VOGONS


First post, by SW-SSG

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I have this photo I saved from some site ~15 years ago, and I'm trying to figure out what model of what manufacturer the motherboard is.

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It's clearly Socket 5/7 (the Intel box cooler of that period gives that away), and Baby AT with green-coloured PCB. The large VRM sinks, Seagate 4500RPM HDD, PS/2 mouse bracket attachment, and onboard I/O point to something with 430VX from ~1996 (at least to me). There are at least four ISAs, at least two PCIs, a "VIA-II" keyboard controller, and one of those Dallas-type self-contained battery things. I've yet to see a match come up searching terms in Google Images.

Anybody have any idea?

Reply 1 of 13, by dionb

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That's very, very little to go on.

What I'd do: the most noticeable feature is the RTC location, not horizontal along the bottom as usual, but vertical in front of the ISA slots. If I really wanted to ID this, I'd open up TH'99 and manually go through all the Pentium boards looking for AT boards with >=4 ISA slots and an RTC in front of them. Would take an hour or two, and I'm afraid I can't be bothered now to do it for you - but it's your best shot IMHO.

Reply 3 of 13, by PC Hoarder Patrol

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That thought occured too re. the RTC - maybe some Shuttle board like this HOT-533

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Reply 4 of 13, by PARKE

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Looks like DFI G586IPV
https://www.cbo-do.de/Motherboards/Intel/Inte … tml?language=en

edit: G586IPV just "looks like it" but isn't exactly the same - G586IPC looks spot on.

Last edited by PARKE on 2020-06-10, 15:33. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 5 of 13, by SW-SSG

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dionb wrote on 2020-06-09, 22:40:

... If I really wanted to ID this, I'd open up TH'99 and manually go through all the Pentium boards looking for AT boards with >=4 ISA slots and an RTC in front of them. ...

Thanks, I did just that and managed to find it within (luckily) ~20min. It's the DFI G586IPC. Turns out it's a 430HX...

There's some good photos of one on *bay ATM. Date codes are pointing to early 1997 for that one.
EDIT: Fixed typos

Last edited by SW-SSG on 2020-06-10, 05:22. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 6 of 13, by darry

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Happy that you found it .

That's some, euh, interesting photography . Do you know what the purpose of the photo was ? Inquisitive minds want to know ? 😀

Seriously, if the photo is cropped and this is something private, please disregard my question .

Reply 7 of 13, by SW-SSG

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I saved it from some website that had a collection of dusty/dirty/grimy PC photos. I can't remember anything useful about the site, though, and reverse-searching the photo turns up nothing.

Reply 8 of 13, by dionb

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Well found! And nice board too, populate it with a COAST with extra tag and you can cache all the way up to 512MB

SW-SSG wrote on 2020-06-10, 05:20:

I saved it from some website that had a collection of dusty/dirty/grimy PC photos. I can't remember anything useful about the site, though, and reverse-searching the photo turns up nothing.

Still: why is this particular board interesting to you? What are you going to do with the knowledge now you have it?

Reply 9 of 13, by mkarcher

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dionb wrote on 2020-06-10, 05:59:

Well found! And nice board too, populate it with a COAST with extra tag and you can cache all the way up to 512MB

How do you know? Did you find the manual for that board, where it says that? I have a Soyo SY-5TF with the Intel 430HX chipset, 256K onboard cache (with a tag ram socket onboard) and a COAST socket. I beeped out all the connections, and found that the 3 high tag bits from the chipset are not connected to the COAST module. So the feature combination by itself is not a safe indicator for that big cachable area. As the north bridge is BGA, you also can't add bodge wires to "fix" the issue.

Reply 10 of 13, by dionb

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mkarcher wrote on 2020-06-10, 06:57:
dionb wrote on 2020-06-10, 05:59:

Well found! And nice board too, populate it with a COAST with extra tag and you can cache all the way up to 512MB

How do you know? Did you find the manual for that board, where it says that? I have a Soyo SY-5TF with the Intel 430HX chipset, 256K onboard cache (with a tag ram socket onboard) and a COAST socket. I beeped out all the connections, and found that the 3 high tag bits from the chipset are not connected to the COAST module. So the feature combination by itself is not a safe indicator for that big cachable area. As the north bridge is BGA, you also can't add bodge wires to "fix" the issue.

That's pretty... brain-dead engineering. Apologies, I wasn't aware of that little pitfall 🙁

Reply 11 of 13, by Deksor

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I don't think it's that DFI.
If you look closer you'll see that your pentium had 4 ISA slots while this dfi only has three, and the DALLAS battery is somewhere else.

Trying to identify old hardware ? Visit The retro web - Project's thread The Retro Web project - a stason.org/TH99 alternative

Reply 12 of 13, by dionb

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Deksor wrote on 2020-06-10, 13:31:

I don't think it's that DFI.
If you look closer you'll see that your pentium had 4 ISA slots while this dfi only has three, and the DALLAS battery is somewhere else.

I'm pretty sure I see a fourth ISA slot in that pic. Can't comment on the RTC though.

Reply 13 of 13, by Deksor

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Ah nevermind I was talking about PARKE's post but I didn't see that SW-SSG actually found a different model which indeed looks like the one in the photo.

For the manual, you can find many versions of it here : http://www.elhvb.com/mobokive/Archive/Dfi/man … 6ipc/index.html.

There are even bioses in here !

Trying to identify old hardware ? Visit The retro web - Project's thread The Retro Web project - a stason.org/TH99 alternative