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Best (Super) Socket 7 motherboard?

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Reply 60 of 151, by Intel486dx33

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I have this baby AT motherboard from Soyo. It looks nice but the capacitors have gone bad so they need to be replaced. I have 4 of them and all the caps went bad on all of them so they need to be fixed. I have not used
them yet.

Read about my build:
AMD K6-lll+@500mhz., Voodoo 3000 (desktop)

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Last edited by Intel486dx33 on 2019-06-29, 17:22. Edited 2 times in total.

Reply 62 of 151, by PcBytes

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devius wrote:
PcBytes wrote:

One thing I never figured out on these is... where is the fan header?

Not all boards from this era had a fan header. This only started becoming common practice on ATX boards.

I've found it eventually, in the most unexpected place! It's right above the PSU jumpers (between the last two ISA slots at the bottom) and it only has 12v and GND.

"Enter at your own peril, past the bolted door..."
Main PC: i5 3470, GB B75M-D3H, 16GB RAM, 2x1TB
98SE : P3 650, Soyo SY-6BA+IV, 384MB RAM, 80GB

Reply 63 of 151, by RetroPC_King

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Try the Lucky Tech P5MVP3. It is good, I own it. VIA MVP3 chipset and works good with Windows XP too. It have the color changeable Award BIOS!
PCBytes, I have the same motherboard, but mine has 512KB cache with TMTech chips.

Reply 64 of 151, by aaronkatrini

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Intel486dx33 wrote:

I have this baby AT motherboard from Soyo. It looks nice but the capacitors have gone bad so they need to be replaced. I have 4 of them and all the caps went bad on all of them so they need to be fixed. I have not used them yet.

I have the same exact board, rock solid!
cheers

Reply 65 of 151, by ruthan

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I wonder if someone find 256MB SD-RAM sticks which is working with SS7 machine?
So far i tried few of them, but everyone with ALI chipset is - not detected, detected as 128 or as 512 MB (its really 256 MB memtest is failing in 256-512 MB range).

Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.

Reply 66 of 151, by havli

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I think most of the "BX compatible" 16-chip double sided SDRAMs should work on SS7 also. At least they worked for me. I recall using pair of Infineon 256MB PC133 CL2 on ALI boards - no problem at all, detected as 512 MB and completely stable. https://hwbot.org/submission/2421984_havli_su … min_36sec_956ms

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Reply 67 of 151, by ruthan

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Meanwhile is other thread i found this:

However, for any sort of modern usefulness, the VIA chipsets that I've seen have a limitation of 128mb of RAM per DIMM slot, meaning that the typical board is stuck using 256mb/384mb RAM. Some ALI boards have hacked BIOS files available that allow them to use 512mb Modules for 1.0-1.5GB Total RAM.

"BX compatible" 16-chip double sided SDRAMs

How to recodnize them? I have couple of 16 chips double sided sticks, no luck.. anything special. I would be really nice to know exact models, which i can order and test it..

Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.

Reply 68 of 151, by havli

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Well, even mine MVP3 worked fine with 2x256MB. https://hwbot.org/submission/2289241_havli_su … 5min_0sec_352ms

The exact model of the Infineon SDRAM is hys64v32220gu-7-c2 They work perfectly on all kinds of chipsets - VIA MVP3, VIA KX133, KT133A, AMD 750, ALI Aladdin V, i440BX/ZX, i815.... everything.

HW museum.cz - my collection of PC hardware

Reply 69 of 151, by HanJammer

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Nothing has changed since the 90s -> the Best SS7 motherboard is FIC VA-503+ 😁

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Reply 70 of 151, by Intel486dx33

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HanJammer wrote:

Nothing has changed since the 90s -> the Best SS7 motherboard is FIC VA-503+ 😁

Yes, I have 2 of these and they work great. They have a 5.5 multiplier so you can have an AMD 5x86-133-P75 over clocked to 550mhz.
1mb of cache and up to 512mb. of ram. 2x AGP support. USB supports USB-3.0 thumb-drives with Win98 USB update patch.

Runs very stable in regression testing with DOS and Win98se and benchmarks high.

Read about my build:
AMD K6-III+@550mhz., Voodoo-3-3000 (tower)

Reply 71 of 151, by W.x.

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kanecvr wrote on 2016-11-02, 15:50:
devius wrote:

I'm probably in the minority here, but I don't even see the point of overclocking old PCs, unless you're into that sort of thing and that's your primary objective to begin with.

I mean, if a game runs too slow on a K6-2 450MHz it will probably not be that much faster on the same CPU at 600MHz (law of diminishing returns of SS7 and all that). If you need more performance, just build a faster Pentium III or Athlon machine.

Agreed. From 400Mhz to 500Mhz you will see a ~ 18-20% difference, but going higher, performance percentage will diminish greatly.

From 300 to 400, you'll see like 11% differance, but from 400 to 500 18-20%? From where you have these percentages, because they are wrong. Between 400 and 500, amd k6-2 rise very bad. Basicaly, it's optimal limit is around 300 mhz and 100 FSB speed, after that, it raise really slow. Because cache stays at 100 mhz, it is holding it back.

The differance between amd k6-2 300 and 400 is around 11%-13%, while you'll have 33% increase in clock speed.
Between 400 and 500, it will be even worse ratio (because cache staying at 100Mhz, holding it back even more). So with 25% increase clock speed, my guess would be 7-10% gain in fps in games, not 18-20% 🤣. It is worth to take k6-2 high, no doubt, if you can, but differances are really tiny. There will be increase, but not so big. I would rather undervolt it, and puting it low , around 350 Mhz, than taking it to 500 or 550 with increased voltage. Really, differance is not so big. Amd k6-2 limit is around 300, after that it is raising really uneffectively.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/219/6

Here's another example:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/211/4

Differance between K6-2 300 and 400 is tiny (around 11%), but with K6-3, it scales much better. (thanks to cache), particulary in more demanding benchmarks, as the last one. Conclusion - for me, I would not take K6-2 too high, rather, preserve it, by undervolting it, so it lasts longer.
K6-3 on other hand, is worth to take at high speeds, because it scales much better thanks to on-die cache. Same with K6-2+.

Reply 72 of 151, by HanJammer

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I agree with W.x. - in the super seven era 300Mhz was a sweetspot and best 'bang for buck' when it came to K6-2.

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Reply 73 of 151, by W.x.

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HanJammer wrote on 2021-03-05, 10:52:

I agree with W.x. - in the super seven era 300Mhz was a sweetspot and best 'bang for buck' when it came to K6-2.

Thanks. Btw, I found a benchmarks in the meantime from the last post, that shows bigger gains between AMD k6-2 400 and 500 or 300-400, than 7-10%. But never seen so big as 20% (for 400 to 500 case). That would be almost perfect gain, as from 400 to 500, you have only 25% raise in clock speed, and such perfect gain as 20% is possible only if FSB, cache, and memory is raising too by 25%. But k6-2 platform is opposite. Both 100 Mhz FSB, memory and L2 cache, is holding it back. So even from this, you can know, that the more you go higher, the less gains will be achieved.

I provide these benchmark, it's Quake 2 Time demo software mode, so pure CPU/FSB/memory test , without 3d accelerator, but also with 3d accelerator. Not sure, what's going on, but in this case, gains with K6-2 are much higher, than in anandtech tests. Dont know from where I have it downloaded, I have just this image. But these are not mine benchmarks.
(in this case, gains are 20,5% between amd k6-2 300 and 40o, and 13,5% between 400 and 500. Well, it's still much less than 18-20% anyway, and usually I saw less gains, than 13%)

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Reply 74 of 151, by Socket3

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meljor wrote on 2014-11-25, 21:55:

Asus p5a, rock solid boards. Aopen ax59pro also very good.

The ali board you are pointing at at ebay doesn't have agp....

^This. I prefer the AX59 PRO over the P5A since the asus can be very quirky, especially regarding the AGP slot (weak voltage regulator depending on revision). But if you get a hold of a late revision P5A board, it's great to use and quite stable once you sort out any potential issues. For my build I ended up with an early revision board, and did a full recap + voltage regulator upgrade (both AGP and CPU VRMs) and it's been rock solid (as asus would put it) for almost a year now.

The AX59 PRO works great out of the box. AGP performance is superb (for a super 7 board that is). It also comes with 1 or 2 MB of L2 cache witch means it can cache quite a bit of ram (I use 256MB on my 2MB board) with no performance penalty. It's also a great overclocker. After a complete recap, it can run my K6-III+ at 550MHz and my K6-2+ at 600MHz perfectly stable (600MHz only seems stable with on motherboard cache disabled).

Another great board and quite common in east europe / asia / russia is the Lucky Star / Lucky Tech P5MVP3. Performance is not as good as the AX59 PRO, but it's quite stable out of the box and AGP performance is satisfactory as long as you don't stick anything faster then a Geforce 2 Pro / Radeon 7500 in there.

As a side note, from my experience MVP3 and ALi Alladin V super 7 boards are not very stable with most nvidia video cards due to what seems to be a driver issues and perhaps a low-budget AGP implementation on said chipsests. It seens to be more severe on ALi chipsets. I've had great results using ATi Radeon cards on super 7 builds, particularly the Radeon DDR and Radeon 7200/7500. Even the Radeon 8500 will run fine on these boards, but it's performance is severely limited by the CPU's lackluster floating point performance. Early radeon drivers are recommended. The lastest driver I've had success with is Catalyst 3.8

Reply 77 of 151, by devius

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Nemo1985 wrote on 2021-03-06, 12:13:

I wonder why noone mention the Gigabyte GA-5AX, the best ss7 board without doubt.

It was mentioned. Check the rest of the pages.

Reply 78 of 151, by Nemo1985

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devius wrote on 2021-03-06, 12:30:
Nemo1985 wrote on 2021-03-06, 12:13:

I wonder why noone mention the Gigabyte GA-5AX, the best ss7 board without doubt.

It was mentioned. Check the rest of the pages.

Well people keep saying the asus p5a as best ss7 board, while the gigabyte it's a bit faster at the same settings, it supports the tillamook, it doesn't have issues with k6-x+ cpus as the latest asus revisions, furthermore it allows (in later revisions) to reach higher fsb.

Reply 79 of 151, by Bancho

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I think this board had been mentioned in this thread already but I think the Iwill XA100 Plus (Rev 1.3) had to be up there as one of the best Super Socket 7 boards. Really stable, K6 + support and what I think is its defining feature is the SoftFSB in the bios.

I run my K6-3+ 450 on this board at 550mhz (5x110fsb with all caches enabled). Its the SoftFSB in combo with setmul which really makes this board a winner.

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