Great work! I wished I would have had the tools and utilities you used in this video back in the day! My sister's ex husband had a small Compaq PC with this exact board in it when they first got together many years ago. I remember working on that machine and remembering the system behavior with the Compaq BIOS was fussy (to say the least!) The lack of an AGP slot and the lousy onboard video wasn't so hot either. Ultimately I think the PSU died rather spectacularly in the machine so it ended up getting tossed at some point.
Amazing stuff. I have a Compaq Pentium III board, and other than the branding which I don't care for (I'd like to 'genericise' it), it'a a solid board. Very cool what you've managed.
Really enjoyed your video! A friend of mine is currently clearing a warehouse full of computers of this era, I took a lot of parts home to make my own retro computer over the next weeks. Do you know of any socket 7 CPUs worth saving? There was a box with hundreds of socket 7 CPUs that would otherwise go to gold recovery. Let me know if I should save anything!
This is classy work. I appreciate your effort in preparing and sharing your diagnosis and solutions. A work worthy of all thanks. I will save this work in my favorites list. God bless you Free Palestine ✊✌️
Thank you! I have a PCI Geforce 2MX card from a computer of mine that was cooked from a cheapo Chinese PSU many years ago. I want to use it in my old Socket 7 motherboard but if it is bad I don't want to kill this DFI motherboard. Any tips on what to test on the PCI card before inserting it? Shorts to ground?
Hi , if you manage to fix the irq problem could you please share the bios file? I have the same motherboard and i would love to try it running at 133 fsb, but I have 0 experience with making or modifying bios files
@@scrap_computing I found some wpcredit tweaks that really improve performance. I went from 18 to 22.5 fps in Unrealtournament Utbench demo by applying them This is from K6plus forums. SiS530 @133MHz (GA-5SMM/Soyo 5SSM) setup, benching, tweaking Thread, page 14. Posted by Donpedro 50: bit 6 set to 1 (mem single write cycle) or 0 in w2k 52: bit 7 set to 0 (dram time delay set to 0) 52: bit 6 set to 1 (single read allocation) 52: bit 4 set to 1 (sync cpu-dram mode) 55: bit 2 set to 0 (disable res bit for data read dram) 56: bit 7..6 set to 11 (6 clocks) 58: bit 7..6 set to 00 (2 clocks) 58: bit 5..4 setting from 01 to 00 crashes (from 3 clocks to 2 clocks) !!!! never succeeded once here 5D: bit 4 set to 1 (dram write retire rate = x-1-1-1) 5D: bit 3 set to 0 (cas latency = 2 clocks) --> It works for Donpedro but not for me.
I experimented with it a bit more, and I have a version that seems to work kind of OK. The only thing that is not working is the on-board USB, which even though it does work in the bios and does get recognized as a SiS 7001 device by windows (with no errors), it just doesn't detect any devices. Let me know if you would like to try it out on your board.
@@scrap_computingOf course! I have the board lying around for now, but for i would love to push it to the limit , i just aquired 2 k6-2+ 570 ACZ processors that would be perfect candidates for experimentation
i don't think so, the 530/620 runs at 40mhz, it's good for msdos games and 3D software mode games, this computer would benefit more from a K6-3 at 500 - 550mhz upgrade
After some further testing it seems that not all devices are working correctly. So the IRQ routing table must still be wrong.
Damn that "Your sound card works perfectly" from Warcraft brings back memories.
What an interesting video! That BIOS work was quite a feat.
Great work! I wished I would have had the tools and utilities you used in this video back in the day!
My sister's ex husband had a small Compaq PC with this exact board in it when they first got together many years ago. I remember working on that machine and remembering the system behavior with the Compaq BIOS was fussy (to say the least!) The lack of an AGP slot and the lousy onboard video wasn't so hot either. Ultimately I think the PSU died rather spectacularly in the machine so it ended up getting tossed at some point.
This was instructive. You achieved more than expected :)
Amazing stuff. I have a Compaq Pentium III board, and other than the branding which I don't care for (I'd like to 'genericise' it), it'a a solid board. Very cool what you've managed.
Never thought I'd see the day when Kermit the Frog would do tech videos.
Great stuff! Quite enjoying these videos.
excellent deep dive
Really enjoyed your video! A friend of mine is currently clearing a warehouse full of computers of this era, I took a lot of parts home to make my own retro computer over the next weeks. Do you know of any socket 7 CPUs worth saving? There was a box with hundreds of socket 7 CPUs that would otherwise go to gold recovery. Let me know if I should save anything!
My first PC was an Aptiva with this chipset and a very similar main board
Did you use some kind of memory manager like HIMEM/EMM386/QEMM? The cache/memory tests won't run if you have the memory manager in CONFIG.SYS.
This is classy work. I appreciate your effort in preparing and sharing your diagnosis and solutions. A work worthy of all thanks. I will save this work in my favorites list.
God bless you
Free Palestine ✊✌️
You brave running K6-2's with out a fan, I burned a bunch of them out from overheating.
I am using a fan when running benchmarks. K6-2s get quite hot after a few minutes.
Thank you! I have a PCI Geforce 2MX card from a computer of mine that was cooked from a cheapo Chinese PSU many years ago. I want to use it in my old Socket 7 motherboard but if it is bad I don't want to kill this DFI motherboard. Any tips on what to test on the PCI card before inserting it? Shorts to ground?
I guess you could try checking if there is a short between the 5V and GND pins. Also try to use a PSU with short-circuit protection.
Hi , if you manage to fix the irq problem could you please share the bios file? I have the same motherboard and i would love to try it running at 133 fsb, but I have 0 experience with making or modifying bios files
Sure, if I manage to fix it properly I will let you know.
@@scrap_computing I found some wpcredit tweaks that really improve performance. I went from 18 to 22.5 fps in Unrealtournament Utbench demo by applying them
This is from K6plus forums. SiS530 @133MHz (GA-5SMM/Soyo 5SSM) setup, benching, tweaking Thread, page 14. Posted by Donpedro
50: bit 6 set to 1 (mem single write cycle) or 0 in w2k
52: bit 7 set to 0 (dram time delay set to 0)
52: bit 6 set to 1 (single read allocation)
52: bit 4 set to 1 (sync cpu-dram mode)
55: bit 2 set to 0 (disable res bit for data read dram)
56: bit 7..6 set to 11 (6 clocks)
58: bit 7..6 set to 00 (2 clocks)
58: bit 5..4 setting from 01 to 00 crashes (from 3 clocks to 2 clocks) !!!! never succeeded once here
5D: bit 4 set to 1 (dram write retire rate = x-1-1-1)
5D: bit 3 set to 0 (cas latency = 2 clocks) --> It works for Donpedro but not for me.
@@arturoacevedo9749 Cool, I will check it out! Thanks for sharing!
I experimented with it a bit more, and I have a version that seems to work kind of OK. The only thing that is not working is the on-board USB, which even though it does work in the bios and does get recognized as a SiS 7001 device by windows (with no errors), it just doesn't detect any devices. Let me know if you would like to try it out on your board.
@@scrap_computingOf course! I have the board lying around for now, but for i would love to push it to the limit , i just aquired 2 k6-2+ 570 ACZ processors that would be perfect candidates for experimentation
I have this motherboard but sadly it is dead. -.- Great work though!
Wow 530 integrated graphics was really bad. The 630 and 730 aren't too bad and can be used for light gaming.
Yeah the 530 was only good for 2D.
Amazing hacks. 👏
Would repopulating the video RAM improve the IGP perfornance.
i don't think so, the 530/620 runs at 40mhz, it's good for msdos games and 3D software mode games,
this computer would benefit more from a K6-3 at 500 - 550mhz upgrade
Yeah I don't think it would make any huge difference, the IGP is really weak. Even if it became twice as fast, it would still be really slow.