I used a Pc Chips M810LR in the early 2000s. it was a Sis730 based mATX socket A with everything integrated. It sucked. i also had one with a Duron cpu soldered directly to the motherboard that had it's BIOS modified to say Pro1200+ instead of AMD Duron 800...
The latest PCChips board I've seen is a Slot 1 board with an SiS chipset. Maybe they did some other later, but I've never found a newer one. Btw I'm from france, so it's possible that I will find some one day. Except for that latest one, my three other Pcchips boards are green and not brown. Two are socket 3 boards, but the latest one is a socket 7 board with real intel chipset. It doesn't have cache, but it features a COAST connector which is neat. Once it's populated, I guess it's not really worse than a "normal" board
I remember having a PC chips board around the year 2000 with RAM soldered directly to it, a real pain in the ass when it started giving memory problems.
Ah, this brings back memories, not all of them good :P It was the basis of my first PC back when i went to uni in 1998. I'm hazy on a lot of the details, but it was PC-CHIPS, SIS chipset and ran a k6-2 333mhz It was quite spectacularly bad, but one offshoot of that was i learnt a lot of PC-repair from it, which booted my interest in computers from normal user to techy enthusiast/IT tech support. So whilst it's bad in a way, i got some good from that. Some things that came to mind initially on being reminded of that board: -The onboard SIS 8MB chipset GPU was so bad that running something like quake2 (possibly this, or something similar) in accelerated mode was both much slower and horrifically lower image quality than pure CPU rendering. This board was a living example of the 'graphics decelerator' meme ;) -No AGP slot, i eventually ended up with a rather absurd setup of a 32MB GPU (S3 savage4) running from a PCI slot. -Mixing both 2x Dimms and 2x Simms on a single board was something that actually worked, amazingly.
I used several Socket A PCChips-branded boards for builds around 2005. These all had a neat red PCB. I think it was around 2006 or 2007 that ECS retired the PCChips brand. My last PC Chips purchase was around 2008 to repair an old Socket A machine.
I have a couple of PC Chips boards: 1. 486 board with the dodgy fake cache chips 2. VX pro this was board new and was my first 5x86 class processor (IBM 6x86L PR 200) This also had the fake fast write cache chips. 3. Also have a ECS K7SA Socket A Athlon board this was a decent cheap SIS based board(Owned from new) The VX pro is currently being used as as DOS games machine but also has a mixture of drives for transferring files to other format CD, 3.5" FDD , 5 1/4" 1.2MB FDD etc.
I've recently become the owner of two PC Chips motherboards after my aunt bought a storage shed full of PC stuff. She gave all the 'vintage' hardware to me. Both seem to be ok, though definitely low quality. The socket 7 claims to have flash BIOS but is clearly not the case after I pulled off the Award sticker to reveal a blank BIOS chip. This was after trying to flash new BIOS to it and getting "Failed to erase" errors. The boards are also significantly thinner than other boards of the same period. I was genuinely afraid I was going to snap the Socket 3 board when inserting ISA and VLB cards.
PCCHIPS was very popular here in Brazil during Socket 7 and Super Socket 7 days. If you had a k6-II you almost certainly had one of those crappy motherboards. Some time ago I was thinking about building a retro gaming PC with a K6-III processor however it´s very hard to find a suitable motherboard since obviously none of those PCCHIPS junky mobos are working anymore and a good brand like MSI, ASUS or GIGABYTE are hard to find. ECS were also very popular during AM2 days, with nvidia chipsets. I had 2 of those boards that after 2 years of work, the CPU cooler fell off because the plastic retention bracket in the motherboard broke. Fortunately today the low end market is dominated by entry level boards from good brands like GIGABYTE and MSI, wich are very reliable.
I have one of their s370 based MBs with a VIA Apollo Pro chipset. I gave it a P-III 933MHz, and it only runs stable at half the clock (done by halving the FSB clock). It was even worse when I first got it, as one of the filter capacitors was ripped out by human hand, which lead to abysmal stability and increased pickiness with PSUs. Soldering a new cap sorta helped.
Sorry to keep rambling but... on the cheezy TXPro and HXPro chipsets of the era. Don't automatically discount those boards if you happen to find/have one nowdays - yes they were being deceitful banking on Intel chipset names, and switching in Ali and VIA chipsets on you... but hear me out here. If the Socket 7 board you have supports MMX (split voltage processors = super 7) AND... AND gives you FSB (front side bus) speeds over 66. Like... 75 or even 83... be happy! The crappy timings and slow performance (conservative timings) that the "off brand" chipsets were normally set at, where they sucked against Intel at 60 and 66FSB (VS. Intel TX and HX) ALSO let you actually RUN 75 and 83 fsb. And that my friends, was awesome. Take a later K6-2 3D (chomper core, generally 350mhz+) consider this- for backward comparability, later CTX (chomper K6-2 core) K6-2 chips interpreted the "x2" multiplier as "x6" If your hard drives could take it (Samsung was good) 83x6=500. Sensitive hard drives and/or IO controller? 75x6=450. What I'm saying is those same crappy timings help you run higher FSB if you can. Last yea... these boards *might* be hidden gems now, but without the insane "hindsight" at the time many of those systems sucked vs their "genuine" Intel part they were trying to imitate when they were sold. I dunno, again... pcchips/ECS it's soooooo infurating because they didn't really have to sell themselves sooooo short and crappy. They had some winners, but.... they chased that bottom dollar so freaking hard. I guess it worked, since ECS is still around to this day, but... there is a moral here, but I don't think I like it lol.
My M520 isn't that copper color, it's green and I'm sure it was produced in 1997, but it is under Pine branding. Soldering the fake chips might have been cheaper, because using glue or adding stickers may have added an extra stage into production, slowing things down, I get the impression PC Chips would want to ship their boards out quickly in the highest numbers possible. In cheaper systems I've always gravitated towards ECS as I've never had one really let me down, as far as cheap boards go they're generally quite good. They were always abundant here anyway due to Granville and their associates swearing by them and PC Chips was popular with even cheaper or smaller builders as well as appearing to do well with enthusiasts on a budget.
I once had an PCChips M810 motherbord with a Duron 750 soldered straight through the board. No socket. The board was dead so I desoldered it and it worked on another one. The heatsink was glued on the CPU and held with screw on the bracket. Now I have four PCChips M741LMRT (SiS 620) motherboards, with a socket 370 and slot 1 combo, an M571LMR (TX Pro/SiS 5598) and and M710 intel 440LX. They're easy to spot because they often have an all in one package at a time when it was not as common to have video, audio, USB or even LAN on board. There's also many stickers like the "Burn-In 24 Hours" you've mentionned, or the "Y2K" things and such. They were really the cheapest way to get a computer. I've seen socket 775 PCChips motherboards as well.
I used to have a Synthax motherboard with an AMD Duron 900Mhz which actually ran around @ 1.12 GHz. Some programs could not be ran because missing instruction extensions. it would say "instruction not supported".
Hi SuperDuty455, is there anyway you could share the BIOS of your M741LMRT on the Internet. My board is bricked and I can't find a bios for this board anywhere. I would greatly appreciate it and I'm sure others would too!
@@jangelelcangry I had this too buddy - Syntax socket a mobo which I think had a KT266A chipset so supported 133FSB Athlon t-bird, XP Palomino and possibly T'bred A & B and obviously Duron Applebred as well due to same nm process, just less L2 cache but easy to re-enable it from 64kb to 256kb l2 cache as most of the Duron 1600 and 1800 applebreds, maybe a 1400 too were basically 'binned xp's' - AMD probably test 30 CPU's and if one fails a burn in test over 24 hours of 100% CPU use then the 30 processors were downgraded to Durons, obviously at a lower default clock speed and a quarter of the l2 cache compared to the athlon xp. Simply joining two points on the surface of an applebred enabled me to enable 'full' l2 on my 1600 duron applebred about 15 years ago and along with the full l2 cache, I managed to clock it to over 2300MHz 24/7 100% stable (folding@home) after prime95, orthos etc stability testing.
I'll never be 100% sure but I'm pretty sure my first motherboard was a PCChips M912 w/ real cache (indeed, some of these fake cache scams go that far back). I was like 11 or 12 when I picked it out of some catalog and my dad ordered it for me (I spent my saved allowance on it...it was like $100-150 shipped in 1995). It came with a Cyrix DX2 80Mhz CPU (that means 40Mhz bus!) and the performance blew my young mind compared to the 386's (and slower) I was used to. It made DOOM, Descent, and ROTT playable, so as far as I was concerned, it was the best money I ever spent even if it did have fake cache :) My next motherboard was a Soyo 5EHM (for Super Socket 7) then an ASUS A7V133 (for Socket A & breaking the 1ghz barrier).
what always drove me nuts with pcchips/ECS is they actually had some awesome (AND CHEAP) mobos in the super socket 7 and even socket A era (K7S5A) but stupid things like ... omitting heatsinks on chipsets, or using no/horrible thermal interfaces on heatsinks caused their boards to fubar themselves. The joke was they had some solid boards DESPITE themselves, because if you went though and actually added heatsinks to chipsets/scraped off the bubble gum garbage TIM and used a decent thermal paste on the chipsets they had solid boards - but that exactly was the thing. A normal buyer shouldn't have to do that stuff. What was really sad, is many of their boards with voltage and BIOS mods were really awesome cheap performers. But.... I dunno. They really could have been a contender, but by scraping that last few cents they screwed their reputation.
mysterious add on pcb components that only work after mergers decades later sounds like a feature film about military tech monopolies disguised as competing small companies among each other
I have a M912 - actually a decent VLB board with an operational L2 circuit ... was delivered without or with fake cache quite often tho from what I heard.
Wow. Anyways, I was looking at an online store a year or so ago, and wanted to buy an ECS mainboard, but I can now see why some people I talked to online said to not buy one of those boards. Also, the very first PC I used was one of 2 identical custom built PCs we used to have that had a Pentium 3, Windows 98 SE and a "Tomato" mainboard. I wonder if "Tomato" was one of the PC Chips brands...
The "Tomato" mainboard you had sounds like a socket a (462) M810LMR and the official CPU support was from the earliest skt a Duron to Athlon XP's. I had the 7.1 and I think it only had official support for 133FSB Athlon Thunderbirds & Palomino but Thorougbred A & B 133FSB Athlon XP's compatibility is something I'm not 100% sure about but I don't think any M810's officially supported T'bred XP's - though the board with the 'soldered on' CPU might have been a Duron based on XP T'breds - just with 64kb L2 cache rather than 256kb. I re-enabled full L2 cache on a Duron 1600 applebred just by using a hb pencil to join two points on the surface of the CPU and then the processor was recognised as an "AMD Unknown @ 1600MHz" or such like lol
@@benrogersdevon No, the PC had a Pentium 3, so it was likely an Intel socket 370 board. It also had a connector for a cable that terminated in a single red LED. The box was actually just branded "TOMATO MAINBOARD". I remember I also saw a box for a "Raffles" mainboard, and yes, the box was actually branded "Raffles MAINBOARD". I do have a photo of that as I saw the box in the shopfront window display of an abandoned computer shop.
I used an M810LR to build my first PC. AT 15 I thought I was a really bad PC builder after 3 of the board died on me from straight out of the box. Thanks to your video I realised these were just s**** boards and I've now built two PC's without fail!
I ran a trial with PC chips boards in budget Socket A builds probably around 2003? To be honest they didn't cause me any problems! I later started using budget Asus boards in the budget builds (a7v8x-x mostly) and been using Asus ever since.
My first computer had a PC Chips "Elpina" M577 board, with a rebranded Via MVP3 chipset , paired with an AMD K6-2 333 Mhz (because I couldn't afford the 350 Mhz one) ... I chose it based on a popular local computer magazine review and benchmark, it was the best performance for price out of about 30 reviewed motherboards for a few months around that time. I was aware at that time of fake cache chips but by this time, they stopped doing it, and the reviewer said the board was fine, so I went with it. It was great motherboard and it was a great first computer.
That seems kind of unfortunate. The 350 would have had 100 MHz RAM (which might have increased cost I guess but may have had come down in price by then?). The 333 would only have used 66 MHz FSB. Since the cache is also on the motherboard a higher FSB should also reduce cache latency if it isn’t forced to add more wait states.
I had an Amptron PM8700 once and it was an OK board. Sometimes when you played music files on a system using this board the audio became high pitched. It seemed to be the most reliable when used with 50FSB and 60FSB CPUS like the Pentium 75MHz and Pentium 120MHz. I remember it hanging briefly when I was installing some games on the system when it had a 66FSB Pentium chip. These are strange buggy boards. But mine was far from the worst. I also used to own a pcchips m810lr-h and I had no end of trouble with it. Every mobo issue in the book affected it. Picky with ram, bus speeds won't stay at their rated speeds, hardware picky, and stuff. The only good thing about the board is that it was a pretty candy apple red color and had an AGP slot.
My old 486 had A PC Chips M912 v1.7 with actual L2 cache sockets, with the Award "Lawsuit" BIOS (non-Y2K). That was a great board back in the day (which was under the brand known as Hseng Tech.), and I have a PC Chips Socket 754 (Athlon 64) red motherboard that works really well with AMI BIOS. The con of the board is shitty SATA controller that is only IDE mode, so I installed my VIA VT6421A SATA PCI card that uses AHCI (faster and more superior than the SiS SATA IDE Mode controller)
Boards I avoided like the plague in the late 90's early 2000's, ECS, Shuttle and PC Chips. Good for a tight budget but for any reasonable performance they were useless.
with the cache stick the M919 isn't a half bad board. I have a Cyrix 120mhz 5x86 in mine and its a speed demon. It does have its annoying quirks such as RAM. It supports EDO but if you actually use EDO the L2 cache gets disabled. mine is the version with fake cache and on post it even says something like "cache enabled" to further try and trick you.
I had a PC Chips motherboard 16 years ago, and it couldn't install Windows XP because of a flaw it had. Yeah, sounds impossible, but for some reason an OS couldn't be installed because of a motherboard. I googled it years later, because my city didn't have internet for normal people back then, it was very expensive. My experience with them was very frustrating, I had to use Windows 98 for 3 years more because of it, PC parts were terribly expensive back then. Now I only buy Asus or Gigabyte, they usually will have more features than I anticipate instead of less. It's a shame they didn't suffer enough for their sins.
i got a pc chips Motherboard, it's a K7 FSB266 Socket A 462 pin with VIA KT266A and VT8235 chipsets and uses DDR PC2100/PC1600, it was bran new in box too. i got it for 10$ at savers, so far it working well as a windows 98 machine using a AMD Duron 740Mhz and 512MB of ram with a Radeon 9200 128MB, as my Abit-TH7RAID Socket 423 Pentium 4 1.70 GHz 400 MHz 256KB with PC800-40 Rambus Ram was stuttering when playing games but the pc chips runs better witch it weird cause the Duron is clocked slower, but now the video card seems the be a bottleneck. i was using a Radeon x700 pro but it wont work in the pc chips Motherboard sadly.
I have a couple PC Chips P47G socket 775 boards. So is it the same company? According to a couple RU-vid videos, there were several models that came after the P47G. I've managed to hack the BIOS on both of mine to enable Core 2 Quad "S" series CPUs (65W) rather than the supported E8600 Core 2 Duo and they run great.
PC-Chips was HUGE here in Brazil, due to the low price/integrated solution with audio/video/lan/dial-up modem. M537, M598, M748, M810 amongst other models. Even my first PC had one of those (M577), which I've later found out someone released a hacked version of its bios, in order to support K6-3 and K6-2+ I got a M919 a while back, but it's the green PCB version. Is it rare?
I don't ever see an M919 for sale on ebay here in the states, or even listing that show up from worldwide listings. From a stand point of rare, it is hard to say because it seems from the comments there are a few people that have this board, I guess those that have it don't dare sell it :) As far as the green version is concerned, I think it might be a tad bit rarer, but I think more interesting with more historical and collector value due to the fake cache modules being present. Good board though, I find them to be a great performing board and will support any 486 processor ever made, with both VLB and PCI on the board. A lot of other UMC8886 based 486 boards only have PCI and ISA on them.
Had a PC Chips and an Elite Group motherboards back in the day. Both were slow and garbage. The early days of Win98 and the Pentium 3. I remember it used to take 24 hours to encode a movie to cd.
I have a pcchips p21g lga775 motherboard, the copyright date on the bios said that it was from 2005 even though it uses ddr1 so mine must be one of the last mobos they made before merging with ECS...
I have one of these late model socket 3 motherboards, but I can't get an operating system on it because the floppy drive controller doesn't work. Also with the Amptron DX9700 or PCChips more RAM is not better unlike with your Dual Pentium Pro System that support up to 1 GB because even though it can support up to 256 MB anything above 64 MB ties up all the DMA channels preventing use of Floppy Drives or other DMA devices you intend to use. Also unfortunately, none of these older 486 or socket 3 motherboards support booting from CD-ROM, so good luck getting WIndows XP or 2000 installed on it even though it would be slow and if you want to see it in action check out hardware cops videos.
Amptron was another name PC Chips sold mobo's under at about the era you're talking about. Perhaps a 810lmr SiS730 if it had up to 64mb onboard VGA (LOL) and two DIMM slots (168 pin SD RAM) as well as socket a for Duron and Athlons plus Athlon XP's depending on the exact revision of mobo and sometimes you could get lucky and a rev 5 would run an athlon xp 133fsb chip but it was not "officially" supported. Rev. 7.1 supported 133fsb tbirds, xp pallys but not sure about xp tbred a/b due to different manufacturing / fabrication process.
I hated cache on a stick. What was the size again 128 / 256? I can't remember. Also i had a motherboard with a cyrix pr233 and tx pro chipset. The only problem I ever had with it. One of the com ports died.
I still cringe when I hear PC Chips. I dealt with around 100 of them(socket 7) in the early 2000s at a job. I don't know how many hours I spent with random PC Chips motherboards trying to get bios flashed it support K6-2 chips in the 400-450MHz range. I almost always got them to work at 450MHz(usually with a 6x multiplier on a 75MHz bus) but it sucked trying to track down a bios for one.
Excuse me sir. Can I ask where's the location of ROM in the motherboard? And the types of ROM, PROM, EPROM AND EEPROM. If it possble that all these types are in one in the motherboard?
There are a bunch of aliases for PCChips/ECS/Elitegroup including but not limited to Alton, Amptron, Atrend, Matsonic, Pine, XFX (one of the most popular today) and my personal favorite, Fugu Tech (aptly named after the blowfish delicacy which can kill you if it's not prepared properly). WaybackTECH was way too easy on them in this video :)
many OEMs used them, Especially the ones with VIA P4M800(Pro) Chipsets for 775 based systems with Pentium 4 / D / Celeron D. Often these Boards are not branded as ECS, but fully indentical (I have one from Fujitsu, its an (ECS) P4M800PRO - M rev. 1.0, which was fully compatible with the ECS bios. I risked flashing the bios and it worked, now i can overclock it :)). Mine only had a few Ports / RAM slots not soldered on the board, and the board had another color. But the layout and the chips were the same
I've seen ECS boards in Gateway and eMachines. both were Geforce 6100 based. I purchased a KA3-MVP Extreme based on the Radeon Xpress 3200. All three ECS Boards died within a year of each other, they were all AM2 sockets, & all 3 boards were approaching 8 years old. I "considered" myself a backer of ECS. I really blame with 6100 chipset and it's ball grid array.. I dread the day when this ECS GeForce6100SM-M2 kicks the bucket. I have a 2x P3 Laptops, 2x Celeron boards, and 3x Socket A board still kicking it along with a Toshiba 486 DX2 50Mhz laptop. The old saying does apply, they don't make them like the used to...
I just bought a brand new M811 motherboard, anybody know when they last were produced? I'm afraid the caps might have gone bad after a long time in storage.
Look for 10 or so digit numbers printed on stickers on the board. Very often off the last 4 digits the first two are year, ie. 17 for 2017, and the latter two are the week of that year.
If it's a P47G, I have a modified BIOS to run 65W Core 2 Quads on it. Q8200S, Q9400S, Q9550S, etc. Runs just as good as a standard C2Q variant, just cooler.
Good Video. I have one PCChips M919 Board with the fake chips in the right upper corner. But I don´t have the right Cache Stick. Can you please make a video about the drawbacks when the cache misses?
I've done some benchmarking of these M919 boards, with and without the cache module installed and there is very little difference in performance. It is there, so the cache module is indeed being used, but it's not as big as it would seem like it would be. Definitely don't get rid of that board unless you really need the money, they will fetch a very handsome price on ebay for one, but the fake cache version is probably the most rare and collectable version. Probably would never find another one if you sold it.
I have still my first PC's PC CHIPS Utron UT801x "VX pro-II" M559 Motherboard. Too bad it is a crap. The performance was terrible. In middle-late 90s computers were expensive and they aged terribly year by year.
i have a really funny board by pcchips, it's an M558, it has possibly the weirdest and worst socket 7 chipset ever, a utron piece of garbage, relabeled "VX Pro II". no dma support, no sdram, no ps/2 mouse support, fake usb as far as i can tell (cant enable it in any way...), very very bad bioses (with some versions my pci ide controller doesnt boot, with others floppy doesnt work, some actually have the usb enable option but it doesnt actually work, etc. but hey they do have ami winbios!!!), and worst of all proabably the worst memory performance i've ever seen in a socket 7 board. like i have so much better boards but i'm completely drawn to this piece of crap... i absolutely love how bad it is
Wow. Anyways, I was looking at an online store a year or so ago, and wanted to buy an ECS mainboard, but I can now see why some people I talked to online said to not buy one of those boards. Also, the very first PC I used was one of 2 identical custom built PCs we used to have that had a Pentium 3, Windows 98 SE and a "Tomato" mainboard. I wonder if "Tomato" was one of the PC Chips brands...
I can't fault my old ECS K7SA board it was in my computer for 2 years was lent to a friend for a year or so and was in one of my brothers PC's until PC was upgraded. The board is still in its original box with a Athlon XP CPU in it. The issue with capacitors hit a lot of board manufactures I have seen Intel boards with dodgy Capacitors there was an issue around the P4 era.
