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Batman's Revenge socket 4 motherboard - need manual

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First post, by feipoa

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Does anyone have the manual for this socket 4 motherboard or have experience using it? It contains a sticker which says PBA 631022-103. The board powers up, but it identifies my Pentium 66 as a Pentium 60, so I was hoping to find a jumper setting to set the FSB to 66 MHz. Thanks!

The attachment Unknown_Socket4.jpg is no longer available
Last edited by feipoa on 2018-12-12, 22:18. Edited 1 time in total.

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Reply 2 of 65, by feipoa

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Yup, that was it - thanks! It now boots up at 66 MHz. There are two jumper settings for the 60/66 Mhz option. One is for the freq. and the other is for 5.0 V (60 Mhz) and 5.27 V (66 MHz). My board doesn't have this curious voltage jumper. What is the 5.27 V jumper for?

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Reply 3 of 65, by vetz

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My guess is that you have a newer revision were this feature was either built into the VRM or it was expected that the Pentium ran fine with 5V in both 60 and 66 mhz (as per the specification). I have never seen a voltage jumper on my Socket 4 boards.

There were some early production problems with the Socket 4 Pentium. 60mhz was created since many chips was not stable on 66mhz. Having a higher voltage option on the MB could in theory have 60mhz chips run on 66mhz.

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Reply 4 of 65, by amadeus777999

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That's one clean looking board, nice catch!

Reply 5 of 65, by feipoa

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vetz wrote:

My guess is that you have a newer revision were this feature was either built into the VRM or it was expected that the Pentium ran fine with 5V in both 60 and 66 mhz (as per the specification). I have never seen a voltage jumper on my Socket 4 boards.

There were some early production problems with the Socket 4 Pentium. 60mhz was created since many chips was not stable on 66mhz. Having a higher voltage option on the MB could in theory have 60mhz chips run on 66mhz.

From what I can discern, there's not a single voltage regulator on the motherboard. I find it interesting that the manual went into such precision, that is, 5.27 V rather than 5.25 V or 5.3 V. 5.27 V is such an uncommon specification.

The manual states,

motherboards equipped with 66 MHz Pentium processors have a voltage control circuit that regulates Vcc to the CPU and frequency synthesizer. The voltage regulation accomodates a variety of Intel CPUs and increases the overall robustness and reliability of the motherboard. Boards without the voltage regulator circuitry cannot reliably use 66 MHz Pentium processors

If you want to run 3.3 V PCI, you need to connect an auxiliary power supply to that black connector.

amadeus777999 wrote:

That's one clean looking board, nice catch!

That is what I thought at first, but alas, there were 3 broken traces which I had to patch with 30 AWG wire (on the back side of PCB).

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Reply 6 of 65, by amadeus777999

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Dang, that sucks but great to see it repaired and working again - could you post a picture of the traces/fix?
Do you plan on presenting the board a bit more before letting it fade into the archives...

Reply 7 of 65, by feipoa

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I'll photograph the carnage this evening. It is certainly disappointment from a collection standpoint, but irrelevant from a usability perspective.

Attached is an image I found online for this motherboard which contains the extra VRM components. You can see the additional components are a toroidal inductor, a large diode, large SMD capacitor, a voltage regulator IC or transistor, two large electrolytic caps, two SMD inductors, and an 8-pin DIP IC. There may be more, but these are what jumped out at me. So this is what it takes to get 66 Mhz going "stable"? What if using an overdrive?

What is curious is the missing PCI bridge chip on this motherboard. Why would they do that?

The attachment Batmans_Revenge_with_regulator.jpg is no longer available

Does anyone have one of these motherboards with the VRM components?

I wonder if having a power supply that delivers 5.25 V to the 5V rail would be sufficient. I suppose I could measure the output of my old AT PSUs.

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Reply 8 of 65, by Anonymous Coward

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Maybe there were issues with the controller, and the board was sold as ISA only for special use somewhere. ISA only Pentium motherboards did exist in 1993.

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Reply 9 of 65, by feipoa

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Anonymous Coward wrote:

Maybe there were issues with the controller, and the board was sold as ISA only for special use somewhere. ISA only Pentium motherboards did exist in 1993.

I suppose that theory works if the PCI slots had already been soldered on, and then they found out they didn't have enough qualified PCI bridge chips. And there was customer demand for ISA-only.

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Reply 11 of 65, by feipoa

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Interesting to see the subtle differences. Yours has a blue patch cable near U1E1, whereas mine has a black patch cable near the clock gen chip. Yours is also missing U1E1, while my board has this component installed. Yours has the standard KBC DIN, while mine has the minis. If I ever put mine into a case, I'd solder on the standard KBC DIN and put in a header for the mouse.

I'm probably going to desolder the RTC and put in a socket. I'm sure its time is up.

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Reply 12 of 65, by feipoa

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amadeus777999 wrote:

Dang, that sucks but great to see it repaired and working again - could you post a picture of the traces/fix?

This is what the board looked like on eBay. It has these red arrows pointing to something on the PCB, however I am unable to determine what, or even if there was damage.

The attachment Arrows_1.jpg is no longer available
The attachment Arrows_2.jpg is no longer available

Apparently there was damage. It looked as if a knife had been run across the traces. On the cluster of tightly packed traces, I scrapped off the acrylic layer to expose the copper. Two or three were not making any contact. I re-tinned the traces and rechecked to ensure continuity. However, the gaps on the trio of traces on the top of the photo were spaced too far to bridge with solder. Also, because of the tight spacing between ISA slots, I was unable to solder a 36 AWG wire to them to form a bridge.

The attachment Cut_traces.jpg is no longer available

Because of this, I had to find the vias for each end of the trace and patch the bottom of the board with 3 jumper wires. Its not all that attractive, but it works. It could be made prettier if I were to epoxy the jumper wires down instead of using masking tape, but that seems excessive.

The attachment Patched_traces.jpg is no longer available

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Reply 13 of 65, by amadeus777999

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The board was most likely attacked by somebody from a DX4 cult.

Interesting - anyways, are you planning on doing some benching with it?

Looks like all the Pentium boards I have came across in earlier years were Batman('s Revenge?) ones. More enthusiast type solutions like the SI5PI AIO seem extremely rare and I could only score one by accident.

Reply 14 of 65, by Murugan

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I got the Premiere PCI II but somehow it doesn't like the HD I use or there is something wrong with the IDE connectors.
A shame because I wanted to make a P75 system with it.

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Reply 17 of 65, by Anonymous Coward

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It's more than a missing fan though. two pieces of the heatsink have been snapped off, so even if you had a replacement fan it wouldn't fit. My guess is that these cpus must have been sitting in boards that were under mountains of other boards, and the pressure caused the fan and parts of the heatsink to blow apart.

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Reply 18 of 65, by vmr_

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Hi Feipoa,

Looks like this is another way to identify BATMAN vs BATMAN's REVENGE motherboards - based on AMIBIOS identity codes

1.00.xx.AF1: Premiere/PCI Expandable Desktop (Batman)
1.00.xx.AF2: Premiere/PCI ED (Batman's Revenge)

Source: http://www.elhvb.com/mboards/intel/index.html

Last edited by vmr_ on 2019-05-15, 22:58. Edited 1 time in total.

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IBM XT 5160 | 286 | 386 | 486 | S4 SI5PI AIO & S4 Batman + P60 SX828
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Reply 19 of 65, by vmr_

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my PODP5V133 looks fine, also has the cooler 😀

not tested yet with the motherboard, but soooon

Retro builds & sandbox
IBM XT 5160 | 286 | 386 | 486 | S4 SI5PI AIO & S4 Batman + P60 SX828
S8 & PPro 200 | SS7 FW 5VGF & Asus P5A & AOpen AX59PRO K6-III+ 550MHz
Asus K7M Athlon 1Ghz GDF | Abit SH6 Pentium III 1GHz SL4KL...