I already wrote a post on MSI MS6199VA compaq OEM Slot 1 board with Pentium 3 that i fixed and brought it back to life, after recapping it, add the missing ISA slots and flashing it to the latest bios. working perfectly fine with voodoo 3000 and ESS ISA soundcard. overall a prety good board for retro-gaming, even with Apollo pro 133 chipset it was stable for the most part.

on the retro-web they say that Compaq OEM board of will work with retail version of the latest bios, made me a bit curious, the OEM board comes with the annoying Compaq boot screen logo, but there's no real need to do it, i did because I’m a sucker for energy star logo after booting up the pc, very nostalgic. Anyway, I assumed the bios would be identical since there both more or less the same except some missing components like some without on-board audio and missing ISA slots. after re-flashing it booted up fine, everything seems in order until i installed Win 98, it hangs at the installations few times (which it didn't happened before with OEM bios), then when i finally got to the start-up screen, it seems fine, but when i install VIA 1-4 ver 4.43, the computer give me Explore error at the start up and just froze my pc, i took all the cards except the agp card and it booted ok, but no matter what sound card i put in the pc ISA / PCI doesn’t matter, it crashes my pc and got BSOD. im fully aware VIA Apollo pro 133 chipset is notorious for being very picky with certain cards and can be super unstable if you don’t install the VIA drivers first. so after troubleshooting for few hours (checking the bios for IRQ conflicts, disable things like serial ports that I’m never going to use), nothing fixed the issue. so I re-flashed it back the Compaq OEM bios (W6199VC8 V2.0 011901 wimsbios 128GB disk patch) and everything works fine and stable again, no errors, no crashes, no freezes at all, all the cards worked perfectly fine after re-installing VIA drivers. I came to the conclusion, the retail MSI bios ver 3.5 is very unstable with the OEM board, don't waste you're time like i did. i don't know why maybe the bios is written little differently then the OEM one, also the retail version latest bios was from 01/01/2000 and Compaq OEM bios was from 01/19/2001.

i think retro-web just confirm its possible but it doesn’t mean it's stable. I already send them this info for correction in the MS6199VA motherboard page. in general i tend to avoid motherboards with VIA chipsets, they always give me more problems then SiS and Intel.

did anyone have a similar experience with their board retail vs OEM of the same board?