Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

I got this Packard Bell the other day the case to it was smashed and rusted bad. Inside was a SIS 5598 motherboard witch was ver […]
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I got this Packard Bell the other day the case to it was smashed and rusted bad. Inside was a SIS 5598 motherboard witch was very clean to eat off of, I thought that was kind of odd since all the other components where extremely dirty it also came with a Riva 128, 128MB EDO RAM 64MB x4, Cyrix MII 300 and a 2GB HDD that had the click of death so that got tossed.

So now I got everything cleaned of good here is the specs:

New case that came with power supply
Still same 128MB waiting on 256MB kit to come in the mail
Replaced clicking 2GB with a 20GB Seagate HP OEM HDD
Replaced Cyrix with Pentium 233MHz MMX and noticed about a 70% increase in performance
Added 2 port USB card
Added ISA Ethernet card
Same Riva 128 PCI card im pretty sure this is best matched with the P1
Onboard ES1869 Audio drive
Windows 98SE, Unofficial SP 3.56 and kernelex installed

The only problem I have is after it sits running for awhile anytime I refresh my desktop, open my start menu or different windows it rolls out kinda like a leggy effect, could this be from the video card running a bit worm? actually scratch that it was legging because of the USB 2.0 flash drive being plugged in.

Also what games would be perfect on this? im mostly looking for windows based games, cause im not that good at tackling DOS mode yet. So far the games I have installed is Simcity 2000 and the Millennium game pack(comes with 20 different puzzle games)

I'm not sure if your board actually caches memory in excess of 64MB.

Your chipset might, but I've been wondering about this myself, as I have a few 5598 boards laying around here myself.

Your chipset also supports a special BIOS setting, Linear Burst, which isn't supported by any of Intel's chipsets (due to it being a competitor I can presume). You can read more about it on the Vogonswiki page here http://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/Cyrix_CPUs

It doesn't help tremendously though (I think Feipoa, amongst other Vogoners, have actually benchmarked this in the past), but it could be fun to play with.

Iirc, your chipset could work with 75MHz FSB decoupled from the other system busses (like PCI), but other than perhaps being able to run your CPU at speeds like 3.5 x 75MHz without overclocking any of the other busses (and perhaps a bit faster memory speed), I really don't know if this has any actual performance benefits.

Do you know which exact PB SiS5598 board you have?
I have a couple and there used to be a great site with details about these PB boards, including stuff like jumper settings. I even experimented a little bit with undocumented jumper settings (so CPUs with a lower voltage could be used...in theory that is 🤣), I think these are interesting boards in a way.

The website with these old PB motherboards is here http://www.uktsupport.co.uk/pb/mb/pbmb.htm
It's pretty good I think, especially considering how old these boards are.

Thats interesting^^^^

When booting up the board it says Packard Bell FR500 Bios Version 1.03

Some pic's of the build

So yours is probably this one? http://www.uktsupport.co.uk/pb/mb/850.htm

Now I wonder which revision yours is, as I have one of these as well 🤣!
I used it for a testing rig at one time, running a K6-2/300 @ 75MHz FSB with either 3x or 3.5x CPU multiplier. I kinda liked that board for some reason, though I don't remember how it fared vs a real ss7 rig, as I dismantled this system as I moved and my first ss7 build was much more recent.

Your board should be able to run 2.2v CPUs, not bad. Possibly even the K6+'s, but I never tried one of those on this board.

Your build looks nice and particularly clean, like new 🤣!
So you tossed its original case also? 😜

How's your Riva128 faring for you? I never managed to find a PCI version, I ran mine with some Blade3D or BladeXP PCI card (8MB) made by Trident I think?
It was a pretty weird system, I experimented with suspended harddrives and it couldn't be moved because of this. That's why I decided to dismantle my rig with this board as I needed to move quickly.

So the jumpers setting written on the board are not true at all, when I set the multiplier or bus speed it shows up as something else, but right now it got it clocked a 263MHz, 66FSB, multi at 4.0x and voltage at 2.8 only way it will boot stable.

The riva 128 pairs very well with the p1

around 260 should be near the limit anyway (near the rare 266 mmx)
also I remember when I overclocked a 166 MMX not all the combinations of fsb and multiplier worked properly, but the max I could do some basic tests was around 266 and it seemed to have decent stability at 250

but I did the test with a sis 530 board...

in any case when I tested it with need for speed 2 se with a voodoo 2 it played nicely, you thread makes me want to revisit that PC, but I need a decent hard drive, sound card and PSU for it.

Does anyone have the bios upgrade for this board?

**Edit** It says B04 on the motherboard sticker is that it revistion?

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

but right now it got it clocked a 263MHz, 66FSB, multi at 4.0x and voltage at 2.8 only way it will boot stable.

The Pentium MMX shouldn't have any 4x CPU multiplier, I guess you jumpered your board to 3.5 x 75MHz FSB, which will give you 263MHz instead of the 266MHz you otherwise would've gotten if your board was jumpered to 4x66MHz

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

So the jumpers setting written on the board are not true at all, when I set the multiplier or bus speed it shows up as something else, but right now it got it clocked a 263MHz, 66FSB, multi at 4.0x and voltage at 2.8 only way it will boot stable.

The riva 128 pairs very well with the p1

Could you please post a pic of your board?
Preferably including its jumper settings.

Afaicr I didn't have any odd issues with my jumpers and multipliers, but it's not that uncommon to accidentally make a slight mistake when jumpering boards like these (like accidentally mistaking pins 1-2 for pins 2-3 (pin-1 is usually silkscreened with a slightly more fatty white stripe, but it's often kinda tricky to make it out correctly)).

Do you know which board you have? There might be the slight chance someone put a BIOS in there that was intended for one of the other PB SiS boards (not likely, but with stuff this old it's harder to predict how the board was treated by any of its previous owners and it's better safe then to be sorry).

SPBHM wrote:

around 260 should be near the limit anyway (near the rare 266 mmx) also I remember when I overclocked a 166 MMX not all the comb […]
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around 260 should be near the limit anyway (near the rare 266 mmx)
also I remember when I overclocked a 166 MMX not all the combinations of fsb and multiplier worked properly, but the max I could do some basic tests was around 266 and it seemed to have decent stability at 250

but I did the test with a sis 530 board...

in any case when I tested it with need for speed 2 se with a voodoo 2 it played nicely, you thread makes me want to revisit that PC, but I need a decent hard drive, sound card and PSU for it.

I've done around 290 on a few mmx systems, just no 4x mult and fsb limit tops out at 100mhz beyond that no post but I agree 250 is a good clock. The ceramic mmx doesn't clock very well due to the thermals.

here's a few pic's of the board

Hi. I'm sorry about the delay, I happen to have the exact same board, same revision also (B), though mine is a slightly more recent revision (B05) while yours is B04. Don't think this revision difference matters much though.

I found my board, but had some troubles getting my camera to cooperate 🤣

But anyway, I got some readable pics from my jumper settings, I still had mine jumpered for a K6-2 2.2v running at 300MHz (66x4.5), your board appears to be jumpered for 75MHz FSB, 3.5x CPU multiplier and 2.9v

Here's some pics of my board, mostly jumper settings.

The pic didn't come out very sharp, but that shouldn't matter much as you have the same board anyway.

CPU voltage and FSB jumper settings silkscreened on my board.

JP1 to JP3 set the multiplier, yours is set to 1.5x/3.5x (Pentium MMX uses 1.5x for 3.5x)

JP5 and JP6, JP8 to JP11
Set to 2.2v. The JP5 and JP6 should be set to 2-3 and 2-3.

Set to 66MHz FSB on my board, your board is set to 75MHz FSB. I think your board is set to 2.9v CPU voltage.

My board is set to 2.8 and 75FSB, but right now im waiting on a K6-2 333MHz processor to come in the mail I only payed $8 for it, free ship too.

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

My board is set to 2.8 and 75FSB, but right now im waiting on a K6-2 333MHz processor to come in the mail I only payed $8 for it, free ship too.

You could actually just switch CPUs, change the CPU voltage to 2.2v and the multiplier to 4.5x for 337MHz. Your K6-2 will most likely take a 1% overclock 😀.

The only thing I'm not sure of is how much memory this board can cache.
The thing is that when I took my board out of storage this evening, it already had 4x32MB EDO installed (I don't have any 64MB SIMMs) and had the FSB set to 66MHz, but I do vaguely remember I had actually set the FSB to 75MHz in the past. I might've started switching some jumpers around as I was planning to reuse this board for a new build.

Also I forgot to add that I ordered 4x64MB EDO RAM, im going to pop them in right now.

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

Also I forgot to add that I ordered 4x64MB EDO RAM, im going to pop them in right now.

I'm still curious about the cacheable area of that board.

It would still be fixable with a K6-III or K6+ and this board supports these lower voltages (might need a BIOS update for the +'s to make them work).
How much did those 64MB SIMMs set you back?

I actually remember having tried 64MB FPM modules in this board, but those were the kind that has 2 rows of chips on each side instead of just 1 and it was unstable till I switched them out with the modules that are still currently installed (the ones in the pics).

Tetrium wrote:

I'm still curious about the cacheable area of that board.

According to this it should be 128MB: http://www.anandtech.com/show/72/14

The RAM was $15 + free ship on ebay.

So if I add more then 128MB of RAM will that make the system slower?

If go above 128MB its not Cacheable?

I read a few forums on chacheing but nothings to clear on what it means?

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

The RAM was $15 + free ship on ebay. […]
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The RAM was $15 + free ship on ebay.

So if I add more then 128MB of RAM will that make the system slower?

If go above 128MB its not Cacheable?

I read a few forums on chacheing but nothings to clear on what it means?

If you go above the maximum cacheable area, it will probably make your system slower instead of faster.
I can however assume that uncached memory will still be faster than harddrive swapping, but that will only play a major role if your system consistently uses more memory than the maximum amount of cacheable memory, which Windows 98SE will only use if you load it with lots of stuff.

This is a reason why I tend to stick with the unofficial SP 2.0a (for Dutch 98SE) or 2.1 (for English 98SE).

To be honest, I haven't recently read about the newer unofficial 98SE SPs on msfn.org, but the last time I understood that this patch has a high degree of making 98SE work with faster systems and the newer versions may not be as good for older systems compared to the older 2.x versions of the unofficial SP for 98SE.

Afaicr, this unofficial SP stopped being developed at around version 2.1, was in development limbo for a while and then got restarted by other developers who had somewhat other intentions for this SP.

I'm not really sure about this though, as I mostly used ME instead of 98SE, but I did like to keep myself updated, so I kept coming back there to read up every once in a while.

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

So if I add more then 128MB of RAM will that make the system slower?

The performance impact depends on the CPU used. With Pentiums it's not that much of a difference, and IIRC it's not even a two digits percentage difference. You won't be able to tell with the naked eye.

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

If go above 128MB its not Cacheable?

Only the amount that goes above 128MB is not cacheable. Below the first 128MB it's still cached. This may seem harmless at first, and lead you to believe that as long as not much RAM is used there won't be any problems, but Windows uses memory from top to bottom, so it starts by using memory that is in the non-cacheable area.

Also, there's no need for 256MB on a Windows 98 Pentium machine, it will only serve as bragging rights.