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First post, by mekamayhem

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So I purchased a motherboard on ebay , this one in fact :
https://www.ultimateretro.net/en/motherboards/6087
NewTech/SMT TS-486 Terminator
I like the size as it should fit well in an ATX case with a bit of luck.

It arrived today so I connected it up with a video card .. nothing dead.
Connected a speaker for diagnostics but no beeps. Some of the solder joints were oxidized so I fixed them nothing major though .
Connected it up again now I had a long singular beep tone so progress! I assumed that was due to not having any RAM added so I did that but then back to no tone and no post.

I was looking at the board whilst it was turned on still then it just posted randomly just before I turned it off.
I tried to make that happen again which it did but whilst the motherboard came with a intel dx2 50 overdrive it displayed dx2 66. I didn't think too much of that and it got to a point where I could get it to post randomly.

I looked over the manual, the jumper settings were pretty much wrong. Changed a few .. still detected as a dx2 66 but it would post more frequently , the onboard controller wouldn't auto detect drives nor would they work if I set them manually. I wasn't sure what the CPU voltage needed to be so looked up the specifications .. what do you know those jumpers were wrong also.

Changed to the correct voltage then the drive controller started to work as it should. The board would post most of the time not every time. I needed to change the FSB jumpers then CPU displayed correctly.
Posts every time now. You would assume if a motherboard comes with a CPU installed it would be ready to go right ?

Maybe this will help someone ?

Reply 1 of 3, by Deksor

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This reminds me a IBM aptiva pc I found few years ago.

It was working ok, it was advertised to have a pentium mmx 233.

What was my surprise when I pulled the heatsink to see a k6-2 500

But something was off. The pc reported 233mhz clock. Yes this is exactly what you think, they didn't change the jumper settings at all. Meaning the poor CPU was heavily underclocked by more than 50% overvolted by 0.7v

What an upgrade 😂
I'm impressed the k6-2 even survived this long.

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Reply 2 of 3, by dionb

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If the board "detected" the DX/2-50 as 66, that means that the bus speed is set to 33MHz, and that the CPU is being overclocked by 50%, which could be (too) challenging for an early stepping DX/2-50 and so could explain not or only very intermittently booting. Good to see it's nice and stable once correctly set.

You would assume if a motherboard comes with a CPU installed it would be ready to go right ?

Er no, trust nothing and no one selling stuff online. Unless you've personally seen it running with the components on it, don't assume anything. I've received 486 boards with CPU incorrectly oriented in the socket. If I'd turned it on like that, a lot of magic smoke would have been released...

Reply 3 of 3, by BitWrangler

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Yes, always safest to assume the previous owner was a complete moron. Even back in the day when I've bought boards sold new as a "combo" from a retailer with CPU on the board, the board wasn't set up for the CPU.

In fact, approaching "untested" or "not working" boards with this mindset will often get you quite a few that work perfectly.

I'd agree that early DX2-50s might not be good enough to boot at DX2-66, they might do it completely cold, but warmed up just a little may fail. CPU that get into DOS okay and just crash out of Doom or something when they get hot, you can think about stabilizing with extra cooling, but if it's flaky to boot there's little hope for running it at that speed, unless you wanna stick it in a phase change rig.

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

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