Why did nobody want this FREE Socket 7 motherboard?
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- Опубликовано: 22 авг 2024
- Someone on the Overclockers Australia offered this Socket 7 motherboard, but nobody was interested because it is an OEM motherboard. So I grabbed it and turns out this is actually a really nice motherboard for Retro PC Gaming!
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I remember some dummies smashing up socket7 boards, and even socket3 boards and components in 2005-2008. It was painful then and definitely much more painful now.
It's all about that value curve. When things are new, they're expensive and, well... New. A few years later, there's already much better out there and the old stuff is considered obsolete and useless, so value drops, as well as desirability. Give it a few more years after that, and value starts raising again because it's now considered retro and has become more rare
All that stuff was worthless back then and there was tons of it. Most of it ended up in the trash. The pieces going for big $$$$ these days are the survivors.
I kick myself for disposing of my first classic computer hoard around 2006 that I had been building for about 10 years on the cheap. I embraced the idea that I could get rid of anything that wasn't getting a lot of use and just repurchase it again for similar money should I miss it. I did not understand that common things like Amiga 500s and Apple //c would someday become rare enough that I'd have to budget for them.
@@classicpctinker5070 Socket7, for sure, but a 286 system was already pretty desirable by 2006 and I'm pretty sure they found a thrill in knowing this as they smashed one to pieces at the dismay of others.
WOW! I'm bummed I missed out on this one. What a great set of features.
Hopefully @Craft Computing isnt making a server for multiple gamers out of this one :D... Altough...
The search for a good motherboard continues lol
I am with you there. Integrated features aren't too bad these days, but back then I would avoid any motherboards with integrated anything like that plague. That being said I lust for decent socket 7 so bad I would have dove all over this if I knew about it.
@@mikkopaakkolanvaara4804 That may or may not be a project on my list.
@Dmetsys I havent had good luck with motherboards lately. looking for a good board for a xp build
Trident, Crystal, and SIS... All it needs is a Cyrix chip.
The ultimate combo!
Yes! Or a Winchip/Winchip 2 CPU. I would love to see those on this channel as well.
LOL. A true blue IBM Cyrix chip. Perfect!
Cyrix is good on its own with their MediaGX CPU. Or should I call it APU ;)
nope. Transmeta :)
Or IDT Winchip :)
According to the thumbnail, it looks like it's ATX too. Let's put it into a tempered glass case with RGB and Windows 98!
My life is complete. I can die happy now.
😂
It looks as nice as some of Intel's slot 1 boards - and considering how hit and miss AGP could get with S7, it isn't like you were missing out.
The Dell Dimension XPS Pro200n that I have has that cable that connects the pw, reset, HD etc all combined. It goes into the small sockets next to the ram. The aptiva panel was connected to the cable. You can use an atx case with the regular pw switch and just stick in there. Usually the first two pins in the socket is the pw.
I snap up these OEM boards all the time, even the ones with capacitor issues or similar problems. With a little work they become incredibly stable DOS machines, so if you’re trying to build one for someone who is new to the hobby, they’re a great way to go.
Nice to see an IBM board get some love. Circa 2005 I had acquired a 733mhz PIII Acer Aspire that had a damaged case and missing parts, so I bought a new case (very much of the era) and transplanted it, though once I moved on campus at college I never really finished it, but I kept it. A few years ago I rebuilt it, with your channel and web site being a huge asset for learning about what hardware to look for and drivers to use. I just played a few games of the original Age of Empires on it last week.
Thanks Phil for al you do!
What a badass motherboard. My first PC had an SIS chipset with integrated graphics, but no cache memory or integrated sound. It had a Pentium 120 and ran like a champ.
Someone didn't want a Socket 7 board? That's like throwing treasure away!
There may be other reasons for giving stuff away for free, for example someone is moving and has to vacate the apartment fast, and cannot wait months until the motherboard finds a buyer. I gave away some beige cases this way, they were too bulky to take with me.
Great to see you back Phil. Another nice video.
I have an old Asus board that I bought for dirt cheep as power on via a switch connected to the appropriate jumper just doesn't work . So I just picked up a power supply that has a switch on it and set up the BIOS to switch the system on when power is restored. So basically the switch on the PSU is now the power on button. I've been using it for years like that now. Seemed silly to me to scrap the board just because of that minor fault
This board is at the end of the era where the power switch was integrated into the power supply, and not the motherboard. It used to be a large, hugely satisfying switch on the back right in the IBM XT/AT era, but in later systems, there used to be a push button on the front that had a physical plastic stick that ran to a mechanical switch in the power supply. This is likely why you couldn’t find a power switch header on the motherboard.
A push stick in 1997? No. You have your eras mixed up, push sticks ended ages ago. An AT machine from mid 90s had mains cable running to enclosure front integrated into the PSU wiring loom, and yes they still were fairly substantial switches, but not super clonky ones any longer. These use two 6-pin cables to connect mainboard to PSU, they're identical, you must orient them black to black, else there's fire. ATX machine has the 20-pin connector instead (shorter version of today's 24 pin) that has the mainboard supply PS_ON signal, with it being controlled by a front button just like today, and there's a low power always-on 5V supply to the mainboard. This is an ATX computer with an APM power management feature which allows Windows 95 to turn it off automatically.
In another board sharing this chassis there's 6-pin header J22 in the southeast corner of the mainboard which carries front power button, power LED and HD LED, pinout unknown; for this board i think that's the header J38 which is on the northeast, just north of the RAM sockets, also 6-pin, i'm almost certain this is it. I also suspect the first two pins are actually the power switch.
It's fun in 2022 to see oddball slow graphics makers like Trident running some games
In 1997 it was tears haha
Always something interesting on your channel ! The old stuff is way more interesting than the newest, latest greatest ever more complex tech!
Complex and unreliable
I recently acquired a gateway P-133 tower. The plastic was all brittle and destroyed. So I throw out the case and keep all the inside goodies. The motherboard is very simple in them and ATX form factor. It has all the pin outs for power, reset, lights etc… where the motherboard really shines is in DOS gaming. They play so good with this motherboard and the Pentium 133. PCI and ISA slots FTW
i think this kind of system is absolute great for period correct 96/97 builds.
Because AGP did not really took off until '98. Put on a K6/Pentium MMX CPU, maybe ISA Soundcard and a nice PCI graphics card (like TNT, Banchee, Voodoo3) or a basic graphics card (ATI Rage, S3 Virge, Mystique) with additional Voodoo 1/2 and you get a really cool system that will costs hundrets of dollar on ebay.
A lot of these early AGP chipset have bugs, so using PCI avoids all of this.
Really? I still have my original complete P166MMX system from 1997. I probably have a few other machines or at least motherboards from that era, to run my classic ISA and PCI sound cards, but I've not played with them for ages so I'm not sure what I have or if it still works.
My first PC motherboard was Socket 7. Had 32MB Ram and 1 GB HDD. Good ol days
Great video Phil! Hearing that it had SiS graphics reminded me that I noticed on the December Steam Hardware Survey that the SiS Mirage 3 is the top Directx 9.0 shader model 2 GPU. It's wild how many companies used to make graphics cards and chipsets, and now it's like 3.
Among the crazy vintage stuff I have seen lately on eBay: a pristine Voodoo 2 and 3, the bid ended on $2,200 for each.
A used Sony FW900 (the 24" wide CRT) was sold for $3,250.
I believe a new/boxed SS7 motherboard would sell for 150-200.
A nice video, well presented as always.
crazy prices..
Wow they are brave to spend so much on an old Trinitron screen. Even when they were new they were unreliable. I had 3 and all went BOOM. Even my Mitsubishi Diamondtron just died one day. Great image quality, but those BIG crts were really highly strung electrically.
@@jaeger8882 yeah I remember that as well.
I never forgot that story someone posted somewhere, going back and forth to repair his less-than-year-old Sony FW900, hurting his back in the process. They were heavy as rocks.
Aside from sharpness, their blacks are still unmatched by LCDs today.
This is a very nice catch! I was able to score myself a while ago a free ATX AN430TX Intel S7 motherboard. Then I found an AT Soltek SL-54U5 Super 7 for 20€, and I sold the Intel. I kind of regret it now though :D
Thanks Phil, love me a good socket 7 system!
Thinking about the "turning on the board problem" actually reminded me about my own Socket 3 motherboard from pre-built Packard Bell, which was powered on by a button on a front of a case that went directly to the PSU. I don't have enough experience with other boards though to tell if it's exactly like that, but I'm guessing this motherboard initially came in branded pre-built IBM PC with custom ATX PSU that also had a separate button for powering the system on.
I've had System 7 systems with the same setup. I don't know if that makes it an AT compliant psu rather than ATX?
That's an AT board, the predecessor to ATX, you can get adapters that convert ATX to AT, but if you go this route then you should get an ATX PSU with a high amperage 5v rail as well as a -12v rail assuming you still have the board.
-12v is not on modern PSUs, and 5v is typically limited to a couple of amps, whereas AT got most of its power from 5v.
If you can find an AT PSU that's in good condition then that's better, but old PSUs can be a nightmare for reliability.
@@PaulTheFox1988 AT PSUs have a different connector. This is just very early ATX and apparently not using the standard power circuit.
@@JasperJanssen yes I know AT uses a different connector, the description of the board the op has fits with AT, hence why I mentioned using an adaptor for a modern PSU which converts the ATX 20pin connector to the proper AT connector plus a latching power switch.
It absolutely doesn't sound like early ATX, ATX has always used a 20pin connector (later 24pin) and had soft power switches which connected to the motherboard.
The motherboard in the video has a weird front panel set up, which apparently is easy to connect to a modern case although I have no experience with that.
@@PaulTheFox1988 I'm not sure if it actually a real ATX board and not just the one with ATX connector, but otherwise AT in terms of power consumption. A lot of Socket 7 boards came with both AT and ATX connectors, but that didn't mean they supported everything ATX brought to the table. It might be like one of those, just with AT connectors removed for cost-effectiveness, since it's an OEM solution.
Anyway, it's most likely just powers on from the PSU itself. A lot of motherboards tended to do that all the way up to Slot 1, I think. My Intel 440BX board definitely does. Even though it does have front panel connectors.
3:45 The reason the overclocking isn't in the BIOS is because it's too old. You overclocked with jumpers on the motherboard on those Socket 7's. I did just that with my Socket 7 back in the day. But considering it's from an old IBM desktop, there would be limits there too.
first boards with overclocking in BIOS were in VX and HX chipset era, Abit and QDI were first.
QDI with Speedeasy, and Abit with Softmenu.
The QDI explorer and QDI titanium IB (TX chipset), were first boards from QDI.
QDI VX chipset board (QDI P5I430VX-250) had even 2 versions, one without Speedeasy, with jumpers, and Speedeasy version, with soldered jumper positions, but were using same PCB. It can be identified according to jumper area, which version it is.
S
And it's a OEM mobo on top of that, from an IBM Aptiva. OEM boards usually were crippled, except one of Compaq's units which shipped with a Gigabyte GA-5SMM mobo - yes, it was integrated SiS GPUs, but at least you could flash GB's BIOS on it and potentially unlock slight OC features.
Another great video Phil. Been over a year since I've seen one. We had a fire in 2020 and I lost my 3 retro builds and spare hardware. 😥 I just got anxiety after watching because it was just a reminder of everything I lost. But I'm back trying to enjoy all your great videos I missed. Someday maybe I'll be able to afford to get back into retro gaming.
My hunch is that J38 contains the pins for the power button since it also has the pins for the power led and hdd led.
That is a good chunk of change saved given how useful a SS7 board is even though a lot of the oem models are lacking an agp slot but if one already has a pci 3dfx card on hand they've got it made. That Trident gpu might be good in dos so that could be a bonus.
I think those used the black connector at the top right of the board for led and power buttons. Not fully sure but check those.
A free socket 7? Damn it! I needed something like this a few years ago when I was trying to get an Microstar MS-5169 motherboard from eBay. The Microstar 1st was priced at $49.00 USD. And has since jumped to around $400.00 USD over the last several years! For a Super Socket 7? No way! I have since went on to get a SOYO SY-7VCA2 socket 370. Where was free back then? Damn it!
Ebay? That's essentially a garage sale website and they want 400$ for an old motherboard that will likely give out in a year assuming it's not actually fried and they are lying about it? Ebay it's so easy to get burned and unlike Amazon you have ZERO backing. In fact Amazon pulled out of the retro PC stuff likely because they are tired of so many returns.
"Free" for Super Socket 7 boards was mostly between 2002 and 2007. All vintage machines eventually become desireable again. I was picking IBM 5170's up off the side of the road in the mid 1990's. All those Core2Duo and Athlon X2 machines that are a song right now will be hundreds of dollars when Gen Z is older and has spare cash to try and buy their youthful computer back.
Nice to hear from u fellas. Nowadays I acquired an MSI MS-7142 socket 754 brand new. Price was reasonable. Works well with either a Geforce FX-5200/or 6600 256MB AGP 8X card or an Nvidia Geforce 2 Ti 64MB AGP 4X card. I use it for some games that utterly puke at anything from Geforce 3 or later: Star Trek Hidden Evil, Curse of Atlantis, The New Adventures of the Time Machine, Oddysey the Search for Ulysses. I like it because i can use a higher performing CPU at 1.8 GHz while still getting much graphic card backward compatibility for older games. Like Phil mentioned in the Socket 7 video, for some games the Socket 7 CPUs cant saturate the graphic card and thus becomes the bottleneck. A nice perk of the MS-7142 is it allows Win 98 and Win Me to be maxed to 1.5 GBytes recognized RAM after you set MaxPhy pages properly. My SOYO SY-7VCA2 socket 370 wont let either OS recognize anything beyond 512MB max RAM. Period. Have fun fellas! Im off to Tomb Raider II Gold edition for Win 98/Me.😉😉
@@kylehill3643 I’ve rarely gotten burned on eBay, you just have to be careful about the listing and sellers.
If the graphics built into the chipset was so bad they felt the need to add a Trident graphics chip, it must have been REALLY bad. Pretty unique for a board of this era that the onboard graphics not only has its own memory, but that it's upgradeable.
I had a 478 board and the sis can run gta 3 at 480p less than 10 fps so their s7 gotta be really really bad
I'd be happy with the SIS graphics to be honest :D
@@philscomputerlab
since it's a Pentium mmx we gotta deal with msdos. what about that trident's dos capabilities/ compatibility? putting one more videocard into this system (actually third !) we're losing one of three scarcity pci slots.
SIS was OK, not a problem! The reason they installed Trident is because SiS isn't multimedia enough, no 3D feature, pure 2D. Trident 3D, crossing cutting edge 3D off your checklist, your kids are raving about Voodoo, it will shut them up, nobody cares if it really works or does anything. Checklist based product engineering!
Very good Phil. The good deals are out there u just have to dig deeper.
If I recall correctly this had a clunky switch that completed the connection to the power supply with a wonky plug hub. However it was common to jumper the…. was it purple to ground or green to ground… with a 2 state push button switch.
Pretty nice board of its era. Nicer feature set than most of my own collection.
Perfektes Mainboard und CPU für eine Voodoo2 oder Voodoo1. Eine kleine Demo wäre cool.
Was going through older parts at home and found a Gateway P5-166 mobo with ATX power, mmx support, SB Virge 16, ATi Rage 2, and a 256k stick in the COAST slot. Going to add a couple sd-ram sticks, a 200 MMX, and a Voodoo 2 I have laying around for a nice little machine.
To try to
It really looks nice, all the stuff onboard, all we need for a nice retro PC is Voodoo in one of the PCI slots :)
Need Voodoo2 SLI
Going from 240p (or I?) to 480p then is like going from 1080p to 2160p now. Nice video! Great memories :)
Awesome.. I would have grab it if I knew about it. Thanks for the great video.. O, and I did buy one of those new pci graphics cards. The box was kinda damaged but the card works great..
Great board. Gives you everything you need for good old dos gaming! Blue lady was always very peculiar with the connectors and PSU's they used, everything they made was with a limited lifespan in mind. It would help if you could find some pictures of the box. To tell you the truth I would like to hear more from the sound card and how it compares to others. Great video as always.
I just sold last week an IBM 300gl first gen, they have a kind of early ATX function but proprietary... so I prefer regular AT socket 7 board... no surprise with PSU.
Of course I will be watching this tomorrow after work around 4:30 - 5:00 as I'm meeting my dinner
Loved that gateway game back in the day. First time I gave seen it on RUclips.
Interesting benchmark results there! I compared them with the results I got on a Shuttle HOT-569 board running a classic P133 overclocked to 166Mhz using a Matrox Mystique 220. It's actually ahead of some of your results with the ATI card. Some are neck-and-neck (PC Player SVGA), 3d Bench is 6fps ahead and I even get 3fps more in Quake SVGA! Doom is ahead on your ATI by 6fps, though. Might be worth trying a Matrox card in there! I haven't benched any MMX chips as the board seems to have a faulty voltage regulator on the dual voltage side and doesn't post with MMX CPUs in. :(
Checkout Necroware on yt. I think his video could shed some light on voltage management. But as he himself said he is No expert..
@@mikkopaakkolanvaara4804 But it's freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! 😲😲😲😲😲
A kind individual uploaded the recovery cd for this model on internet archive. I would hope that contains all the drivers one would need for any iteration of this.
Awesome, that is good to know!
I'm downloading it now :)
It may have used a custom power supply. I had an old socket 5 computer that's power switch was connected directly to the power supply...nothing going to the motherboard.
Interesting board. I never realized what a gem of a cpu we had back in the day. That Pentium MMX 233 is one of the best old cpus out there from that era.
It's another Geforce FX. Born for retro, we just didn't know it back then.
These are very capable boards! The only issues are that they don't use standard ATX I/O shields and have weird pinouts for the front panel switches/lights like you mentioned in the video.
I had an Aptiva 2170 many years ago. I had attempted to transplant the motherboard from that machine into a standard ATX case, and I recall having similar issues getting the front panel stuff hooked up. Farthest I got was figuring out which pins were for the power switch. If I had a high res picture of this particular board, I could probably figure it out which pins are which, assuming the 2140 and 2170s are similar enough.
I can send you pictures! philscomputerlab at gmail dot com.
SIS chipsets are as stable as a 3 legged mule.
im more exited with this rather than my LGA1200 socket motherboard ahahhaaa
exited what? u can exit thru that door.
@@CougarCat21 ctrl+X
I don't know if the motherboard is too early for this, but some keyboards have a power key, that might work.
My first PC uses Trident 9750 with 2+2MB VRAM. very similar specs as this one.
Did you have better luck with drivers? They installed for me but then could not change the resolution much.
More than one of these boards. The Trident 4Dwave is sound chip is kinda neat.
i have a pcchips m571, with an SIS 5598 (basically the same as the 5597) chipset. honestly, it's the best socket 7 board i own, more reliable than my 430tx lmao. the onboard cmi8330 audio works great, and with a pci video card it's quite a good performer for socket 7, works just fine at 83 mhz fsb. it used to be in my main retro machine, with a k6-2 500, s3 virge and a voodoo 2. also had an sb live for midi, it was a great ff7 machine lol.
I think I've had this motherboard in an IBM aptiva computer. I believe it was the model 2142.
That computer didn't have a power button on the case, but rather it had some sort of expansion bay that was sitting underneath the monitor and that plugged to some proprietary ISA card on the back. That thing contained the CD-Rom drive, the floppy drive, and had the power button on the side.
It's possible that the header between the ISA and PCI slots, right next to the crystal audio chip, is what's been used by this card to turn on the PC, so it's likely what you're looking for lies in that connector
Would you believe me if I told you I found a whole socket 7 system in a family member's apartment today.
It is an Compaq office system.
Don't know anything else about it yet but it's older than I am and needs a decent dusting.
Very nice :)
Even though I can emulate anything on substantially superior machines of today, nothing beats having the actual hardware. Messing around with IRQ and DMA jumpers to get past conflicts of having multiple boards in the machine...I MISS my old 486 DX2 66MHz with 16 megs of memory. I had a full tower, four floppy (one of each format 360, 720, 1.2, 1.44), VESA Local Bus ATI video card, VESA Local Bus peripheral card with a Maxtor 120 meg boot drive and an 16-bit ISA BusLogic SCSI controller hosting a full height Digital Equipment Corporation 2 gig SCSI drive and an external NEC 3x CD-ROM drive and a Mitsubishi 17" VGA monitor with an Intel EX9600 modem. I was on top of the world with that build in 1993/1994.
So true :) It's a great hobby!
@@philscomputerlab
Captain the stolen data tapes have been recovered from the Rebels. Lord Vader has communicated through the back channels you were interested in joining the front against vanilla graphics.
You can probably force Soundblaster compatible or ac97 drivers
Yes the onboard audio is Sound Blaster Pro compatible!
In driver setup you can tell it you want to search or choose from a list. Or click the button "have disk" and browse to a ".ini" file. Pick a model from creative that sounds close. It'll give a warning but just ignore. Worst case it doesn't work or have to go in safe mode and remove then try another.
For power try running a small metal flat blade screwdriver along any headers you see. Oem stuff often have a combo plug of sorts. Like below...
I::::
:I:::
::I::
And so on until it turns on, or...
: :_: : :
:_: : : :
Think you get the idea. Some oem layouts are really tight so you may have to pull the pin connector out of its harness as the plastic harness may be too wide. But once you have the 2 pins you can connect power button. Similar for reset after the system is on.
Some important points I think would have made the video better:
K6-2 compatibility (WA etc)
3DFx compatibility (I have experienced Voodoo lockups on some SiS chipsets before)
Second display adapter (does it stay there after the configuration and drivers installation, does it cause IRQ conflicts of sorts)
Trident graphic card DOS compatibility (with extra picky games)
Onboard sound FM emulation (given the board has both PCI and a ISA Crystal sound chips for some reason)
SiS USB controller(USB keyboard emulation, NUSB 3.x compatibility, hotplug lockups, reboot freezes etc)
On the account of atx power switch etc a respective TheRetroWeb page shows this white pin header next to the ram slots (mb goes by USI Pro-267 rather than IBM FRU number). A picture submission would be also much appreciated.
i had 1 of them tears a go and i think the power plugs in at the top near the memory but mine was a uk version and it was 25 years ago i had a lot of mother boards since then ..i had them manual on cd but there in a box ????
I found the manual for the end user, but no service manual or something that covers the jumpers and headers.
Wish I’d spotted it. What numpties! ATX and all!
Do you have any high resolution images of this board? I have worked on several of these Aptiva machines far in the past, and I remember there was something strange about the power supplies for turning them on.
Is that...atx? A simm slot for vram upgrade? Integrated video, audio, gameport? What is this! I want one lol
It's ATX!
There are recovery disks available online for that board.
Thanks, I have one now :)
As always Phil, Good on ya with the content.
Thanks as always Phil! I hope you find the pinout for the board so you can hook up proper front panel IO to it.
Hoping someone will comment with the solution...
@@philscomputerlab when the board is off, I just short pairs of pins on random clusters until i get it right.
Manual should be readily available with all that information.
@@MarcoGPUtuber LOL, I know this method well. In fact I have one that I can't tell for sure what starts the durn thing up (seems to be more than one combo that works), so I just drag a BIC Stic pen through the whole row of pins and it fires right up. (BIC Stic's metal tip is just the right size for only shorting two pins at a time.) Since the board doesn't live in a case, good enough!
@@philscomputerlab Pins J38, next to your right thumb at 2:21-2:23, six pins in one row and shrouded in white plastic, are labeled "Power/hard disk LED connector" in the manual. Two of those should be the ones to short (the others are for the HD activity LEDs). Good luck, Phil.
Thanks for the entertaining video. Glad to see you are enjoying the hobby.
From what I see in the manual the power button and HD/PWR leds are meant to be connected to the single row white socket at the top right of the board. The black connector is meant for some kind of media expansion. I'm not seeing a pinout for the connector though. It does say pin 1&2, or pins 1, 2 and 3 are for power (+ power saver?). Might need to figure out a ground pin and go from there.
There is also some info on other models having a more proprietary PSU with power saver options so it might be meant to just turn on with the power supply, which seems problematic.
I tried all these pins but no luck.
Hi, Phil! Thanks for your channel, it very useful and amaizing! All these things inspired me and my new(old) computer on p5pv-me (dual boot w98/xp) is already finished!:) Fantastic emotions!:) P.s. Tell please - what a CUTE BEAR on you avatar?)) I realy like it))) It's game or something else?
Well when I started the channel, someone offered to make channel art and use it without strings attached, so that's how the channel got the bear :D
@@philscomputerlab thanks for explanation, very interesting to know it:)
ISA, USB and MMX sounds like heaven sent. Why nobody wanted it?
Yup, picky Retro people only chasing Asus, Gigabyte, AOpen...
Theres 100 times more hopeful sellars of rare treasure on ebay than buyers.
Every old mobo is rare and valuable. the prices of AM3+ is unreal, very greedy or naive sellers.
Ditto expensive secondhand PC cases with their $70 shippings, even tho Amazon does free shipping with their new cases..
Don't know about this particular board but I'm a little leery of not quite standard motherboards from the big OEMs. They can be a little weird. Phil didn't have a good way to turn this one on for instance. If it was the whole system I suspect there may have been more interest.
@@philscomputerlab FIC and DFI and Tyan also made excellent Socket 7 boards... I've had more problem with older Asus going tits up than all other brands combined. I had an AOpen myself that was 100% stable 24/7 for many years. But fact is after a lifetime of building frankenputers from salvage, I don't much care about brands, only that it works. I'd have jumped on it too, if I didn't already have more socket 7 boards than any reasonable person needs. Unreasonable people, now.... I have a Tyan socket 7 system still built and ready to go if I ever need it. :D
Beautiful board 😀 I have a couple similar to it. I still have a socket 7 with a K6-2 400MHz in it, that some day may get put online as a BBS. Your's would be great for that too. It's good to see people that appreciate what the older machines are and actually knows what they are talking about. (especially after I just watched somebody else's video that had so much wrong it was sickening), So keep up the good work.
Nice! No Dallas but worried about the rear io
Yea has coin battery, very nice.
A retro computing forum and nobody wanted it🤔. Can you ever have to many vintage mobos😁. At least its found a good home, curious about that new to buy ati rage card!
OCAU or Overclockers Australia is the forum. It reminds me of VOGONS, way back in the day I was doing Socket 7 projects but everyone thought I was silly and built high end 486 PCI machines :)
@@philscomputerlab haha, yes I suppose 'what's retro' is a moving target
Nice review as usual thanks
How about a video on ATX power supply fan flipping? The original concept for ATX included not needing a CPU cooling fan. Instead the power supply fan would be mounted on the bottom of it and blow down across the CPU heat sink. But by the time ATX systems got into production, CPUs were faster, and hotter. Blowing "pre toasted" air drawn through the power supply at the CPU was not a good way to "cool" it.
What to do? Flip the fan over! Take the power supply apart to remove the fan and reinstall it so it blew outwards, and seal off all other internal openings on the power supply with aluminum flue tape. That's so that none of the air blown into the power supply could recirculate back into the inside. On some systems the change could easily be felt by the case sides being cool instead of quite warm as they'd been with the inward blowing fan. In some systems that had been flaky but still weren't fully stable with the fan flipped, I added a small fan onto the CPU heat sink.
I flipped a lot of fans over before the industry came to its collective senses and put the power supply fan back on the back, blowing outwards. Many OEM ATX PCs that came with the fan back in the proper location and direction used a 90 degree duct (sometimes with big fan) so that outside air would be pulled (or blown) at the CPU.
Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to obtain an OG ATX PC with a hot CPU, take its temperatures as built, then flip the fan, seal the power supply, and do the temperature test again. This Pentium III will overheat in five seconds...
Hi Phil. I would say it's more IBM Aptiva 2142 TYPE A-1 than APTIVA 2140 TYPE A-1. Locate J38 (it's white color next to the ATX power connector) and there's what should You be interested in - power pins. Great video as always, regards.
OMG! It even has a mini pci slot!!!
Edot: dang, it's video ram upgrade, one of those things no one ever saw IRL...
Lenovo has an end of life portal which has all the drivers from the ibm era.
I remember Lemmings. Man I haven't played that in a long time.
Interesting motherboard, why not use it! It would be better if they had its original case but, it is what it is and it's a usable piece of retro tech.
Is that memory expansion slot for the video card proprietary?
Thanks for the video 👍
It looks like the same memory module we stole off my old ... Permedia2?... card back in the day. SGRAM, or something. Never had anything else that used that module, but it still lurks in the bin o' parts.
I think it was supposed to be a standard, but never took off.
Some of the most stable socket 7 motherboards I used back in that era had SiS chipsets. They might not have been as good as an Intel chipset. But they worked very well with Cyrix & AMD CPUs. I had an AMD K6-2 @ 350mhz for my first PC capable of running early DOS & Windows 3D games like startrek starfleet command gold. It had the SiS 5598 chipset paired with a 32mb Nvidia Riva TNT2 ultra pci from EVGA.
SIS actually knew how to build a high performance RAM controller back in the day. Their chips were atop the benchmarks. Also not quite as buggy as VIA is a bonus.
I kind of like ALi Alladin V because they got a lot of finer things right, ISA NMI, BIOS, lowmem, but they crash if you look at them wrong. I had so many returns with these.
I more or less have the same board. Works like a charm with an AMD K6-2 550Mhz and 64MB. I added a Voodoo 2 chip and Monster Sound MX300. I did use a compact flash drive... One caviat: the MB bios Language is in French and I didn't find an English one to flash it...
“FRU” Stands for “Field Replacement Unit”. Common for IBM parts. 👍🏼
Yeah, I remember this PC / Board. the ATX power supply was routed via the power button all you need to do, is insert a switch in the power line. I only ever seen one other power supply like that, it was just a way that IBM tried to stop people for using their motherboards in custom builds... Clearly they did think that Asus was anything to be concerned about and that they had a superior product.. doh!
IBM is known to be victims of its own hubris time and time again.
What? Free Motherboard am I late to the Party?
Maybe you should tinker with connector on your PSU, adding 2 wires going from it to the case power button. And the button should be one with fixation.
Try header J38, north of RAM sockets, probably first two pins? Just measure it, first fully unpower the machine, and find on this header a pin that is hard tied to ground, use Continuity or Resistance (lowest range) of your multimeter. Then attach power, shutdown Windows, so it goes into APM power off mode, where PS_ON is in off-state (weak pullup) but +5V SB is OK. Probe voltage to ground, the pin on this header that shows something like 4.5V under standby-only power is the power button pin. This 6-pin header, other pins will be PW LED and HD LED.
I missed out on this era of computers, went straight from socket 3 to socket 370 and then to socket A.
Same sir, DX4/100 to Celeron 300A. Glad I did though, that upgrade was totally awesome, took me further than if I had gotten a 166mmx or something only a few months earlier.
the black port connector in the absolute bottom right corner @ 0:40 should be the front usb, and the white one above it should be the power/reset/leds. test with a multimeter for led voltage and grounds while running. the front audio i/o, of course, should be behind the ISA near the sound chips.
and i can even see LED on the silkscreen thats visible. someplace in that white connector is your power/reset. dunno which is which, but 3-5v dc when its running should show you which ones are your power and hdd at least, even if one is intermittent while reading/writing. process of elimination from there. should be shared ground, but maybe not.
Wait. Everyone here wants that free board.
I remember back in the mid 2000’s when you couldn’t give away these boards. What changed?
5:16 that copyright date 2019 - 2021 for a universal ISA PnP driver... 😀 Good to see software being still written for hardware from that era.
I was born in 1990 and only just know of ISA systems through videos like this - by the time I'd first gotten into hardware PCI express and SATA was rolling out ;)
Yes this driver is so awesome! Especially rarer cards with chips from OPTI or Crystal, it can be hard finding the correct drivers.
Wait! It detect BOTH graphic chipsets!
So it means the SiS chipset is wired properly, even tough VGA connector is not soldered in, if wired properly.
It might be the only one motherboard with two integrated graphic cards!
If data sheet for chipset is available, missing elements can be repopulated to utilize additional VGA header!
My favorite word. ( free ) I had no idea that there was a free socket seven anywhere
With headphones on, I can hear quite an echo in this video. Otherwise, great video as always.
I used to get some scrap PC parts back in 2000’s. I had a socket 7 with AMD K6 before, then i ditched it for pentium II.
Now i regret getting rid of it.
Overclocking on most socket 7 is done by the jumpers on the board, very few had it in the bios
1. RE: No overclocking options in the BIOS.
Why would there be? -- The overclocking options are on board, you already covered them (you change the base frequency and multiplier via jumpers).
From memory: Socket 7 predates the era of over/under-volting components; so you'd have to hit the silicone lottery both in terms of CPU and in terms of on board components.
Still though, with a good cooler, you could probably set it to 75 mhz, or bump the multiplier. -- But not both. -- And you'll definitely want to run a burn-in test to make sure the CPU's advanced functions are working correctly. (Some of the NT based OSes won't boot if it's unstable -- but Win9X will usually boot just fine on a bad overclock, and just be flakey in other ways that won't be obvious at first.)
2. RE: Pins to turn the motherboard ON/OFF
I have never seen a Socket 7 system with ATX (which looks like what you have. Crazy!) -- But usually in the Socket 7 era we literally used toggle buttons that came directly from the PowerSupply to the front of the case -- and when you pushed them, they would lock into place and turn on the Power, and when pushed again, they would cut the Power.
That's why Windows 9X would come up with a screen at shutdown that said "It's now safe to turn off the computer." You had to push the toggle button to cut the power at that point.
I think you could do something similar with the ATX Power Good wire (one of the wires on the connector, if you ground it, will turn on the Power Supply, versus not) -- you could use an ATX extension cable and break that signal out to a similar Toggle button that replaces the momentary push button on the case. -- You should be able to find a toggle equivalent in the same profile.
3. RE: Sound Blaster Support
You should be able to find a generic Sound Blaster Driver for Windows 9X that will pick up the BLASTER config from your autoexec.bat environment variables.
I bet this computer came with an atx power supply where the power button just powered on the psu. No pins for a "soft" power button like on modern pc's. But perhaps you can hack the power connector to work with a modern psu? :)
Honestly pretty good specs and versatility for such an older board. USB, ISA and PCI, integrated graphics with memory expansion!! I wonder what the performance boost is with the VRAM upgraded!?!?
Upgraded VRAM wont bring any performance boost - it just brings higher resolutions with true 24 bit colors, therefore you will actually get less fps as result. This memory is so small, that even video buffer hardly fits to it, because games usually need double video buffer + z buffer, it makes 4MB very insufficient and 4MB can be used for 800x600x16bits gaming only. I had ATI Rage Pro in my first PC computer, therefore I know what I am talking about.