Yes, there are two types of motherboard with a V3 onboard, this ATrend ATC6254 full ATX board with a full 16MB V3-3000 and Yamaha 740 sound, and the MSI MS-6168 uATX board with a V3-2000 but only 8MB of RAM, and a Creative ES1373 (SB64PCI) onboard. The MS-6168 came in two revisions, the Rev.1 with i440ZX chipset and no Coppermine support and the Rev.2 with i440BX chipset and Coppermine support.

There were also a number of prototypes (see here: http://falconfly.vogonswiki.com/cgi-bin/yabb2 … m=1134682380/11 ) but only the ATC6254 and MS-6168 made it to full production. The MS-6168 is by far the commonest as it was used in a pretty mainstream Packard Bell P3 model in late 1999. There is also a retail BIOS available, fortunately.

I have two of the MS-6168 rev 2.0, although I can't get Coppermine support to run on one and the other is artefacting in a way that makes me suspect the video RAM.

This A-Trend is very rare, at least I have never seen one for sale.

As for the MS-6168 - 16MB version also exists but is very rare too. I'm not sure if MS-6168 V1 can support Coppermine or not but it definitely lacks support for TV-OUT.
Are you sure MS-6168 V2 has i440BX chipset? I always thought it is also ZX... anyway with MSI 1.3 BIOS I can get 133 MHz FSB and also 512 MB RAM. V2 PCB is ready for BT868/869 TV-OUT encoder... which sometimes is present on the board and sometimes isn't.

For me Coppermine worked perfectly https://valid.x86.fr/show_oc.php?id=536138 Tualatin Celeron also worked but VRM was too hot for my taste and I don't consider it safe.

havli wrote:

This A-Trend is very rare, at least I have never seen one for sale.

As for the MS-6168 - 16MB version also exists but is very rare too. I'm not sure if MS-6168 V1 can support Coppermine or not but it definitely lacks support for TV-OUT.
Are you sure MS-6168 V2 has i440BX chipset? I always thought it is also ZX...

Very sure, under the heatsink it says "FW82443BX" 😉

Not that it makes any difference with only two DIMM slots, the ZX supports max two double-sided DIMMs, the BX can do four. But with only two slots, no difference.

anyway with MSI 1.3 BIOS I can get 133 MHz FSB and also 512 MB RAM. V2 PCB is ready for BT868/869 TV-OUT encoder... which sometimes is present on the board and sometimes isn't.

Mine runs at 133MHz, but isn't stable - and CPU and RAM are known good at that speed. It also has the TV-Out, and I have the bracket. Nice for authenticity's sake, but I never liked TV or indeed TV-Out.

For me Coppermine worked perfectly https://valid.x86.fr/show_oc.php?id=536138 Tualatin Celeron also worked but VRM was too hot for my taste and I don't consider it safe.

Mine also boots with a Celeron 1400A, at least the 'good' one, but as it was artefacting all over the place I stopped that. Fortunately I found one of my bits of soldering around a new cap wasn't good, so I'll fix that ASAP, then try again. There's hope yet.

I don't like the packard bell/MSI version. Both are crappy companies (IMHO!) and I just don't like their products, or had any luck with them. Every single MSI board that was in my house was either unstable, had very bad caps or didn't work at all/died..... same goes for most of the graphics cards (especially the Medion cards, also made by MSI).

I had 2 of those boards and only one was working but very unstable. I found 3 more at the recycling, probably someone stripped 3 of those PB systems at once and the 3 boards were laying stacked on top of eachother. I left the 3 boards and later also dumped my own 2 boards. I am a 3dfx collector but was never ever going to use those boards and I only keep working products.

But BOY! do I like the A-trend in the video!! Very nice with that retail box and everything. I wonder if those were more stable? Never seen one before..

Well, I have four MS-6168. One of them is V1, two are V2 without TV-OUT, one V2 with TV-OUT. All of them had bad caps (not really MSI's fault IMHO... most boards of that era had bad caps). I replaced caps on one of them and everything worked perfectly fine and stable. For some time it was in one of my retro rigs and one day it will be again.
The other three can POST but at the moment are just spare boards, so still with bad caps and original BIOS.

I don't really like MSI either (their K8 boards are mostly trash). 🤣 But older boards are fine and video cards are not that bad either. I even have Medion GF3 Ti200, GF4 MX460 and few R300/350 based cards. Perhaps then don't overclock as good as others but definitely work well enough. Better than Manli 😵

MSI had good and bad times, they were rock-solid in mid-1990s before the whole cap plague - also nice designs: just the minimum required, no unnecessary crap - but nothing missing either. Then they got hit bad with bad caps, plus somebody on their design team started smoking something. I remember some (So775? So939? not quite sure now) board with literally a roller-coaster of heatpipes doing loop-the-loop. Some reviewer dropped his board: the heat pipes were empty, made of wafer-thin copper alloy. I.e. completely non-functional. However things improved again later and I particularly like their later AM3(+) designs, once again simple and functional.

As for the MS-6168: agree fully with havli - of course the caps are bad on a late 1999 board. I'd be very surprised if that ATC6254 didn't suffer from the same, enough other ATrend boards did. Apart from that it's clearly a lower-end offering than the ATC6254, but decent enough for what it's designed for. I personally find full ATX a glaring waste of space in anything with the level of integration of a board like this. The only real downside is the 8MB SGRAM.

Damned shame to let five relatively rare Voodoo3 devices get scrapped just because of your own prejudices. More likely than not most would work perfectly well after a good re-capping.