Hi all, Does anyone out there have a spare Pentium motherboard & chip? I don't need it immediately but am planning an upgrade at some stage in the near future due to several "issues" that have arisen with both my current 486 motherboard and its local bus IDE card. It all works just fine but won't boot without intervention at two stages. I'm not 100% sure what the board's problem is (may be related to the battery) but the card's BIOS doesn't like booting off the 6Gb disk I just installed.
I figure I might as well upgrade the machine and start getting ready for a 100baseT network into the bargain... all the cards use this new-fangled PCI thing. My requirements are as follows: * The board must be reliable and Linux-friendly (and big-hard-disk-friendly). I don't want to get "signal 11" during a kernel compile :) * It must have a good chipset on it (eg 430VX) with at least 256kb cache. I've seen a lot of variation between machines which are similar on paper due to old chipsets... * UDMA IDE would be nice but I can live without it. * CPU at least 133MHz but I'll take a faster one :) I intend to use a passive heatsink: if you have one I'll take it, if not I'll find one somewhere else. * I will need two ISA slots minimum; three preferred (gotta use that 256Kb Trident 8900!). Alternatively I might also be looking for a stable (in windows), reasonably fast 2D PCI graphics card so I can do some swapping around on my workstations. * For memory I'd like a couple of 3.3V DIMM slots available. * AT form factor. Size isn't important as its going into a full-tower case. * Anything else I haven't thought of :) The old board, along with loads of other 486 goodies (30-pin memory, small hard disks, cases, ISA and VLB cards) may become available afterwards if anyone is interested. Its about time I had a clean out. Cheers, - Dave David A. Mann, B.E. (Elec) http://www.digistar.com/~dmann/ "Why is it that if an adult behaves like a child they lock him up, while children are allowed to run free on the streets?" -- Garfield
