Pics? And be prepared to use at least a 300W A rated PSU 😜

I have been using this board a lot over the past couple of months. I've played a considerable amount of games on various video cards. I've discovered some interesting things about its AGP 2x instability.

Riva 128ZX - AGP 2x by default and stable.
Riva TNT - AGP 2x by default and stable.
GeForce 256 - AGP 1x by default (driver). Forced 2x eventually results in a freeze.
GeForce 2 Ti - AGP 1x by default (driver). Forced 2x eventually results in a freeze.
GeForce 3 - AGP 1x by default (driver). Forced 2x eventually results in a freeze.
GeForce 4 Ti 4600 - AGP 1x by default (driver). Forced 2x eventually results in a freeze.
GeForce FX 5200 Ultra - AGP 1x by default (driver). Forced 2x seems stable.
GeForce FX 5900 Ultra - AGP 1x by default (driver). Forced 2x seems stable.
Radeon 8500 - AGP 1x by default (driver). Forced 2x seems stable.
Radeon 9800 Pro - AGP 1x by default (driver). Forced 2x seems stable.
Intel 740 - AGP 2x by default but often freezes after a time.
Matrox Millennium G200 - AGP 1x by default (driver). Didn't test forced 2x.
3dfx Voodoo3 2000 - AGP 2x by default and stable.
3dfx Voodoo5 5500 - AGP 2x by default and stable.
S3 Savage 2000 (Viper) - AGP 2x by default and stable.

The unstable GeForces were tested with a variety of driver versions which didn't seem to help the instability.

All of this is with Super Bypass enabled. Some old forum posts say disabling this helps if you have problems even at AGP 1x. There are a number of revisions to the AMD 750 chipset and I think some have more problems than others.

Some random observations:
- GeForce 256 seems to have a stutter problem regardless of driver version. Even at low resolutions you can see frames are not rendering smoothly even though the frame rate is high. I have the DDR version. You can find complaints about this in old usenet and forum posts too. A TNT2 can provide a better experience. GeForce 2 doesn't have the problem.
- Surprisingly an Athlon 1000 is not fast enough to keep some 1999-2000 games running buttery smooth, particularly if you don't use Glide if it's available. D3D and OpenGL clearly have more overhead.
- It's said that TNT lacks trilinear filtering but there is a setting in later drivers to disable "fast linear mipmap linear" and then its trilinear filtering looks normal. The fast mode certainly looks strange, especially on alpha textures....sort of a stippled trilinear.
- Riva 128 is one fugly glitchy renderer. Curious color banding, blending problems, texture mapping precision problems (seams), fakey cheap filtering, misleading driver settings (per pixel mip mapping 🤣), yada yada.
- Savage 3D on the latest drivers is much more visually pleasant than Riva 128 and similar in speed.
- Savage 2000 is a nice Quake 1/2/3 card. 1600x1200x16 is surprisingly fast.

Interesting info. I acquired one of these a few months ago but haven't done much with it. At least the AGP 1X mode sounds like it works reliably enough, so that's good.
It looks like NVidia figured something out eventually, because from your list, they were having 2X problems from Geforce1-4 but then not on the FX cards.

I thought it was unusual that this board is made in China - the other Asus boards I've seen from this time period were made in Taiwan.

I found that my K7M will not POST if either of 2 old keyboards are connected. One was a model M, the other from a 386-era Wang. This nearly made me decide the board was bad. Luckily I just happened to try it when there was no keyboard connected, and then it POSTed immediately.
It boots fine with a more modern keyboard, or no keyboard at all, but the old ones cause no POST. I've never seen that kind of glitch before.

shamino wrote:

Interesting info. I acquired one of these a few months ago but haven't done much with it. At least the AGP 1X mode sounds like […]
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Interesting info. I acquired one of these a few months ago but haven't done much with it. At least the AGP 1X mode sounds like it works reliably enough, so that's good.
It looks like NVidia figured something out eventually, because from your list, they were having 2X problems from Geforce1-4 but then not on the FX cards.

I thought it was unusual that this board is made in China - the other Asus boards I've seen from this time period were made in Taiwan.

I found that my K7M will not POST if either of 2 old keyboards are connected. One was a model M, the other from a 386-era Wang. This nearly made me decide the board was bad. Luckily I just happened to try it when there was no keyboard connected, and then it POSTed immediately.
It boots fine with a more modern keyboard, or no keyboard at all, but the old ones cause no POST. I've never seen that kind of glitch before.

Yeah on my board the GeForce cards are fine at AGP 1x. I'm not sure why GeForce FX works at forced 2X but the fact that both of my cards use an aux power connector might be part of it (less load on AGP). I've read that the cause of instability with AMD 750 AGP is a signal quality issue and perhaps electrical load contributes to it. Though on the other hand the Radeon 8500 seems fine and it only uses AGP power.

I have a Micro Innovations KB730 PS2 keyboard from about 10 years ago that works with the board. I don't have any other PS2 keyboards to try unfortunately.

shamino wrote:

I found that my K7M will not POST if either of 2 old keyboards are connected. One was a model M, the other from a 386-era Wang. This nearly made me decide the board was bad. Luckily I just happened to try it when there was no keyboard connected, and then it POSTed immediately.
It boots fine with a more modern keyboard, or no keyboard at all, but the old ones cause no POST. I've never seen that kind of glitch before.

Maybe the motherboard has some kind of over current protection on the PS/2 ports and the old keyboard controllers draw so much power that they trigger it.