SiS 530 chipset question re 133Mhz FSB

Discussion relating to Socket 7 hardware.
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Uranium235
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Post by Uranium235 »

The SiS530 boards rock when setup correctly. There is only a small minority who really know what these boards are capable of.

Here's another old SiS530 thread:
http://k6plus.com/index.php?name=PNphpB ... 075556ce74

I'm sure the engineers who designed this chipset were fully aware of it's capabilities and could have created a Super 7 board that could have really blown away every other board out there. Why they decided to cripple it? We'll never know.....
DonPedro
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Post by DonPedro »

kenb,

one more IMPORTANT advice which helps in cases where no jumper is available to deactivate the onboard graphics engine is to leave ram bank #0 FREE of any ram stick. that is because if one wants to use the onboard graphics device ram bank #0 MUST hold a ram stick where the chipset expects one in order to allocate its graphics ram.

I am non familiar with unix/linux systems but I am very sure that back in those days I found explanations on the net on how to tweak linux/unix drivers in regard to setting up certain chipset registers. when i remember correctly such a move would also include a re-compilation of the "kernel".

best regards
KenB
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Post by KenB »

Thanks for the tips, Don.

By the way, my apologies if I sounded a bit of a nincompoop earlier in the thread.

I'm currently finding out how to discover and /or disable any GPU driver in the FreeNAS OS I'm using.
DonPedro
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Post by DonPedro »

all,

I received information via pm that the proposed "leave bank #0 free" does not help to get a working sis530 system (don't know which board was used for this test) when an add-on pci video card is installed.

I am sorry that I may not remember correctly in this case (time has passed since I played around with the sis530 chipset) but it may also fail because of a faulty logic: from the notes in the soyo 5ssm manual which say that one MUST use dimm #1 (bank 0) when the onboard vga is to be used I deducted that when bank 0 is left free that it might convince the bios boot process to use the add-on card and therefore shuts-off the onboard vga.
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swaaye
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Post by swaaye »

I've run a few 530 mobos. Been many years though. I know one of them died for no apparent reason. I also remember trying to play GLQuake on one and it was only able to manage about 5 fps. :D

I didn't know that any 530 mobos had AGP. It's not like any of the Super 7 boards had great AGP support anyway. A Voodoo3 PCI gets the job done fine with K6 boards.
jsc1973 wrote:BX133...AGP 89MHz.... For whatever reason, it didn't seem to be a problem. Nearly every AGP card that was tried ran perfectly normally at the higher AGP port speed.
That has not been my experience. :) The only AGP cards that I've found to work semi-reliably are Voodoov 3/5 and some NVIDIA cards. It was not a stable setup. The cards may even seem to be fine but will freeze up in games after 30 mins or so.

Some cards simply refuse to run correctly. Usually it's 3D that's affected the most. Matrox cards come to mind. Some cards would work "better" if you forced AGP 1x mode.

I imagine that it's very likely that motherboards themselves were the problem. Maybe my board isn't very stable at 133 MHz. Since the boards and chipsets were not validated for that speed, that's just another possible point of failure. I have only lightly used the Abit BX133, which supposedly was validated for 133 MHz operation. Most of my experience is with the Abit BF6.

815 is such a better platform to be running 133+ MHz on. I picked up a ASUS TUSL2-C about a year ago and it is just so much better all around than my BX mobo. The only tragic fault is the artificial 512MB RAM limit thanks to Intel trying to steer people to P4. It's ridiculous that BX can run 1GB whereas 815 is 512MB max.
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Post by Jim »

Is there any way that you can think of to get around that limit ? I have one of those (Un)Intel 815 boards in a machine here at home.
Superpuppy 3
K6-3+ 450 ACZ (6x100)
DFI K6BV3+/66 Rev B2 (2 Meg) w/ 2x28mm Chipset Fans
2x256 Meg PC 133 Hynix SDRAM
1x 20G Maxtor (7200)
2x 80G Maxtor (7200) Ducted w/ 2x486 Fans Mount
52/24/52/16 LG CDR/RW/DVD
8/4/3/12/24/16/32 LG Super Multi
ATI 9000 aiw Radeon AGP
SB Audigy 1 MP3 Sound
CMD 649 IDE Controller
NEC USB 2 Card
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swaaye
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Post by swaaye »

Well I think it's some sort of hardware lock down. What is strange is that if you put in more, the BIOS will see it, but the board will freeze before it starts booting. I can get mine to count 768MB, but it won't boot with it.
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Post by Jim »

Mine, (Unintel D815 EFPV Universal), has 768 in it, (3x 256 Meg PC133 CL2 Hynix), and it will boot and run like that, but it doesn't use it. Gives me a message that there is more Ram installed than it can use.
Superpuppy 3
K6-3+ 450 ACZ (6x100)
DFI K6BV3+/66 Rev B2 (2 Meg) w/ 2x28mm Chipset Fans
2x256 Meg PC 133 Hynix SDRAM
1x 20G Maxtor (7200)
2x 80G Maxtor (7200) Ducted w/ 2x486 Fans Mount
52/24/52/16 LG CDR/RW/DVD
8/4/3/12/24/16/32 LG Super Multi
ATI 9000 aiw Radeon AGP
SB Audigy 1 MP3 Sound
CMD 649 IDE Controller
NEC USB 2 Card
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Witte
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Post by Witte »

Didn't know of any sis530 board with AGP support. Anyway, from my experience I can say that 133MHz is by far not easy to get stable, atleast not on my Gigabyte board. I tried different cpu's and different mods, it just wouldn't do it.
Fast, hmm, it's more than decent, certainly when applying the register mods, but you must know that boards like P5A sure do very fine too. It's rather hard to say what exactly is the best, there is a lot involved: amount of L2 cache, chipset performance, cpu of chose, DRAM, ... Combined with P2's I've seen some very fast pi scores from the P5A board, faster than my sis530 board. But I haven't found any sis530 board with 2MB L2 cache. Any board with this amount of cache will certainly score very well in superpi even when only running at 100MHz.
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Post by Jim »

Personally I know noting about the SIS chipset. But if you read Don Pedro's posts to this thread you will find a link to another thread which has a lot of info that may help you get stable.
Superpuppy 3
K6-3+ 450 ACZ (6x100)
DFI K6BV3+/66 Rev B2 (2 Meg) w/ 2x28mm Chipset Fans
2x256 Meg PC 133 Hynix SDRAM
1x 20G Maxtor (7200)
2x 80G Maxtor (7200) Ducted w/ 2x486 Fans Mount
52/24/52/16 LG CDR/RW/DVD
8/4/3/12/24/16/32 LG Super Multi
ATI 9000 aiw Radeon AGP
SB Audigy 1 MP3 Sound
CMD 649 IDE Controller
NEC USB 2 Card
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Stedman5040
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Post by Stedman5040 »

I am writing this message from my computer running a K6-III+500 @ 600MHz (4.5x133). The board is a Gigabyte GA5SMM revision 1.2 with the aforementioned SIS530 chipset. It is running as steady as a rock. Just performed Superpi 1M and got 4min 51 secs. Everest home memory scores of Mem read 402 Mem write 154. This is running with 512mb of Twinmos 256mb CAS 2 sdram with settings 2-3-2-6 with the memory tweaks applied with wpcredit. Onboard cache is disabled. I am running a PCI card which is a ATI 9250. As far as I am aware there are no SIS530 boards with a dedicated AGP slot. The chipset is slow and only comes close to the VIA and ALI chipsets at 133 bus speed. Of course the big plus is that the pci clocks are at 33mhz with the 4x divider.

Stedman :)
moondog
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Post by moondog »

Hello together, just digging out this thread again...

I lately got a Biostar M5SAA for playing around a bit, unfortunately I flashed the latest BIOS and so I deleted the option to set FSB/DRAM to 133 Mhz :?

Before this I got the board to boot with my K6-3+ @ 4x133 and 4,5x133 but it was hanging later on. Unfortunately I can´t examine it furthere with this wrong BIOS now. I found several BIOS´ but all are undocumented and I don´t want to flash them each after another to find out the right one, as I don´t want to flash the board to death by accident...

Has anyone experiences with this mobo? Does anyone know what BIOS supports the 133 mhz option? The actual SAA0727F does not :(

Thanx in advance,

Eric
K6-3+ ATZ 400@616@2,4 Volt
Epox MVP3G5
768 MB Apacer PC133 CL2.0
Geforce 4 TI 4200

IPC Powernote
K6-3+ ATZ 400@500@1,8 Volt (Prime-stable)
512 MB (!!!) PC 133 RAM :-D
Ati Rage Mobility M 4 MB
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Stedman5040
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Post by Stedman5040 »

Eric,

I think that you should be able to hard set your motherboard to 4.5x133 even though your manual does not give the settings. I have taken a look at the settings for the jumper block FS0,FS1,FS2, and SD and these seem to be similar to the jumper block on my GA5SMM board. So to give a setting of 133/33 I think that it should be set as off off off off or open,open,open,open. So remove all of the jumpers from that jumper block which for 100/33 is set as closed,closed,open,open. You can always set the multiplier block to a lower setting (say 3.5) BF0, BF1, BF2 as open open open and see if it boots. I think that it should. If it does boot I can supply you with the other hidden settings for 112, 124, 105 fsb. If it works you can keep the bios you have.

Stedman
moondog
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Post by moondog »

Hello stedman,

many thanx for your tip! I´ve tried several bios´ before, nearly flashing the board to death (it doesn´t wanted to boot right with the latest, I had tried as it was one of the oldest available ones... but I was able to fix it at last...)...

Today I was trying out your jumper-tip and... it works! So far I got a clean Windows-boot with 3,5x133, 4,0x133 and 4,5x133 - quite impressive. Unfortunately the last option was some kind of unstable - seems I have to try a higher voltage then. I had to deactivate the onboard cache and vga to get the board to work with fsb 133 - but then it works. I´m going to make some benches later on :) Many, many thanx again!

Unfortunately I found out, that the 5x multi doesn´t work right - it seems to work as real 2x as the board then boots with 267 mhz only... but I´m just at the beginning by now...

Greetings and all the best for you all!

Eric
K6-3+ ATZ 400@616@2,4 Volt
Epox MVP3G5
768 MB Apacer PC133 CL2.0
Geforce 4 TI 4200

IPC Powernote
K6-3+ ATZ 400@500@1,8 Volt (Prime-stable)
512 MB (!!!) PC 133 RAM :-D
Ati Rage Mobility M 4 MB
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Uranium235
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Post by Uranium235 »

That Biostar M5SAA looks like a real good SiS530 board to experiment with the 133 FSB. I've got to find me one. :bricks
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