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Yet another Elpnia PCChips AT board.

Posted: Sat Oct 27, 2007 6:42 am
by bizzybody
This one has 3 ISA, 4 PCI with one shared, 4 72pin SIMM, 2 DIMM, 430VX chipset, AT power only, Houston Tech clock/CMOS/battery module in a socket(!) between SIMMs and power connectors.

The floppy, IDE and parallel ports are between the SIMMs and PCI slots. The CPU is way down in the corner by the ISA slots with two power supply heatsinks- one on each outer edge of the CPU socket.

It has four chips of two different types in the L2 cache area and an set of holes for a COAST slot that's not installed.

There's a pair of serial port headers, PS/2 keyboard header by the AT board port and I suppose that's a PS/2 mouse header by the serial ports.

It has V1.3 printed by the keyboard connector and Elpina as part of the etching on the bottom. The serial number label on the outside ISA slot is date-checked March 1997.

My SOYO PCI POST card lights up FF with all voltages good, most likely the IBM 6x86 PR200 is dead. (Whee, big loss there.) I have a K6-2 300 occupying the socket of an Amptron/PCChips M571 V3.2A, but the box would likely be better served by dropping that whole board into it.

In addition to finding a manual and BIOS (if it's flashable) for the Elpina, I'd like to find out if this is one of those $%&*! boards with the DIMM voltage jumpers marked backwards. I fried a perfectly good 16 meg DIMM on a no-name PCChips board some years ago because of that.

P.S. I wish someone would put the PCChips Lottery back online, with several mirrors and new updates. I used that site sooooo much as a PC tech in the late 90's!

Posted: Sat Oct 27, 2007 1:55 pm
by KachiWachi
M520?

Posted: Sat Oct 27, 2007 2:21 pm
by bizzybody
Close to it. It appears to be the M535, without the COAST slot installed.

http://motherboards.mbarron.net/models/pcchips/m535.htm

Posted: Fri Nov 02, 2007 11:40 am
by edwin
How much cache is onboard? 512kbyte perhaps? If so you don't need the coast slot.

Posted: Fri Nov 02, 2007 12:18 pm
by bizzybody
Beats me. I've had it hooked up on the bench to flash a Unicore BIOS I found, didn't look to see what it said it has for cache. That BIOS is supposed to up the max hard drive size, dunno what to.

Fastest CPU it can run is 75x3 and the lowest Vcore is 2.5 so that lets out running even a K6-2 450 AHX with its 2.4 Vcore with the multiplier set to 2x75 (which of course with that CPU gets 6x multiplier). Perhaps with a really large heatsink and PC100...

Has an IBM 6x86 150 in it. Jumpers were wrong and it wouldn't POST, set them to what should be correct and it's running at 200 Mhz. Go figure. ;)

Posted: Fri Nov 02, 2007 12:27 pm
by edwin
Are you sure it's not saying PR200+ instead of 200MHz? That would make sense to me...

Posted: Fri Nov 02, 2007 1:49 pm
by KachiWachi
Oops.

I missed the 2 DIMM slots part. :oops:

Posted: Sat Nov 03, 2007 8:53 am
by bizzybody
It's 200Mhz. That CPU was shortly before they started the PR sillyness. The printing on the chip says 150Mhz, no PR number.

I won't be using the board for anything. I'd like to find someone who likes old stuff like this to give it (and a somewhat older Biostar with a K5) to.

Posted: Sat Nov 03, 2007 4:55 pm
by KachiWachi
@ "four chips" -

Two of these are the Chipset data path units.

The other two *could* be fake cache chips.

Thanks.

Posted: Sun Nov 04, 2007 7:41 am
by bizzybody
Not fakes.

UT6164C32Q-6 series- Access time: 6 ns, 64 Kx 32 Bit synchronous pipelined burst CMOS SRAM in 100-pin TQFP package.

A friend of mine did end up with one of the 486 PCI/VLB boards with fake cache, but it came with a real COAST module.

I dug out my ISA POST card and funny thing, the board sends the data on port 80 on the ISA bus only. My Soyo PCI POST card can only use port 80, but my ISA one can use 80 and some others.