Motherboard Questions

Jun 15 04:39 UTC 1999

Alright, I've got some motherboard questions, hope some of you people 
can answer a few of them.

First of all, I have a 430VX motherboard that has a socket 7 place for 
the CPU.  I don't know if the motherboard is made by intel, or some 
clone company.  I don't know what company make the board.  It's a long 
story, but I have the manual for a motherboard with the part number 
"MP064" yet the part number on my motherboard in my computer is 
"MP071A".  (That's what's written on the the motherboard in white text.)

Anyway, the motherboard manual for the MP064 says the motherboard has 4 
ISA slots and 4 PCI slots.  However, the motherboard in my computer has 
4 ISA slots, 3 PCI slots, and one slot that I think is an AGP.  The 
slot in question is the contact density of a PCI slot, however it's 
slightly longer than a PCI slot, and shorter than an ISA slot.  This 
slot is brown in color, opposed to the PCI slots which are white.  Does 
this sound like an AGP slot to you?  Ok, here's another thing about the 
slot.  All my PCI and ISA slots are on the same side of the 
motherboard, near the back of my case, so I can easily plug things in, 
such as the monitor (into the PCI video card) the speakers into the ISA 
sound card, etc.  The thing about the slot (the one I think might be 
AGP) is that it is not not near the PCI and ISA slots.  The AGP slot is 
parallel to the other slots, however, it is on the OTHER SIDE of the 
motherboard, towards the front of the case, and it is really close to 
the CPU.  In addition, the AGP slot is located directly below a hard 
drive and a floppy disk drive.  I couldn't put a card in there if I 
wanted to--at least not with my current case.  Is it standard practice 
for AGP slots to be far away like this?

Now, I mentioned that my motherboard manual does not correspond to the 
motherboard I have.  The manual shows jumpers for things such as clock 
speed and multiplyer.  The jumpers in the manual don't match up to the 
motherboard.  Moreover, the motherboard jumpers seem to have three 
pins, and the thing you put on them to close them, well it's either 
positioned on the two pins on the right, or on the left.  I have no way 
of knowing what setings they are, or which jumpers are for which 
settings.  So, does anybody know a good resource for how I might 
identify exactly who made my motherboard, and where I might get a 
manual for it?  It would be very difficult for me to upgrade my 120mhz 
pentium without knowing what jumpers to change :)

OK, here's one more question, it has to do with an ISA sound card that 
is not PnP.  The sound card's model number is "1831" and it has the ESS 
ES1688 chip on it.  The card was made by some company--I think Audio 
Drive might be the name of it, not entirely sure.  Anyway, I got this 
sound card to work under slackware 3.6 by just typing "modprobe 
sound."  However, when I upgraded from the 2.0.36 kernel to a 2.2.x 
kernel, the sound card would no longer work after modprobe sound.  So I 
did a lot of messing around with compiling kernel modules, and using 
modprobe sb with various settings, including trying the same IO, DMA, 
IRQ settings that windows uses on the same machine.  Still, I couldn't 
get the sound card to work with a 2.2.x kernel.  I started from scratch 
with slackware 4.0, and ran into the same problems as with the slak3.6 
+ kernel 2.2.x.

Anyway, the troubles with the sound card get better.  Remember, it's a 
non PNP card.  The jumper settings for the IRQ of the card do not match 
up with what windows claims is the IRQ that it is using.  And, there 
are no jumpers on the sound card where you are supposed to specify the 
DMA.  The manual doesnt describe a setting for NO jumper in that 
area....  Aren't those two facts extremely strange? or am I missing 
something obvious?  I'm not a hardware expert, but it seems to me, if 
jumpers on a non pnp card say to use an IRQ, shouldn't it use that IRQ 
or give an error about some conflict if it couldn't use that IRQ?  Oh, 
one more thing, there are no IRQ, DMA, IO conflicts listed in the 
windows control panel applet "System."  Everything works great under 
windows, despite the IRQ and DMA confusion with the jumpers.  
Everything works under linux except my WinWriter printer (that's 
understandable) and the soundcard.  The soundcard just won't work with 
2.2.x kernels.  However, I heard of some people who got ES1688 cards to 
work in RH6 using the sndconfig utility.  I'm going to try to get that 
to work soon.  I downloaded RH6 and burned it to a CD, hopefully it 
will work.

Anyway, does anybody know of good motherboard manual resources?  And do 
you know what's up with the soundcard strangeness?  Any input would be 
greatly appreciated :)

response 6 of 44:

Jun 23 18:21 UTC 1999

Well, that's what my work PC has, a big slot close to the CPU for a fast
external cache.

response 8 of 44:

Jun 25 06:15 UTC 1999

HI, I run Linux on my laptop, and I was wondering if any of you guys, konw
what the best setup is for it.i.e. all the hardware specs., Ram sizes, Memory,
HDD, And , help me cos I'm clueless, what does the motherboard do for a
computer? cheers.

response 10 of 44:

Jun 25 19:59 UTC 1999

Um, Ronaldo, the motherboard is the main board, onto which plug the 
CPU (processor), the memory, and pretty much everything else.
Some motherboards have onboard sound & video, some don't.

response 12 of 44:

Jun 27 05:22 UTC 1999

I remember when motherboards had no real intelligence, just a bunch of
100 pin connectors, and a power connector that went to a mother of a
supply.

response 14 of 44:

Jun 27 21:34 UTC 1999

The slot is a cache slot as scott(?) said.  I think there are ess modules that
can be used under linux to make the sound work.  You might check the sound
howto.  I would expect the card to insist on whatever is jumpered.  Maybe the
jumpers set a default, but it really uses software settings.  That would
account for windows meing able to push it somewhere other than the jumpers
say.  As to upgrading, it may be hard to find a CPU that will work on that
board.  The new stuff uses different bus speeds and more importantly different
voltages than were supported at the time that board was made.  You'll be
limited in what CPU you can use, or you can upgrade the motherbaord as well
as the CPU.  This will, conveniently for the companies, require a RAM upgrade
as well.

As to 'stupid questions' the only ones that might be stupid would be the ones
you already have the answer to if you think.  If you don't know, how will you
know if you don't ask?  I remember a time when I knew pretty much nothing.
I just barely spoke English.  I used that little bit to ask questions that
built on each other to learn what I know today.

response 16 of 44:

Jul 2 04:27 UTC 1999

does anyone know about CompaqPCI stuff?

response 18 of 44:

Jul 2 20:29 UTC 1999

Well, there is quite a lot of info about SCSI.  What do you need to know?

response 20 of 44:

Aug 31 23:02 UTC 2005

Why is ryan, or others, scribbling these completely innocuous responses?

response 22 of 44:

Jul 25 22:24 UTC 2006

I just recently started looking for a mainboard that might
do for a light file server or application server.  I have
yet to decide on a chip, but it might be Sempron 64 or
perhaps Intel Core Solo or even Duo (I'll decide based on
cost, power and heat).  SATA or SAS would be a definite
advantage, as would a 1000baseT port and perhaps PCI-express
to add things that haven't been thought of yet.  I expect to
run NetBSD.  The board would probably be microATX, but full
ATX isn't out of the question.  It's a server, so I don't
care about graphics (MDA would suffice!)

What brands of mainboard have worked well for you?  Which do
you avoid?  What features do you look for in a server main-
board and why?

response 24 of 44:

Jul 26 06:29 UTC 2006

I was looking at Asus boards earlier today.  The ones I
looked at use nVidia chipsets and I really don't know enough
to distinguish them.  I'll google for the Intel boards,
thanks.