nforce4max wrote:

This is why those old school Enermax and Antec units with the strong 5v rail and -5v rail are almost required for these beastly Athlon rigs. You need the -5v rail for the ISA if I remember right and the cpu on most socket A boards pulls from the 5v rail.

Yeah, I originally had one of those - until it died.

shamino wrote:

*snip*

Thanks, that was very helpful!

And yeah, USB did work originally. No biggie if it doesn't though, I have a card for it anyway.

Out of frustration, I've built a P3 rig in the meantime. I mean, I love the old Athlon, but a BX board is a BX board. Rock solid.

I had similar USB issues with a KT133A board, even with a NEC USB 2.0 PCI card. Now using KT266 and all is good + native USB 2.0 support.
Unless you need an ISA slot, better to go with a later chipset.

Athlon was amazing tech, but unfortunately it came out during the capacitor plague. Now many Athlon boards have bad caps. Add that to the flakey early chipsets and the high power draw of these chips, and you're looking at a recipe for instability. I believe P3 on BX has aged much better, but personally I've no interest in them as I never had one originally. The price point of Socket A was too good to pass by 😀

I've killed my KT266 board by plugging in a RAM stick incorrectly 🙁 That was almost 10 years ago and I still regret it. I need the ISA slot for DOS though.

IIRC, USB on the KT133 did work originally, but that was mostly with input devices. USB mass storage wasn't really around back then. No problem really, the USB 1.1 card works, is fast enough, and for larger transfers I use the network anyway.

I never had a P3 either, but: the Athlon is a ca. 2001 machine, the P3 I've built now is more 99 era. In 99 I had a K6-2 300, and the P3 system is screaming compared to the K6-2, not to mention much less problematic. So, fifteen years later, I'm finally admitting that a Slot1/BX setup is simply better 😉

Now, early P4 compared to socket A is another thing entirely...