the ability to use my nice & sharp Matrox PCI graphics card. I'm not unhappy that these boards are slow and ineffecient, because I only intend to use these 486 boards for games which are too fast for a P90, and this probably only equates to a small handful of games in my case.

This is really interesting. I guess different people have different experiences. I also had problems with PC Chips MBs, but one of them, PC Chips 730s was surprisingly good. I remember overclocking a duron Spitfire from 750Mhz to 1000 Mhz just by changing FSB from 100 to 133. That same board had awesome 56k AMR modem in the package - a modem that was in fact working better then US Robotics Sportster 56k back at that time! I'll never forget that one.

I also kinda disagree on VIA KT133A (exactly with 686b south bridge) - I still use the good old Abit KT7A V1.3 (with ISA slot) and I also used MSI K7T and K7T-Turbo (the first ''red'' mainboard!) as well as ASUS A7V 133-c. Not a single glitch with them. They were as fast as hell and rock stable at the time.

The same goes for Voodoo 5 5500 - its true that it might be a pain to find a right driver for a newbie in 3dfx community, but given the right driver the card is pretty stable.

What I did have problems though was the old OPTi MAD 16 pro sound card. For some reason card wanted to work only with IRQ 10 and therefore worked only in a handful games. Waste of money.
Another thing that went on my nerves were ''cheap-ass Taiwanese PSUs'', though I'll wager they were chineese 😀 Especially JNC. Also, VIA MVP3 based Socket 7 boards. I get a headache by just remembering Chaintech 5AGM2.

Not to forget are also the first Athlon XP Palominos - hot and unstable. Pain to OC. 😒

elfuego wrote:

I also kinda disagree on VIA KT133A (exactly with 686b south bridge) - I still use the good old Abit KT7A V1.3 (with ISA slot) and I also used MSI K7T and K7T-Turbo (the first ''red'' mainboard!) as well as ASUS A7V 133-c. Not a single glitch with them. They were as fast as hell and rock stable at the time.

My K7T Turbo makes me happy, except the Quick POST option doesn't work. 😢

SCSI.
HDDs and controllers in general.

@elfuego, please note regarding the Voodoo 5 5500, I was commenting on their ability to simply function, rather than any specific driver/stability issue. To put this in to other words, some of my V5s have failed to work at all, as in "POST".

Regarding PC Chips, this website -

http://www.redhill.net.au/b/b-99.html

liked the PC Chips M571 mobos (but then added that a later revision of this board was very bad.)

retro games 100 wrote:

@elfuego, please note regarding the Voodoo 5 5500, I was commenting on their ability to simply function, rather than any specific driver/stability issue. To put this in to other words, some of my V5s have failed to work at all, as in "POST".

Thats new for me - never encountered a 3dfx card that didnt work. Even where GF2 MX 400 didn't work, 3dfx did. For example the damned Chaintech 5AGM2...

k6-2 350

any dfi motherboard
any 'mouse systems' mice and keyboards
Jaton video cards
Cyrix 6x86 MX
Seagate '95 assd. drives
Maxtor '00 assd. drives

leileilol wrote:

Maxtor '00 assd. drives

You just reactivated some brain cells. Thx.

I had a Maxtor 10gig in 2000 that was a POS. It was incredibly sensitive to PCI bus clock. The slightest overclock caused it to stop working.

I used to have a lot of Maxtor hard drives. They were never really fast, or really quiet...but I always found them reliable. That is until Maxtor bought out Quantum. Quantum used to make the best hard drives on the market...that is until they came out with the Quantum Fireball KA. I believe that was the first 7200rpm IDE drive on the market. It was fast as hell, but terribly unreliable. All Quantum hard drives after the KA were equally terrible. After Maxtor scooped them up, I was surprised to see many of their new models using Quantum techology. Many of the later Maxtor drives I owned looked to be Quantum drives with Maxtor logos stuck on. Using Quantum's production lines was a big mistake, and it probably played a part in Maxtor's downfall.

I've had the Quantum Fireball Plus KA and the Plus LM. They worked fine for years.... 😁 They were very loud drives though. Both seek and bearing noise. As you said, they were fast drives in their day. Very fast.

I ran various Quantum drives from 1996 - 2000. One of my friends had a 5.25" Quantum Bigfoot. That was a curious drive for an era of 3.5" HDDs.

swaaye wrote:

One of my friends had a 5.25" Quantum Bigfoot. That was a curious drive for an era of 3.5" HDDs.

That reminds me, I had one of these in 1995 or so. It was cheap, slow, noisy and dead after eighteen months. 😵
Worst HDD I've ever bought. Well, except for the 10 MB monstrosity in the XT clone I once had.

My worst piece of sh... was an Asus P3 board. I *think* it was the CUSL2-C. Its USB controller was a piece of sh.. that never worked reliable. I had so many problems with USB devices and never learned that it was actually the controller that had a problem until I switched to a P4...

i have a pci trident card in an old rig it sucks balls

Contrary to the overall community's experience, back in the Pentium P-II era, I had much better service from a little-known "VIP" mainboard with a Via MVP3 chipset than from a genuine Intel MB with a 440BX chipset. The Intel board gave me constant problems, while the semi-generic Via board soldiered onward many years past the time I gave up on the Intel (and took up a semi- exclusive relationship with AMD processors).

The MVP chipset seemed missing from eBay's auctions when I went looking for retro hardware a few years ago, and I spent some time reading period reviews of Super Socket 7 hardware. I didn't run acrosss any honest reviewers' work, unluckily, and eventually had four MBs with the Acer ALi Aladdin5 chipset.

The Biostar M5ALAs didn't seem to like K6s at all well, and weren't much better at dealing with the faster PI/MMX cpus, either. The newer of my two Asus P5As never has worked at all correctly, and the older one works quite erratically. It is incompatible with a variety of AGP cards and their drivers, and was also very difficult to get it to work with sound cards.

I eventually found some MVP3 boards, but the first one, an Aopen, was DoA. Second, since I got it with a CPU, HSF, and some RAM, I went ahead and bid a low winning on an FIC 2013 board with the MVP3 chipset. While breadboarded, all spread out on the table, it worked just fine. Moving it into a case totally killed the old thing, however.

My SOYO-5 motherboard works without a single hitch, except that I've never seen any BIOS that was as S-L-O-W doing its POST as this one.