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Asus P5AB v1.05 slow regardless of CPU

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First post, by zb10948

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Hi,

I get a ~120-140 (Pentium 150 territory) on Speedsys and the machine feels universally slow running Windows 98. Tried P166MMX, K6-2 and 2+ on 500/550 MHz. Lowering down CPU speed by 100 MHz in K6 case doesn't have any effect on experience or the score.

Tried various BIOS revisions from Retro Web, 1005, 1008, 10, 11-beta...they all behave the same. Last awdflash seems to botch the update (from 08 back to 05), the computer works but I get ESCD error just before boot and the flash chip is now Unknown in awdflash. It can probably be resolved by another flash utility.

I have 2x64 MB PC100 in there, Geforce 2 on AGP.

I understand >v1.04 boards may have problems running K6-2+ CPUs. But I have K6-2 too and they behave the same.

I have a single BIOS power management error, as the newer ATX PS doesn't have -5 rail. Can this affect the board somehow?

Reply 1 of 2, by momaka

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zb10948 wrote on 2025-11-12, 17:54:

I have a single BIOS power management error, as the newer ATX PS doesn't have -5 rail. Can this affect the board somehow?

I highly doubt it.
On such retro boards, the monitoring chip does a basic check if all of the power rails are there, and if any are missing, board usually won't boot at all.
Missing -5V rail is almost never an issue, save for cases where a specific ISA card might actually need it (and those are very, very few.)

Reply 2 of 2, by Matth79

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Give it a cachechk or speedsys and make sure both caches are enabled, make sure you are proceeding from load Setup defaults rather than load BIOS defaults

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