i820 (and i840) RDRAM with Slot 1 were a thing, yes - in fact this was the platform it was launched on, with the Intel VC820 in 1999. It was Intel's flagship development at the time, but had a very difficult and buggy genesis. Originally the i820 was supposed to work with three RIMMs, but it turned out that that was simply unreliable in all cases, the infamous 'Caminogate'. It got worse after the market balked at the price of RDRAM, and Intel tried to accomodate with the MTH, which let you use SDRAM slowly and buggily on i820. That entire solution was recalled, although you still occasionally see i820 SDRAM boards crop up. Original 1st gen i820 boards were recalled too and had one RIMM slot removed. Your board is a 2nd gen i820 design, with only two slots intended. As for intentions, the i820 chipset was explicitly designed to be legacy-free, so no ISA support at all. This choice of PCI to ISA bridge chip is odd; Asus also did some i820 boards with ISA, like the P3C-E, but they went with the ITE IT8888F, which does do full DMA. Not sure which market FIC/HP were trying to address here, as ISA slots without DMA is just asking for lots of frustrated support calls.

The onboard CS4280 audio isn't bad for PCI audio and supports PC/PCI, but here the PC87200VUL again bottlenecks: PC/PCI requires ISA IRQ and DMA to be supported somewhere, and the latter isn't so no luck here, it's TSR-time at best.

All in all a fine board for Win98SE or later, but not useful for DOS, and they might as well have left off those two ISA slots for all the good they do here. Even in 1999/2000, if you were going to use ISA, it would invariably be for a card requiring DMA.

It is actually possible to force flash the FIC BIOS without an external tool.

I used the HP BIOS flash utility and simply swapped the HP .ROM with the FIC .ROM before beginning the process. Uniflash would not do it, the the HP flash utility would.

I'm pretty sure I tried both flash utilities at the time, but it's been a while and I don't remember anymore.

That's a nice board BTW. HP used it for Vectra VL600 corporate PCs. 533MHz or 600MHz PIII Coppermine, 128Mb RDRAM, Matrox G400. Not bad at all, though I recall 128Mb RDRAM cost about $1000 those days. May take a PIII Tualatin with the right slotket. The onboard CS4280 + CS4297 audio bundle is a good one actually. It supports PC/PCI DMA, and 82801AA with NatSemi PC87200 also support it. DOS games should be happy with the right TSR. I admit the choice of this NatSemi PCI-ISA bridge seems weird because ISA without native DMA has a somewhat limited use. Should be fine still for AdLib cards as they only need an I/O address and an IRQ. Maybe a General MIDI synth like Yamaha SW60XG or Turtle Beach Maui. Yes, Turtle Beach MultiSounds should be also fine as their architecture doesn't make use of ISA DMA.

On the other hand, i820 wasn't really great even with Rambus and the i820 + SDRAM MTH solution was a disaster. There was a better i840 released about the same time with two interleaved Rambus channels and memory prefetch cache, but it was mostly featured on dual CPU boards. Intel claimed that i820 and i840 were designed by different teams and the latter should be free of bugs, but no, those i840 based boards with SDRAM MTHs were also screwed. Supermicro even made a statement that their boards "were not guaranteed to be 100% ECC compatible". Yeah, right.

I don't think HP recalled their Kayak XM600 machines with HP D8350-60002 boards featuring three RDRAM slots and dual Slot 1 CPUs. Those were ASUS P3C-D actually. Although when they refreshed XM600 with Socket 370 CPUs, there were only two RDRAM slots present.

What issues are there with ECC memory on these RDRAM platforms?

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-01-26, 13:44:

What issues are there with ECC memory on these RDRAM platforms?

On RDRAM? None. Those Supermicro boards, P3DM3 and P3DME, used i840 with two SDRAM MTHs. Servers take a lot of memory and RDRAM's price was a no go. Besides dual channel memory bandwidth even with SDRAM exceeded system bus throughput. Yet the layout was a tough job even for Supermicro. Didn't work well with 4 modules at all, no matter registered or unbuffered.

Gatewayuser200 wrote on 2022-01-15, 01:52:

It is actually possible to force flash the FIC BIOS without an external tool.

I used the HP BIOS flash utility and simply swapped the HP .ROM with the FIC .ROM before beginning the process. Uniflash would not do it, the the HP flash utility would.

Can you upload FIC BIOS please? I can't find it

White wrote on 2022-02-09, 08:57:

Can you upload FIC BIOS please? I can't find it

Looks like this one - http://cwcyrix.duckdns.org/ftp-archives/ftp.f … ocket370/kc19+/

Double check which BIOS type though...

Award - .bin, .awd
AMI - .rom

The BIOS I used is the same one linked by PC Hoarder Patrol.

I've attached it here for reference.

Thanks! And do you have as well HP flashing utility?

I don't. I tried using both Uniflash and a generic AMI flash utility which refused to flash it or reported an error, which is why I removed my chip to program it using a USB programmer.

Soldered BIOS chip replaced with PLCC socket

Gatewayuser200 suggested that it can be done with HP's flash utility but I can't confirm this.

One more question. I remember that in some reviews i saw that BIOS allows to switch CPU multiplier, but FIC BIOS that was flashed, do not have this option. My CPU is unlocked ES. I think that there is should be another version. Or not?

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-02-09, 12:12:

I don't. I tried using both Uniflash and a generic AMI flash utility which refused to flash it or reported an error, which is why I removed my chip to program it using a USB programmer.

Soldered BIOS chip replaced with PLCC socket

Gatewayuser200 suggested that it can be done with HP's flash utility but I can't confirm this.

I can confirm. I have flashed it.

I didn't see any option to set the multiplier. The reason I wanted to flash to the FIC BIOS was to be able to skip the memory test at boot.

As i think, there is no mu sense to flash FIC BIOS instead of HP. Some minor changes do not provide any benefits.
Maybe someone knows is there any other versions for this board?

Try used a Pentium 2 with 128mb of ram and see how slow it takes to boot as it tests each and every megabyte. A Pentium 3 scans the memory faster, but then you probably want 256mb. I think it supports up to 1gb or more but this would take ages even on the fastest Pentium 3.

With the FIC BIOS you can press the spacebar to skip the memory test. I would not keep this motherboard if this were not possible. I reboot often during testing and the wait is extremely tedious.

If there are any other differences in the BIOS options I didn't see them, though I didn't look very closely.

Maybe this BIOS have some hidden options? Some of AMI's BIOSes have. Try any key combinations such as ALT+F keys, or CTRL+ALT+F keys.

Kahenraz wrote on 2021-12-20, 09:32:

I picked this board up on eBay out of curiosity. I'd never heard of a Slot 1 supporting RDRAM but this is a real thing with with […]
Show full quote

I picked this board up on eBay out of curiosity. I'd never heard of a Slot 1 supporting RDRAM but this is a real thing with with the Intel 820 chipset.

https://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/relea … 99/cs111599.htm

Besides the RDRAM, it was very interesting to see a board like this with not one but two ISA slots! Unfortunately, this board relies upon a large PC87200VUL PCI-ISA bridge chip which does not support DMA. This means that while music is possible, there will be no digital effects from a Sound Blaster.

This board is still a fun tool for comparing performance characteristics of SDRAM and RDRAM. It would be kind of silly but may be possible to run a Pentium 2 or possibility even a Pentium Pro with RDRAM with the right slocket adapter.

Another caveat is that the HP BIOS will NOT allow you to skip the memory test at boot and this makes a cold boot or reboot a very long and boring process. Especially if you are running a slower CPU paired with a large amount of memory. It is possible to fix this by flashing the FIC BIOS but this is not trivial as it requires the use of an external programmer.

I had a lot of fun experimenting with this but the lack of DMA on the ISA bus really ruins it for me. But maybe someone else can find a use case for this. I would say that it's still a nice board to add to a collection as long as you understand its limitations.

Note that this board normally has the BIOS chip soldered on without a socket. In my photo there is a socket because I put one in after reprogramming the chip. I wasn't sure at the time if the FIC BIOS would work and didn't want to brick my board.

The AGP slot is also universal so that's neat.

IMG_20211220_034130_resize_98.jpg

IMG_20211220_034101_resize_85.jpg

IMG_20211220_041729_resize_65.jpg

My 98 rig's an 820 slot 1 system, My ITE ISA bridge chip supports DMA however.

I didn't have any issues with DMA on this board. Will check it again.