Small find in local roadside throwout recently:

ABIT Slotket III with box. As a bit of an ABIT fanboy, this was nice to find! Has nice SECC plastic housing as opposed to a bare PCB. Hadn't seen one in person before, only in online reviews.

In the same area, I found a CD copy of After Dark Deluxe for Windows 95 & Macintosh in the jewel case with insert booklet. Some demo CDs, a 1996 Panasonic VHS player with remote (that works) and a fairly new Fuji Xerox mono duplex laser printer.

Happy with that little haul. 😀

One of the offices I am IT at was throwing one of these out:

Not my picture, but I didn't feel like dragging it up to the hotel room with me... Got the pic from here:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:P55T2P4D.jpg

Wowzers. PCI, MediaBus, ISA, and EISA? Great board and score, man.

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-05-24, 05:28:

One of the offices I am IT at was throwing one of these out: [...]

That has to be some kind of record for distance between the keyboard controller and the keyboard port.

@cyclone3d

now that's a MOTHERboard

What a find!

I see one cache on a stick slot. Will that be 'cut' in half for the CPU's?

*PD2JK mumbles;
Never understood those soldered-on Dallas clocks. At least put those in a DIP socket as well! What were they thinking. That's one piece of planned obsolescence right there...

PD2JK wrote on 2020-05-26, 09:04:

What a find!

I see one cache on a stick slot. Will that be 'cut' in half for the CPU's?

Nope, Pentium bus SMP is very simple, and the cache controller's on the chipset anyway, so they share it.

Biggest reason to use the COAST isn't for the cache itself but for the extra tagRAM on it, allowing the board to cache the full 512MB supported by this beast.

*PD2JK mumbles;
Never understood those soldered-on Dallas clocks. At least put those in a DIP socket as well! What were they thinking. That's one piece of planned obsolescence right there...

It does surprise me how Asus did it, even on their absolute top-of-the-range boards like this. When the whole board costs many hundreds of USD, the cost of a DIP-24 socket should be negligible.

They are not terribly difficult to replace with a socket, even a total noob like me can manage it with a 30W soldering iron, a solder pump, and some solder braid.

Still, it is a total WTF AFAIC..

It does surprise me how Asus did it, even on their absolute top-of-the-range boards like this. When the whole board costs many hundreds of USD, the cost of a DIP-24 socket should be negligible.

its simple. There is almost no advantage to replace the dallas chip. At least when this board was made. The only real advantage a socket had was the ability to use different manufacturers chips during assembly. Run out of dallas brand 1287's ? Just drop a pin-compatible chip in. Also, that board is NOT using the standard Dallas DS1287 chip pedestrian boards use. In fact its one that is unique to EISA systems DS17487. It stores quite a bit of info on the EISA slots in its memory. In fact they are still made and sold: https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Maxim-In … xMNPF51Yg%3D%3D

Also a socket is a point of failure. A loose chip = RMA. While an rma for a consumer board is negligible, enterprise customers wont stand for it. A work around is to glue/ziptie the chip into the socket, which requires a person to do the manual labor, at (relatively) great expense.

luckybob wrote on 2020-05-26, 20:00:

In fact its one that is unique to EISA systems DS17487. It stores quite a bit of info on the EISA slots in its memory. In fact they are still made and sold: https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Maxim-In … xMNPF51Yg%3D%3D

Also a socket is a point of failure. A loose chip = RMA. While an rma for a consumer board is negligible, enterprise customers wont stand for it. A work around is to glue/ziptie the chip into the socket, which requires a person to do the manual labor, at (relatively) great expense.

The DS1587 is also used in many older EISA, got to store the cfg data somewhere 😁

Compaq zip-tie the socketed dallas IC to their motherboards.

Cheers,

luckybob wrote on 2020-05-26, 20:00:

It does surprise me how Asus did it, even on their absolute top-of-the-range boards like this. When the whole board costs many hundreds of USD, the cost of a DIP-24 socket should be negligible.

its simple. There is almost no advantage to replace the dallas chip. At least when this board was made. The only real advantage a socket had was the ability to use different manufacturers chips during assembly. Run out of dallas brand 1287's ? Just drop a pin-compatible chip in. Also, that board is NOT using the standard Dallas DS1287 chip pedestrian boards use. In fact its one that is unique to EISA systems DS17487. It stores quite a bit of info on the EISA slots in its memory. In fact they are still made and sold: https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Maxim-In … xMNPF51Yg%3D%3D

Also a socket is a point of failure. A loose chip = RMA. While an rma for a consumer board is negligible, enterprise customers wont stand for it. A work around is to glue/ziptie the chip into the socket, which requires a person to do the manual labor, at (relatively) great expense.

That was informative, thanks for posting this - I admit I hadn't thought about these issues before!

Found another Dell Dimension 2400 in the alley today. I was about to pass it up, as these low end PCI-only P4 machines are about as boring as they get. However I noticed a DVI port on this one. I cracked it open to check out what video card the poor schmuck who owned this thing installed back in 2004 to get it to run Halo at more than 2 fps.

I found an ATI-built card with a fan on it; a feature I don't believe I've seen on a PCI Radeon before today. Anyway, the ATI-built cards usually have 128-bit memory interfaces, so I went home, grabbed a screwdriver, and pulled the card out. Left the rest of the machine in the alley.

At home, I installed the card in my Athlon XP 2800+ based test machine. The dinky little fan certainly sounded rough, but I have a few identical spares that I can easily swap in. The card turned out to be a Radeon 9100, which is kinda weird. I always thought that was an IGP!

Model number aside, the benchmark results confirmed that I had indeed found another 128-bit PCI card. Surprisingly, it's the fastest PCI card in my collection. This unassuming little monster spit out 8100 points in 3DMark01, which absolutely puts to shame my 128-bit GeForce FX 5500, 6200, and Radeon 9250! Huzzah!

PCI Radeon 7500 and Radeon 9100 cards do have fans and are two of the fastest PCI 3D cards out there, good catch. If you happen to find a 128-bit 9250 that will be faster than the 9100 though.

My 9250 is the official, built-by-ATI 128-bit version, and it's actually a good bit slower than this 9100. It only scores 6080 in 3DMark01.

Standard Def Steve wrote on 2020-05-29, 23:15:

My 9250 is the official, built-by-ATI 128-bit version, and it's actually a good bit slower than this 9100. It only scores 6080 in 3DMark01.

That is because the 9100 is a whole different beast

Radeon 9100 is a rebaged Radeon 8500 LE (full blown R200 core)

Radeon 9000, 9200 and 9250 are cut down 8500 designs (RV250 or RV280)

So you basically found a "Radeon 8500 LE PCI"

Carlos S. M. wrote on 2020-05-30, 09:17:

That is because the 9100 is a whole different beast […]
Show full quote

Standard Def Steve wrote on 2020-05-29, 23:15:

My 9250 is the official, built-by-ATI 128-bit version, and it's actually a good bit slower than this 9100. It only scores 6080 in 3DMark01.

That is because the 9100 is a whole different beast

Radeon 9100 is a rebaged Radeon 8500 LE (full blown R200 core)

Radeon 9000, 9200 and 9250 are cut down 8500 designs (RV250 or RV280)

So you basically found a "Radeon 8500 LE PCI"

That's pretty interesting! Thinking I might dust off my old SFF Deskpro EN and get this card going in it. A 9100/8500LE class GPU would probably suit a P3-1000 just about perfectly.

ATI certainly did some funky stuff with their product naming back in the day. I'm almost certain I had a laptop back in the day with a Radeon 9100, but it was an IGP & much, much slower than this PCI 9100.

Standard Def Steve wrote on 2020-05-30, 20:26:

Carlos S. M. wrote on 2020-05-30, 09:17:

That is because the 9100 is a whole different beast […]
Show full quote

Standard Def Steve wrote on 2020-05-29, 23:15:

My 9250 is the official, built-by-ATI 128-bit version, and it's actually a good bit slower than this 9100. It only scores 6080 in 3DMark01.

That is because the 9100 is a whole different beast

Radeon 9100 is a rebaged Radeon 8500 LE (full blown R200 core)

Radeon 9000, 9200 and 9250 are cut down 8500 designs (RV250 or RV280)

So you basically found a "Radeon 8500 LE PCI"

That's pretty interesting! Thinking I might dust off my old SFF Deskpro EN and get this card going in it. A 9100/8500LE class GPU would probably suit a P3-1000 just about perfectly.

ATI certainly did some funky stuff with their product naming back in the day. I'm almost certain I had a laptop back in the day with a Radeon 9100, but it was an IGP & much, much slower than this PCI 9100.

Well yeah, also keep in mind there are 9100s which are underclocked compared to the standard 8500 LE, even 64 bit 9100s, although the standard 9100 should have the same clocks as the 8500 LE (250/500 DDR)

Radeon 9100 IGP was basically a beefed up 9000 IGP, both based in a cut down ATI RV250/RV280 core

Comparsion of ATI DX8 cores:

(Pixel shaders : Vertex shaders : Texture mapping units : Render output units)

R200 - 4:2:8:4 = 8500, 8500LE, 9100
RV250/RV280 - 4:1:4:4 = 9000 (Pro), 9200 (SE), 9250
RS300/RS350/RC350 - 4:1:2:2 = 9000 IGP, 9100 IGP, 9100 Pro IGP (SE)

Another tiny compact in for my collection 😀 Just fond this little beauty (well it was not a beauty when I found it - coffe was spilled into/over it many years ago and it needed lot of cleaning) at local scrapper's yard. I love it's design. Just a few clicks and whole computer is disassembled. Well, not just a few if some halfwit spilled oversugared coffe into case which sticks chassis with MOBO drawer together... And it has ESS1868 onboard! I think I won't put any cards into it, only some RAM for onboard ATI.

What bothers me is missing CD-ROM cable. As you can see, it has some proprietary connector on board and that slim drive is classic notebook one with add-on with the same 50-some pin connector. I have no idea where to find suitable cable.