Hi there!

I bought this Asus board boxed a while ago, supposedly new and certainly in mint condition. The box had only the bare motherboard included though, no manual, no disks and no power converter card.

The motherboard has two power connectors, one conventional AT connector for 5V/12V and one similar dual 6-pin but for only 3.3V and ground. It can be seen at the upper edge of the motherboard to the right of the memory slots. If using the standard connector with a standard AT PSU (the only type I've got), the below pictured power converter card needs to be put in one of the PCI slots. (All this stated in the manual that exists incomplete online).

So, to get this board running I would either have to hunt down this PCI card (seems highly unlikely to succeed) or find an AT PSU with two 3.3V connectors instead of (or in addition to?) the normal P8 and P9.

I think I have seen one or two people here running this board or the ISA equivalent, how have you solved this? Is the converter card really neccessary or only there to fully support the PCI standard? Do you have the converter card or did you manage to find a proper PSU or hack some other solution? I could try without the converter card, but read some old post in Google Groups that stated the board would not start without it due to some safety measure, and I also wouldn't want to risk harming the board.

I'm curious, would the intended PSU only have the 3.3v connectors? Then it would also have to provide 5v and 12v for the buses through motherboard voltage regulation, so how many Watts should be required on this sole 3.3v line? Why would the motherboard convert only upward from 3.3v, wouldn't it be more logical to convert downwards to a lower voltage? Maybe it is understood that the PSU should have both the normal P8/P9 and the 3.3v P10/P11 in addition and use both connectors on the motherboard? In that case the wording in the manual is unclear and confusing:

There are two system power supply connectors on the mainboard. One is for a 5-volt power supply, the other for a 3.3-volt power supply. If the power supply is a 3.3-volt mode, you can connect the leads to the 3.3-volt connector. If the supply provides 5 volts, you must connect the leads to the 5-volt connector AND install the supplied Power Converter card in any available PCI slot.

It sure sounds as the PSU would only provide 3.3 volts.

So far I have located AT PSUs with the standard P8 and P9 and one single 6-pin 3.3v connector (P10) in addition to those. I also found this IBM power supply for dual socket 8 that have both P8/P9 and two 3.3v P10/P11. That one seems close but I think it is in between AT and ATX, it lacks the power button and relies on motherboard power switch a la ATX. At least it gives me some hope of being able to find a proper PSU.

My plan if I get power to this board is to put it in the proper case pictured below, install NT and OS/2 and experimenting with running dos and windows on top of OS/2 for gaming. I have an EISA NIC, PCI SCSI RAID (would like to find an EISA), S3 vision 968 or a Millenium, maybe a voodoo 1 and an ISA sound card that works with OS/2.

Thanks for reading and any advice is much appreciated!