You can buy Pentium MMX 150mhz cpus that aren't laptop bound!?

I use a Socket 7 i430TX for my Pentium / Cyrix6x86 80mhz rig.

leileilol wrote:

You can buy Pentium MMX 150mhz cpus that aren't laptop bound!?

That's almost certainly my mistake! 😦

PC Chips M571 seems to have a pretty strong following:

http://m571.com/m571/

and see also the redhill link I posted.

Happen to have 3 of these in the cupboard, apparently unused .

🤣

Superb website, wish I'd seen that ages ago!

Why have you got 3 unused PC Chips M571 mobos in your cupboard? 😮

The short answer is because I'm a hoarder.

I bought a job lot of 20 motherboards from a dealer who was having a clear-out, a few years ago now. Two 486s and 18 socket 7s.

Still have the 486s - a tk8881 and a Jetway 466-B, though I am starting to doubt I will ever use them. Very battered boxes but I went to the trouble of setting the jumpers up and they worked (also found I had a DX100 with the Intel stamp showing DX50, weird).

Then I have a couple of new-in-box baby-AT super socket 7 Chaintech boards. And the three M571s, in roughed-up boxes. Not sure I ever had a plan for them (except in that the M571s would be my only non-Super socket 7 boards, which seemed important at the time).

😳

Well, if you ever fancy having a clear-out yourself.... 🤣

I may stick them on ebay in the next week, if I can find time to test them.

For a Pentium I would choose a Intel 430TX based motherboard. I have two AN430TX Intel motherboards, but still haven't completed my Pentium setup. Except for Intel boards Asus boards are also good, but there around 7 or more variations of the TX-97 and the one I'm interested in seems to be rare (ATX, with DIMMs only, TX97-X if I remember correctly).

My next project will be a Pentium board with an HX chipset. Any recommendations?

The Asus P55T2P4 (rev. 3.x) is legendary.
Make sure you get the TAG RAM as well, otherwise the board will only cache 64 MB RAM.

Moogle! wrote:

My next project will be a Pentium board with an HX chipset. Any recommendations?

Are there any other advantages of the HX over the TX except for being able to cache more RAM and SMP support? I really like the TX because DIMM memory is easier to find and motherboards often come in ATX form factor.

TX gets you UDMA33 too. Kinda nice. It's less painful to have to stick a modern drive on UDMA33 than old MWDMA2.

Also, HX boards only cache more if they have the proper tag RAM for the L2.

And, it's a lot easier to find a 430TX board cuz everybody used the chipset.

I wouldn't really be worried about going with TX. The performance difference may have been "exciting" back then, but good luck noticing a few % today with your Pentium system. 🤣

One thing to remember however is that 430TX used very early SDRAM and you have to worry about that 2 clk vs. 4 clk spec. And it will only take low density sticks and probably 64MB (?) max per DIMM....

My Pentium 166MMX that I'm building is based on the ASUS TX97-L. It's about one of the best you can get. It does have the 64MB memory cache limit that the HX boards don't have, but if you want it for DOS, Win31 or Win9x, that'll be fine.

Any of the ASUS TX97 variations would be good. I did used to have an ASUS P55T2P4 back in the day. That was a good board too.

Here is a link to an ebay auction of an asus tx97-x. 😁

I would go for a motherboard with the following criteria:

1.) Socket 7 or Super Socket 7 Motherboard - Has the highest compatibility when it comes to CPU selection of the respective class.

2.) ATX Form Factor - AT form factor requires the hard power switch, the AT PSU and requires an AT casing. Though AT casing is not difficult to get, ATX casing is more common and there are many,many choices of casings available. It's much easier to replace an ATX PSU, than the AT's counterpart. if something happens to it. And ATX form factors have the PS2 keyboard and mouse ports built-in. Much easier to get a PS2 mouse/keyboard nowadays. You can use any usb mouse or keyboard with a USB-PS2 adaptor. And remember the keyboard connector "hole" drilled at the back of the AT casing? 😉

Additional Luxury - Socket 7 with AGP slot. Some early AGP versions were available. Can be expensive. Will be able to use early AGP cards. But since this is a first generation AGP, I'm not sure of it's efficiency and/or potential conflicts/problems and the voltage considerations, since I haven't used them yet.

Awesome guys. 😎

I'm think that I should get an ATX style socket 7 mobo! 😀

EDIT: I have seen one or two of these style mobos with AGP. Very interesting.

Usually they're AGP 1.x tho, which can be pretty limiting

Check out this web site too: http://web.inter.nl.net/hcc/J.Steunebrink/k6plus.htm

Now granted, you don't want your retro Pentium mobo to be too fast and run an AMD K6-III+, but these hacked bios' do have other nifty features, like 128GB IDE HDD support. w00t!

On my ASUS TX97.... It has both AT and ATX power supply connectors. Baby AT cases also have more slots available than micro-ATX if smallness is a concern. Otherwise, you'll need to buy a bigger ATX case for your Pentium. I found a source for new Baby AT cases if you are interested. It's easy to convert the AT power switch to ATX. You can put an ATX PSU inside an AT case.

Can't believe I said "here is the link to a tx97-x" and forgot to leave the link. 😅 Sorry about that. Here is the link:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ULTRA-RARE-ASUS-TX97-X-SU … p3286.m20.l1116

Again, sorry.