Author Topic: Fastest motherboard with at least 1 ISA slot?  (Read 18959 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline bob225

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 259
  • Country: gb
Re: Fastest motherboard with at least 1 ISA slot?
« Reply #50 on: September 23, 2018, 03:26:30 pm »
ah the joys of old hardware, those where the days when you had to properly diagnose problems not just click a box and software fixes it for you

Any IRQ, I/O or DMA conflicts between the cards ?
 

Offline precaudTopic starter

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 734
  • Country: us
    • LinearZ
Re: Fastest motherboard with at least 1 ISA slot?
« Reply #51 on: September 23, 2018, 03:45:20 pm »
Any IRQ, I/O or DMA conflicts between the cards ?

No problem there, the ISA card only uses a couple IO ports and doesn't use IRQ or DMA, its all programmed IO controlled by the software.
I sense you're heading toward suggesting a USB->ISA adapter. I have confirmed with the mfr that it won't work, those converters require some software changes.
 

Offline bob225

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 259
  • Country: gb
Re: Fastest motherboard with at least 1 ISA slot?
« Reply #52 on: September 23, 2018, 05:15:23 pm »
not at all, the usb - Isa just adds another layer of complexity and another driver in the mix, as you need Isa you have to stick with a chipset that natively supports it (agp graphics era)

iirc some of the older usb chipsets dont play nicely with others (winbond springs to mind)
« Last Edit: September 23, 2018, 05:20:31 pm by bob225 »
 

Offline drussell

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 1855
  • Country: ca
  • Hardcore Geek
Re: Fastest motherboard with at least 1 ISA slot?
« Reply #53 on: September 23, 2018, 05:20:29 pm »
...shows a Biostar M7MIA that has one ISA slot, uses the AMD 761, and DDR memory. Limited to 1GB of memory, though (the Soyo does 1.5GB).

The specs I saw said 2GB maximum, but maybe they were wrong.

Quote
EDIT: Well its not all that rosey... it appears Biostar never updated the BIOS to support the faster XP+ cpus, so the fastest cpu it supports is 1.4GHz. The Soyo will run a XP 2600+ (1.91GHz). Grrrrr...   |O

You might be able to cobble together a custom BIOS but that is a lot of effort.  :)

There are also Intel 845 based boards (ick, P4) that do up to 333 MHz DDR supposedly with a "real" ISA slot with working DMA, etc.

Although... since you say:

Quote
No problem there, the ISA card only uses a couple IO ports and doesn't use IRQ or DMA, its all programmed IO controlled by the software.
I sense you're heading toward suggesting a USB->ISA adapter. I have confirmed with the mfr that it won't work, those converters require some software changes.

... that you don't need DMA, then any newer board that has a PCI->ISA bridge or LPC->ISA bridge on it should work, though it has been so long I don't remember how the IO ports would get mapped in there.  It is usually DMA that causes the problems when trying to do ISA since newer chipsets simply do not support mapping that stuff to where it needs to go.

Not USB...  That is icky.  PCI, though, you should be able to use your own PCI->ISA bridge and have success (or any motherboard that has one built in like some of the SuperMicro boards, industrial boards, etc.)

I guess I need to go back and do some more reading and re-learning.  :)
« Last Edit: September 23, 2018, 05:22:14 pm by drussell »
 

Offline bob225

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 259
  • Country: gb
Re: Fastest motherboard with at least 1 ISA slot?
« Reply #54 on: September 23, 2018, 05:31:44 pm »
oops i missed 2 posts on page 2 - i see you had to get the drivers in the right order - i forgot that was a thing back then


It surprising what you forget, new info in - old redundent info out  :-\

 

Offline precaudTopic starter

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 734
  • Country: us
    • LinearZ
Re: Fastest motherboard with at least 1 ISA slot?
« Reply #55 on: September 23, 2018, 06:33:40 pm »
iirc some of the older usb chipsets dont play nicely with others (winbond springs to mind)

Yeah, I disabled the onboard USB before installing a USB2 card.

Which reminds me of something I wondered about briefly when putting this together. (Pls correct me if any of this is wrong).

Max xfer rate of USB 2.0 is spec'ed at 480Mbit/sec, or roughly 48MByte/sec.
To achieve that rate, it has to be attached to a mboard bus that supports that xfer rate.
But PCI busses are clocked at ~ 33MHz.
This suggests that no PCI plugin USB 2.0 card will ever achieve 48MB and will be limited to < 33MHz xfer rate. It may be protocol-compliant, but is transfer-rate limited.
If so, then this is also playing a big role in slowing things down. And no machinations of cpu or memory speed will make up for it. It probably explains why the Soyo was not more than 2X faster than the Tyan combo. By all rights it should have been.

You might be able to cobble together a custom BIOS but that is a lot of effort.  :)

Definitely not worth it !

Quote
There are also Intel 845 based boards (ick, P4) that do up to 333 MHz DDR supposedly with a "real" ISA slot with working DMA, etc.

... that you don't need DMA, then any newer board that has a PCI->ISA bridge or LPC->ISA bridge on it should work, though it has been so long I don't remember how the IO ports would get mapped in there.  It is usually DMA that causes the problems when trying to do ISA since newer chipsets simply do not support mapping that stuff to where it needs to go.

PCI, though, you should be able to use your own PCI->ISA bridge and have success (or any motherboard that has one built in like some of the SuperMicro boards, industrial boards, etc.)

There is indeed a SuperMicro P4 board (the P4SCA) with two 16-bit ISA slots that looks like it would work well. But they're industrial darlings and pull a minimum of $400 used...

oops i missed 2 posts on page 2 - i see you had to get the drivers in the right order - i forgot that was a thing back then

Yeah, wasn't that fun?!?!

Quote
It surprising what you forget, new info in - old redundent info out  :-\

Maintaining sanity (or some semblance thereof) requires that we forget such things  :)
 

Offline drussell

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 1855
  • Country: ca
  • Hardcore Geek
Re: Fastest motherboard with at least 1 ISA slot?
« Reply #56 on: September 23, 2018, 06:42:31 pm »
But PCI busses are clocked at ~ 33MHz.
This suggests that no PCI plugin USB 2.0 card will ever achieve 48MB and will be limited to < 33MHz xfer rate. It may be protocol-compliant, but is transfer-rate limited.

You forgot that it is 32 bit, not 8-bit, so the standard 33 MHz PCI bus gives you 133 MB/s transfer rates.  (So an ATA-133 card with a modern disk on it uses the whole dang bus...  :) )

 
The following users thanked this post: precaud

Offline Wan Huang Luo

  • Regular Contributor
  • *
  • Posts: 137
  • Country: us
  • 顽谎骆 from the Shenzhen Market
Re: Fastest motherboard with at least 1 ISA slot?
« Reply #57 on: December 05, 2018, 06:33:07 pm »
Never mind. I just ordered the caps to recap them both and I'll go that route.

I did that with Soyo boards back in the 90's. The originals lasted a couple of years. After replacing the caps with quality Japanese units the boards were taken out of service (retired) last year after ~17 years of 24/7 use. At the time it seemed nuts, but they were the only boards I could find that had the right chipset and form-factor to fit the requirements.

If you already have boards that work, then stick with those. The more pre-heat you can get into the board, the easier it'll be to re-work the caps. Motherboards have huge internal planes and really suck the heat from the joint.
For DIYers, Soyo boards used to be the duck's guts way back then.
 

Offline precaudTopic starter

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 734
  • Country: us
    • LinearZ
Re: Fastest motherboard with at least 1 ISA slot?
« Reply #58 on: December 06, 2018, 12:47:57 am »
For DIYers, Soyo boards used to be the duck's guts way back then.
[/quote]

Yes, but very stable too, not as tweaky as, say, the Abit's which gave you insane overclocking options...
 

Offline Wan Huang Luo

  • Regular Contributor
  • *
  • Posts: 137
  • Country: us
  • 顽谎骆 from the Shenzhen Market
Re: Fastest motherboard with at least 1 ISA slot?
« Reply #59 on: December 06, 2018, 02:33:24 pm »


Yes, but very stable too, not as tweaky as, say, the Abit's which gave you insane overclocking options...
Ah yes, to be back in the heady days of 200...1? with an Abit KT7A-RAID, and an AMD Duron  with pencil graphite over the multiplier traces, enabling unlock and bringing 600MHz to 1GHz, stable with some $25 heatsink. And twin IBM Deathstar drives in RAID-0  :scared: :-BROKE
 

Offline amyk

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 8240
Re: Fastest motherboard with at least 1 ISA slot?
« Reply #60 on: December 22, 2020, 04:25:19 am »
I just found this: https://www.dfi.com/product/index/1502

You can put an 8-core i9 and 64GB of RAM in it, and it has two ISA slots! Lots of other I/O too.

Was unable to find a price, but I'm guessing it's in the range of "if you have to ask..." :o
 
The following users thanked this post: oPossum

Offline precaudTopic starter

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 734
  • Country: us
    • LinearZ
Re: Fastest motherboard with at least 1 ISA slot?
« Reply #61 on: December 22, 2020, 04:16:47 pm »
Interesting, thanks. Best price I see is $276. No mention of what OS's it supports with drivers, though...
 

Offline macboy

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 2252
  • Country: ca
Re: Fastest motherboard with at least 1 ISA slot?
« Reply #62 on: January 05, 2021, 04:48:51 pm »
I few years ago I bought a used Intel-made industrial P4 board (845G chipset) with a single ISA slot plus AGP and some PCI. I believe this chipset is the most modern one ever made with actual proper ISA support, i.e. BIOS support including PnP, I/O addresses, IRQs, booting from ISA cards. This means any operating system which supports Intel ISA slots should work fine. I used this board with a 3.06 GHz P4 and 2 GB of DDR 400 MHz RAM. I put that system together solely to use a (free to me) GPIB ISA card, since it was cheaper than buying a PCI GPIB card at the time. (serach *bay for D845G or 845G or P4 ISA).

Various companies have produced motherboards for more modern CPUs, but due to removal of chipset support, all of them use some type of bridge chip, which itself requires some driver to function (maybe limiting operating system support), and often requires driver level changes for the ISA card to work properly. So "Fastest motherboard with at least 1 ISA slot" depends on whether you want true ISA support or not, and whether you are OK with buying a single used product with poor/no documentation, or need to buy multiple brand new units with warranty and support.
 
The following users thanked this post: precaud


Share me

Digg  Facebook  SlashDot  Delicious  Technorati  Twitter  Google  Yahoo
Smf