eightbit Posted June 17, 2022 Share Posted June 17, 2022 (edited) This past Friday I found someone locally giving away a beige tower that included a motherboard. They told me it had been "long dead". But, I was really after the case as I need one for an upcoming build. I took the motherboard out (it was just a case, motherboard and two CD drives) and immediately noticed most of the larger caps (1500uF and 1000uF rated) were bulging and some just completely blown open. Electrolytic crap all over the board on areas too. I wish I took a picture of the completely blown ones before I tossed them. I took the pic of the others after removing them, and you can still see the bottoms were leaking. Funny as the tops looked fine so you would never know just by looking while they were on the board. I decided I would give it a go and desoldered all of the large caps and cleaned the board in the sink with Dawn and a toothbrush....and let it dry out over the weekend. In the meantime I ordered some quality caps (Rubicon and Panasonic) to replace these garbage "Choyo" caps. I also hit ebay and ordered a PII 450 for $18...since I have no slot 1 processors. I recapped it on Tuesday and the CPU came today. And it works! The 40GB hard drive I had would not detect so I had a hunch it was a BIOS issue. Thanks again to the Wayback Machine which allowed me to travel back in time and obtain the last BIOS update from the old Biostar page. Updated using Unibios (what a lifesaving tool...I have used it many times now) and the hard drive now detects. I had some crap Windows ME install on the drive tested, but just testing for functionality and formatting a "disk" (gotek mounted image) here. More intense testing tomorrow but the machine has been on for around 6 hours with no issues. I am actually surprised that it is working at all. Much more testing is obviously needed before I can put my stamp of approval on it, but the results are looking pretty good so far! Edited June 17, 2022 by eightbit 2 Quote Link to comment https://forums.atariage.com/topic/336968-saved-a-biostar-i440bx-motherboard-from-the-dump/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
wierd_w Posted June 17, 2022 Share Posted June 17, 2022 Some of those could go to early celerons on a converter board. Might be worth looking into if that one can be coaxed into it. At some point though you are going to have too many machines, and your significant other will complain. You might want to find a home for that one. Quote Link to comment https://forums.atariage.com/topic/336968-saved-a-biostar-i440bx-motherboard-from-the-dump/#findComment-5074627 Share on other sites More sharing options...
eightbit Posted June 17, 2022 Author Share Posted June 17, 2022 (edited) 6 minutes ago, wierd_w said: Some of those could go to early celerons on a converter board. Might be worth looking into if that one can be coaxed into it. At some point though you are going to have too many machines, and your significant other will complain. You might want to find a home for that one. She's fine with it and I am really good with maximizing minimal space. I have six machines all hooked up in a 4ft section. It's all about how you set it up I'm not getting rid of my hardware! I am fairly certain I can get up to an 800MHz PIII working in this board. I'll be trying that soon! Edited June 17, 2022 by eightbit Quote Link to comment https://forums.atariage.com/topic/336968-saved-a-biostar-i440bx-motherboard-from-the-dump/#findComment-5074630 Share on other sites More sharing options...
eightbit Posted June 18, 2022 Author Share Posted June 18, 2022 I also want to reiterate the convenience of using a Gotek floppy emulator. Once again I used one here to flash the bios by creating a virtual floppy using Winimage and using it with the floppy emulator. I guess if you have real floppy drives and disks across machines you would not care about this. But, even if you do you might not want to waste floppies to do such things. I do not, so these are essential to me. I have these in all of my machines, all flashed with the FlashFloppy firmware. I flashed all of them myself as well since it is so easy. GREAT devices. Quote Link to comment https://forums.atariage.com/topic/336968-saved-a-biostar-i440bx-motherboard-from-the-dump/#findComment-5075175 Share on other sites More sharing options...
eightbit Posted June 19, 2022 Author Share Posted June 19, 2022 Looks like after some research this can only use Katmai processors. So the best it can do is a PIII 600 SECC. I have one coming. Overall the build around this board has been excellent. The i440BX chipset is pretty rock solid. I have been running it nonstop for a few days now. Quote Link to comment https://forums.atariage.com/topic/336968-saved-a-biostar-i440bx-motherboard-from-the-dump/#findComment-5075667 Share on other sites More sharing options...
wierd_w Posted June 19, 2022 Share Posted June 19, 2022 BX was a very good chipset, yes. It was the heart of many consumer 3rd party boards back then. Quote Link to comment https://forums.atariage.com/topic/336968-saved-a-biostar-i440bx-motherboard-from-the-dump/#findComment-5075673 Share on other sites More sharing options...
wierd_w Posted June 19, 2022 Share Posted June 19, 2022 On 6/17/2022 at 12:03 AM, eightbit said: She's fine with it and I am really good with maximizing minimal space. I have six machines all hooked up in a 4ft section. It's all about how you set it up I'm not getting rid of my hardware! I am fairly certain I can get up to an 800MHz PIII working in this board. I'll be trying that soon! This guy claims to have gotten a 1.4ghz Celeron working in his M6TBA. https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/old-slot-1-upgrade.482801/ A lot of those BX boards could do cpus that were not 'officially' supported, which is why I mentioned adapter boards. 1 Quote Link to comment https://forums.atariage.com/topic/336968-saved-a-biostar-i440bx-motherboard-from-the-dump/#findComment-5075680 Share on other sites More sharing options...
eightbit Posted June 22, 2022 Author Share Posted June 22, 2022 On 6/19/2022 at 4:00 AM, wierd_w said: This guy claims to have gotten a 1.4ghz Celeron working in his M6TBA. https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/old-slot-1-upgrade.482801/ A lot of those BX boards could do cpus that were not 'officially' supported, which is why I mentioned adapter boards. It's possible to do, but the possibility of obtaining a "Slot-T" adapter to do it is another story. I'd imagine they were pretty easy to obtain back in 2003 when that post was written, but now finding a Tualeron compatible "Slot-T" adapter I think would be difficult. Using any of the standard "Slotkets" you find a dime a dozen on ebay (and those are not necessarily cheap either nowadays) would have to be modified along with the Celeron in order to use it in a BX board: http://www.mrufer.ch/pc/tualatin2_e.html Not a pretty mod in my opinion. I would rather have a Slot-T adapter from a company like PowerLeap...but good luck finding one of those these days. I personally hated using slotkets in general. When I ran my computer store in the late 90's customers would ask for these and I would obtain them and install them on demand, but they all felt so cheap. Because they were...cheap Chinese hack boards. I always hated pairing a quality mainboard and quality Intel CPU with a $10 slotket. It worked, but I never really trusted them to be honest. 1 Quote Link to comment https://forums.atariage.com/topic/336968-saved-a-biostar-i440bx-motherboard-from-the-dump/#findComment-5077226 Share on other sites More sharing options...
wierd_w Posted June 22, 2022 Share Posted June 22, 2022 How about a 10$ interposer to go with your cheap slotket? https://www.ebay.com/itm/283583586110?hash=item4206e61f3e:g:8vMAAOSw88NdWCZ~ Quote Link to comment https://forums.atariage.com/topic/336968-saved-a-biostar-i440bx-motherboard-from-the-dump/#findComment-5077350 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keatah Posted June 22, 2022 Share Posted June 22, 2022 (edited) I used a PowerLeap Pl-iP3/T to get a 1400 MHZ Celeron/Tualatin going on a BX board back in the day. Paid something like around $120 - $150 for it with processor. And since it was a dotcom era product it needed recapping. But it's been solid since. https://www.roberthancock.com/dell/plip3t/ https://www.roberthancock.com/dell/plip3t/powerleap-v2.htm https://www.cpushack.com/UpgradeProcessors.html#PowerLeap PL-IP3-T.pdf powerleap _ PL-iP3T.pdf Edited June 22, 2022 by Keatah Quote Link to comment https://forums.atariage.com/topic/336968-saved-a-biostar-i440bx-motherboard-from-the-dump/#findComment-5077588 Share on other sites More sharing options...
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