My endless confusion with a i440BX Pentium II mainboard. 

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.

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.

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?

@@jeremyandrews3292 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 :)

Is already in production ;)

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!

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.

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 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.

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...

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 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

Similar history with latest asus 440 bx boards

Haha ;)

May be the IDE controller is defective. I'd suggest to try a PCI IDE controller and see if it works.

Thank you, just search for EEPROM and FlashROM. You also can find some info here for example: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-bQM4e7AwI0U.html

Your wish shall come true, look at the latest video on my channel, which I released a second ago ;)

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).

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))))

Yeah, I mentioned it in the notes for this board.

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.

Could be one of the transistors in the voltage regulating circuit. That is a common issue as well.

That's the point :)

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!)

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.

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.

The 440bx was actually not that bad, it was more the later Athlon systems, which were badly affected by the capacitors plague. To be honest, behind the scene I checked the removed caps from this board and they were all in very good condition. Still perfect capacity and low ESR, even the scratched ones turned out to be absolutely ok. Still, I don't regret replacing them.

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.

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.

Kind of, they are for the voltage stability and ripple filters.

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 🤔

@@hajcus22 It's even dangerous, as sometimes, you don't have everything connected, because you don't expect 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.

Уже в работе.

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

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.

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?

Я от нынешней ситуации начал сходить с ума и должен был что-то сделать, что меня хотя бы краткосрочно от происходящего ада отвлечёт. Я помогаю людям которые бегут от того что дед полоумный натворил, но лучше не становится так как всем помочь не могу и стыд за себя и за тех, кого людьми считал, душу жрёт....

@@necro_ware я устроился на работу и в спортзал хожу.

@@necro_ware Да, от Бидона можно просто прифигеть. Да и Шольц походу ещё хуже.

@@denyda1754 ну вот, а как же "прощай навсегда"? Ну зачем так обнадёживать? Только чтобы потом прийти и язвительный комментарчик в линию госпропаганде оставить? Не хорошо так, обещания надо выполнять.

@@necro_ware Да я мимо проходил. Вчера с Украины приехал на недельный отдых. Нациков там мочим. Думаю к зиме наведём порядок там. Если надо у вас навести порядок, обращайся, поможем. П.С. Забыл написать. Ты же говорил, что пока идёт операция, новых видео не будет. Ай, как не хорошо врать. П.С.С. Смотрю шизанулся на экологии. Я вас зелёных не понимаю. Орёте о экологии, но при этом пользуетесь супер неэкологичными вещами (например, батареи в телефоне, оооооочень не экологичны)