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First post, by kolderman

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I have seen for the first time on ebay a slot-A mobo appear in my country. With 2xISA, PCI and AGP. It looks it would make an ideal, wide spanning retro computer if the CPU could be slowed down to slow 386 speeds. But I am not sure what slot-A CPUs would fit the bill. What prospect would such a mobo be for a DOS-lateWin98 gaming rig?

Reply 1 of 3, by chinny22

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It's more or less on par with a Intel Slot 1 rig.
It was never as refined as Slot 1 but that's to be expected as AMD abandoned it for Socket A relatively quickly.
I've just finished playing NFS 4 on my Athlon (non Tbird) 600Mhz with a 3dFX Banshee and plays fine.
It dual boots into dos and plays games just fine, but I'm not downclocking or anything.

You'll need a "goldfinger" to really unlock multipliers, there is an active thread going on at the moment
AMD K7 "goldfinger" cloning thread

Motherboards are more rare the CPU's so I'd say grab it. Double check what chipset the motherboard is using
The original AMD 750 Irongate based boards have buggy AGP (hence the 3dFX card in mine)
VIA KX133 have buggy so better off using a PCI card of some sort.

Reply 2 of 3, by canthearu

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I went to the trouble of replacing 3 faulty PCI slots in my Asus K7V Slot-A board .... that was a LOT of desoldering and resoldering.

I'll probably never easy access to another Slot-A board, so it was worth it.

Reply 3 of 3, by mothergoose729

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Any board with ISA can be a good DOS machine.

You can disable L1 cache and get a pretty spot on 386. Hitting 486 speeds or anything slower than a 386 can be done with a combination of throttle and moslo with varying degrees of success.

The biggest issue with socket A is finding the right power supply. There aren't a lot of modern PSUs with 30A or 35A on the 5v rails.