BCM SQ588 motherboard w/ P100

[dracos]

Going through some stuff I picked up in a lot, found a case with this mobo:

http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/motherboards/B/BCM-ADVANCED-RESEARCH-INC-Pentium-SQ588.html

Has a P100, 16mb ram and 256k cache. Decent mini tower with a turbo switch/led, ODD & floppies, no hdd.

Anyone have any experience with these mobos? Wondering if it would be worth maxing out ram and cache to revive it?

Powers up and diags ok, hmm...

 

[Compgeke]

Seems like your average AT style Pentium motherboard. The 16 megs of ram is enough unless you want to try and run Windows 98 or newer. The cache is also fine as it is.

 

[Old Thrashbarg]

The 16 megs of ram is enough unless you want to try and run Windows 98 or newer.

That's a matter of debate... 16MB is plenty for DOS or Win31, but I'd at least want 32MB even for Win95. It's not like it's some great trouble or expense to get a couple more SIMMs anyhow.

As for the cache, 256K will usually allow 32MB cacheable area. If you're not planning on running more than 32MB RAM, there's not much reason to upgrade the cache.

Also, as an aside, it looks like that board has the CMD640 IDE controller on it. It was a common chip on many earlier Pentium boards, but if you're not aware, that chip has some pretty nasty bugs. There are workarounds, but for best results you may want to consider adding a PCI IDE card or going SCSI.

 

[dracos]

Also, as an aside, it looks like that board has the CMD640 IDE controller on it. It was a common chip on many earlier Pentium boards, but if you're not aware, that chip has some pretty nasty bugs. There are workarounds, but for best results you may want to consider adding a PCI IDE card or going SCSI.

Yeah, that's the kind of info I was looking for, much appreciated!