It looks a bit like a capacitor

h-a-l-9000 wrote:

It looks a bit like a capacitor

You're right! I hadn't noticed it at first because it is mounted on its side and it looked like a thin metal bridge. But watching closely I see that it is indeed an SMD capacitor...

So, I guess everything points to this being a factory fix after all.

That PCChips model is known as being quite good, and will run at 500mhz 83x6 with a k62+ or k63+ cpu with the right bios installed.

http://m571.com/m571/

Imperious wrote:

That PCChips model is known as being quite good, and will run at 500mhz 83x6 with a k62+ or k63+ cpu with the right bios installed.

http://m571.com/m571/

Very interesting, thanks for the info!

Now I want to fire up this board and see how it performs! 😁

Imperious wrote:

That PCChips model is known as being quite good, and will run at 500mhz 83x6 with a k62+ or k63+ cpu with the right bios installed.

http://m571.com/m571/

That's only half of the truth! You forgot to mention that you have to get a stable one first! Many of the earlier revisions are unstable, even at 75MHz FSB, forget about 83!
And even those of the last revision do not gurantee you stable 83MHz, but usually work fine when set to 75MHz and the PCI divider set to 2.

I stumbled across this in a search. hate to necro but the topic wasn't answered or resolved so I'll try for the sake of future searchers.

that smd component doesn't even appear to be soldered on, rather just wedged in there. (so far as I can see from here)

I just made a pcb that compiles all the socket 5/7/ss7 mods that I could find, and while this one is near WT/WB and BRYDC it looks all wrong. I think the motherboard was just sat down on this part and it wedged in there. did it blow up when you plugged it in 🤣?

It's soldered, the picture quality prevents one to see the solder clearly but it's there. Not sure what it does or if it's a common factory fix for this model.

The board did work properly and I used it to test cards and other components for a while, until one day I killed it by accidentally shorting some pins in the ISA slot with the multimeter probe. The BIOS chip was blown as a result, but after flashing and installing a new chip it is still completely dead on power on, so something else in there probably bit the dust as well (most likely the chipset). Its corpse has now become a donor of parts for repairs.

Think there's a mod of that type on m571.com

edit: derp, the front door is boarded up, have to sneak in round the side... http://m571.com/m571/m571upgrade.htm

editII: and now I'm not seeing what I ws thinking about in a quick scan.... maybe confusing it with the M537 ATA stability mod.

TheMobRules wrote on 2022-04-01, 20:01:

It's soldered, the picture quality prevents one to see the solder clearly but it's there. Not sure what it does or if it's a common factory fix for this model.

The board did work properly and I used it to test cards and other components for a while, until one day I killed it by accidentally shorting some pins in the ISA slot with the multimeter probe. The BIOS chip was blown as a result, but after flashing and installing a new chip it is still completely dead on power on, so something else in there probably bit the dust as well (most likely the chipset). Its corpse has now become a donor of parts for repairs.

can you give a straight on pic so I can see the pins it's attached to I'm curious about it.

it may indeed just be something the mfg installed after the fact to tweak a shortcoming but I'm curious which pins exactly it's attached to
now

edit: in front of a computer now, it seems to be shorting brdy# to brdyc# on one side (so a cache mod like tillamook). but what is odd is the other side of that (capacitor?) is shorting vss (ground) to ewbe# no idea what that's about.

if I got the pins correct.

edit2:

https://www.pchardwarelinks.com/586pin.htm
ewbe# is defined as External Write Buffer Empty.

edit3:

https://www.dexsilicium.com/Intel_Pentium.pdf

"The external write buffer empty input, when inactive (high), indicates that a write
cycle is pending in the external system. When the Pentium processor 75/90/100/
120/133/150/166/200 generates a write, and EWBE# is sampled inactive, the
Pentium processor 75/90/100/120/133/150/166/200 will hold off all subsequent
writes to all E- or M-state lines in the data cache until all write cycles have
completed, as indicated by EWBE# being active."

so that pin really sounds like a active pin, not just a setting.. it's weird that they would actually pull it low permanently like that.