Few days ago I scored free Socket 7 board, so finally today I got the time to test it.
When I got my hands on it I just looked at it and thought Yeah, very, very crappy Socket 7 board with very dirty and sticky golden-plated CPU, so maybe my first Cyrix processor? Yeah!
So I grabbed it. But I didn't expect it to be this. I did know that there were many CPU makers back in the day, I heared about quite a few of them, but I haven't heard about ST X86 company before. Yeah, it is totally possible that this is Cyrix, but I am so dumb that I don't know it. 😁
Before first powerup I remembered that I need to inspect the board quite thoroughly, because it is not the first board from this particular place and every single one had messed chips. And sure, this did too. Somebody took out the BIOS chip and crudely jammed it back, so half of the pins were bent and misaligned, so I had to take it out and straight it up back again. When I thought it was good enough I stuck SDRAM stick in there, but the socket for that is very tight and crude. Yes, it was correct RAM I tried to put there, but my thought is it was so new technology back in the day (1996/7) so it is just not perfect. It sounds like metal cracking when you insert it and you need quite a force to do it and it retracting barely works. But yay, a socket 7 board?
When I finally powered it up, as every board I test it was a little bit stubborn and didn't want to post, but after few tries I convinced it it should wor. About testing and my observations, it is quite finicky, I had to reseat everything about three times until it started to behave. But right after that it blew my mind off. This board was not powered since late 2006, and when I entered BIOS settings it looked like this.
Yeah, you see right, only TEN MINUTES AHEAD! (That one hour is daylight savings.) It just blew my mind off! Ten years with half-inserted BIOS chip and only ten minutes ahead!
So I tried booting from floppy, worked flawlessly, tried booting HDD with DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11, also perfect. But after ten minutes of testing, quite big passive heatsink got very hot, at the fact so much it was barely possible to keep a hand on it. So it needs fan, but since that board doesn't have FAN plug, it is quite hard to find good fan with MOLEX plug.
After that I decided I need to sort through my stash of PSUs (about 30 of them) and look what caps I need to order so I can make them working again. That was way more boring 😁