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M-Tech R407W2 Motherboard

I

imoldnow

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Joined
Dec 4, 2022
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Northern Indiana, USA
I have recently acquired a Socket 3 motherboard which I cannot find a lot of information about. The only identification on the motherboard itself is a sticker that says R407W2. I did find a page on The Retro Web for a similar R407, the picture is the correct board though terrible quality, the jumper documents are for a slightly different revision. There are tables of jumper settings in the silkscreen of the board which is nice. It does support DX4 and has the proper multiplier, I have not verified that 3.3V is present on the board or socket. I do hope to run a DX4-120, I am concerned about heat, I may make a different post on cooling. I never personally built of configured a board of this vintage, I was a teenager in the mid 90's but did not get into building and component level stuff until about 97-98 when I built a K6-2 based system.

So, for those that may know or have more experience, I have some questions.

This board has both 30 pin and 72 pin simm sockets, so 4 banks, according to the limited information I have it can support 128 MB of parity RAM using either 30 or 72 pin memory or a combination of the two. Is there any benefit to using one type of simm over the other? When I look at RAM, I see faster speeds on the 30 pinn memory.

There was a Varta battery on the board when I got it. Amazingly while the battery was a little crusty it had not leaked all over the board and damaged anything. I have removed it from the board. My first thought was to replace it with a 3V coin cell or AAA battery pack, but I believe that battery was rechargeable. There is also an external battery header, would that be for a non-rechargeable battery? And if so, should I even worry about replacing the Varta?

There is nothing on board in terms of I/O other than the keyboard connector. It has an Award Bios chip dated 1995 and says ISA 486. Would a BIOS of this vintage support an ISA IDE controller or am I looking at needing an XT-IDE adapter.

I have not powered it on, I don't have a VGA adapter for it yet. I do have a couple ISA I/O cards with IDE and floppy on them. I want to make sure there are no shorts on any of the voltage lines.
 
Almost any 486 board should support an IDE adapter, however the BIOS on early ones often didn't support EIDE (limiting the drive to 504/540MB). If you have an external battery connector, just use that instead of replacing the Varta. Any way you could post some pics? May help finding the original documentation for that rev of board.
 
There is an issue with the retroweb for this board. There are definitely two distinct variants, which was more apparent in the original Microhouse Technical Library. There is an M-Tech R407 and a R407E. Yours looks like an R407E. I have an R407, and it is not the same as yours. You have 3.3V capability, the jumpers are different, and your BIOS and Keyboard IC socket locations are swapped. The BIOS are different too, in my understanding. In Microhouse, they had listed R407 and R407E entries, and there the R407 was just a copy of R407E with more typos introduced. It seems like the retroweb just combined that into one entry now, and that is wrong. They are different.

I wanted to eventually send in the correct info on R407. It was a struggle because I had to reverse engineer the jumpers without a manual, and I wanted to eventually have someone help me confirm the jumpers and their purpose. BTW, my board clearly has an "R407" written in the silkscreen, and the BIOS ID on boot identified M-Tech as the manufacturer. So if you do contact retroweb, please have them distinguish your board from R407 again. I would probably group yours as an R407E unless maybe the BIOS is different then maybe not? I doubt it. There are several other people that have R407E out there. I am the only one I know in recent times that has an R407.
 
Oops, there is an R407E in the silkscreen on your image, lower left. Solved!

BTW, the retroweb probably did not have all the correct jumper settings anyway. I do have the manual for R407E if you want it.
 
I totally missed the model in the corner, it shows up better in the picture than in person. I have an EEPROM programmer on the way so I can backup the BIOS, I will see if that lists a manufacturer. I will probably borrow an ISA card from my IBM 5170, perhaps I am wrong by eBay prices for any ISA or VLB graphics card seems high.
 
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