add a speaker. listen if it gives a beep or beeps. no beep is no boot, beeps is something wonky. One beep should be ok.

This was an abominably awful board back in the day (I was forced to buy it because my good board succumbed to what I now know is capacitor plague, and I didn't have more than what's now EUR 25 to get a working computer with my Celeron 433 again...), and crap chipset, buggy BIOS aside it was also a paper-thin PCB with low-quality components on it.

That said, if you have a VGA connector lying around, you can use DuPont cables to play around with the VGA pinout. For absolutely minimal image you only need to get three right: HSync, VSync and one of the colours (R/G/B). Usually you can see when you get a sync line, as it significantly affects the output even if it's not perfect.

most pcchips boards have the tendency to fail around capacitors and ram slots
i have that motherboard, the next one (756lmrt) and both fail because of ram, the slots get loose or something and they start to fail badly

I believe this board shipped with five I/O panels with ribbon cables for the integrated (1) video, (2) modem, (3) LAN, (4) audio/game port, (5) serial/parallel ports

In addition, if you wanted PS/2 mouse and USB you needed to get the optional ATX Form card.

Collecting all the parts for this sounds like an epic quest.

Errius wrote on 2021-11-06, 18:27:

I believe this board shipped with five I/O panels with ribbon cables for the integrated (1) video, (2) modem, (3) LAN, (4) audio/game port, (5) serial/parallel ports

In addition, if you wanted PS/2 mouse and USB you needed to get the optional ATX Form card.

Collecting all the parts for this sounds like an epic quest.

that's true, but using a standard pci or isa video card with a keyboard connected should give some result

Errius wrote on 2021-11-06, 18:27:

I believe this board shipped with five I/O panels with ribbon cables for the integrated (1) video, (2) modem, (3) LAN, (4) audio/game port, (5) serial/parallel ports

In addition, if you wanted PS/2 mouse and USB you needed to get the optional ATX Form card.

Collecting all the parts for this sounds like an epic quest.

This would be a quest yes!!! I'm only looking to get the sound and video for my needs, I actually found a vga expansion card pretty cheap on ebay just a bit ago
https://www.ebay.com/itm/184609738277 to go with the audio/game port I found yesterday, I'm hoping that at least gets me a display so i can get in bios.

bLUETHUNDER83 wrote on 2021-11-06, 18:43:

Errius wrote on 2021-11-06, 18:27:

I believe this board shipped with five I/O panels with ribbon cables for the integrated (1) video, (2) modem, (3) LAN, (4) audio/game port, (5) serial/parallel ports

In addition, if you wanted PS/2 mouse and USB you needed to get the optional ATX Form card.

Collecting all the parts for this sounds like an epic quest.

This would be a quest yes!!! I'm only looking to get the sound and video for my needs, I actually found a vga expansion card pretty cheap on ebay just a bit ago
https://www.ebay.com/itm/184609738277 to go with the audio/game port I found yesterday, I'm hoping that at least gets me a display so i can get in bios.

The rest of the ports are pretty well documented (check UH19 for the manual), pinout for USB etc is given. Typical manual: pinout that's completely standard is given, pinout that's unique isn't...

weldum wrote on 2021-11-06, 18:41:

Errius wrote on 2021-11-06, 18:27:

I believe this board shipped with five I/O panels with ribbon cables for the integrated (1) video, (2) modem, (3) LAN, (4) audio/game port, (5) serial/parallel ports

In addition, if you wanted PS/2 mouse and USB you needed to get the optional ATX Form card.

Collecting all the parts for this sounds like an epic quest.

that's true, but using a standard pci or isa video card with a keyboard connected should give some result

I would think so but these boards are wonky from what I've been reading

Does anyone have a NIB board? I'd be interested to see pictures of all the original parts, especially the modem unit.

I had one playing dead but somewhere in the fiddling it got a fresh CMOS battery and came to life, not sure if it was definitely that or a touch of oxidation in the DIMM slot that got wiggled out.

Things to take note of with this board though. Stock it only takes PPGA celeron mendocino in the socket. Then I think it only likes PIII earlier than B stepping in the slot and slower than 800. Takes any SECC PIIs though.

edit: another point of note is that the LAN hookup cable is very unique, has the "magnetics" on a board, so simple hookup wire is a no-go.

Errius wrote on 2021-11-06, 19:27:

Does anyone have a NIB board? I'd be interested to see pictures of all the original parts, especially the modem unit.

This looks like the complete package

Thanks, from left to right, that is the (1) ATX Form card, (2) analog audio/game port, (3) Ethernet, (4) serial/parallel, and finally (5) the modem resting on the PCB. The modem does not use a ribbon cable but plugs directly into the board (the vertical connector just below the 'S' in the picture)

Missing are (6) video and (7) digital audio (which plugs into the connector left of the red wire inductor)

So that's 7 parts you need to get. Sheesh.

I also note that the two expansion slots share a single case I/O bracket, so you can only have 1 card. (I'd probably put a Voodoo2 in there)

I have a m741LRT and a m748MR, both have same chipset as m748LMRT and are very picky !
Agree with Bitwrangle on the cpu's... The m741LRT is basically the ATX version of the m748LRT and runs a celery 366 soc 370 OK but nothing faster.
One thing: the 748's must have an older (less than spec 2.03) ATX PSU or will not boot at all from my experience. Most any real AT supply should work though (not a new ATX to AT converted).
Also the RAM is an issue and only certain true 66mhz and 100Mhz SDram works in mine iirc. Honestly hate the boards... more headaches than they are worth ;p

The advantage of all this integration is cost reduction. It allows you to build a fully featured but very low cost system.

Horun wrote on 2021-11-07, 01:00:

I have a m741LRT and a m748MR, both have same chipset as m748LMRT and are very picky ! Agree with Bitwrangle on the cpu's... The […]
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I have a m741LRT and a m748MR, both have same chipset as m748LMRT and are very picky !
Agree with Bitwrangle on the cpu's... The m741LRT is basically the ATX version of the m748LRT and runs a celery 366 soc 370 OK but nothing faster.
One thing: the 748's must have an older (less than spec 2.03) ATX PSU or will not boot at all from my experience. Most any real AT supply should work though (not a new ATX to AT converted).
Also the RAM is an issue and only certain true 66mhz and 100Mhz SDram works in mine iirc. Honestly hate the boards... more headaches than they are worth ;p

I was building machines with those boards for over a year, it was a job, and my opinion is those boards are best used as clay pigeons. 😁

In case someone else runs into this in the future
6 Months in the making but I stumbled across a post that needs to be translated to help me out with the problem I was having, Originally I was using an MX440 pci with 64mb of vram and wasn't posting, According to this post it claims this board doesn't have enough juice to power a pci graphics card with more then 32mb of vram, I recently purchased a Rage 128 pci with 16mb of ram and posts just fine, would like one that supports directx7 and has 32mb of ram but pci graphics card of that era are hard to find and when you do you will pay for it.

Here's the link:

https://www.clubedohardware.com.br/forums/top … geforce-mx4000/

Heres the quote from the link that gets to the point:

"The M748LMRT motherboard is an End-Of-Life product, therefore, we no longer support it, the motherboard only support PCI video card with 32MB of video memory, since the GeForce MX4000 video card has 64MB of video memory, more current is required to initialized it successfully and the regulators on the motherboard will not be able to support it.

Thank you for using PCCHIPS products

PCCUSA Technical Support"

Resistors in the area of the backside of the GPU control the visible memory size on GF1/2 boards, so in theory, you can cripple an MX down to 32MB if you really want to. It may not be power, but how it handles it's memory map and where it puts the frame buffer.

Edit: Yah I realise what PC Chips actually said, but I'm reading between the lines of how they limited it, maybe to protect the onboard Vreg when powered from AT PSUs, but for ATX PSU there really shouldn't be a power limitation due to that, the card will have it down to 2.5V or whatever on it's own reg.

I see what you mean,. I had thought about doing that, wouldn't know how to go about crippling it honestly, if I used a heatgun and removed half of the memory chips would that have the same effect you think?

Edit: The memory map thing does make sense after thinking about it