Hi all!

Just got back to the old hardware business after mucking around with DOSBOX and decided that nothing beats having the real thing 😜

After reading around the boards, I have managed to obtain a couple of motherboards (A PCCHIPS M598LMR, a Asus P5A and an incoming Asus P5A-B) with a K6-2 500 and a K6-2+450, a few random graphics card, floppy drives, HDD and some RAM.

I have also ordered a An Audician 32+ and managed to obtained a box of random soundcards which included a Soundblaster AWE64.

However I've only 1x ATX PSU at the moment. Initially I wasn't even aware of the -5V (Which the ATX PSU I have does supply).

This all seems to be working all fine and well. I am using the K6 2+ 500 with the AWE64 at the moment.

The other day I bought the ASUS P5A with me to work to try out a couple of old ATX Case lying around in the office. The case had a power supply with it and was previously powering up some Celeron D machine.

When I plugged it in, the machine booted up but then there was a warning message saying that the -5V was not detected (Error). I looked at the motherboard manual and look at the Power supply's 20 pin connector and see that where there should be a -5V pin is indeed missing.

I don't really have any idea as to what this all about but I did some checking, and it was sort of mentioned that the -5V is needed for the ISA bus? The Soundcards I am using are indeed the ISA ones (AWE64 and Yamaha Audician 32+)

Does this mean that the above 2 cards won't work without the -5V or only certain cards need the -5V ?

I have the intention of getting a couple of new ATX PSU, but do I have to ensure that they supply -5V as well?

I hope someone can enlighten me on this!

Thanks!