Let's repair Asus SP97-V

[@philscomputerlab]

This is a really good board and yes, SIS is underrated 😊

[@myne00]

Probably because their efforts after socket 7 were... Less than stellar.

[@g412bb]

​@@myne00Not true. Example , for Pentium 4 there was the 645/645dx/648/648fx chipset. Great alternative to the Intel chipsets.

[@NSHG]

​@@g412bbDon't forget their 735, 746 and 748 chipsets for the Athlons.

[@SianaGearz]

@@myne00 They used to have the fastest DDR controller for a while and PCI and USB implementations are less buggy than VIA chipsets of the era, so i would say they were fine.

[@ABRetroCollections]

@@g412bb Until you get to the SiS 7001/7002 USB controller, which was problematic compared to using Intel.

[@littlewillie65]

The guy I used to work for bought dozens of these back in the day - we used them to upgrade old AT style computers for our customers. The ATX/AT style power connectors would work in their old cases - and the AT keyboard port worked with their existing keyboards. Having the built-in graphics saved the cost of a new graphics card - and the ISA slots would work with their old EGA/CGA cards and monitors while leaving an inexpensive upgrade solution when the old monitors finally gave out. Great little boards...

[@vlfreak]

We used to do exactly this in our shop as well 👍

[@LG-HH]

I love (Super) Socket 7 content!!!

[@glitchwrks]

ASUS produced an OEM ATX board, the SPAX, that is essentially this board in ATX. There's usually (always?) a PCI slot omitted with the onboard graphics backplate connector populated. I've cleared the holes for the missing slot and installed a connector on several SPAX boards, and then used the SP97-V BIOS to get K6-2, -III, -2+ and -III+ CPUs, which makes for a really decent SS7 system! Losing the onboard graphics is, of course, no loss :P

[@camjohnson2004]

Just a FYI, you spoke about the 430HX and its dual Chip arrangement, which is true, however, you got the chips features. The Northbridge contains the Memory controller (RAM and Cache) along with the CPU FSB and the PCI Bus. The Southbridge is connected to the northbridge through the PCI Bus. The southbridge contains the ISA bus, IDE controller and any other low speed devices (USB, UART etc). SiS were one of the first chipset manufacturers to integrate the North and Southbridges into a single chip which, while making the chip larger, actually saved space, allowing for more compact board layouts.

[@necro_ware]

True, north and south bridge are communicating through PCI bus with each other. I think, south bridge does the bus mastering, DMA control and similar stuff, but the main PCI controller is in the north bridge indeed.

[@VPRHPC]

I just made a video a week ago, that's when I learned about the integrated North and South Bridge into a chip, but I am surprised it existed even earlier, also the more you learn about SiS the more you start to respect it.

[@RetroSwim]

This motherboard is very special to me. It was the first PC of my very own, given by my parents for Christmas 1997. I'd love to have one again some day!

[@envoycdx]

Back when I first got into building PC's for other people, these boards were used alot for cheap PC's, coupled with a Voodoo card, they were not all that bad game wise, but yes, SIS chipset drivers used to be a pain, especially in Windows 98! The onboard sound is pretty poor though, c-media if I remember rightly.

[@necro_ware]

Yes, unfortunately drivers were really on the bad side. This particular model has no integrated sound chip, but some similar boards had one. Usually it was ESS, but also some boards had C-Media and Crystal. I think latter was one of the bad ones.

[@envoycdx]

@@necro_ware I'd take crystal and ess over the cmedia early stuff. But yes, I think XP did alot for driver conformity / stablisation though, but we are well into the Pentium 3 / Pentium 4 by that point sadly :(

[@steeviebops]

Yep, our one had a CMI8330 which was rubbish.

[@jozefzahradnicek9619]

I really like it when you fixing a dead board and searching for a problem.

[@zuldanfpv4634]

The code name for this motherboards chipset is “Jedi Pentium”, how cool is that!

[@fft2020]

what a wonderful day when necroware posts a video :)

[@SatansLtlBaby]

i worked on a lot of these systems long ago and had no idea they had integrated graphics. crazy!

[@JohnSmith-iu8cj]

The integrated graphics are optional, I have a few without. The header is not populated.

[@pavelfara9333]

Regarding the new bios chip - I have been there too. During restoration of a very early socket 7 SiS based Asus board. Not only you need a flash chip to let the board update the ESCD but it needs to have a proper organization - my problem was a chip that allows deleting data in chunks of specific number of bits. This resulted in a corrupted bios after every! escd bios update! I have studied datasheets of all my spare chips and found some where you can change data bit by bit and it works! The board is now running a P90 in a real gaming museum and bringing fun to people 😀

[@ajdothack]

Necroware legendary as always

[@steeviebops]

My parents had a PC with this chipset and I thought it was terrible at the time, mostly due to that integrated graphics. I remember it used the same drivers as the SiS 6326 dedicated card. I also remembered reclocking the CPU at 66x4 because the default 75x3.5 was causing graphics artifacts.

[@sakitoshi]

in my experience asus never disappoints. even today their hardware is very competitive.

[@alexthemorgan]

I had the same chipset on a PC Chips motherboard, in my first SI special. It had the same USB and Mouse board, but the bios was compatible with K6-2. It came with 16mb and a Cyrix MII-233. I added a K62-350 overclocked and a Voodoo Banshee and it was a capable dos gaming machine.

[@nyh-workshop]

This unlocked memories! Many years back I got a discarded CPU with this SP97 motherboard from a nearby computer store. It is a simple little motherboard, possibly the former owner used it for typing documents and such. Unfortunately, I didn't know better and I did only salvaged the Pentium 166 processor and the RAM, but did not preserve the motherboard. Back then there was not a lot of information on SiS chipsets boards, and there are stigma around them in the tech forums. If that is aired in 2006, I'd happily keep it! 😆😅

[@DevilbyMoonlight]

I seem to remember some boards SiS chipsets having a bit of a chequered record, but I do remember that the SiS 630 and 730 chipsets were flawless, fast and had no issues as I dont remember any customers complaining who had machine built with them, if memory serves that was about the time of the p3, a bit later than this MMX board here was being sold..

[@7828191]

Good video as usual :). Also the board supports long ISA cards. A good thing if you are in my case using a Sound Blaster 16 (CT2910 Yamaha chips) with a Gravis Ultrasound MAX.

[@Konnor_RK-800]

Gracias a Necroware y estos videos que hace, tuve el valor de reparar una computadora retro. La usaba mi madre para manejar un negocio hace 27 años, ahora esta funcionando con DOS 6.22. No se para que usarla, pero esta perfectamente operativa.

[@aaaalex1994]

Instálale Windows 3.11! O prueba a ver como corre DOOM...

[@necro_ware]

Muchas gracias también!

[@terrysanford8296]

Making me feel warm hearted for my amd k6-2 400 @ 450 over clocked on Asus agp 4x board

[@dj_paultuk7052]

I used to build SiS SuperSocket 7 PC's back in the day as a little side-line at home. Did about 7 to 10 per week and with the Cyrix MIII 333. With lots of RAM, a good HDD and a Modem thrown in they sold like hot cakes. I could not make them fast enough. Why ?, they were cheap. £100's cheaper than a shop PC but with excellent performance for the time.

[@Choralone422]

I probably would have been very interested in a board like that back in the socket 7 days if I hadn't already purchased an Intel HX chipset based board that was also capable of 83 MHz FSB. I had one before any of those SIS based boards or the Intel TX chipset were released. Ran my AMD K5 and later K6 chips on the 83 MHz FSB for a nice performance boost. 😊

[@teknologyguy5638]

Always great info, thanks for putting the time in and sharing the results.

[@IcySon55]

I have an OEM version of this board called the ASUS SPAX used in various HP Pavilion machines. Jan Steunebrink was nice enough to create a modified SP97-XV BIOS for the SPAX with the CPU and HDD upgrades too. Although it has trouble running certain games like Descent 2.

[@labibleatarilesitedesatari6724]

You are the gentleman of hardware and retro computing!

[@Species3472]

Oh, i have one of this boards with heatsink, also with new caps on it... :D

[@rdxdt]

I have a SP97-XV, and everything works just fine on Windows, nice board.

[@josejeswin6936]

The onboard SIS 5598 vga core was the precursor of dedicated pci SiS gpu chips like SiS 6306,6326 and agp SiS gpu chips like SiS 300 and SiS 305...😊

[@OldSkoolF]

So cool. I found your channel. Please post more electronic repair videos. I worked on many PC's with those Sis boards and drivers were a pain.

[@djdoo]

It has only advantages as a board for me. Very feature rich for the era, great that has usb and ps/2 very useful, I saw many parameters to play at BIOS for tweaking memory and cache, has also ATX header very important, a great overclocker and supports a wide range of cpus! I love boards with integrated graphics of that era cause you can test them without a video card, a really great find! Keep up, cheers from Greece Jim.

[@darthtripedacus1]

My first and favorite PC was a super socket 7 with the SIS 530 chip set. I miss that old IBM and thank you for the wonderful reminder of that machine :)

[@gottfriedbogen5184]

Thank you very much

[@alaricjeard269]

Very interesting... Never thought SiS board can be competitive !

[@nm0490]

Thank you for another great video.

[@krizator]

Interesting mobo. Good work. Thanks.

[@2dfx]

This just in - eBay prices on SP97-V boards have skyrocketed. More at 11.

[@dalecomer5951]

Asking or selling prices?

[@brucetungsten5714]

Had one of these during the end of the 90ies - very nice board. p.s. : bought one(with a P133) yesterday for an old beige tower I have laying around.

[@MrBooMY3]

I built many a PC in my younger days with boards similar to this. We also recommended not using the onboard VGA but if they were being cheap it would work.

[@logipilot]

It took me a moment but: 5th Element at 8:46 😁

[@vlfreak]

I used to use those SP97V boards quite often (i was working in IT back at that time), they were good solid board for general purpose office machines (as mentioned), but definitely needed an external GFX card for any kind of gaming.. plenty of flexibility for configuration and upgrading, as well as being relatively cheap compared to intel based chipset boards. Edit: typed while watching your video, wow that final test config was pretty much what i ran back in the day, until I upgraded to BH-6 (then P2B, it was better) running cel. 733 @ 1.1ghz

[@mvgostev]

Interesting video. Thanks

[@tigheklory]

Love the video, I would love to see you test a DFI 586IPVG. I still have mine from back in the day and it was such a good board! It also has USB and IR.

[@DemianTowers]

u need the gold key!! 😮 keep it up and thanks for your videos!

[@necro_ware]

That will never happen, but as long as it makes fun, everything's fine.

[@JeffMeyers-zm2lh]

I have 2 of these boards. Got 1 at an e-waste store and then I got one on Ebay that I upgraded the bios from 1.03 to 1.08.

[@reidster87]

I used quite a few of these (and similar boards) back in the day to upgrade 386 and 486 systems. They were for office-type use, so the integrated graphics was a useful feature. It performed better than reusing the ISA graphics. (which were generally very low end models to begin with)

[@djtongi]

Great Video. I really like the videos and their style. Do you actually build systems with these Boards or is it only for collection? I'm asking because i have a really really rare board here: a Dual Pentium2 Xeon slot 2 with CPUs but unfortunately it's dead... i really didn't have the time to look for the damage but maybe it's a chance to test your skills :P I'd love to use it as a Win2k or xp gaming machine

[@JeffMeyers-zm2lh]

Hey if your interested I can part with my 2 boards and you could use for spare parts. They have been very temperamental boards. They certainly brought me back to some of the frustrations I experienced back in the day.

[@adraacg]

Very good, as long as you don't use the onboard video. I remember that from SiS 530.

[@borlibaer]

"cheap office machines"? I had this board running for a longer period of time as my Windows NT 4.0 PDC with IDE & SCSI HDDs and int and ext DAT, AVM B1 ISA ISDN, 3COM NICs, ... in a nice midi tower case. So the embedded "-V" was cool. Still with me and running fine. Btw. It got a NT 4 Workstation on DOS FAT ! boot option as well.

[@xsc1000]

I had Gigabyte board with SIS 5591 chipset. It was standard 2 chip solution, performance was good and it had AGP slot. But there was AGP driver only for Win98, but not for W2k. So AGP cards under W2k were very slow.

[@ching-chenhuang8119]

Wow, I have a keychain made of a SiS5598 chip!!

[@D4rk4ng3l83]

ich liebe Freitage 😃

[@Crazy80ivan]

This motherboard has a 83Mhz FSB option. The PCI bus runs at 33Mhz, when set to 83Mhz. So, with good memory you can use that speed. Memory does run at 83Mhz. Also a Tillamook processor runs with no problems on this board. So you can make a 333Mhz system, like I have. It's a very stable board and faster then a TX motherboard (PCI throughput with 3dfx cards). 128mb memoryt can be cached. 256mb maximum memory supported. Only downside is that Asus did not implemented the sdram, while the chipset supports it.

[@danthompsett2894]

my only critism as that it doesnt have sdram slots, other than that its pretty similiar to the pcchips board i had but that only had a SIS 530 chipset with 8mb agp onboard, except the cpu settings where done in the bios.

[@PROSTO4Tabal]

I think key poind finding pc retro parts is searching for good prices and offers instead of searching by model number. I've bought recently boxed asus p55tp4xe with pentium 166, cpu cooler and ram for 50gbp shipped. All I need to do is replace rtc dallas with necroware module. Thanks !

[@Eyetrauma]

Wow, all this time and I didn't know the PNP configuration was persisted. I know the BIOS can 'run out' of writes, but thought it was purely related to (user set) configuration data.

[@Stefan_Payne]

Luickily the SIS 5598 doesn't necessarily come with a Heatsink. My Gigabyte one didn't. PS: great thing is the 32bit Memory Interface. SO its AWESOME for PS/2 SIMM Testing.

[@the_kombinator]

Hey I got one of your nwx287 and I put it into an NEC Ready - all it does is get hot and eventually crash the system.

[@SimonZerafa]

Can you run the Integrated graphics and a PCI graphics card at the same time? Could be useful if that's possible 🙂

[@necro_ware]

No, that doesn't seem to be possible, at least not on this board. Integrated VGA gets deactivated as soon as external card is present

[@SimonZerafa]

@@necro_ware Drat! Oh well it would have been cool if they could have been used in parallel 🙂🤷‍♂️

[@andressepter]

I still wonder what you will do with all those repaired boards :)

[@necro_ware]

Some I keep, some I change for broken parts or other interesting hardware. In the future, may be I'll sell some of those too, but for that I have to do some German bureaucracy first.

[@wishusknight3009]

I think this board can also work with a single simm. That would be interesting to test, as well as intergreted graphics performance with that. there is also a pin header between the ISA slots, is that for sound?

[@necro_ware]

No, that is a VGA feature connector.

[@wishusknight3009]

@@necro_ware OOOOH! I see.

[@doodles113]

18:13 Me, telling YESSSS to myself...during the whole video i was thinking about the heatsink...

[@rodneyhchef1]

I did a lot of testing with a pcchips m571 board based on this chipset, but I definitely got inferior performance compared with my Intel 430vx board. Perhaps this was due to the motherboard manufacturer rather than the chipset in my case, as pcchips were notorious for cutting corners!

[@warrax111]

I have PCChips M726MRT, and it has like -40% performance, when I use same procesor in competition, like some VIA Apollo Pro board. I am suspicious of BIOS. PCChips often sucks, also on BIOS side.

[@jk180]

How would the integrated graphics do with suck an overclock and K6-3 installed?

[@danielktdoranie]

Oh Mylanta

[@OscarSommerbo]

Could you use two monitors with this motherboard?

[@djpirtu2]

My 'better than I thought moment' few days ago: found an Asus A7V133-VM from my stash. VIA KM133A chipset, integrated ProSavage and VIA audio. Flashed newest bios, put there Athlon XP-M (Barton) and of course it runs underclocked because CPU is aimed at 166FSB and mobo gives up to 133FSB. Then I played with setmul and viafsb-programs, and got the bus speed to 166(!) and it is stable with PC133 memory set to 3-2-3 settings. Then I installed Windows and run good old setfsb-program which took it 170FSB(!!). Never seen over 170MHz bus speeds on any SDR memory motherboard... My Abit KT7A boards (KT133A) can do just 150MHz and that's it. So, mATX office-motherboard overclocks better than anything :D

[@dolphhandcreme]

In times of K6s with integrated L2 Cache, the cacheable memory range of the chipset isn't that important anymore. Especially for the modded K6-3+...

[@twiterMatt]

Hi all, I have socket 3 mainboard which on startup via analyzer cards shows only dashes. When I pull down the chipset with a finger there are some number, but post stucks on code "13 12". Ami bios. The question is: is it possible to repair connection between chipset and pcb at home? I don`t remeber well, but necroware or another YTber has the same issue. Help please :)

[@cheyopimienta]

SIS boards were super fine for MSDOS or even Windows 3.11. Once Windows 95 arrived, there was a fest of blue screen of death, SIS simply could not keep up and the company needed to re-brand itself because of their fame as unstable and nightmarish boards.

[@tommyking2687]

500MHz. Nice :)

[@Xpun-oi2zz]

Damn. 500 mhz on a socket 7 mobo. Thats very impressive.

[@sonyericssoner]

Do the AMD super socket 7 CPUs also use on board L cache?

[@simontay4851]

The + versions have L2 cache.

[@necro_ware]

Yes, they do. K6-2 and K6-3 both use L2 cache. The K6-2+ and K6-3+ have internal L2 cache (128K and 256K) and the on-board cache becomes L3 cache. Some boards have hardware bugs and don't support L3 though.

[@warrax111]

@@necro_ware k6-3 has also internal L2 cache. Only K6-2 doesn't have.

[@necro_ware]

@@warrax111 right, my bad.

[@ayan.debnath]

what BIOS IC it uses?

[@necro_ware]

SST29EE010

[@adrian_sp6def]

how You gonna to glue heatsink onto the chipset?

[@necro_ware]

Heatsink plaster

[@AncapDude]

You should Update your Benchmark Pack

[@Luke-rr9po]

Excellent board, and excellent and very interesting video, thanks! 😊

[@HugoFaria-AZ]

I have an SP97-XV that I've been trying to get it working, I can make it POST and boot from time to time but it fails on most occasions (when I hit the button it just does a spin of the PSU and stops) and that is very confusing to me lol

[@oldschooldude8370]

Try cleaning the bios, ram & cpu sockets with contact cleaner.

[@HugoFaria-AZ]

@@oldschooldude8370 I still need to clean the BIOS socket.. the placement is not ideal and I have no clue where I placed my chip puller 😅 the rest has all been cleaned and the caps replaced..

[@oldschooldude8370]

​@@HugoFaria-AZIf you're gentle, a small flatblade screwdriver will work.

[@SianaGearz]

Magic Finger™ not helping?

[@necro_ware]

Those could be dry capacitors. Instability issues like that are usually a sign of bad caps.

[@Sierron]

Had a laptop with SiS Mirage graphics. Those were god awful and drivers hardly working. At least this motherboard seemed to be something worthwhile that SiS made :D

[@totallyuselessvideoz]

Onboard vga for server usage in 1997 with max ram 128mb and async overclocking? wow sis was THE pc master race compant but they didn't know!

[@chaoticsystem2211]

pop in 2x voodoo² and you're golden with the integrated gpu :P

[@cigea]

I bought Gigabyte's SiS5571 motherboard in the past. It was little slower than TX430 in Benchmarks (´・ω・｀) Because it set 4T for dram write cycles. The setting didn't exist in the BIOS. So I checked the data sheet. A while later, a new BIOS was released. The BIOS had a setting for dram write cycles. So, I try to change it 3T (๑•̀ㅂ•́)و✧ It worked without any problems. The benchmark results were almost the same as TX430. I think Intel's political power was too strong at the time (>_

[@georgeaiaskaridis5812]

Another example where the engineers tried (successfully) their best and somebody wanted to virtually restrict product capabilities through the manual. Then they wander why the product had bad reputation. If the company itself doesn't want to sell.... then they won't sell.

[@jantestowy123]

I've serviced PCs 1995-2015 and as always I've lernt a lot....

[@AbdAlgani1999]

128mb it can run windows xp

[@warrax111]

SIS was like Ati... their drivers sucked, and in time, when they've fixed it and made it finally reliable and kinda usable, the PC component was out of date. It's like with Rage Pro and Rage 128. These cards works quite well with 2001 or 2002 enhanced drivers, that are on page of Ati now. But it wasn't the experience during 1997-2000. Maybe users with Rage Pro, had to wait year, for good OpenGL drivers. They weren't even able to play Quake 2 as it came out, or Quake 2 demo. So Ati had to do special opengl.dll for Quake 2, but it dropped performance in other openGL games. Their drivers were mess. They've then released Ati Rage Pro Turbo chip, with drivers, that added 30% performance to Quake 2. So it seems like new card. But it wasn't. It was same chip as Rage AGP 2x, just renamed. But performance in other games with those drivers dropped. What a joke!

[@kcopy]

Ich mag das Brett! Habe es in meinem 97er HighEnd PC. Dort aktuell mit einem auf 250Mhz laufenden P 233 MMX bei 3 x 83Mhz. Rennt super kzbin.info1fAGoQVU2ak?si=89J6vLwIXftVkJAW

[@user_00759]

Nice video. I have a simatic microbox IPC427. I've installed windows on it. But it is showing bluescreen problem and restarting continuously. How to solve it? Plz let me know the procedure.