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ms-6530 "pentium 4" with ISA slot

Posted: Mon Jan 25, 2010 11:12 pm
by stevenaaus
MS-6530 i845 motherboard (oem). 2xSDRAM, AGP, 3xPCI, 1xISA

There's not a lot around documenting this board, so i might post here. This
board is a zippy i845 brookdale motherboard with a single ISA slot. Handy
for all sorts of legacy hardware! I bought this old dust covered board of ebay
for a buck + postage for a friend who tests old stallion technology.
I booted it up with an old knoppix to test the ISA slot with a sound card,
and everything seems good :>

Does anyone know if this chipset will run reliably at 133MHz ? The boards
top overclock is 133, and PC133 is fairly common. The other consideration
now is the CPU.

I have a 4x100FSB celeron 1700 which runs fine. I also tried a 4x200FSB P4
2.8GHz. The CPU ran ok, at 1400MHz (14x100Mhz), and it'd probably run at
a half decent 14x133MHz = 1966 (i think!) if i'm confident enough to
overclock the chipset.

But , the issue here is , running memtest on the P4@1400 gives VERY slow
L1 and L2 access speeds ; only 10% faster than the SDRAM access times.
(500-1000MB/s). Memtest with the 1700 Celeron reports normal L1/L2
speeds > 10,000 MB/s. So i guess the 800FSB P4 is fairly useless in this
board.

RE: ms-6530 "pentium 4" with ISA slot

Posted: Tue Jan 26, 2010 12:31 am
by Jim
You might be running the wrong version of MemTest. I recently downloaded 4 different versions. 1 of them, 3.5 said to use 3.4 for more than 4 gig oif ram. Another, version 4.0 I haven't tried yet. The one I am using, Version 4 Deluxe, (cost $14.00), comes with both a 32 bit version, and a 64 bit version, with which type you use depending on processor type you are using. It also comes with another version that you can run in the background within windows so as to check how applications affect your memory performance.

Posted: Fri Feb 05, 2010 7:37 am
by stevenaaus
I ~was~ using an oldish version of memtest86+... but i don't think that was the problem
1) Because i was running the P4 (200FSB) at 100FSB
2) The system ~did~ seem incredibly slugish running knoppix
But , the issue here is , running memtest on the P4@1400 gives VERY slow
L1 and L2 access speeds ; only 10% faster than the SDRAM access times.
(500-1000MB/s). Memtest with the 1700 Celeron reports normal L1/L2
speeds > 10,000 MB/s. So i guess the 800FSB P4 is fairly useless in this
board.
Anyway, this board seems to have found a CPU. Picked up a 2.0GHz P4 (20 x 100FSB), and when i tried out the max sys overclock of 133MHz...
Presto , a working 2.66GHz P4, with memtest reporting fine cache access times :-).
Haven't tested the system for stability though.. Just Memtest for a few minutes.
Some of those intel CPUs are pretty bullet proof, laugh, despite the shit netburst architecture.

Posted: Thu Feb 18, 2010 11:04 pm
by jsc1973
Whoever came up with the NetBurst architecture should have been banned for life from any form of semiconductor design. Only Intel, with its manufacturing capabilities, could have succeeded with such a poor design, and only Intel, with its stubbornness, would have pushed it as far as they did when it was clearly a dud.

Sometimes I wonder what they'd have out now if they'd kept developing the P6 architecture all along, instead of wasting years with the NetBurst before going back to P6 for the Pentium M. Even the Core2 was so similar to the old P6 chips that old diagnostic software will identify one as a "Pentium II" at some ungodly speed. If I ever get ahold of a Core i7, I'm going to run WinTune on it just to see what it thinks the CPU is. :D

(I've also tried it on my Athlon II X4. WinTune 98 IDs the CPU as four "AMD 1586" processors running at 7269 MHz!)