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Asus P5S-VM vs. P5-99VM

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First post, by _tk

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I have a motherboard that I picked up a long time ago (circa 2000) and it's marked Asus P5s-VM Rev 1.01. I haven't messed with this board in forever (since I originally got it) and I decided to bust it out and see if it still worked.

On my bench, it booted right up with a P233 MMX...but the BIOS is an Award BIOS for a P5-99VM. Upon looking, I cannot really find any difference between the two boards. With that, I was going to update the BIOS, but not sure if I should stick with the P5-99VM BIOS or go back to the P5S-VM BIOS.

I found this thread and it looks like others have went this route as well, but I don't think my motherboard is OEM HP because it does not have built-in audio nor is it marked HP anywhere on it.

SiS 530 SS7 motherboard PCI compatibility woes

For all I know I could have done this for one reason or another back in the day. Just don't remember.

Anyone have any thoughts? Thanks.

Reply 1 of 3, by TheMobRules

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I had one of these boards but sold it about a year ago.

I don't think there's any difference between the P5S-VM and P5-99VM other than the BIOS. Mine was labeled P5-99VM and had the corresponding P5-99VM BIOS, BUT: the P5-99VM label was actually a sticker, and when I peeled it off it just revealed the "P5S-VM" text silkscreened on the board.

So, I think the P5-99VM is the non-OEM version of the board/BIOS, while the P5S-VM is the HP OEM. It may be that in your case someone removed the label at some point but left the BIOS untouched.

Reply 2 of 3, by _tk

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What's odd is that Asus has an entry for the P5S-VM and offers drivers and bios updates for it:

https://www.asus.com/supportonly/P5S-VM/HelpDesk_CPU/

Do they do that with other OEM boards? I'm going to flash the "latest" P5-99VM bios onto it and see how that goes. I suppose if it handles one bios version (1004) it should handle all of them.

Mine is a bit different than the other OE HP's that I've seen as it has an Asus sticker on it and it does not have the sticker barcode like the OE HP versions have. Also has the holographic Award decal on the bios chip.

Also, when looking at the same revision as the OE HP, mine has different capacitors and the capacitors are soldered in different locations. Very odd.

Reply 3 of 3, by _tk

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As an update and for future reference/googling, I was able to flash this board with the 1006 P5-99VM Bios (latest one Asus had). It needed a primary HD attached as with only the A:\ drive I got a "bad table" error.

Also, after being flashed I had to hook a PCI video card up to get a display on my monitor. But, that's ok as I was going to disable the onboard video anyways (which you can do via a jumper on the mobo).

So, I guess I answered my own question here!

Next quest is to see if the 66mhz host/100mhz SDRAM/33mhz PCI setting will work (vs the 66/66/33 I'm currently running).

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