Socket 7 update!

I keep flip flopping between builds so I might start posts with such a heading going forwards

Yesterday the new CPU finally arrived so it was time to give it a try. Can I hit 600MHz??

Things didn’t start well. I set the motherboard voltage to 2V (as low as it goes) and swapped the CPU over. It’s rated for 1.6V but I know 2V is ok on these as some models are 2V such as the k6-2+ 570)

Power on. No POST

Crap. Did I buy a dead CPU?

It was still set at 4.5 x 100. So I tried turning things down

I got it to post at 4 x 100 after going down to 233MHz and going up slowly. But it would not go over 4 x 100

Something not right. I checked the voltage at the CPU and it turns out it’s only getting 1.25V at the 2V setting.

Managed to find a datasheet online for the voltage regulator which confirms that the motherboard manual is wrong. There is no 2V setting.

https://www.ardent-tool.com/datasheets/Cherry_CS5151.pdf

Im going to have to try it at 2.1V (actually 2.15V) a bit higher than I would have preferred!!

I was still having problems. Finally fixed with a new jumper. The original one must’ve been a bit loose across the pins and without the jumper, it outputs 1.25v instead of 2.15v

At least I have the option to make it a low power system after I’m done playing around! Also - going back several pages - I was playing around with o/cing the original Pentium 233MMX - but it wasn’t stable at 83 x 3.5 and needed more voltage. I now know I can go up a bit more in volts with it. The motherboard manual doesn’t have any mention of voltages between 2.9v and 3.3v but they are there in the datasheet

Now working at 2.15v. Time to try 6 x 100

Socket 7 post!

589? Damn. I wish it would round up!! 😅

Socket 7 - Updated my benchmark table for the socket 7 showing the progression of the upgrades

These are all done with the Voodoo3 2000 PCI I have (143MHz, SD-RAM variant)

Pretty pleased with the outcome! We have come a long way from the start. Pretty much 2x performance across the board, and up to 4x in some cases. Running stuff at higher resolutions in DOS with smooth frame rates is a first for a computer of mine. It's the first time I've had the right cpu/gpu & driver combo for it I think.

Mixed feelings now about what is next - I am kinda done tinkering with it as there is nothing else left to improve - yesterday I was just playing Quake 2 on it all afternoon, at ~600MHz, and had no crashes!

I'm curious how it would do in the K6 aiming for the stars thread. But with only having PCI, I'm limited to GF2 MX / GF4 MX or early ATI cards.

I always wondered why ancient chipsets could overclock to 83mhz
( or 80mhz for socket 4)
But the tx with low vio support couldn’t crack 83mhz.

You would have figured one of the overclock friendly board makes who kept selling tx boards into 1998 would have snuck in unofficial super 7 overclocking bus speeds with a patch for the HD ROM bug from the factory.

Now I wonder, none of my boards ever had unofficial and useful bus speeds (at least not socket 7)

Interesting points. Thinking about what you’re saying; this board has fully documented settings up to 83MHz. It’s ATX form factor. It’s got switching voltage regulators.

So, it’s about as late a design as you can get for a TX chipset!

You got me thinking about the date the board was released. I bought new in 1999 an MS-5169 which is an early Aladdin V super socket 7. This is a 5158, it can’t have come out long before.

My previous 2 boards were PCchips m571, rev 3.2 which had undocumented 83MHz setting (documented in rev 7.0) but was a terrible board, slower than my previous fullyes 82430VX, but this had nothing above 66Mhz

Socket A update

Been faffing around this week making bad decisions - I bought another DDR board to replace the A7V333 but it is no good. I should have done some proper research into it. It doesn’t have multiplier or voltage adjustments and it’s undervolting my 3000+ enough that it’s not stable. I’ve yet to try my Barton 2600+ and I don’t think my 2800+ mobile will work with this board either

Do not buy a biostar m7vit bravo if you want to run a powerful cpu and/or want to do any overclocking 🙈

I had another look at the A7V333 and it is definitely broken - it picks up and installs drivers for the Audigy in windows now, but it just doesn’t output anything. Still totally stable though. FSB wall is about 185MHz, with my 2600+ at 2.2GHz. My 3000+ and this board don’t get on, i can only select 13x and above with the 3000+ and so overclocking the FSB isnt really possible

What now then? Well, I think it’s time I took a break from building and benching and do some playing instead! I will stick with the kt133A system (again!) for now

I am glad I trusted my gut and didn't get that BIostar then! It did seem cheap for a new old stock socket A. Though I am not really Interested in overclocking for the most part.

If I want a faster processor I just use the next gen CPU. The only CPU I have overclocked is my Pentium MMX. I run that at 300Mhz. I am ok with that, as I have several of them, and also the Voodoo 1 in that system scales up to around that speed CPU.

RetroPCCupboard wrote on Yesterday, 13:06:

I am glad I trusted my gut and didn't get that BIostar then! It did seem cheap for a new old stock socket A. Though I am not really Interested in overclocking for the most part.

If I want a faster processor I just use the next gen CPU. The only CPU I have overclocked is my Pentium MMX. I run that at 300Mhz. I am ok with that, as I have several of them, and also the Voodoo 1 in that system scales up to around that speed CPU.

Yeah their sale value makes a lot more sense now. If they were decent boards they could have sold them for a lot more. The shuttle board he was selling was no better than the biostar either, according to my googling since. I should have backed out of the purchase when I had the chance.

I dunno why but I just can’t help trying a little overclocking here and there. I did also consider a socket 754/939 build but it’s a pricey platform to get into so it seems, plus I have more nostalgia towards the Athlon xp hardware

You might also point out why do I need a much faster machine anyway? For anything that can run in xp/needs fast dx9 I have my i7-2600k build and I am pretty sure the Athlon build I have now is enough to bridge the gap for anything that really won’t run on the xp machine.

Socket A related business

I got the M7VIT board working with the 2600+ confirming what I thought; that it’s too marginal on the voltage selection with the 3000+

With the 3000+ I couldn’t even install 3dmark without it completely locking up. With the 2600+ it installed fine and I was even able to do some benchmarking

Slightly worse performance than the a7v333 with the same stick or corsair DDR3 CL2 ram set as the same timings. Not really a surprise!

I found out hwinfo reports clock speeds of the GPU and can confirm that when running 3d it clocks up to 390MHz, so slightly slower than @Mike_

Btw, I found a cheap CL2 memory stick on local market, but for some reason it doesn't have much effect on my 3DMark score.

EDIT: Never mind, while CAS latency was 2, other timings were still at 3. There are no BIOS settings for them, so I had to change them manually with WPCREDIT. It did the trick, but it's not particularly handy. 🙁

Ah, good old wpcredit! I remember using that on my pcchips m571 socket 7 board to perk it up a bit! I might see if I can do something similar on my socket 7 as I think it might get me some better 3dmark99 scores.

I’ve been tidying up today. Put the 5900xt back in the machine with the kt133A setup in it after playing around for the last week or so with DDR test benches.

Here’s a summary of 3dmark01se results starting with the palomino 2000+ in the kt133A, ending at the best result I got for a ddr based machine

Even with a ~500MHz clock speed advantage, the xp-m 2800+ in the kt133A still fails to beat a stock 2600+ in the a7v333

The m7vit had one small victory. Game test 4 was a couple of fps higher than the a7v333 at the same fsb, but at a lower overall clock speed. I am wondering then if this is somehow an agp bottleneck/chipset bottleneck as that is pretty much the only difference between the two boards (agp8x vs 4x)

I would have put the XP-M 2800+ in the a7v333 but I didn’t fancy swapping it out of the kt133A - it was expensive and I don’t want to break it! I might do some more messing if an interesting board comes my way with a faster chipset

So I think that’s it for a while. I closed up both the socket 7 and socket A cases today. The socket 7 is still configured to run at ~600MHz 2.15v and still has the pci ide controller card in there. Did some tweaks today and managed to increase free base mem up a bit by removing a few non-essentials from the startup files, up to 583k now with mouse and cd which should be enough for most things