First post, by Kahenraz
- Rank
- l33t
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.