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WANTED - Gigabyte GA-5AX Motherboard

D

DoomGuy II

New Member
Joined
Oct 18, 2014
Messages
2
Looking for a GA-5AX motherboard since I have an AMD K6-3+ 450, which I am itching to use hopefully sometime soon.

Here's an example pic:

ga-5ax.png


I've looked on EBay, but couldn't find one.
 
Chromedome45 said:
Yeah but would have been nice to have the AGP slot. But still a nice board. Good buy!!! SIS made some pretty decent chipsets and were even an Intel Licensee for the Pentium 4's.
like this one: http://www.ebay.com/itm/ASUS-P4S800...-4GHz-P4-/321541351578?_trksid=p2054897.l4275
Click to expand...

Yeah, I was only alright with no AGP slot because that board was more than $10 cheaper than the price range I was expecting. I don't think I'd need AGP for what I'd be using it for, though, and I'll probably be alright with the integrated graphics (I pretty much just want to replace the AT motherboard in my 3-drive floppy imaging machine with an ATX version so I can get my only AT power supply back for use in future 486 builds; integrated graphics and sound are good for a machine like this because that means I can use the cards I'm currently using in other machines).
 
Aw, seems like this motherboard probably isn't gonna work for me. :( It is functional, but judging from the look of some of the capacitors, it could probably use a re-cap. Took me a while to actually get it booting reliably. But the worst part is that I was intending to use it in my floppy imaging machine, to free up my AT power supply for a 486 board, but it doesn't work with my 4-drive floppy controller. It takes ages to start up with the controller installed, and when it finally does, for some reason the option ROM doesn't detect any of the drives (I'm wondering if the on-board floppy controller is interfering with its operation, even though I disabled it in the system BIOS). It did actually work like it was supposed to on the M5ATA I was intending to replace, although I had to alter the address of the ROM before it did. Maybe it'd be a better solution to just adapt the M5ATA to an ATX power supply.

Well, I guess if anyone's interested in buying the board I just bought off me, I'll listen to offers. It can probably do *somebody* some good, I just doubt that that somebody is me.
 
Well, I use a 4-floppy Compaticard in a P5-A motherboard. I don't use the CC BIOS, but rather the native on-board BIOS. The second two drives on the CC are strictly for use with direct-access utilties such as ImageDisk, 22Disk, etc., so they don't need native BIOS support. I suspect you might get that under DOS using the Tulin driver however.

At any rate, if your board is anything like the P5-A, the trick is to install your floppy controller with its BIOS disabled, but otherwise at the primary floppy address (3Fx). Next, go into your BIOS setup and under one of the menus you should have one that says "Onboard Floppy Controller" or something like that. Set that to "disabled". Leave your primary menu drive A: and B: choices to reflect reality.

The board should boot right up using the BIOS-declared floppy settings, but using your ISA controller. My P5-A is set up this way and runs DOS, Win98SE, Windows XP and Ubuntu with no problems in accessing the floppy drives. As I said, the second two drives are both external and are used by non-BIOS-dependent utilities.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Well, I use a 4-floppy Compaticard in a P5-A motherboard. I don't use the CC BIOS, but rather the native on-board BIOS. The second two drives on the CC are strictly for use with direct-access utilties such as ImageDisk, 22Disk, etc., so they don't need native BIOS support. I suspect you might get that under DOS using the Tulin driver however.

At any rate, if your board is anything like the P5-A, the trick is to install your floppy controller with its BIOS disabled, but otherwise at the primary floppy address (3Fx). Next, go into your BIOS setup and under one of the menus you should have one that says "Onboard Floppy Controller" or something like that. Set that to "disabled". Leave your primary menu drive A: and B: choices to reflect reality.

The board should boot right up using the BIOS-declared floppy settings, but using your ISA controller. My P5-A is set up this way and runs DOS, Win98SE, Windows XP and Ubuntu with no problems in accessing the floppy drives. As I said, the second two drives are both external and are used by non-BIOS-dependent utilities.
Click to expand...

That trick doesn't work with this board. It lets me boot to the hard drive, but won't let me boot off even my first floppy drive, and when I try to access a drive, I get the old "Not ready reading drive A" error. Same with Drive B. Of course, I had to set up drive D with DRIVER.SYS, which is giving me a 'General failure' error. So yeah, it's gonna be a pretty useless board for me, I think.
 
I've seen that with one or two later boards. In particular, I've got an HP P3 motherboard--a really nice board--3 ISA slots, 133MHz FSB, but the horrible Intel 815 chipset (requires RDRAM). It doesn't even bother to implement DMA on the ISA slots and IRQ6 is permanently assigned to the onboard FDC, even if I disable it.

For those who are wondering about the relationship between the similarity of the OP's Gigabyte board and the ASUS P5-A, compare:

51OikiJILlL.jpg
 
Chuck(G) said:
I've seen that with one or two later boards. In particular, I've got an HP P3 motherboard--a really nice board--3 ISA slots, 133MHz FSB, but the horrible Intel 815 chipset (requires RDRAM). It doesn't even bother to implement DMA on the ISA slots and IRQ6 is permanently assigned to the onboard FDC, even if I disable it.
Click to expand...

Well, we might have found the common factor there. My board is also an HP board.
 
Could be; at some point, HP started outsourcing their motherboards. The one I referred to was made by FIC--the only change to it was the thermistor for the Vectra power supply fan added. I've got another HP Pavillion Slot 1 board; seems to have been made by ASUS; the damned BIOS will flat out disallow booting unless you have an HP PSU with the funny fan connector plugged into the board.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Could be; at some point, HP started outsourcing their motherboards. The one I referred to was made by FIC--the only change to it was the thermistor for the Vectra power supply fan added. I've got another HP Pavillion Slot 1 board; seems to have been made by ASUS; the damned BIOS will flat out disallow booting unless you have an HP PSU with the funny fan connector plugged into the board.
Click to expand...

Interesting. Mine says SPAX in big letters on it, which Google seems to associate with ASUS and HP. It has an SiS chipset, but the BIOS is HP branded. I think once I got into it it ended up being a Phoenix BIOS, but I already have the board uninstalled from the case so I can't boot it up again to make sure right now.
 
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