Intel 810e/815 chipsets

[metalchic]

(first off i'm looking for a community open to discussion about such archaic computers or older ones that i fish up parts and rebuild machines out of as a hobby but experence and intuition can only get you so far before you need help from somone else. if this is an innapropriate place for such disscussion i will take it else where (or if theres a more aproiate forum i found this one by searching intel 815 in topics) so yeah.)

anyway i've got an Intel Desktop Board thats not retail (its been flashed with an oem bios from gateway) wich is somthing i've run into before and so my first question is there a way to flash it back to the retail bios if i can track down the retail model number (i used to have it written down but i've forgoten this stuff over the year its been in storage before i moved.)

another thing i'm curious about is that i used to have a 1Ghz P3 for it but i droped it once with the heatsink on and it chiped (and presumably cracked undernieth) the die of the cpu. after realizing it was the only 133mhz fbs cpu i had i gave up on it for a wile but then recently read about some Intel 810e and 815 chipsets being able to take a Tualatin core P3 i put it on there and it worked. (933/256/133 tualatin P3) the information is vuage so i'm owndeirng if anyone knows a bit more definitive ly if its only some 810e/815 chipsets that take tualatin or is it that some 810e take them and most/all 815s take them.

(another thing, i'd like to apologize in advance for my pooly organized post. i'm trying to give as much information about the problem and my thought process on solving the problem as possible. this seems to irritate most people so again sorry in advance.)

 

[nforce4max]

ESS is very good when it comes to pci sound cards. Clean output and compatible with many dos games as well serves very well for more modern stuff. You just won't get real hardware opl and midi support (software and hardware emulation).

 

[sk1939]

well i dont know if i can afford *everything*


i've found an interesting solution for freeing up a PCI used by network. i've got this card that is very nondescriptly modeled ISAPC-00. its a PC Card adapter. 5v 16bit. i was able to use it to attach a Orinoco Silver Wifi card to it for computers with limited or no PCI slots, interesting solution i have to say. and i shudder about that sound blaster, i've got one of those cards idk mabye its shorted to ground or somthing it has horrible static, horrible gameport accuracy and gave me a horrible grounded loop shock through my headphones. it also ended up trying to spit fire when i hooked its Line in to the Line out of a ATi TV Wonder.

If you can pay for shipping you can have it all ($16).

 

[metalchic]

ESS is very good when it comes to pci sound cards. Clean output and compatible with many dos games as well serves very well for more modern stuff. You just won't get real hardware opl and midi support (software and hardware emulation).

the AudioPCI cards havent given me any trouble. i'll poke through my cards bins later to see if i have any ESS hardware not integrated.

 

[nforce4max]

the AudioPCI cards havent given me any trouble. i'll poke through my cards bins later to see if i have any ESS hardware not integrated.

They never made integrated so far as I can remember, they were more of a premium brand than generic. Creative later bought them out and soon after made one of the best pci audio cards that one can get based on the same hardware as what ESS had made. After that Creative slowly went down hill after the Audigy 2.

 

[metalchic]

i had a laptop with an integrated ESS sound system, unfortunatly it also had a BGA Celeron as well. and i know one of the motherboards i have an ESS sound system was an optional component but its not installed.

edit:so then is it possible that an 810 motherboard might take a tualatin cpu or only some 810e and 815 boards?

also i pulled a random 810e microatx board out and its got an ESS Allgero ES1989S audio chip.

 

[metalchic]

wasent paying attention to my posts

 

[nforce4max]

i had a laptop with an integrated ESS sound system, unfortunatly it also had a BGA Celeron as well. and i know one of the motherboards i have an ESS sound system was an optional component but its not installed.

edit:so then is it possible that an 810 motherboard might take a tualatin cpu or only some 810e and 815 boards?

also i pulled a random 810e microatx board out and its got an ESS Allgero ES1989S audio chip.

ok, it is worth a shot and wouldn't be too surprised if one did run a tualatin. Personally I would hunt for something better, there are some boards that can push a tualatin up to 1.8ghz.

 

[metalchic]

well this 933 i have is salvage from an old Dell PowerEdge (the phat tower one) Server, actualy the cpu was theo nly thing i salvaged. the board is a Compaq BMW-2 from a Compaq Presario 5132EA my research shows. somthing like that. its fine, i put my IDE card, the GeForce FX 5500, a USB 2.0 card, and my netgear wifi card on it and it runs windows fine. not to hot considering the heatsink came from like a 700mhz celeron. actualy barely warm.

i think the video card floppy problems might be coming from the disk drive itself becasue its having the same problems as the other one. i seriously doubt that 2 seprate unrelated boards would have the same incredibly obscure problem. i'm working on fitting the thing into a case right now for furthar heat testing, i think i threw away that presario xe783 power suppy tho i dont have any other mini atx supplys

once i get in a case i'll put XP on it and run some CPU tests on it to see if it gets to hot.

edit: HO HO HO! whoa ok so i found a mini ATX supply and its get this... 100w.

a tad shy of the 230w supply that came with the compaq case its going in but hey it posted and didnt lock up (i didnt have the hard drive hooked up tho.) if i can get this working on 100w i can hook it up with the monitor (20w~) to my 200w inverter and go hog wild in the car rofl. heres hopin

 

[sk1939]

Wouldn't it be easier to use an old laptop?

 

[metalchic]

youd think so cept i dont have any. my last one my grandmother bought me broke down abotu a year after the warentee expired and the one with the ESS sound system cant even do opengl 3d.

i've hit a rather serious snag however. its got one of those 'ram card slots are to high up and hitting the cd drive bay' issues, only breaking off the tabs wasent enough the bay is still about 1mm over the slot so i cant fit the cards in. i could cut the drive bay, or i could bend the drive bay. i dont even know if this psu is powerfull enough to run everything, not if the cd drive draws most of its power through the 12v.

i took some pics with my DS but there not the best, i've never actualy posted a photobook album before so if this link doesnt work i'll find another way

http://s363.photobucket.com/albums/oo72/Eagoth/

edit: ok so it looks like i have to bend it, and also use a short DVD drive the regular one covers up the power socket of the motherboard, and i guess i must have lent my tinsips out so i have to bend it, its not very far i can warp the case to the side to get the ram cards in but i'm worried about the ammount of pressure it puts on the card's edge when i let go and it assumes its regular shape

 

[sk1939]

I would worry a great deal about bending the card, the traces are not very flexible and flexing can cause micro-fractures.

 

[metalchic]

it wasent flexing force the parts bending were only the metal case parts, they were pushing at a 90 degree angle on the side of the cards, i descided that isnt acceptable and untill i can mod this case to accept this board i'll just put it in this dell desktop case i have.

on a side note i hooked up the hard drive all 4 expansion cards, hooked up the hard drive to the IDE card and a DVD/CD Burner to the motherboard controler and loaded it up, it works fine. CD was spined up didnt overload. downloaded java and played a bit of minecraft wich even at the title screen maxed out the CPU at 100% constantly and brought the memory useage up from 0-1% in taskmanager to 99% in task manager played that for abotu 2-3 minutes ran around killed sheep, very playable even at normal view distance. in browser version on firefox in windows 2000 sp4.

i'm quite impressed with it i was worried abotu the 2A max on the 12v rail but i'm not sure excatly when the shift from 5v to 12v happend excatly. its got 10A on the 5v so it seems fine the cpu and the power supply didnt even start to get warm.

so heres what we got so far

933MHz Pentium 3 Tualatin, 256k cache, 133mhz fbs
Intel i810e chipset
Bestec Power ATX100-5 100w power supply.
512MB PC133 CL3 SDRAM
GeForce FX 5500 128MB PCI
60GB Diamondmax 9 UltraATA 133 Hard drive
Via VT6421A IDE/SATA RAID controler

on 100watts. though i'm not sure weather or not the computer is droping its power to reduce power consuption becasue of the small psu or whats going on or if it really just is able to run on that low power. i need to find a way to get in there and measure the current draw when its on full load.

 

[sk1939]

It's probably able to run on that low power. I remember I had a PIII 1Ghz that had a 150W power supply, so it is doable, although the video card may be pushing it a bit.

 

[metalchic]

i added a SATA hard drive via a 4pin periphrial connector to sata power connector and its fine cept i cant tell the vt6421a wich of the 2 hard drives it should be booting from. i'm gonna hit the sack and pick this back up tommorow. thanks for entertaining my rambling and providing interesting feedback.

edit:so i made the face you see in my avatar picture at this computer this morning when the floppy drive wouldent read to load the textmode drivers for the IDE card. the problem with this is (why i cant just connect the drive to the onboard) is that i need bolth the SATA and the IDE drive to be connected to the card so that windows will put the boot info on the sata drive to tell it to point to the IDE drive for the windows boot. it wont do that if its not connected to the IDE card.

the whole problem being that it wont let me select a drive lower in the list as the boot device for the card. its listed like this

SATA Channel 0
Port 0
SATA Channel 1
Port 1
IDE Channel 0
Port 2 Master
Port 3 Slave

i'm gonna have to burn off a reintegrated copy of the disk with the texmode drives installed already it looks like and the CDR i use for these thigns has bit the dust, frustratiing.

 

[metalchic]

Best answer selected by metalchic.