Goddamn computers

Posted on by grahams

I am thinking of replacing my motherboard. The USB on it is damn near completely non-functional, and the addon USB card I purchased to try and make up for the fact that my motherboard’s USB support eats it isn’t much better. I can’t even get my Logitech Mouseman Optical to work on the onboard ports, and when I have it connected to the add-on ports, the OS fails to recognize it about 1 out of every 3 boots. I then have to crawl behind the computer and disconnect and reconnect the mouse a few times until it lights up.

My motherboard (Asus P2B-DS) has been perfect in every other respect, the onboard Ultra2 SCSI works great, I could use a few more PCI slots, but whatever. In replacing the board, however, I have a few demands:

  • Onboard Ultra(2 or 3) SCSI
  • Dual Slot 1
  • Support for all the Pentium IIIs (my current board only supports up to 500Mhz or so)
  • Isn’t completely outdated…

I don’t think that these requests are unreasonable, but apparently the motherboard manufacturers do… There are three boards I have found that are close to these specifications. All of them have limitations:

  • Tyan Tiger 133 – Lacks SCSI, but has pretty much everything else. I could get this board and a Adaptec 2940U2B for about $200 and be done with it. It is apparently no longer made by Tyan, but I still see it all over the place.
  • Tyan Thunderbolt – Everything plus the kitchen sink…. The major disadvantages are that it costs around $375 and only has a 100Mhz FSB
  • AOpen DX6G Plus – Everything I am looking for (plus an Ethernet controller), but it only has a 100Mhz FSB (and apparently doesn’t run with PC133 memory installed)

Does anyone have any suggestions? At this point I am just thinking of waiting a little while and just starting from scratch again….

2 thoughts on “Goddamn computers”

  1. Supermicro

    I have the Supermicro PIIIDM3, with dual PIII 600EB’s. Works great, after the initial fighting with RAM.

    Upsides:

  2. Dual slot 1
  3. Four DIMM slots (must be paired)
  4. 133MHz FSB
  5. 4 32-bit PCI slots
  6. 2 64-bit PCI slots
  7. onboard Intel etherexpress pro ethernet
  8. onboard adaptec ultra160 scsi – on the 64-bit bus.

    Downsides:

  9. It’s only got UDMA/66 for IDE, but since I have all SCSI devices (except for a 40G “random crap” drive), it wasn’t a huge concern for me. Even so, you can get a promise ATA/100 card for like $50.
  10. Pretty picky about memory, but memory is dirt cheap right now, regardless of where you buy. Supermicro has recommended parts, as well.
  11. Probably pricy.. I don’t recall how much I paid, but it’s got damn near everything on it.
  12. Pricewatch doesn’t seem to find any matches, not sure if they’re still around. I bought mine (it was almost a brand new release) 5/00.

    Here’s a link

    13. Reply

  13. tyan and usb

    I have the Tyan Tiger 133 at work with dual 750s. It’s been a good board except that synching a pilot over USB was taking about 15 minutes, and other USB stuff was weird too. Upgrading the BIOS fixed that.

    Reply

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