Motherboard, Pros and Cons

Discussion relating to Socket 7 hardware.
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theEMP
Senior K6'er
Posts: 121
Joined: Wed Feb 28, 2007 9:28 am

Post by theEMP »

well from what I've always heard DFIs will clock, but they are sure to make you work for it :lol:
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Stedman5040
Veteran K6'er
Posts: 271
Joined: Mon Sep 05, 2005 4:22 pm

Post by Stedman5040 »

@the EMP

As a starter here is some info on the Gigabyte GA5SMM motherboard

Super Socket 7 based on the SIS530 chipset with 512k onboard cache. The onboard cache will only cache up to the first 64Mb of RAM. The chipset has integrated VGA with shared memory up to 8Mb.

The board is Micro ATX form factor and features 1 ISA slot, 1 shared ISA/PCI slot and two further PCI slots. Unfortunately no AGP slot which is a real downer on this board. There are 3xDIMM slots for Sdram up to 768Mb. The board might support up to 1.5Gb as this is suported by the chipset. Use only low density dimms as high density only records half of the size of the dimm.

The chipset supports hardware monitoring through the SIS5595 southbridge but there is no temperature monitoring sensor on the board. So effectively this board has no cpu hardware monitoring worth having.

CPU Voltages can be set between 1.3V and up to 3.3V to cover all of the K6, K6-2 and K6plus chips. Bios rev F5 identifies K6plus chips correctly.

The board supports FSB speeds of 66, 75, 83, 95, 100, 105, 112, 124, and 133. Speeds above 100 are not officially supported. What is of real interest is that the fsb speeds of 124 and 133 are supported with a 4x divider so the fsb can be increased with the pci bus at 33 or below. At 124 and 133 MHz the onboard cache must be disabled as it cannot cope with the increase in speed. This being the case it is imperative to use a K6plus type chip when considering these overclocked fsb speeds.

The board also supports ATA66 and has integrated sound but not LAN.

The benchmarks of this board and the SIS530 chipset in particular can be looked at in a long thread in the forums. Basically with integrated VGA being used the performance is much less than spectacular. The memory bandwidth is poor when compared to its rivals the ALI Aladdin V and VIA MVP3. Only with the fsb souped up to 133MHz with onboard VGA disabled can the board begin to catch up with the boards based on the ALI and VIA chipsets running at 100fsb.

For your first dip into the Socket 7 market I would not recommend the SIS530 chipset based boards. There are much better choices to make amongst the ALI and VIA boards.

Stedman
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theEMP
Senior K6'er
Posts: 121
Joined: Wed Feb 28, 2007 9:28 am

Post by theEMP »

thank you Stedman :D

You got us rollin' in the right direction.
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