I still got a box of approx ten old slot1 333-500mhz cpu's made in Ireland. Some of them used to overclock really well. I used to run a couple of 500mhz in a dual hp tower server with a matrox agp and two matrox pci cards. Great little workstation at the time.
God I love Pentium II's so bad. I actually remember back in the day when having a P2 or P3 was ace. For some reason I remember Pentium 4 as not being altogether that amazing, as it was so cool to have a Pentium II which was the basic of what you needed to play each game worth playing (no hardware accelerator necessary, I guess video card graphical accelerator or GPU would be equivalent, you did benefit a ton from having a soundcard though, back when onboard sound was such shit that Soundblaster was a valid use of money for gaming). I also actually remember when having TWO cores was something amazing. Like wow, just look at that, it has DUAL CPU's! No I pretty much look at it and we got enough cores that you can actually play Doom in task manager. Not just a Ti graphing calculator, I mean I actually saw someone using CPU utilization in task manager to try and render graphics on a Threadripper. Games can't even keep up with CPUs at this point.
This video had a bit of everything. - Board repair, troubleshooting. - The suspense when a repair doesn't work. - Hacking / modding the bios to run stuff it wasnt supposed to. Thanks for the video!
I wouldn't really call it hacking/modding of the BIOS since all that's happening is including the necessary Identification and microcode. This is exactly what the sort of thing that a BIOS firmware update might have been be issued for back then. I.e. the CPU is theoretically compatible, but the BIOS needs to know what to do with it.
It was a real treat to see that 440bx return in style after being in storage for many years! 👍👏 Not only did you revive it, you also improved it! Putting things to the side until new ideas come is sage advice 💡
This makes me want to dig one of my 3 440BX chipset rigs out of cold storage and have some fun with them again! Just so that this information is known for people wanting a Pentium II PC: If you are looking for a 440BX board to start building a Win98/DOS rig, look no further than a Cisco PIX-520 firewall device. It hides an Intel brand motherboard with the 440BX chipset. I would recommend swapping the guts out of it into a standard ATX case because the Cisco case is proprietary. With the Cisco PIX-520, you will have the motherboard, a 300MHz Pentium II, some RAM, a standard 3.5" floppy drive, and an old Gateway style PSU. You should be able get one of these for about $75-$100 USD. That's better than the $150-$200 USD that a Pentium II system usually goes for.
I've installed I don't know how many pix firewalls over the years in places like banks, hospitals, 911 centers, you name it... so it's kind of odd that I've never heard of this big enough to drive a mac truck through sized vulnerability that you just described. Anything is possible, I suppose.
I'm not seeing those online for the price you described. They're all right around $200 already, or have insanely high shipping costs that push it right up to that range. What about the PIX 525? That seems to be reasonably priced and has a Pentium III. What kind of board would be in that?
$200? And here I was giving away for free slot 1 board (ok, with via chipset) with some PIII CPU and nobody even ask about it. Maybe it would be better to stick €100 pricetag on it :)
This gives me (mostly good) flashbacks - 440BX was the first chipset I was professionally familiar with as a system builder. I had a 440BX-based dual P3-850 system for years as my home computer. Thanks for sticking with this project!
Hi my friend! You are really a box full of surprises :D Great video. Looking forward to see the sound card one. Here in Portugal, about 20 years ago, we had a TV commercial showing that even a monkey can recycle and separate plastic, paper and glass, that monkey was called Gervasio. I dont really understand why people cant do what Gervasio did
Your efforts with 'vintage' hardware inspired me to revive my dual-P3 system from my university days. Tyan Tiger 230T -- now with dual P3 1.4Ghz Tualatin (the 512 KB L2 cache model) Had to replace some capacitors, a few were looking tired, but not exactly dead. Currently compiling some FreeBSD source code on it 🖤
It is really fucking sad to me to be living in the Dark Ages of Humanity. A day will come where all our books have been burned and everything, every bit of human knowledge ever made, is encoded on a bunch of shitty NAND flash chips and that, even without the solar flare, even if they could have magically been kept stable and able to retrieve the data 50 years later, there simply isn't any capacity to manufacture the hardware/firmware for it anymore. Like they are going to find a bunch of shitty useless PCBs in a landfill somewhere and they will contain all the greatest treasures of humanity and all the treasure of human greatness ever written, and it'll all be lost, alongside some guy's useless bitcoin keys. And no one will even know what happened and why, because they didn't make a hardcopy for literally decades by the time it all went down, and only some musty national archives buried under a mountain in West Virginia or somewhere in Siberia or Alaska or Norway is even going to contain the precious scraps we have left to pass on to future generations. The coming calamity will be literally worse than the burnings of the Library of Alexandria. At no other point in human earth history has there been such a great and total universal loss in all human knowledge, than when they made all that data digital and then promptly lost the ability to retrieve it by a combination of incompatibility, corruption, physical destruction, and loss of knowhow to both the parts and the data itself. You think I'm joking and I'm not, they can find things like the cure for cancer and "cures" for male pattern baldness and the cure for smallpox but it'll be like basically trying to unearth a fully working STC. Already, we have physically lost the blueprints to make the original rockets NASA made. If you want just a taste of this, go try and find some website you remember from the 1990s. Or some article. Or even go and find some meme you remember from the late 2000s that was literally so everywhere nobody even thought to archive it, much the same as it occured to no one to try and save their old CRT monitors in the 2010s. At least now a CRT can be found in theory. 2035 A.D.? Good luck. At least on the plus side all the shitty memes will have also died permanently (though it irks me they outlived the good ones, nobody remembers the Calgary Keys, but the shitty, crap ass cringe-disgusting forced meme of a bunch of brainlet 12 yos like slenderman still survived to have games made about it, while Gideon's Calgary Keys are mostly 404'd)
I enjoy watching your videos. I didn't even know about The Retroweb until I found your channel. It has helped me with a lot of my retro projects. Today I posted a picture of one of my 486 boards that I'm working on a Facebook group for vintage hardware and someone from The Retroweb saw it and asked if they could use my photos to show an example of a Magitronic BL2443G. I was excited to have accidentally been able to contribute.
Ohh the good old days of 440BX :) I never would have been able to solve that POST screen issue. Brings me back to days of troubleshooting old computers, how fun was it.
All the 440BX chipset one of the greatest chipsets Intel ever produced! I'm so glad you got that board working! I had an Abit BH6 BX chipset board with a Celeron 300A overclocked to 464 Mhz for quite a long time. I later had a Socket 370 Celeron 566 Mhz in a slotket adapter in a Asus P3V4X slot 1 mainboard seriously overclocked to 892 Mhz using a 105 Mhz FSB. Those were the days! :)
I'm searching for that board Asus P3V4X. Hopefuly I find it sometime, but last year, no luck. If i remember correctly, it was VIA 694x chipset board, with ISA slot, and universal AGP.
@@warrax111 It was a really nice board. I only replaced it because I won an AMD Athlon XP 1800+ and a MSI motherboard at an AMD roadshow event when the Athlon XP chips were first launched in 2001.
Nostalgic... I had an ABit BH6 rev 1.01 (iirc), it wasn't supposed to be able to run the Coppermine cpus until rev 1.2 (also iirc). With the latest bios i put my P3 700 in a slotket with the stock cooler, it booted up and i set it to 7*133 (933 MHz) in the bios with a little voltage tweak and ran it like that for a long time. Never a hitch. The ABit BH6 rev 1.2 is pretty much the ultimate BX440 board, especially for overclocking. FSB, different bus dividers for PCI and AGP, memory latency, voltage tweaking etc is all done through the bios and with a lot of different options.
Great repair job there! 440BX is such a great platform with a wide range from mid 90's DOS to even early WinXP era. I've got a Jetway J-7BXAN with a P II 450, which even goes up to 133 Mhz FSB. So with a Slocket adapter, this could potentionally even be a 1400 Mhz PIII system if I ever desired that.
Еее, Necroware снова с нами ) Так и знал, что всё закончится биоспатчером )) Тоже лежит одна DTKшная доска, но не такая пафосная, как 440BX с 4xDIMM... Спасибо за видео, пусть на него и ушёл год! )
I had either that same motherboard or one very very similar. Cracking machine and lasted a long time before I needed to upgrade. Brought back many memories thanks.
Thanks to Biospatcher, I just got a Coppermine P3 to work in a Socket 8 Board using a Powerleap PL-PRO/II interposer, that wouldnt post before. Tried for months before coming across you tipp with Biospatcher. Thanks a million!!!
You are Great! So much patience and talent you have to resurrect such a masterpiece, i have that board and the pentium ii 266 cpu still working, I didn't know that the chipset support ecc memory.
Finally a new video. Had hard concerns that you quiet making repair vids. Had an old Gigabyte Board a few years ago with LX Chipset and that revision was only capable of handling the first line of P2 and Celerons. The Mendocino Line was not supportet due to Bios Problems and no newer version available. So, very good job by modding the 1.15 Version and weclcome back.
The stupid bell got deactivated and never notified me of your new uploads! WTF, youtube! Good thing now, I have a little backlog of videos to binge watch. Good to see you back!
Great video! Just acquired an old generic PC clone with the DTK PRM-0080I first revision with the 3 jumpers. I actually already have a 1GHz Slot 1 PIII so very enticing, but the chip programmer would be quite an expense for this one project.
What a blast from the past. i440BX chipset mainboards were the mainstay of the Pentium II and Pentium III. I can see why the previous owner could flash the wrong BIOS. However, I was starting to get worried when you washed the mainboard in the kitchen sink. That is something I’ll never do. If I have to do such cleaning, I would opt to use distilled water instead. It would be a good idea to look into that. But I still like to see old tech being used instead of being sent to the landfills.
Some motherboards more than others. Newer boards will be more sensitive. Older ones without regulators or with linear regulators, it doesn’t matter much.
Never had issues with good quality name brand caps. Just look at many motherboards kept kind of working for a while even with puffed caps, it is not that critical for retro use
@@krz8888888 Yeah, that's the funny thing, when I'd get a call to fix a computer that's crashing or stopped posting and I find the capacitors were the cause, they are usually way, WAY gone by the point functional problems appear. I would try to order the best parts I could but it was really more of a "I don't ever want to see this board again" kind of thing and probably could have gotten away with a lot crappier parts and nobody would ever know the difference unless someone hung onto it for another 15 years.
I just go to Digikey, select Nichicon, In Stock, pick the lead spacing and diameter (and height if t matters), then filter by 105C or higher, and pick the one with the highest ripple current rating. That usually lands in the low-ESR range meant for switching supplies and point of load switching regulators. Should be perfect for PSUs and motherboards. Unless you have access to the original designer’s intention, it’s always a guess what the capacitor’s secondary specifications should be. But usually, the most robust cap is more than adequate, without veering so far off that it causes loop stability issues or anything like that.
@@nickwallette6201 No need for stupid guesstimating if you'd put some time into looking up the datasheets for the dead caps you're replacing. But.. you know.. that would require common sense...
Yes! If you think it is not the bios it is the bios 😄 I saved two board I really wish to have working in a very simillar way. Those were not posting at all and waiting on the "to do" pile - This I have learned from your videos - wait until you have an idea and time and stay calm. 👍
And one more remark for the others - one of these boards is FIC VA503+ which is a socket super7 legend. This board has a soldered bios chip - and it is quite frequently failing (or it is bricked by a previous owner - as there are many PCB rev.). If you got such a board in a pristine co dition but no post - desolder bios, put a socket there and give it a try.
Very cool! I watched the BIOS Patcher video before this one :D Used to have a lot of DTK boards/cases in the day... think they're all gone now though :( This takes me back!
Great video once again :) I always fix stuff when ever I can. I’m no good with electronics but I’m hoping some of your talent will rub off onto me one day.
I have an i440BX based system on which I run WinFLP as a platform for running 16-bit Windows and DOS applications. The CPU is a Celeron 700, which is supported by the BIOS but is deliberately underclocked to 528MHz as this particular mainboard (Gigabyte GA-6BX7) can't be clocked that high with a processor made for a 66MHz FSB. The video board is a 16MB AGP Radeon 7000, chosen for its ability to drive a 1920x1080 display. WinFLP runs surprisingly well on there considering it only has 256MB of RAM and XP Embedded really wasn't designed for that generation of processor.
The 440BX chipset was amazing for its time. I used to have one and I got a Tualatin Celeron 1400 and threw it in there to make a decently powerful backup PC. My mobo (Shuttle brand) wasn't stable at a 133 Mhz FSB, but I OCed it to 115 and that pushed the Celeron to 1610. Fun times.
I just recently received 3 bx motherboards - intel se440bx-2, abit bh6 and the legendary msi bx master, need to set up a nice early p3/cel2 system to play with.
At the 7:33 minute mark you open a box that shows what looks like a yellow plastic memory slot organizer for both 30 and 72 pin memory. Where in the world did you get this from? I have so many sticks of vintage memory laying all over the place and this would be a great way to organize and store it. Thank you.
@@necro_ware Hi Necroware. I have been watching your videos for sometime now. You have definitely helped me repair retro hardware in the past and I’m grateful to you for this. I would love to purchase your 30/72 pin ram stick organizer with the cardboard enclosure box. If you ever decide to make those for your store please let me know. Greg
Still have a 440BX based system running using an Asus P2B mainbord. When I got the PC in 1999, it contained a Slot1 Mendochino Celeron 400 MHz, 64 MB of RAM, Matrox Millennium G200 AGP card, Soundblaster Live soundcard, a 6 GB Quantum Fireball HDD, and CD-RW drive. OS was Windows 98. The current final configuration is a Tualatin Celeron 1.3 GHz, 768MB of RAM, Matrox Millennium G550 AGP card, Soundblaster Live soundcard, a 80GB Seagate Barracuda HDD, a Hitachi Deskstar 120 GB HDD, 1 DVD+RW, 1 CD-RW and an Intel 100Pro NIC. OS is a dual boot of Windows XP and Debian Linux 11. Problem with these vintage systems is getting a decent power supply. Modern ATX power supplies are not really suited anymore for the old CPUs,; they don't deliver enough power on the required voltages for vintage CPUs.
If you have a relatively low power CPU and at least 20A on the 5V rail you should probably be fine... Which is why I stick to my Pentium II 333 that has a TDP of 20W.
@@lordwiadro83 The TPD of the Tualatin Celeron 1.3 GHz is 34W. The GFX card is also a factor. That is the reason I replaced the GeForce Ti4200 with a Matrox G550: it eats much less power: (around 12W compared to the 30-40 Watts of the Ti4200).
I do it the same, with 366 Celeron Mendochino, it can be ran without cooler, for testing purpouses to BIOS, if it boots and get into BIOS, it can be run like that up to 15 seconds, before temperature start reaching 90 degrees. But Celeron 300A would be even more suitable for this purpouse, as it heats up 10% slower.
That was a nice chipset (great for OC) and a good why to update CPUs with a new socket and even different pinout (Tualatin core for example). It even had max memory capacity of 1 GB and newer Intel chipsets like 810/815 had only up to 512 MB. I had a few boards, one failed with a mosfet blown (capacitor leaked). I don't know why I still remember it was some CET 30V, 40A, 50W that I couldn't find anywhere.
Maybe he updated to the latest (but incorrect) BIOS and then after seeing the graphics corruption he checked the power supply and thought that damaged the motherboard. Despite the ATX specifications of ±5% for +3.3V, +5V and +12V that come on some of their stickers, actually in the most common (cheaper) power supplies all voltages tend to vary by a percentage proportional to that of +5V , that is, ±3% for +3.3V, ±5% for +5V and ±12% for +12V because the regulator only cares about stabilizing the +5V and the others come from different taps of the same transformer. Only some slightly better (expensive) ones also regulate the +3.3V to prevent it from exceeding the maximum value, if the +3.3V goes too high then those will pull the +5V and +12V down as much as it takes to keep the +3.3V in range, even if that means the power supply itself or the mainboard decides to shut down because PG (power good) goes also too low. But the +12V beyond incorporating more and better filters (again according to the price tag) I have never seen any ATX power supply that takes them into account at all for regulation purposes, if a low resolution voltmeter is used it will be easy to find a worrying 14V in the +12V output and think that it has damaged other components.
I saw it more times , that someone incorectly identified motherboard, or did mistake in revision, and flashed incorrect BIOS. These boards often ends in electrowaste, and it's so easy to repair them, if you have BIOS flasher card, and BIOS is socketed. So pity for motherboards, that were destroyed. Particulary slot 1, socket A and super socket 7 ones. I have one such board, MSI KT6 Delta, and I don't have how to repair it. Sooner or later, I will have to throw it out, because of space problems, and it ends up destroyed. What is worse, BIOS chip is not socketed, but soldered, so it would be more difficult to flash it.
@@warrax111 what winbond superio and what flash chip? looks like it might have an LPC flash chip on there. We could work to bring it back. A common fault is that the winbond LPC flash will fail during writing and will not be written to ever again, you might as well replace it, which will make it easier, i.e. you can just cut it off once you have the programming rig figured out and scoop up the leg remnants, and soldering a new one in is easy enough.
@@warrax111 Ah figured it out for you, if i found the right schematic. It's an MS-6590, it's got Winbond SuperIO W83697HF-VF and W49F002UP BIOS flash chip. You write it with a TL866 or have any repair shop program you a blank chip like that, you clip off the original chip and solder a plcc32 socket in its stead, and simply plant the chip in there, again you don't have to do it yourself, any repairman can easily do it for you, they don't have to be specialists either.
Interesting, the bios situation for this board (and different revisions) makes it confusing. This should get mentionned somwhere on the retro-hardware website
In 2003, I had a PC in our company's office with (almost) exactly this motherboard and a CPU adapter. IIRC there was a PIII with 900 MHz installed. 100 MHz FSB, that makes me as a die-hard overclocker completely crazy. I never understood why we as a consulting company had worse hardware than our customers. God, I really hated that computer. A year later I bought a Powerbook G4 17" 1.33 GHz, left the company and switched privately to OS/X completely within a week. That was a real revelation. Back then, you still had real reasons to buy a new computer every two years at the latest, or to constantly upgrade the old one. I've had my current main computer for eight years now. Unchanged: an i5 4670K with 16 GB RAM. Only the SSDs (now .m2) and the graphics card (now RX570) I replace in the time. All that stuff has really become more durable. The environment thanks it. I hope we'll have ARM CPUs in desktop computers soon. Until then, I'm experimenting with TV boxes.
I feel like the new processors and graphic cards are not that impressive anymore... Also, it's getting expensive upgrading to the latest and greatest all the time :p
440bx чипсет прекрасно работает с fsb 133mhz, при этом все делители выставляются правильно и pci и agp шины работают на штатных частотах, но многие материнки не умеют выставлять fsb 133mhz автоматически для соответствующих процессоров, приходится выставлять руками перемычками, или через БИОС (некоторые БИОСы вообще поддерживали разгон fsb до 150mhz ),и на большинстве подобных материнок, кроме разве что ранних и самых дешевых образцов, с питание нет никаких проблем даже после модификаций под tualatin, контроллер питания, как правило, позволяет устанавливать напряжение от 1.3в)))) подобные материнки отличная база для опытов, и на них, в большинстве случаев, можно заставить нормально работать всю линейку slot1\socket370 процессоров)))
Не со всем соглашусь, i440bx работает на 133МГц FSB шикарно, но при этом AGP/PCI слегка разогнаны. На штатных частотах AGP/PCI в 66/33МГц этот чишсет работает только до 100МГц. На этом борту разгон через BIOS не возможен, он довольно ранний и только на перемычках. Что касается напряжения, то я полно бортов видел, которые не могут давать меньше двух вольт. Один из наиболее известных примеров был Asus P2B. Позже был выпущен по вакту тот же борд с улучшенным питанием и новым BIOS'ом под названием P3B.
@@necro_ware на счет питания вы правы, но это болше справидливо для ранних материнских плат на 440bx чипсете, в зависимости от контроллера питания они могли устанавливать напряжение не менее 2в или 1.8в, возможно такои контроллер ставился и на поздние и дешевые платы не знаю)))но на поздних, уже, как правило, этой проблемы не было, там контроллер умел от 1.2 вольт, на счет p2b, не все так просто)) у меня была такая и она прекрасно работала с процессорами coppermine выставляя правильные напряжения, они и ревизиями отличались, у меня была последняя ревизии 1.12 и она умела напряжения ниже 1.8, и процессоры coppermine, на сколько помню про это даже на сайте асус была инфа, а вот более ранние ревизии умели только 1.8в)) на счет FSB, даже не знаю, те что есть у меня умеют при частоте 133 мгц FSB устанавливать множитель 2 и 4 соответственно для шин AGP и PCI что соответствует нормальной их работе, возможно какие то экземпляры и ранние платы и этого не умеют не знаю не спорю))))
@@necro_ware к стати да, освежил память, вы правы, ранние не умели выставлять множитель больше 1.5 и 3 для шины agp и pci такая возможность стала появляться в более поздних платах и обновленных ревизиях существовавших, та жа p2b позже плучила разновидность в виде p2b-f которая уже с первои ревизии все это могла))))
Very nice and nostalgic video. I have two retro PCs (Pentium II) with the 440BX chipset that I revived from the old days. Although they do seem to work, I have trouble loading an O/S on them. USB is out of the question and Windows disks do not work either. What do you recommend in such case if I want to avoid using the floppy?
I had problems with software on a BX mainboard, I had one failed and the replacement the NT system did not like, I checked and is was not the same REV number, getting a replacement one of same manufacturer and the system worked as I expected it too. (Slow , the memory expansion is pretty sparse on these)
What I found frustrating with my board when I got it was that it reported a ‘CPU error’, even ended up buying a different CPU only to have the same issue. In the end after remembering a CuriousMarc video I thought to try reflashing the BIOS which cleared it. Why they couldn’t have had ‘BIOS checksum’ as a separate error code IDK.
I think the main reason why that kind of checksum comparison is not used, is that the precalculated checksum would be stored in the same location where the BIOS is stored. So the precalculated checksum could corrupted even though BIOS data is correct and then the comparison would report discrepancy between those two resulting in a ”broken BIOS”.
@@tab8k Either that or the area which is corrupted (probably a flipped bit) was not ‘essential’ to booting to DOS from a floppy disk and allowing me to perform the update.
Those slotket adapters will eventually burn out the vrm regulators next to the slot. I upgraded my board all the way up to a Pentium3 Tualatin with the slotket and was still using that PC till 2012. But the slotket draws more power than the spec of the board allows. That's how my 440bx came to an end. I finally had to upgrade my PC after 15 years of use.
Yes, by exchanging the clock generator, but it is a lot of work and 440BX doesn't support 133MHz officially, it overclocks the AGP to 83MHz at that speed, so I prefer to stay at 100MHz FSB on that chipset.
@@necro_ware beware there are at least two revisions of the 440bx chipset. The oldest one has only up to 1/3 divider for PCI meaning that 133mhz fsb would translate to over 43mhz on PCI. The newer revision has 1/4 for PCI which makes it running at a proper 33mhz.
Yeah, I'm aware of that. I actually thought, that all i440bx couldn't handle 133MHz with proper clock division regardless of revision. Furthermore, this board would need a hardware modification to get over 100MHz anyway, so I'll stick with that so far.
@@necro_ware can just try softfsb in win98 and see if it works (assuming board supported). Very easy and low risk - if your pc crashed, power and cycle and you're back to previous settings (at least on my msi 6119 440bx!)
Hi, did you noticed BIOS 1.?? is 1 Mbit in size? maybe he tries to flash de 2Mbit into a 1Mbit ROM chip and it didn't fit and something is missing, can it be possible with a proper 2Mbit ROM chip and use the latter versions of the BIOS? not sure about what I'm saying but noticed the difference @13.18
Yes, the V1 BIOS is 1Mbit, where V2 is 2Mbit. The original EEPROM was a 2Mbit and the image was written completely. If it wouldn't be complete, then the checksum wouldn't fit and the board wouldn't start to initialize. Furthermore I tried to reflash various 2.x version as experiment too and none worked.
heh, have an old celeron board someone flashed the wrong bios to. it sat for years because both me and my buddy thought it was dead, and at the time we couldn't find a bios file for it (as we were looking for the right board revision, while the previous owner seems to have grabbed whatever they could find, which was a revision down as i later found out). got bored one day and said screw it, lets see if there's one floating around now. yup. thanks to archival programs like TURP, i managed to find the proper one, flashed it, and it fired right up. has me wondering about my unstable pentium pro board now.. hrm.
All 440BX and other vintage PII PIII & P4 motherboards can get homebrewed BIOS with new old-stock features by your educational video and BIOS Patcher, Thank you ^&^
Great work as always, I'm wondering about that Bios chip you used, it's not a UV erasable? Very curious about that, would be a nice time saver when trying other Bios versions. Can you refer me to a video or info about that?
I don't quite remember, what I used in this video. It was just something, what I had on the table at that moment. I think the first one was an ATI Rage IIc PCI and the AGP card must have been an S3 Savage 4, but I might be wrong.
I remember having issues with memory on these old slot 1 boards. Does anyone know anything about that? I think it was on some RAMs with more chips on them, you could only access half the capacity or something like that.
May I ask why you take a DOM? I have installed an IDE adapter to m2 SSDs in my Powerbook G4 17". CF cards are now really expensive, rare and even retro. Are you not worried that the module will break even if it is read only? Where did you get the thing anyway? When I see such a part, I always have to think of Pollin.
Hi, that's not a DOM in a classic way. It is a CF2IDE adapter with a CF card. I have a bunch of them with different setups for various machines. They actually are quite cheap and still very good available. The adapter costs about 3€ if you buy a pack of 5 and the small CF cards between 500MB and 2GB also cost only couple of €.
@@necro_ware Aha, they've gotten cheaper again? I would not have expected that. They used to be absurdly expensive. But sure, 13 Euros for 2 GB is a lot of money in comparison, but we're also talking about DOS and very early Windows versions here. Back then, people dreamed of hard disks of this size. My Quantum Bigfoot had a gigantic 1.7 GB. I was the HDD king in my circle of friends.
Hi Marco! Thank you very much, usually you can use the email from the channel info page. But as you see in this video, I'm heavily in delay and currently I have quite a lot of material for the channel. As soon as I'm out of topics I'll let you know ;)
ICS should be easy to hack to 150MHz FSB. With 1.8V Mendocino will be stable, getting faster RAM is not issue nowadays (or configure CL2 modules as CL3) and only problem will became 100MHz AGP. Some wisely chosen GF4Ti should work.
i found in trash treasure Gigabyte GA-BX2000, 440BX and SB Link. Easy repair missing only jumper for bios clear so MB now starting :D Will change some bad caps and letz go try Yamaha YMF724F-Y XG and sb link functions 😊
That DTK also had SB-link. You should totally do that! I've always found this ISA backward compatibility feature an interesting relic of the time. I have a Yamaha waveforce but have not got around to testing SB link functionality.
Ah, nice board. I'm trying to get it for reasonable price for like year, but no luck. I have only GA-6BXC, which is older, and how some flaws (overclocking through jumpers), also is powering on by itself, when you turn on power supply, which is pretty irritating. Want to change it for GA-BX2000, which is also newer board, and handles "BX-133" better. Btw, that flaw with auto-powering on, is even mentioned in tomshardware review of first bunch of slot 1 motherboards. Just search of it by typing of name of motherboard and putting review. It can be seen, that it is first bunch of BX Slot1 motherboards from 1998, and I finally want some later one (I have only 4 early 1998 ones BX motherboards)
@@warrax111 same thing my older mobo Fujitsu Siemens D1107 vith BX440. When i turn on PSU motherboard will start for like two seconds. I think is not error or broken. Some motherboards just doing this. Dont know for what is this function but ye ... is little bit annoying 🤔
You also need to be careful about ESR and current ripple, not just capacitance. The VRM needs very low ESR especially on the output, that's why you often see 2 or 3 capacitors in parallel on each phase of the VRM - to lower the ESR. Look in the datasheet at impedance at 100 kHz and that's pretty much your ESR (at high frequencies ESR is pretty much the same value). In most cases, you need to match or get very close (let's say within 5-10%) of ESR and current ripple should also be equal or higher. This motherboard you have powers the VRM with 5v from the power supply, so there's no point in using 16v rated capacitors. I would have suggested either 6.3v or 10v rated electrolytic capacitors, or solid (polymer) capacitors, in which case you can often use lower capacitance (for example 1000uF or 1200uF 6.3v instead of 1500uF 6.3v would be fine). ON the output side, you could use 4v rated solid/polymer capacitors, which should be easy to source.
Ah memories.. 11:11 I worked in Fab 10 in Intel Ireland when the Pentium II were being made.. its good to see some of them still knocking around..
I worked in Fab 15 where 440BX chips were made. It was as if we couldn't make enough of them. We used to buy Celeron 300A and overclock it to 450MHz.
Thank you both for your work, if not for that I would have missed some pretty epic and chill gaming moments.
I still got a box of approx ten old slot1 333-500mhz cpu's made in Ireland. Some of them used to overclock really well. I used to run a couple of 500mhz in a dual hp tower server with a matrox agp and two matrox pci cards. Great little workstation at the time.
God I love Pentium II's so bad. I actually remember back in the day when having a P2 or P3 was ace. For some reason I remember Pentium 4 as not being altogether that amazing, as it was so cool to have a Pentium II which was the basic of what you needed to play each game worth playing (no hardware accelerator necessary, I guess video card graphical accelerator or GPU would be equivalent, you did benefit a ton from having a soundcard though, back when onboard sound was such shit that Soundblaster was a valid use of money for gaming). I also actually remember when having TWO cores was something amazing. Like wow, just look at that, it has DUAL CPU's!
No I pretty much look at it and we got enough cores that you can actually play Doom in task manager. Not just a Ti graphing calculator, I mean I actually saw someone using CPU utilization in task manager to try and render graphics on a Threadripper. Games can't even keep up with CPUs at this point.
This video had a bit of everything.
- Board repair, troubleshooting.
- The suspense when a repair doesn't work.
- Hacking / modding the bios to run stuff it wasnt supposed to.
Thanks for the video!
Don't forget The Matrix! 😎
I wouldn't really call it hacking/modding of the BIOS since all that's happening is including the necessary Identification and microcode.
This is exactly what the sort of thing that a BIOS firmware update might have been be issued for back then.
I.e. the CPU is theoretically compatible, but the BIOS needs to know what to do with it.
It was a real treat to see that 440bx return in style after being in storage for many years! 👍👏 Not only did you revive it, you also improved it! Putting things to the side until new ideas come is sage advice 💡
Awesome stuff! Of course, now we absolutely want a BIOS Patcher video like... yesterday! 😀
Is already in production ;)
This makes me want to dig one of my 3 440BX chipset rigs out of cold storage and have some fun with them again!
Just so that this information is known for people wanting a Pentium II PC: If you are looking for a 440BX board to start building a Win98/DOS rig, look no further than a Cisco PIX-520 firewall device. It hides an Intel brand motherboard with the 440BX chipset. I would recommend swapping the guts out of it into a standard ATX case because the Cisco case is proprietary. With the Cisco PIX-520, you will have the motherboard, a 300MHz Pentium II, some RAM, a standard 3.5" floppy drive, and an old Gateway style PSU. You should be able get one of these for about $75-$100 USD. That's better than the $150-$200 USD that a Pentium II system usually goes for.
I have no plans to follow this advice, but I gotta say that's pretty awesome.
I've installed I don't know how many pix firewalls over the years in places like banks, hospitals, 911 centers, you name it... so it's kind of odd that I've never heard of this big enough to drive a mac truck through sized vulnerability that you just described. Anything is possible, I suppose.
I'm not seeing those online for the price you described. They're all right around $200 already, or have insanely high shipping costs that push it right up to that range. What about the PIX 525? That seems to be reasonably priced and has a Pentium III. What kind of board would be in that?
@@pennyandrews3292 That one is proprietary and wouldn't really fit in any other case without some metal work.
$200? And here I was giving away for free slot 1 board (ok, with via chipset) with some PIII CPU and nobody even ask about it.
Maybe it would be better to stick €100 pricetag on it :)
One of favorite channels about retro computers. Your repair videos with explanations are amazing!
Greetings from Ukraine :)
This gives me (mostly good) flashbacks - 440BX was the first chipset I was professionally familiar with as a system builder. I had a 440BX-based dual P3-850 system for years as my home computer. Thanks for sticking with this project!
Hi my friend! You are really a box full of surprises :D Great video. Looking forward to see the sound card one. Here in Portugal, about 20 years ago, we had a TV commercial showing that even a monkey can recycle and separate plastic, paper and glass, that monkey was called Gervasio. I dont really understand why people cant do what Gervasio did
Hi Jorge! If I still can surprise you, then I did something right ;) And yeah, I'd wish to see more people like Gervasio, which you describe. Cheers!
Your efforts with 'vintage' hardware inspired me to revive my dual-P3 system from my university days.
Tyan Tiger 230T -- now with dual P3 1.4Ghz Tualatin (the 512 KB L2 cache model)
Had to replace some capacitors, a few were looking tired, but not exactly dead.
Currently compiling some FreeBSD source code on it 🖤
It is really fucking sad to me to be living in the Dark Ages of Humanity. A day will come where all our books have been burned and everything, every bit of human knowledge ever made, is encoded on a bunch of shitty NAND flash chips and that, even without the solar flare, even if they could have magically been kept stable and able to retrieve the data 50 years later, there simply isn't any capacity to manufacture the hardware/firmware for it anymore. Like they are going to find a bunch of shitty useless PCBs in a landfill somewhere and they will contain all the greatest treasures of humanity and all the treasure of human greatness ever written, and it'll all be lost, alongside some guy's useless bitcoin keys. And no one will even know what happened and why, because they didn't make a hardcopy for literally decades by the time it all went down, and only some musty national archives buried under a mountain in West Virginia or somewhere in Siberia or Alaska or Norway is even going to contain the precious scraps we have left to pass on to future generations.
The coming calamity will be literally worse than the burnings of the Library of Alexandria. At no other point in human earth history has there been such a great and total universal loss in all human knowledge, than when they made all that data digital and then promptly lost the ability to retrieve it by a combination of incompatibility, corruption, physical destruction, and loss of knowhow to both the parts and the data itself.
You think I'm joking and I'm not, they can find things like the cure for cancer and "cures" for male pattern baldness and the cure for smallpox but it'll be like basically trying to unearth a fully working STC. Already, we have physically lost the blueprints to make the original rockets NASA made.
If you want just a taste of this, go try and find some website you remember from the 1990s. Or some article. Or even go and find some meme you remember from the late 2000s that was literally so everywhere nobody even thought to archive it, much the same as it occured to no one to try and save their old CRT monitors in the 2010s. At least now a CRT can be found in theory. 2035 A.D.? Good luck.
At least on the plus side all the shitty memes will have also died permanently (though it irks me they outlived the good ones, nobody remembers the Calgary Keys, but the shitty, crap ass cringe-disgusting forced meme of a bunch of brainlet 12 yos like slenderman still survived to have games made about it, while Gideon's Calgary Keys are mostly 404'd)
@@drek9k2 'Tis a fundamental law of the Universe. Nothing is meant to endure in perpetuity.
Good to see you back making videos again Necro.
Thanks for the Video. Great Job on the Motherboard Repair, nice to see old parts brought back to life.
A video by Necroware? What a treat!
I was looking for new video's from you.. waited long time now. And suddenly 3 new video's 🙂 👌 gr8 tnx
I enjoy watching your videos. I didn't even know about The Retroweb until I found your channel. It has helped me with a lot of my retro projects. Today I posted a picture of one of my 486 boards that I'm working on a Facebook group for vintage hardware and someone from The Retroweb saw it and asked if they could use my photos to show an example of a Magitronic BL2443G. I was excited to have accidentally been able to contribute.
Ohh the good old days of 440BX :) I never would have been able to solve that POST screen issue. Brings me back to days of troubleshooting old computers, how fun was it.
All the 440BX chipset one of the greatest chipsets Intel ever produced! I'm so glad you got that board working!
I had an Abit BH6 BX chipset board with a Celeron 300A overclocked to 464 Mhz for quite a long time.
I later had a Socket 370 Celeron 566 Mhz in a slotket adapter in a Asus P3V4X slot 1 mainboard seriously overclocked to 892 Mhz using a 105 Mhz FSB.
Those were the days! :)
I'm searching for that board Asus P3V4X. Hopefuly I find it sometime, but last year, no luck. If i remember correctly, it was VIA 694x chipset board, with ISA slot, and universal AGP.
@@warrax111 It was a really nice board. I only replaced it because I won an AMD Athlon XP 1800+ and a MSI motherboard at an AMD roadshow event when the Athlon XP chips were first launched in 2001.
Nostalgic... I had an ABit BH6 rev 1.01 (iirc), it wasn't supposed to be able to run the Coppermine cpus until rev 1.2 (also iirc). With the latest bios i put my P3 700 in a slotket with the stock cooler, it booted up and i set it to 7*133 (933 MHz) in the bios with a little voltage tweak and ran it like that for a long time. Never a hitch.
The ABit BH6 rev 1.2 is pretty much the ultimate BX440 board, especially for overclocking. FSB, different bus dividers for PCI and AGP, memory latency, voltage tweaking etc is all done through the bios and with a lot of different options.
Similar history with latest asus 440 bx boards
Great repair job there! 440BX is such a great platform with a wide range from mid 90's DOS to even early WinXP era. I've got a Jetway J-7BXAN with a P II 450, which even goes up to 133 Mhz FSB. So with a Slocket adapter, this could potentionally even be a 1400 Mhz PIII system if I ever desired that.
That´s true! because I actually own a MSI i440BX Slot 1 one with a slocket and a Coppermine @ 1 GHz which works flawless at 133 MHz FSB.
I'm a huge Dethklok fan & he said "I plans to make this video" Love ya Necro.
Finally you're back with some retro repair :). I love it.
It's not just the educational and entertaining factor that makes you and your channel so precious but also the message. 🙏
Your underwater photography is amazing! Nice work. :-)
Еее, Necroware снова с нами ) Так и знал, что всё закончится биоспатчером )) Тоже лежит одна DTKшная доска, но не такая пафосная, как 440BX с 4xDIMM... Спасибо за видео, пусть на него и ушёл год! )
I had either that same motherboard or one very very similar. Cracking machine and lasted a long time before I needed to upgrade. Brought back many memories thanks.
Thanks to Biospatcher, I just got a Coppermine P3 to work in a Socket 8 Board using a Powerleap PL-PRO/II interposer, that wouldnt post before. Tried for months before coming across you tipp with Biospatcher. Thanks a million!!!
That's a nice board, especially for the great price of free! Definitely keep that heatsink bracket because they can be hard to find.
great efforts! and results, thanks! the board does look great all cleaned up and shiny.
You are Great! So much patience and talent you have to resurrect such a masterpiece, i have that board and the pentium ii 266 cpu still working, I didn't know that the chipset support ecc memory.
Finally a new video. Had hard concerns that you quiet making repair vids. Had an old Gigabyte Board a few years ago with LX Chipset and that revision was only capable of handling the first line of P2 and Celerons. The Mendocino Line was not supportet due to Bios Problems and no newer version available. So, very good job by modding the 1.15 Version and weclcome back.
The stupid bell got deactivated and never notified me of your new uploads! WTF, youtube!
Good thing now, I have a little backlog of videos to binge watch.
Good to see you back!
Beautiful work.. no feeling like it when a machine posts correctly.
20 pleasantly spent minutes,thank you
I do love the saying of "take only pictures, leave only footsteps"
Great video! Just acquired an old generic PC clone with the DTK PRM-0080I first revision with the 3 jumpers. I actually already have a 1GHz Slot 1 PIII so very enticing, but the chip programmer would be quite an expense for this one project.
This is impressive! Awesome piece of work!
What a blast from the past. i440BX chipset mainboards were the mainstay of the Pentium II and Pentium III. I can see why the previous owner could flash the wrong BIOS.
However, I was starting to get worried when you washed the mainboard in the kitchen sink. That is something I’ll never do. If I have to do such cleaning, I would opt to use distilled water instead. It would be a good idea to look into that.
But I still like to see old tech being used instead of being sent to the landfills.
ESR-value is also an important part to take into consideration when replacing caps on a motherboard.
Some motherboards more than others. Newer boards will be more sensitive. Older ones without regulators or with linear regulators, it doesn’t matter much.
Never had issues with good quality name brand caps. Just look at many motherboards kept kind of working for a while even with puffed caps, it is not that critical for retro use
@@krz8888888 Yeah, that's the funny thing, when I'd get a call to fix a computer that's crashing or stopped posting and I find the capacitors were the cause, they are usually way, WAY gone by the point functional problems appear. I would try to order the best parts I could but it was really more of a "I don't ever want to see this board again" kind of thing and probably could have gotten away with a lot crappier parts and nobody would ever know the difference unless someone hung onto it for another 15 years.
I just go to Digikey, select Nichicon, In Stock, pick the lead spacing and diameter (and height if t matters), then filter by 105C or higher, and pick the one with the highest ripple current rating. That usually lands in the low-ESR range meant for switching supplies and point of load switching regulators. Should be perfect for PSUs and motherboards.
Unless you have access to the original designer’s intention, it’s always a guess what the capacitor’s secondary specifications should be. But usually, the most robust cap is more than adequate, without veering so far off that it causes loop stability issues or anything like that.
@@nickwallette6201 No need for stupid guesstimating if you'd put some time into looking up the datasheets for the dead caps you're replacing. But.. you know.. that would require common sense...
New Necroware video!
Yes! If you think it is not the bios it is the bios 😄 I saved two board I really wish to have working in a very simillar way. Those were not posting at all and waiting on the "to do" pile - This I have learned from your videos - wait until you have an idea and time and stay calm. 👍
And one more remark for the others - one of these boards is FIC VA503+ which is a socket super7 legend. This board has a soldered bios chip - and it is quite frequently failing (or it is bricked by a previous owner - as there are many PCB rev.). If you got such a board in a pristine co dition but no post - desolder bios, put a socket there and give it a try.
I would very much like to see more about the bios mod. Great video!
Very cool! I watched the BIOS Patcher video before this one :D Used to have a lot of DTK boards/cases in the day... think they're all gone now though :( This takes me back!
Great video once again :)
I always fix stuff when ever I can. I’m no good with electronics but I’m hoping some of your talent will rub off onto me one day.
What an awesome job you just did ！👍👍
I have an i440BX based system on which I run WinFLP as a platform for running 16-bit Windows and DOS applications. The CPU is a Celeron 700, which is supported by the BIOS but is deliberately underclocked to 528MHz as this particular mainboard (Gigabyte GA-6BX7) can't be clocked that high with a processor made for a 66MHz FSB. The video board is a 16MB AGP Radeon 7000, chosen for its ability to drive a 1920x1080 display. WinFLP runs surprisingly well on there considering it only has 256MB of RAM and XP Embedded really wasn't designed for that generation of processor.
Another great video thanks.
Nice job man, nice job!
props to you friend on keeping this motherboard project going and not giving up even with all the crap going on in today's world.
The 440BX chipset was amazing for its time. I used to have one and I got a Tualatin Celeron 1400 and threw it in there to make a decently powerful backup PC. My mobo (Shuttle brand) wasn't stable at a 133 Mhz FSB, but I OCed it to 115 and that pushed the Celeron to 1610. Fun times.
My first PC growing up was a Pentium 3 @ 800mhz with 256mb of ram. Loved that system. Swish I still had it.
I just recently received 3 bx motherboards - intel se440bx-2, abit bh6 and the legendary msi bx master, need to set up a nice early p3/cel2 system to play with.
At the 7:33 minute mark you open a box that shows what looks like a yellow plastic memory slot organizer for both 30 and 72 pin memory. Where in the world did you get this from? I have so many sticks of vintage memory laying all over the place and this would be a great way to organize and store it. Thank you.
I printed them.
@@necro_ware Hi Necroware. I have been watching your videos for sometime now. You have definitely helped me repair retro hardware in the past and I’m grateful to you for this. I would love to purchase your 30/72 pin ram stick organizer with the cardboard enclosure box. If you ever decide to make those for your store please let me know. Greg
Still have a 440BX based system running using an Asus P2B mainbord.
When I got the PC in 1999, it contained a Slot1 Mendochino Celeron 400 MHz, 64 MB of RAM, Matrox Millennium G200 AGP card, Soundblaster Live soundcard, a 6 GB Quantum Fireball HDD, and CD-RW drive. OS was Windows 98.
The current final configuration is a Tualatin Celeron 1.3 GHz, 768MB of RAM, Matrox Millennium G550 AGP card, Soundblaster Live soundcard, a 80GB Seagate Barracuda HDD, a Hitachi Deskstar 120 GB HDD, 1 DVD+RW, 1 CD-RW and an Intel 100Pro NIC. OS is a dual boot of Windows XP and Debian Linux 11.
Problem with these vintage systems is getting a decent power supply. Modern ATX power supplies are not really suited anymore for the old CPUs,; they don't deliver enough power on the required voltages for vintage CPUs.
If you have a relatively low power CPU and at least 20A on the 5V rail you should probably be fine... Which is why I stick to my Pentium II 333 that has a TDP of 20W.
@@lordwiadro83 The TPD of the Tualatin Celeron 1.3 GHz is 34W. The GFX card is also a factor. That is the reason I replaced the GeForce Ti4200 with a Matrox G550: it eats much less power: (around 12W compared to the 30-40 Watts of the Ti4200).
I do it the same, with 366 Celeron Mendochino, it can be ran without cooler, for testing purpouses to BIOS, if it boots and get into BIOS, it can be run like that up to 15 seconds, before temperature start reaching 90 degrees. But Celeron 300A would be even more suitable for this purpouse, as it heats up 10% slower.
That was a nice chipset (great for OC) and a good why to update CPUs with a new socket and even different pinout (Tualatin core for example). It even had max memory capacity of 1 GB and newer Intel chipsets like 810/815 had only up to 512 MB. I had a few boards, one failed with a mosfet blown (capacitor leaked). I don't know why I still remember it was some CET 30V, 40A, 50W that I couldn't find anywhere.
Maybe he updated to the latest (but incorrect) BIOS and then after seeing the graphics corruption he checked the power supply and thought that damaged the motherboard.
Despite the ATX specifications of ±5% for +3.3V, +5V and +12V that come on some of their stickers, actually in the most common (cheaper) power supplies all voltages tend to vary by a percentage proportional to that of +5V , that is, ±3% for +3.3V, ±5% for +5V and ±12% for +12V because the regulator only cares about stabilizing the +5V and the others come from different taps of the same transformer.
Only some slightly better (expensive) ones also regulate the +3.3V to prevent it from exceeding the maximum value, if the +3.3V goes too high then those will pull the +5V and +12V down as much as it takes to keep the +3.3V in range, even if that means the power supply itself or the mainboard decides to shut down because PG (power good) goes also too low.
But the +12V beyond incorporating more and better filters (again according to the price tag) I have never seen any ATX power supply that takes them into account at all for regulation purposes, if a low resolution voltmeter is used it will be easy to find a worrying 14V in the +12V output and think that it has damaged other components.
I saw it more times , that someone incorectly identified motherboard, or did mistake in revision, and flashed incorrect BIOS. These boards often ends in electrowaste, and it's so easy to repair them, if you have BIOS flasher card, and BIOS is socketed. So pity for motherboards, that were destroyed. Particulary slot 1, socket A and super socket 7 ones.
I have one such board, MSI KT6 Delta, and I don't have how to repair it. Sooner or later, I will have to throw it out, because of space problems, and it ends up destroyed. What is worse, BIOS chip is not socketed, but soldered, so it would be more difficult to flash it.
@@warrax111 what winbond superio and what flash chip? looks like it might have an LPC flash chip on there. We could work to bring it back. A common fault is that the winbond LPC flash will fail during writing and will not be written to ever again, you might as well replace it, which will make it easier, i.e. you can just cut it off once you have the programming rig figured out and scoop up the leg remnants, and soldering a new one in is easy enough.
@@SianaGearz Don't know, it's just Microstar KT6 Delta motherboard, eighter LSR or FSR, the one without RAID chips.
@@warrax111 Ah figured it out for you, if i found the right schematic. It's an MS-6590, it's got Winbond SuperIO W83697HF-VF and W49F002UP BIOS flash chip. You write it with a TL866 or have any repair shop program you a blank chip like that, you clip off the original chip and solder a plcc32 socket in its stead, and simply plant the chip in there, again you don't have to do it yourself, any repairman can easily do it for you, they don't have to be specialists either.
@@SianaGearz Thank you. I note it to motherboard, I copy paste your message, and put it on paper next to it, when I push it to someone for repair.
Interesting, the bios situation for this board (and different revisions) makes it confusing. This should get mentionned somwhere on the retro-hardware website
Yeah, I mentioned it in the notes for this board.
In 2003, I had a PC in our company's office with (almost) exactly this motherboard and a CPU adapter. IIRC there was a PIII with 900 MHz installed. 100 MHz FSB, that makes me as a die-hard overclocker completely crazy.
I never understood why we as a consulting company had worse hardware than our customers. God, I really hated that computer.
A year later I bought a Powerbook G4 17" 1.33 GHz, left the company and switched privately to OS/X completely within a week. That was a real revelation.
Back then, you still had real reasons to buy a new computer every two years at the latest, or to constantly upgrade the old one. I've had my current main computer for eight years now. Unchanged: an i5 4670K with 16 GB RAM. Only the SSDs (now .m2) and the graphics card (now RX570) I replace in the time. All that stuff has really become more durable. The environment thanks it.
I hope we'll have ARM CPUs in desktop computers soon. Until then, I'm experimenting with TV boxes.
I feel like the new processors and graphic cards are not that impressive anymore... Also, it's getting expensive upgrading to the latest and greatest all the time :p
440bx чипсет прекрасно работает с fsb 133mhz, при этом все делители выставляются правильно и pci и agp шины работают на штатных частотах, но многие материнки не умеют выставлять fsb 133mhz автоматически для соответствующих процессоров, приходится выставлять руками перемычками, или через БИОС (некоторые БИОСы вообще поддерживали разгон fsb до 150mhz ),и на большинстве подобных материнок, кроме разве что ранних и самых дешевых образцов, с питание нет никаких проблем даже после модификаций под tualatin, контроллер питания, как правило, позволяет устанавливать напряжение от 1.3в)))) подобные материнки отличная база для опытов, и на них, в большинстве случаев, можно заставить нормально работать всю линейку slot1\socket370 процессоров)))
Не со всем соглашусь, i440bx работает на 133МГц FSB шикарно, но при этом AGP/PCI слегка разогнаны. На штатных частотах AGP/PCI в 66/33МГц этот чишсет работает только до 100МГц. На этом борту разгон через BIOS не возможен, он довольно ранний и только на перемычках. Что касается напряжения, то я полно бортов видел, которые не могут давать меньше двух вольт. Один из наиболее известных примеров был Asus P2B. Позже был выпущен по вакту тот же борд с улучшенным питанием и новым BIOS'ом под названием P3B.
@@necro_ware на счет питания вы правы, но это болше справидливо для ранних материнских плат на 440bx чипсете, в зависимости от контроллера питания они могли устанавливать напряжение не менее 2в или 1.8в, возможно такои контроллер ставился и на поздние и дешевые платы не знаю)))но на поздних, уже, как правило, этой проблемы не было, там контроллер умел от 1.2 вольт, на счет p2b, не все так просто)) у меня была такая и она прекрасно работала с процессорами coppermine выставляя правильные напряжения, они и ревизиями отличались, у меня была последняя ревизии 1.12 и она умела напряжения ниже 1.8, и процессоры coppermine, на сколько помню про это даже на сайте асус была инфа, а вот более ранние ревизии умели только 1.8в)) на счет FSB, даже не знаю, те что есть у меня умеют при частоте 133 мгц FSB устанавливать множитель 2 и 4 соответственно для шин AGP и PCI что соответствует нормальной их работе, возможно какие то экземпляры и ранние платы и этого не умеют не знаю не спорю))))
@@necro_ware к стати да, освежил память, вы правы, ранние не умели выставлять множитель больше 1.5 и 3 для шины agp и pci такая возможность стала появляться в более поздних платах и обновленных ревизиях существовавших, та жа p2b позже плучила разновидность в виде p2b-f которая уже с первои ревизии все это могла))))
Very nice and nostalgic video. I have two retro PCs (Pentium II) with the 440BX chipset that I revived from the old days. Although they do seem to work, I have trouble loading an O/S on them. USB is out of the question and Windows disks do not work either. What do you recommend in such case if I want to avoid using the floppy?
May be the IDE controller is defective. I'd suggest to try a PCI IDE controller and see if it works.
Magnifique vidéo ! Merci !!!!
I had problems with software on a BX mainboard, I had one failed and the replacement the NT system did not like, I checked and is was not the same REV number, getting a replacement one of same manufacturer and the system worked as I expected it too. (Slow , the memory expansion is pretty sparse on these)
What I found frustrating with my board when I got it was that it reported a ‘CPU error’, even ended up buying a different CPU only to have the same issue. In the end after remembering a CuriousMarc video I thought to try reflashing the BIOS which cleared it.
Why they couldn’t have had ‘BIOS checksum’ as a separate error code IDK.
I think the main reason why that kind of checksum comparison is not used, is that the precalculated checksum would be stored in the same location where the BIOS is stored. So the precalculated checksum could corrupted even though BIOS data is correct and then the comparison would report discrepancy between those two resulting in a ”broken BIOS”.
@@tab8k Either that or the area which is corrupted (probably a flipped bit) was not ‘essential’ to booting to DOS from a floppy disk and allowing me to perform the update.
Those slotket adapters will eventually burn out the vrm regulators next to the slot. I upgraded my board all the way up to a Pentium3 Tualatin with the slotket and was still using that PC till 2012. But the slotket draws more power than the spec of the board allows. That's how my 440bx came to an end. I finally had to upgrade my PC after 15 years of use.
Pls make full video about bios patcher. And thanks for sharing yours hobby 🤝
P.s cool glasses 😎
Your wish shall come true, look at the latest video on my channel, which I released a second ago ;)
А вы можете снять видео по работе с BIOS Patcher ?
Уже в работе.
is there a way to upgrade the FSB to 133?
Yes, by exchanging the clock generator, but it is a lot of work and 440BX doesn't support 133MHz officially, it overclocks the AGP to 83MHz at that speed, so I prefer to stay at 100MHz FSB on that chipset.
Can you overclock the FSB on this motherboard to 133MHz, to get the 866MHz P3 to run at its stock frequency?
Yes, it is possible, but probably I have to replace the clock generator. I didn't check if it supports frequencies over 100MHz.
@@necro_ware beware there are at least two revisions of the 440bx chipset. The oldest one has only up to 1/3 divider for PCI meaning that 133mhz fsb would translate to over 43mhz on PCI. The newer revision has 1/4 for PCI which makes it running at a proper 33mhz.
Yeah, I'm aware of that. I actually thought, that all i440bx couldn't handle 133MHz with proper clock division regardless of revision. Furthermore, this board would need a hardware modification to get over 100MHz anyway, so I'll stick with that so far.
@@necro_ware can just try softfsb in win98 and see if it works (assuming board supported). Very easy and low risk - if your pc crashed, power and cycle and you're back to previous settings (at least on my msi 6119 440bx!)
wow!!!! great video. Do you have the STL file for your ram stick holder?
There is no revision number on motherboard? Always watch revision and download exect same BIOS
Hi, did you noticed BIOS 1.?? is 1 Mbit in size? maybe he tries to flash de 2Mbit into a 1Mbit ROM chip and it didn't fit and something is missing, can it be possible with a proper 2Mbit ROM chip and use the latter versions of the BIOS? not sure about what I'm saying but noticed the difference @13.18
Yes, the V1 BIOS is 1Mbit, where V2 is 2Mbit. The original EEPROM was a 2Mbit and the image was written completely. If it wouldn't be complete, then the checksum wouldn't fit and the board wouldn't start to initialize. Furthermore I tried to reflash various 2.x version as experiment too and none worked.
Love any video you do ! Awesome
Where can I get that soldering iron with the motorized solder pump?
I can't find it anywhere even online
Wow amazing work
heh, have an old celeron board someone flashed the wrong bios to. it sat for years because both me and my buddy thought it was dead, and at the time we couldn't find a bios file for it (as we were looking for the right board revision, while the previous owner seems to have grabbed whatever they could find, which was a revision down as i later found out).
got bored one day and said screw it, lets see if there's one floating around now. yup. thanks to archival programs like TURP, i managed to find the proper one, flashed it, and it fired right up.
has me wondering about my unstable pentium pro board now.. hrm.
All 440BX and other vintage PII PIII & P4 motherboards can get homebrewed BIOS with new old-stock features by your educational video and BIOS Patcher, Thank you ^&^
I have a MSI 6119 440bx but it sadly stopped posting suddenly. One of the voltage line is shorted. Normally these caps don't fail short so I dunno.
Could be one of the transistors in the voltage regulating circuit. That is a common issue as well.
Great work as always, I'm wondering about that Bios chip you used, it's not a UV erasable? Very curious about that, would be a nice time saver when trying other Bios versions. Can you refer me to a video or info about that?
Thank you, just search for EEPROM and FlashROM. You also can find some info here for example: th-cam.com/video/bQM4e7AwI0U/w-d-xo.html
How did the board work before the psu event if the bios revision was wrong
That's the point :)
What Video card did you use? Apologies if it was mentioned I could not find it.
I don't quite remember, what I used in this video. It was just something, what I had on the table at that moment. I think the first one was an ATI Rage IIc PCI and the AGP card must have been an S3 Savage 4, but I might be wrong.
found modbin 6.0.0.38 and 6.1 - v4.50.77 and v4.50.88
which version is needed ?
Depends on BIOS which you use. If the board is older and uses BIOS 4.5x, you will need modbin 4.5x and for 6.x. the newer version.
As i read the title I was shocked for about 1/10 of a second. Then my eyes reached "mainboard" and i was relaxed
Haha ;)
Please make a video how to install Tualatin Celeron on 440bx motherboard!
when ordering caps for a crowded area - pay attention to the diameter too !
I remember having issues with memory on these old slot 1 boards. Does anyone know anything about that? I think it was on some RAMs with more chips on them, you could only access half the capacity or something like that.
May I ask why you take a DOM? I have installed an IDE adapter to m2 SSDs in my Powerbook G4 17". CF cards are now really expensive, rare and even retro. Are you not worried that the module will break even if it is read only? Where did you get the thing anyway? When I see such a part, I always have to think of Pollin.
Hi, that's not a DOM in a classic way. It is a CF2IDE adapter with a CF card. I have a bunch of them with different setups for various machines. They actually are quite cheap and still very good available. The adapter costs about 3€ if you buy a pack of 5 and the small CF cards between 500MB and 2GB also cost only couple of €.
@@necro_ware Aha, they've gotten cheaper again? I would not have expected that. They used to be absurdly expensive.
But sure, 13 Euros for 2 GB is a lot of money in comparison, but we're also talking about DOS and very early Windows versions here. Back then, people dreamed of hard disks of this size.
My Quantum Bigfoot had a gigantic 1.7 GB. I was the HDD king in my circle of friends.
@@necro_ware If you ever get a chance to get a Quantum Bigfoot: These are really nice hard drives. Visually and technically.
where do i buy your cmos adapter thing you made ?
did you ever make a bios hacking follow up?
So far, only this one: th-cam.com/video/VwZT40sRMzM/w-d-xo.html
@@necro_ware cheers. keep up the good work :)
Are all those capacitors for noise filtering?
Kind of, they are for the voltage stability and ripple filters.
How can we contact you to donate products?
Hi Marco! Thank you very much, usually you can use the email from the channel info page. But as you see in this video, I'm heavily in delay and currently I have quite a lot of material for the channel. As soon as I'm out of topics I'll let you know ;)
@@necro_ware Thanks! Should I send one anyways so the connection is established and then wait till you're free?
ICS should be easy to hack to 150MHz FSB. With 1.8V Mendocino will be stable, getting faster RAM is not issue nowadays (or configure CL2 modules as CL3) and only problem will became 100MHz AGP. Some wisely chosen GF4Ti should work.
In the late 90's my friend upgraded to a slot 1 system and I upgraded to a super S7 system. Good times.
Brings back memories
Hey guys does anyone know if there's any PS2 emulator that doesn't need sse2 and works on a Pentium 3 ?
and now that it works what happens?
As I said in the video, I'm going to build a Retro machine for Dos/Windows98 games and hardware test bench for the future projects.
@@necro_ware looks like you got it built.
Neues Video erscheint, Like, Play.
i found in trash treasure Gigabyte GA-BX2000, 440BX and SB Link. Easy repair missing only jumper for bios clear so MB now starting :D Will change some bad caps and letz go try Yamaha YMF724F-Y XG and sb link functions 😊
That DTK also had SB-link. You should totally do that! I've always found this ISA backward compatibility feature an interesting relic of the time. I have a Yamaha waveforce but have not got around to testing SB link functionality.
Ah, nice board. I'm trying to get it for reasonable price for like year, but no luck. I have only GA-6BXC, which is older, and how some flaws (overclocking through jumpers), also is powering on by itself, when you turn on power supply, which is pretty irritating. Want to change it for GA-BX2000, which is also newer board, and handles "BX-133" better.
Btw, that flaw with auto-powering on, is even mentioned in tomshardware review of first bunch of slot 1 motherboards. Just search of it by typing of name of motherboard and putting review. It can be seen, that it is first bunch of BX Slot1 motherboards from 1998, and I finally want some later one (I have only 4 early 1998 ones BX motherboards)
@@warrax111 same thing my older mobo Fujitsu Siemens D1107 vith BX440. When i turn on PSU motherboard will start for like two seconds. I think is not error or broken. Some motherboards just doing this. Dont know for what is this function but ye ... is little bit annoying 🤔
@@Dudulinek82 It's even dangerous, as sometimes, you don't have everything connected, because you don't expect it.
My favourite chipset of all time.
You also need to be careful about ESR and current ripple, not just capacitance. The VRM needs very low ESR especially on the output, that's why you often see 2 or 3 capacitors in parallel on each phase of the VRM - to lower the ESR. Look in the datasheet at impedance at 100 kHz and that's pretty much your ESR (at high frequencies ESR is pretty much the same value). In most cases, you need to match or get very close (let's say within 5-10%) of ESR and current ripple should also be equal or higher.
This motherboard you have powers the VRM with 5v from the power supply, so there's no point in using 16v rated capacitors. I would have suggested either 6.3v or 10v rated electrolytic capacitors, or solid (polymer) capacitors, in which case you can often use lower capacitance (for example 1000uF or 1200uF 6.3v instead of 1500uF 6.3v would be fine). ON the output side, you could use 4v rated solid/polymer capacitors, which should be easy to source.
Absolutely true.
I'm love 440BX, run it with Copermine is best computer before Core era :)
it's usually okay to replace electrolytic capacitors with bigger ones.
It depends, usually higher value capacitors have also higher ESR, but if you use high quality caps and keep that value in mind, then yes.