Merry Christmas to you and your families! Hopefully your Christmas is a happy one!
Does anyone know of any Slot A motherboards from 1999? Not familiar with Slot A but want to do a 1999 build with Slot A as a change-up compared to most retro builds.
FIC SD11, asus k7m and theres quite a few more from msi, dfi, epox...etc. slot a was very short lived so all the boards were introduced from late 99 to mid 2000.
GRUMPY OLD FART - On Hiatus, sort'a
Mann-Made Global Warming. - We should be more concerned about the Intellectual Climate.
You can teach a man to fish and feed him for life, but if he can't handle sushi you must also teach him to cook.
wrote:FIC SD11, asus k7m and theres quite a few more from msi, dfi, epox...etc. slot a was very short lived so all the boards were introduced from late 99 to mid 2000.
wrote:
Thank you very much!
I have a SD11 and a Jabil Kadoka.
K7M here.
I did not know we were doing that too.
- Epox EP-7KXA here.
Bought new in 1999 IIRC. Was my main every day system until about 2003.
Used multi-boot with (at different times) DOS, NT4, W95, W98 and W2k. (Maybe W3.11)
Don't recall any significant issues.
The caps were crap (Tayeh) but they never actually blew.
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GRUMPY OLD FART - On Hiatus, sort'a
Mann-Made Global Warming. - We should be more concerned about the Intellectual Climate.
You can teach a man to fish and feed him for life, but if he can't handle sushi you must also teach him to cook.
I don't think I have a Slot A board. A friend of mine had one of the early ones (MSI I think) and yes, was it fast! But also troublesome when it came to stability.
My ASUS K7M has Rubycon capacitors. The AMD 750 chipset is pretty solid except for compatibility problems with some AGP video cards. GeForce drivers automatically run AGP 1x. I found that at least some GeForce FX cards are more stable than prior GeForce chips and can run 2x. TNT also has no problem with 2x. I also had Savage3d and i740 at 2x and they seemed stable.
VIA KX133 has defective AGP 4x. I think it's fine as long as you run AGP 1-2x.
It's a bit like dealing with Super 7's problems.
Anyone that recalls back in the day AMD was making this big hoopla about using "Athlon Certified" or "AMD Certified" PSUs.
Looking back on that with all I've learned since then, I suspect this is what that was all about.
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I think the first few generations of Athlon were more sensitive to ripple than their Intel counterparts.
So, with a cheap PSU (one just barely within the ATX ripple specs) the Athlons could be unstable. Particularly if the mobo also had poor filtering.
Those PSUs that got the AMD Certification were ones where the ripple was much less than the max allowed by the ATX PSU spec.
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I think Epox avoided the problem by over-killing the quantity of motherboard caps (to lower total ESR) and so they could handle 'dirtier' non-certified PSUs without issues.
My Epox has 18 2200uF caps in the VRM.
I think the reason the Tayeh never blew was (1) I didn't use bottom end PSUs and (2) there were just so dang many caps.
So, between the two, my caps just never saw much stress.
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I think the most 'advanced' video card I ever used in it was a Voodoo3 so I have no idea how it would handle AGP 4x.
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GRUMPY OLD FART - On Hiatus, sort'a
Mann-Made Global Warming. - We should be more concerned about the Intellectual Climate.
You can teach a man to fish and feed him for life, but if he can't handle sushi you must also teach him to cook.
I think you are correct about the PSU quality aspect.
Voodoo3 was a rock solid choice. Voodoo AGP cards tend to be about the least sensitive cards when it comes to any AGP problems.
wrote:I think you are correct about the PSU quality aspect.
Voodoo3 was a rock solid choice. Voodoo AGP cards tend to be about the least sensitive cards when it comes to any AGP problems.
They're essentially a PCI card in an AGP slot.
All hail the Great Capacitor Brand Finder
wrote:They're essentially a PCI card in an AGP slot.
Yup.
wrote:wrote:I think you are correct about the PSU quality aspect.
Voodoo3 was a rock solid choice. Voodoo AGP cards tend to be about the least sensitive cards when it comes to any AGP problems.
They're essentially a PCI card in an AGP slot.
The funny thing is that in the day this was seen as a disadvantage, and now we see these things as reversed 🤣
wrote:wrote:wrote:I think you are correct about the PSU quality aspect.
Voodoo3 was a rock solid choice. Voodoo AGP cards tend to be about the least sensitive cards when it comes to any AGP problems.
They're essentially a PCI card in an AGP slot.
The funny thing is that in the day this was seen as a disadvantage, and now we see these things as reversed 🤣
The i740 pretty much showed that AGP texturing using system RAM instead of onboard memory is SLOW. PCI versions of the Real3D Starfighter test a lot faster than the AGP, which would seem to defy logic since AGP is supposed to be a faster slot. The PCI cards have onboard texture memory that the AGP cards don't have, and nothing is faster than onboard memory.
I also have the EPoX EP-7KXA paired with a 800MHZ Pluto CPU.
Great board, never let me down, caps are fine 😉
