VOGONS


First post, by Jasin Natael

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I recently purchased a PC Chips m571 Rev 3.2 board.

I know that these boards do not officially support K6-3+ CPU's but I did find some rumors online that they have unofficial support with a modified BIOS.

Does anyone know if there is any truth to this? Any experience or possibly a link to such a BIOS?

I checked the board and confirmed it is working but the manual and the board itself only has jumpers for as low as 2.5v, I know for a fact my chip will work fine as high as 2.2v but I really don't want to exceed that.

If it is losers gambit I can simply run a K6-2 in this rig but I'd rather use my old K6-3+ if possible.

I know that it won't support faster than 75mhz FSB or possibly 83mhz if I'm lucky as this is a SiS5598 chipset board. I'm fine with that.

Anyone that has any advice or experience with the particular mode is appreciated.

Last edited by Jasin Natael on 2021-07-18, 00:58. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 2 of 60, by Jasin Natael

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Doornkaat wrote on 2021-06-22, 16:19:

web.inter.nl.net/hcc/J.Steunebrink/k6plus.htm
I tried to format as a link but it doesn't work. Just copy/paste instead. 👍

Doornkaat,

Thank you for this. I had visited Jan's site but for whatever reason I couldn't find the M571 listed, I guess I was looking right past it cause there it is.

Thank you again.

Reply 3 of 60, by Joseph_Joestar

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Jasin Natael wrote on 2021-06-22, 16:15:

Does anyone know if there is any truth to this? Any experience or possibly a link to such a BIOS?

On this page there are references to a modified BIOS which allows K6-2+ and K6-3+ to run on the M571.

I have that motherboard but I've never tested this since I lack the relevant CPUs.

PC#1: Pentium MMX 166 / Soyo SY-5BT / S3 Trio64V+ / Voodoo1 / YMF719 / AWE64 Gold / SC-155
PC#2: AthlonXP 2100+ / ECS K7VTA3 / Voodoo3 / Audigy2 / Vortex2
PC#3: Athlon64 3400+ / Asus K8V-MX / 5900XT / Audigy2
PC#4: i5-3570K / MSI Z77A-G43 / GTX 970 / X-Fi

Reply 4 of 60, by Doornkaat

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Jasin Natael wrote on 2021-06-22, 16:38:
Doornkaat, […]
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Doornkaat wrote on 2021-06-22, 16:19:

web.inter.nl.net/hcc/J.Steunebrink/k6plus.htm
I tried to format as a link but it doesn't work. Just copy/paste instead. 👍

Doornkaat,

Thank you for this. I had visited Jan's site but for whatever reason I couldn't find the M571 listed, I guess I was looking right past it cause there it is.

Thank you again.

No problem at all. I got confused before by the two separate lists (official support and patched BIOS).

Reply 5 of 60, by Jasin Natael

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Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2021-06-22, 16:53:
Jasin Natael wrote on 2021-06-22, 16:15:

Does anyone know if there is any truth to this? Any experience or possibly a link to such a BIOS?

On this page there are references to a modified BIOS which allows K6-2+ and K6-3+ to run on the M571.

I have that motherboard but I've never tested this since I lack the relevant CPUs.

Joseph,

Thank you as well. I will take a look at it. I actually scored the CPU for a cheap price and used it in my Compaq before the board died, trying to avoid another OEM model if I can.

I had three different Socket 7 boards, two Biostar's and another that I can't recall off the top of my head but they all are faulty for one reason or another.

This cheap and nasty PC Chips actually seems to work so i'm hoping I can make it work with the K6-3+ chip. I
f it doesn't I have other chips I can use and at the very least it might make for some fun benchmarking a classic Pentium against a MMX or a K6 vs a K62 etc....

Reply 6 of 60, by Jasin Natael

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Quick update. And maybe some advice....

I was able to flash this BIOS and get the CPU to recognize and work correctly. There is no 2.2v jumper setting on my motherboard, so I set it to the lowest (2.5v)

From what I was able to read online, only the revision 3.2a and 7.0 boards have a 2.2v setting, but I couldn't find any clear way to determine the difference between a 3.2 and 3.2a revision.

One site noted that a black surround around the keyboard DIN connector identified the board as a 3.2a revision. Mine is black but also clearly marked 3.2 with no "a" present.

At any rate I rolled the dice, flashed the BIOS and the chip is recognized and working at both 75mhz and 83mhz FSB speeds.

The problem is that it is widly unstable with any IDE devices. With any drives be it optical or HDD it will hang at POST about half the time during NVRAM count. Usually removing and power and doing a cold boot resolves this but not always.

It seems to be far more stable although not perfect with only drives connected to the secondary channel.

I can usually get it to boot to floppy/CD/HDD on this channel and can even fdisk/create partitions/format and create directories.

However.....If I try to copy files to the drive (I've tried 5 different drives, all known good) I get read/write errors. Retrying always seems to work. I've used three different Win98/ME discs. All working fine in other PC's and even burned a fresh copy, I've also tried multiple optical drives and cables. All working fine on other systems.

If I try to run the installer directly from the disk or from the Win98 directory after finally getting files copied I get a "Invalid FAT" error during SCANDISK. I get the same error every single time on every single drive I try.

Reformatting doesn't help. If I let Scandisk fix the errors and setup tries to launch then It fails with a invalid cab file message.

I've tried multiple known good sticks of RAM, tried disabling motherboard cache.....a few other things.

I've NOT tried a different power supply or tried swapping back in a different CPU or reverting back to the old BIOS.

What are all of your opinions?

I'm planing on trying a PCI-IDE RAID card that I had at work, andy maybe even a SCSI card/drive if I can find my SCSI cables.

But maybe the board is just crap? It seemed to work ok with the old K6 chip before I flashed it but I did very little testing and didn't try to boot or install anything. The caps LOOK fine, but that means little.

Maybe I've made the CPU unstable with too much voltage? I can' try a K6-2 350 that I know works, I've also got a 166mmx and the K6-200 that came in it, maybe a few others. But really wanted to use my k6-3+ of course.

Maybe I should try throwing in a ATX power supply?

Even though the AT power supply was working fine with my 486 build just a few months ago. It isn't old it is a new cheapie brand from Amazon......

But I've never had this much trouble with drive corruption just trying to install Windows before. Even back in the day.

I'm open to suggestions if anyone can think of something I've overlooked......

Reply 7 of 60, by Joseph_Joestar

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Jasin Natael wrote on 2021-06-28, 16:59:

I was able to flash this BIOS and get the CPU to recognize and work correctly. There is no 2.2v jumper setting on my motherboard, so I set it to the lowest (2.5v)

I have an M571 revision 3.2a. On my board, 2.2V is achieved by removing the jumper from JP6 i.e. having all the pins be empty.

Check here for the full jumper settings, with pictures: http://m571.com/m571/jumpers.htm

PC#1: Pentium MMX 166 / Soyo SY-5BT / S3 Trio64V+ / Voodoo1 / YMF719 / AWE64 Gold / SC-155
PC#2: AthlonXP 2100+ / ECS K7VTA3 / Voodoo3 / Audigy2 / Vortex2
PC#3: Athlon64 3400+ / Asus K8V-MX / 5900XT / Audigy2
PC#4: i5-3570K / MSI Z77A-G43 / GTX 970 / X-Fi

Reply 8 of 60, by Jasin Natael

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Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2021-06-28, 17:07:
Jasin Natael wrote on 2021-06-28, 16:59:

I was able to flash this BIOS and get the CPU to recognize and work correctly. There is no 2.2v jumper setting on my motherboard, so I set it to the lowest (2.5v)

I have an M571 revision 3.2a. On my board, 2.2V is achieved by removing the jumper from JP6 i.e. having all the pins be empty.

Check here for the full jumper settings, with pictures: http://m571.com/m571/jumpers.htm

Correct. I did this.

This is also, however the same for setting the 2.5v setting on a non "a" revision board.

In short, I don't know if I have 2.2 or 2.5v but I'm not super worried about it. My chip is a 2.0v vcore and seems very tolerant.

Reply 9 of 60, by Jasin Natael

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Update in case anyone cares.....silicon image PCI RAID card works fine, drives are detected and system is stable. However the bios does not support booting from it so I can't realistically install Windows 9x as the installer can't see any of the drives attached to it. It does seem to support booting from a SCSI controller, I have a few if might try that.

If anyone knows any tricks regarding Win98 and a Silicon Image PCI raid let me know.

Thanks

Reply 10 of 60, by Joseph_Joestar

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I think only revision 7.0 of the M571 officially supports 83 MHz FSB speed. Unofficially, it may work for older revisions as well, but various issues may arise.

Did you try running that CPU at 66 MHz? Just to test if the hard disk problems would go away. Also, be sure to set PCI clock to 33 MHz instead of 1/2 FSB using JP5(D). The latter setting is known to cause issues on that board.

Lastly, are you aware of this:

How do I achieve a 6x multiplier setting on AMD K6 2 and AMD K6 3 processors?

The highest multiplier documented on M571 boards is 5.5x. However, a clock multiplier setting of 2x is interpreted by K6 2 and K6 3 chips as 6x. For example, a Front Side Bus setting of 66 MHz and a multiplier setting of 2x would provide a processor speed of 400 MHz (6 x 66 MHz = 400 MHz). Similarly, a Front Side Bus speed of 83 MHz and a multiplier setting of 2x would result in a processor speed of 500 MHz (6 x 83 MHz = 500 MHz).

That excerpt was taken from here: http://m571.com/m571/m571_amd.htm

PC#1: Pentium MMX 166 / Soyo SY-5BT / S3 Trio64V+ / Voodoo1 / YMF719 / AWE64 Gold / SC-155
PC#2: AthlonXP 2100+ / ECS K7VTA3 / Voodoo3 / Audigy2 / Vortex2
PC#3: Athlon64 3400+ / Asus K8V-MX / 5900XT / Audigy2
PC#4: i5-3570K / MSI Z77A-G43 / GTX 970 / X-Fi

Reply 11 of 60, by Jasin Natael

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Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2021-06-29, 17:11:
I think only revision 7.0 of the M571 officially supports 83 MHz FSB speed. Unofficially, it may work for older revisions as wel […]
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I think only revision 7.0 of the M571 officially supports 83 MHz FSB speed. Unofficially, it may work for older revisions as well, but various issues may arise.

Did you try running that CPU at 66 MHz? Just to test if the hard disk problems would go away. Also, be sure to set PCI clock to 33 MHz instead of 1/2 FSB using JP5(D). The latter setting is known to cause issues on that board.

Lastly, are you aware of this:

How do I achieve a 6x multiplier setting on AMD K6 2 and AMD K6 3 processors?

The highest multiplier documented on M571 boards is 5.5x. However, a clock multiplier setting of 2x is interpreted by K6 2 and K6 3 chips as 6x. For example, a Front Side Bus setting of 66 MHz and a multiplier setting of 2x would provide a processor speed of 400 MHz (6 x 66 MHz = 400 MHz). Similarly, a Front Side Bus speed of 83 MHz and a multiplier setting of 2x would result in a processor speed of 500 MHz (6 x 83 MHz = 500 MHz).

That excerpt was taken from here: http://m571.com/m571/m571_amd.htm

Thank you,

I have not tried running the chip at 66mhz FSB. I probably should.

I have however used the 6x multiplier (83x5.5) which gives me 500mhz. This seems to be just as stable as 75x6 which clocks at 450mhz.

Neither one of which is stable enough to install Windows, but I really think this is a problem with the IDE channels, as otherwise it seems rock solid.

If I try running Win98 installer with the /is switch to skip Scandisk i get either a corrupt .cab file error/a GDI error, or a general protection fault.

If I let Scandisk run it just loops itself in a FAT error. No matter what hard drive I use.

I wasn't however aware of the JPD5 PCI clock jumper. I will check that to see if it makes a difference.

Not sure, but looks like a just have a faulty old crappy PC Chips board...surprise surprise.

Reply 12 of 60, by Joseph_Joestar

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Jasin Natael wrote on 2021-06-29, 21:13:

Not sure, but looks like a just have a faulty old crappy PC Chips board...surprise surprise.

While PC Chips did make some bad boards, the M571 is generally regarded as one of their better products. Both contemporary and current day reviews give it fairly decent marks.

I have used mine for about 2 months with a Pentium MMX 166 and never had any issues. It's currently sitting in storage waiting for a K6-2 CPU, but it ran flawlessly for me during that time. Also, the on-board CMI8330 sound card is quite nice and offers some interesting features with regards to DOS gaming.

Of course, it's possible that your particular board may have some issues such as broken traces or bad capacitors, which might explain the problems that you're facing. But I wouldn't dismiss it off-hand just because it's made by PC Chips.

PC#1: Pentium MMX 166 / Soyo SY-5BT / S3 Trio64V+ / Voodoo1 / YMF719 / AWE64 Gold / SC-155
PC#2: AthlonXP 2100+ / ECS K7VTA3 / Voodoo3 / Audigy2 / Vortex2
PC#3: Athlon64 3400+ / Asus K8V-MX / 5900XT / Audigy2
PC#4: i5-3570K / MSI Z77A-G43 / GTX 970 / X-Fi

Reply 13 of 60, by Jasin Natael

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Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2021-06-30, 00:34:
While PC Chips did make some bad boards, the M571 is generally regarded as one of their better products. Both contemporary and c […]
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Jasin Natael wrote on 2021-06-29, 21:13:

Not sure, but looks like a just have a faulty old crappy PC Chips board...surprise surprise.

While PC Chips did make some bad boards, the M571 is generally regarded as one of their better products. Both contemporary and current day reviews give it fairly decent marks.

I have used mine for about 2 months with a Pentium MMX 166 and never had any issues. It's currently sitting in storage waiting for a K6-2 CPU, but it ran flawlessly for me during that time. Also, the on-board CMI8330 sound card is quite nice and offers some interesting features with regards to DOS gaming.

Of course, it's possible that your particular board may have some issues such as broken traces or bad capacitors, which might explain the problems that you're facing. But I wouldn't dismiss it off-hand just because it's made by PC Chips.

Fair enough. I know they are built around a solid chipset and that helps.

I've also got a m598 and it just flat out died one day with no warning.
Back in the day I had the M598LMR version and it was buggy and unstable with awful memory bandwidth, but that was the machine that I really learned computers on, so I've got a fondness for PC Chips in some regard.

This machine might do better with a different CPU I'm not sure. I've got other Socket 7 chips I can use, I'm just partial to my k6-3+.

I need to do some experimenting with bus speeds and what not maybe even try using some SIMMs before wirting it off I suppose.

Reply 14 of 60, by BitWrangler

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(Biggles) If you can fly a PCChips, you can fly anything. (/Biggles)

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.

Reply 15 of 60, by Intel486dx33

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Jasin Natael wrote on 2021-06-22, 16:15:
I recently purchased a PC Chips m571 Rev 3.2 board. […]
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I recently purchased a PC Chips m571 Rev 3.2 board.

I know that these boards do not officially support K6-3+ CPU's but I did find some rumors online that they have unofficial support with a modified BIOS.

Does anyone know if there is any truth to this? Any experience or possibly a link to such a BIOS?

I checked the board and confirmed it is working but the manual and the board itself only has jumpers for as low as 2.5v, I know for a fact my chip will work fine as high as 2.2v but I really don't want to exceed that.

If it is losers gambit I can simply run a K6-2 in this rig but I'd rather use my old K6-3+ if possible.

I know that it won't support faster than 75mhz FSB or possibly 83mhz if I'm lucky as this is a SiS5598 chipset board. I'm fine with that.

Anyone that has any advice or experience with the particular mode is appreciated.

I have mine working with default Voltage and core clock.
What ever was labeled on the CPU is what I used and they run stable.
I benchmarked and stress tested the heck out of them and they perform fine with no problems.
I have them over clocked at 500mhz and 550mhz.

Reply 16 of 60, by Jasin Natael

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Intel486dx33 wrote on 2021-06-30, 17:58:
I have mine working with default Voltage and core clock. What ever was labeled on the CPU is what I used and they run stable. I […]
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I have mine working with default Voltage and core clock.
What ever was labeled on the CPU is what I used and they run stable.
I benchmarked and stress tested the heck out of them and they perform fine with no problems.
I have them over clocked at 500mhz and 550mhz.

That is good to know. Mine seems to be stable at 500 with no problems with both 75mhz and 83mhz FSB apart from the aforementioned issues with the IDE controller. Which kind of sucks.

Reply 17 of 60, by DundyTheCroc

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I have PC Chips M567 V1.1, it is almost the same board like M571 and I have the same issues with IDE HDDs and CDs. Changed 4 HDDs, 3CDs, none of them works fine. Sometimes HDDs start to format, but get error writing FAT. Onboard video works with huge artifacts, so I use PCI card. Only FDD works fine, can load DOS and test programs. Think problem is in chipset, maybe it is degraded with time.

Reply 18 of 60, by Doornkaat

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Jasin Natael wrote on 2021-06-29, 16:01:

It does seem to support booting from a SCSI controller, I have a few if might try that.

Usually this does not only enable booting from SCSI controllers but from any drive controller with its own bootable option ROM.

Reply 19 of 60, by Jasin Natael

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DundyTheCroc wrote on 2021-07-01, 09:18:

I have PC Chips M567 V1.1, it is almost the same board like M571 and I have the same issues with IDE HDDs and CDs. Changed 4 HDDs, 3CDs, none of them works fine. Sometimes HDDs start to format, but get error writing FAT. Onboard video works with huge artifacts, so I use PCI card. Only FDD works fine, can load DOS and test programs. Think problem is in chipset, maybe it is degraded with time.

This is good information to have.

Maybe these old boards have just begun to reach the end of their life.