new mainboards

[b_dirk]

Hello,
I am searching for a board for my P3 733 (fcpga). I have seen the new ones
often have no ISA slot! And now with all the driver-stuff the EWS seems to work, so I don't realy want to buy myself a new soundcard.

Does anyone know a good board with udma 100, 133 fsb, able to use 1gz pentiums and one ISA slot for my EWS?

thanks for any help

Dirk

[philippz]

Hello Dirk,

I?m using a MSI 6163 pro board with my EWS 64 XL cards. It works absolutely flawlessly.
I?m using an overclocked Celeron II(892 MHz@105MHz FSB) which is pin compatible with your P III. My board provides two ISA slots, the newer Version of the board which ist called BX Master still provides one slot. You can find out more about these at the MSI-homepages(german: www.msi-computer.de) or directly: http://www.msi-computer.de/produkte/.../6163m_inf.htm

Don?t hesitate to mail me(german or english at your choice;-) if you got further questions: [email protected]


Bye, Philipp

[b_dirk]

I found only one pcpga board for udma 100 on this page, but it had no isa slot :-(

[philippz]

Sorry, I forgot you where searching for UDMA 100. I don?t think that there is any motherboard with UDMA 100 and ISA. ISA is simply too old. Are you sure you really need UDMA 100? UDMA 100 only makes sense if your HDDs are actually able to produce a data stream of 100 MB per second. If you only have a single harddisc, UDMA 100 won?t perform noticeable better than UDMA 33(I compared UDMA 66 and UDMA 33 by myself with my Seagate ST320430A(UDMA 66 drive with approximately 20 MB/s). My proposal: get a BX Master Board which works reliable and buy a PCI UDMA 100 controller if you really need it and turn off the onboard HDD controller.

Bye, Philipp

P.S. I forgot to write that the BX Master board is a Slot I board. You would have to get an adaptor like the MSI 6905. I?m also using this one and it works perfectly.

[b_dirk]

I found the ABIT BX133 RAID.
It has 133 fsb FCPGA, 100 udma, RAID-controller, 1 Isa slot and you can put 1ghz p3 in it.
I just orderd it :-)
That should help/last for a while...

[Joachim Zauner]

I think it?s a real bad situation with new motherboards and ISA support.

Especially in case of EWS 64, there is no equivalent in PCI. More and more boards of the new generation (Socket CPU?s) don?t support ISA. All EWS-Owners, who first paid a lot of money for their soundcard, who second had to wait for software (ed!son) and drivers (NT) patiently are now in a very bad situation.
They can either buy a new (up-to-date) PC and put the EWS in a drawer of their desk (believe me the day of absolutely no ISA slots on mainboards isn?t so far) or the can stay with the EWS on their having PC and never update any installed software.

I just can tell something about the situation in austria. The price of this card is nearly the same since the last three years. But in the meantime you can buy several other soundcards with nearly the same features and with a PCI-Interface for almost between a thirds and a half of the price of the EWS.

Does anybody know:
Is there a PCI-Equivalent existing?
If not, is it planned?
If yes, is there a possibility for crossgrading from ISA to PCI

What?s the future of the EWS?

For MicrowavePC useres the situation might be
harder.

[philippz]

I don?t think that the situation is this bad at all. Sure, the EWS64 hardware is special in two ways: it?s very useful and very oldfashioned.
I?m planning to move my EWS64?s to a seperate PC - although I own a mainboard with two ISA-slots - to get a cleaner running system. To be honest, ISA is really outdated, consumes a lot of CPU power, is hard to configure and always causes trouble. A real clean system shouldn?t contain any ISA-cards(and this is not a special EWS problem).
I think using an older PC like a Pentium 200 or similar just to put the EWS64 in it will be the best way in the future. The new PCs could simply run a good MIDI interface to connect the EWS64 and a fast audio card which could be connected to the EWS64 by SPDIF.
Besides minimizing hardware trouble with the PC running the sequencer software, this solution will also provide a very nice user interface:-)

Bye, Philipp

btw: I remember certain rumours about a card called EWS 96 M which should have a connector for the MWPC.

[Beta-Decay]

b_dirk, you may want to be careful with that board. Someone from terratec has said "Intel's BX chipset and Windows95 are unable to use IRQ 9 for ISA cards."

If you are using 95 it might not work and you may have to reconfigure all your IRQs (annoying as hell!) But if there are no other boards then you dont have all that many options.

[b_dirk]

I dont use IRQ 9. The last boar I had was a BX too and I think I did not used IRQ 9.

I think you'll allways have to reconfigure your IRQs when you install a new board - because you have at least a new/fresh bios. But this was not too hard, it runs good now. I have to say I have many cards in my computer: EWS, SCSI, TV, AGP and now the new Raid Controller on board. I haven't tried it but I think you can use both IDE-Controler-pairs:
2 UDMA100/66 or use it as RAID
and 2 UDMA/33 Controller

it seems that I can install 8 IDE-devices!!
I am not shure if there would be no driver conflict, but theoretical it should work.

The only disadvantage I can see is that it takes some more seconds until the computer is initialized when you use the RAID/UDMA-100 controller pair.

I am satisfied :-)

[KKu]

Don't know sure about PIII/Cel2 motherboards, but personally I'm gonna buy Athlon...

Abit KT7-RAID seems to have RAID & UDMA100 controller and it also has ISA slot. Only "Disadvantage" is that it only has 3 DIMM slots...

Why change to AMD? Money talks... Processor upgrade later on seems to be cheaper...

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