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Research on AM3+ board and chipsets: Resume


ragnargd

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@ruthan  I would need to know specifically what happened when you tried to use the 7600.

  I have very bad memory, its about 5 years. Im not sure, maybe it not even posted, no picture after boot at all.. or freeze during Win9x boot. Only thing im sure that it was Gigabyte card with passive cooler, probably with less that 512 MB.

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> > > PCI-E cards work fine under 98SE
> >
> > Based on what I'm reading here about video cards, I just bought these off e-bay:
> > BFG Tech GeForce 7950GT DirectX 9 256MB PCI Express x16 ($30)
> > BFG Tech GeForce 7900GS DirectX 9 256MB PCI Express x16 ($28)
> > Will use one or the other on an Asrock 4-Core DUAL-VSTA
>
> I had this board and i have failed to make Geforce 7600 PCI-E running

Nice to find that out now.

> PCI-E cards work fine under 98SE

Tell me - what motherboard with PCIe has decent win-98 driver support?

 

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775i915PL-SATA2  ?

915 chipset has win-98 drivers?  Too bad it's not DDR-2.  Even though there *appears* to be many boards, the reality is different.  The search results show many boards that don't show win-98 in the actual page.

Besides the 915-based boards, I see AMD SiS756 based boards.  And it seems all of them are DDR, perhaps DDR 400 at that.  And they all have HD-Audio, so you're not gaining anything there because there will not be HD-audio drivers for win-98 (has anyone checked the driver download for the  775i915PL-SATA2 ?)  Funny how it looks like SATA-2 in the model name, but is actually SATA-1 controller.  And there are win-98 SATA drivers for the 915?  I thought the 875 was the last Intel chipset to have Win-98 SATA drivers.

Even if there are win-98 drivers for the 915PL (including SATA, USB and LAN controllers) I don't see the point in getting these boards over a socket-478 board unless they have DDR-2.  Fully-functional PCIe is a good thing, but for win-98 it's not going to out-perform AGP so the DDR vs DDR2 thing becomes more relevant.  Having win98 sound drivers for the 915PL would, however, tilt this in favor of the 915.

 Show me a non-Via chipset board with socket 775 and DDR-2, with win-98 drivers for LAN, SATA, USB, PCIe bridge, not necessarily having audio driver.  Or show me the same except without PCIe slot but with AGP slot.

I'm not familar with AMD CPU's of the same vintage and performance of the Intel 478/775 models and the level of win-98 driver support for such AMD-based boards.  Maybe there are some?
 

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Boards with full driver support have all the modern features - of 2001 (That's when XP came out, just if you don't remember).

That's why this research on AM3+ was done in the first place, right? ;)

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On Sunday, March 19, 2017 at 8:32 PM, Nomen said:

Tell me - what motherboard with PCIe has decent win-98 driver support?

14 hours ago, Nomen said:

 Show me a non-Via chipset board with socket 775 and DDR-2, with win-98 drivers for LAN, SATA, USB, PCIe bridge, not necessarily having audio driver.  Or show me the same except without PCIe slot but with AGP slot.

You keep asking for a PCI-E motherboard "with 98 drivers"... what exactly do you hope to accomplish here? There are no "drivers" for motherboard chipsets other than a simple set of INF text files as I have already stated before. I have provided an unofficial set of these for later Intel chipset-based systems by taking the 2K/XP INF files and converting them to the expected 9x format using the 865/875 INF's as a guide. You will not find "drivers" for a motherboard other than this, and the system does not even NEED them anyway. :rolleyes:

Now, as for onboard devices, you can forget a SATA driver for any "modern" board unless you want to buy rloew's patch, but we've been through that before as well. You can also forget any driver for HD Audio (unless rloew and I have a breakthrough on this front which has not been promising so far - but if you won't buy the SATA patch then you probably won't buy a HD Audio driver package either if we ever get there so why mention it...). LAN is simple - look for a board using a Realtek LAN chip and then check it against the last Realtek driver package for 98SE. USB(2) is already covered by NUSB. USB(3) is out same as HD Audio, once again unless there is a breakthrough orchestrated by rloew.

Now to go back to your main issue - I have yet to see any issues with using PCI-E graphics cards under 98SE other than the issue at 512MB that has been previously discussed. No doubt problems can occur in some hardware configurations but I would say the systems exhibiting "problems" are the exceptions not the rule.

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22 hours ago, Nomen said:

Show me a non-Via chipset board with socket 775 and DDR-2, with win-98 drivers for LAN, SATA, USB, PCIe bridge, not necessarily having audio driver.  Or show me the same except without PCIe slot but with AGP slot.

What's wrong with VIA-Chipsets?

This one -> http://www.asrock.com/mb/VIA/4CoreDual-SATA2 R2.0/ runs fine for me, with W98SE, XP Pro and W10, with native drivers on all OSs.

Q9550S (@266FSB), or a Q6600; 4GB DDR2-800 (@667) or 4GB DDR-400; GF 7900 GT 512MB AGP or GF 7600 256MB PCIe; Intel MT Gigabit PCI or Onboard 100MBit; SB Audigy PCI. 2IDE-SSDs, 2 SATAII-SSDs (@SATA1).

It's like shopping with Dad's Golden Credit Card(tm), you can run practically *all* hardware after PIII on this one... :)

The AM2+ aequivalent, as you asked for it: http://www.asrock.com/mb/NVIDIA/ALiveDual-eSATA2/ runs (mostly) fine with W98SE, XP 64bit and some Linux, albeit not with anything newer from M$ than Vista, because of NForce3 chipset...

i.e. ran with: Phenom II 910e; 16GB DDR2-800; onboard Gigabit Lan (RTL8111B), GF 7900 GT 512MB AGP or GF 7600 256MB PCIe; SB Audigy PCI. 1IDE-SSD, 2 SATAIII-SSDs (@SATAII), + 2 SATAII-SSDs (@SATAI).

I still rather prefer the AM3+ platform... but to each his own.

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> What's wrong with VIA-Chipsets?

Ruthan said he's never gotten a PCIe video card to work on VIA-chipset boards (or at least the Asrock 4coreDual boards, specifically the VSTA which I have).  Aside:  What's the difference between the dual-VSTA and dual-SATA anyways?


 

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775Dual-VSTA has just SATA I (1.5 Gb/s), and supports only Dual-Core CPUs. It officially supports Vista 64bit, and officially supports W98SE.

The 4coreDual-SATA2 R2.0 supports SATA II (3.0 Gb/s), and Quadcores. It officially supports W7 64bit, and does NOT support W98SE officially - although, technically, there is no reason not to, as drivers exist, and all work.

The latter basically is newer, and has the newer southbridge.

I got AGP-cards and PCIe-cards working at the same time, but i also took a close look at the GPU-compatibility-table, and having the latest BIOS (the beta with 4GB Ram support from PCTreiber.net)

Although the 4coredual is highly cross-compatible up to W10, and runs W98SE fine (with me!), this is - from todays perspective - a board for running AGP-cards.

This is no less due to the board-layout, which clearly favours the AGP-slot.

There are "newer" boards for AGP (like the still supported 775i65G R3.0), but with Quadcore, Sata II and DDR2, this is it.

To run PCIe-cards, I'd rather use any other platform we mention on msfn.org (including, of course, AM3+, although Intel P35 ist still a good contender IMHO), but these are rather "soft" reasons from my side.

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This is the board I have:

http://www.asrock.com/mb/via/4coredual-vsta/

4core dual-vsta.  So it's not the dual-core VSTA you mentioned in your previous post.  Yes, it is SATA-1.  If the 4core dual-sata has a SATA-2 controller, explain how because I thought the sata controller was in the chipset and I thought both boards have the same chipset (PT880 / VT8237A).  If the dual-sata has SATA-2 controller, and there are win-98 drivers for it, then that's going to be the only sata-2 controller I know with win-98 drivers.


 

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On 28.3.2017 at 4:08 AM, Nomen said:

(PT880 / VT8237A)

On the 4coreDual-SATA2 R2.0, it's the (PT880 Pro/ VT8237S) chipset, which is about one revision later. No other board uses it, AFAIK, three boards use it, but never to the fullest.

As far as i remember, it uses can use the same driver on W98SE for the SATAII controller as on the 775Dual-VSTA (both from 2003), that is, the latest VIA Hyperion, BUT (!):

On my current installation, i disabled the SATA-ports for W98SE, as the way i use it, i have SSDs with XP and W10 on that ports, with NTFS (W98SE booting from IDE-SSDs on FAT32).

It took me some time - and some unpleasant re-installation, as i fu**ed up - to have all 4 SSDs get a SSD-friendly alignment...

Just for you... ;) ...I just downloaded the drivers from asrock, had a look, and looking at the infs, they still seem to support W9x.

I will try this out later this week, just to make sure. Yes, it would then be the only SATAII-driver for W98SE, but i suspect, the chipset is backward compatible.

Maybe I'll try some benchmarking, to see if the driver/chipset really provides SATA2-speed, or if we are up to some fake-news... :-)

Edited by ragnargd
typos, content
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Just doing a bit of searching and there was a  Biostar PT880 Pro-A7 board with  VT8237R and the specs say SATA-1.  So it must be the S version of the 8237 that can do SATA-2?  The Biostar board has DDR + DDR2, PCIe +AGP, but (and get this) it has AC-97 audio (Realtek ALC-655) so this means there are win-98 drivers for sound - yes?  RAM limited to 2 gb.  I don't see this board on ebay at the moment.  Something I found out about the 8237S from wikipedia:

"The SATA-II feature of VT8237S is limited to 300 MB/S Data Transfer Rate bearing no NCQ functionality."


 

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2 hours ago, Nomen said:

So it must be the S version of the 8237 that can do SATA-2?

Correct.

2 hours ago, Nomen said:

...bearing no NCQ functionality."

Cool. I suspected something in that line, but didn't know that (it is not in the german wikipedia-text... :)

btw.: The Biostar-board is limited to P4, so i wouldn't bother...

The 4coredual SATA2 R2.0 is supported by the VIA Hyperion drivers, which includes sound, LAN, SATA, etc., that's why we have drivers. They weren't made specifically for that board.

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