Let's repair a Super Socket 7 mainboard: Gigabyte GA-5AA

45 thoughts on “Let's repair a Super Socket 7 mainboard: Gigabyte GA-5AA”

• I would love to see how/if this board would work at 133fsb 2.5x multiplier. The bump in fsb was the best performance boost at this time.

• I'm loving your channel!!!!

• I personally wouldn't be so daring to plug in a CPU with caps in that condition, after all the output of a switch mode voltage regulator can only be stable with output caps vagely to spec, and the prior unloaded voltage test also tells you as much. Indeed i wouldn't even call it unloaded, since the caps in that condition also exhibit leakage, equivalent parallel resistance, so the output was already loaded down by the caps and was still jumping all over the place. Things are potentially worse with ripple than a multimeter is capable of indicating.

• noting new under sun 1 pc same sokcet 7 to inastaled intel and amd cpu it .1997.ocf leaking those not best guitaly

• Hello friend, a question, I have a Foxconn CN15235 motherboard saved, it is old with the INTEL05 E2168 processor.

• But why you did't try MMX on 100Mhz FSB?)

• precisely because of the winbond's vpp requirement, is why it cannot write to nvram, if you look on post, with the sst chip it said update ok, with the winbond it said no nvram, the nvram is used for things like escd, pci/pnp configuration and such. it (pci/pnp) might work without that but I just wanted to share.

• Thanks for the video. Hope to see more.

• Thanks for the another great video!

• BIOS probably tries to update hardware configuration in ESCD at the end of the POST which is stored in Flash ROM page if I remember correctly. If motherboard can not write to the ROM chip (wrong voltage, unsupported internal configuration) it will hang or print an error about ESCD.

• Nice video! Thanks.

• I have this motherboard with severe stability issues. DOS runs great with Tillamook 120×3.5 for a nice 420 MHz but Windows 95/98 just won't run properly. Should look into recapping or if other repairs might be needed.

• 19:47 – after change of BIOS-Chip it tells no NVRAM

• Hi. I have two Asus P2B-DS boards to repair. One does not start the power supply at all, the other one starts the power supply but generally does not work. Are you able to guide me in repairing it?

• Greetings! Good job resurrecting this board and its not undead! Ha! By the way, i stumbled upon boxes with all kinds of old (motherboard) connectors from power connectors to PCI and whatnot. Its all "used" / removed from boards i guess. I have absolutely no use for it, as i am more interested in other equipment. I just wanted the boxes so … if you want, i could sent you the stuff for free (if you indeed live in germany). So i don't need to throw it away.

  Best wishes from near Berlin!

• I don't know if Intel CPUs FPU were so so sooo much better than others, but, Quake was heavily optimized even in assembler for the Pentium FPU architecture, of course it performs better on the targeted CPUs.
  K6-2 added 3dnow instructions which Quake was never optimized for, for example.
  I mean, it is not a fair comparison.
  Best wishes.

• Supercachanga

• @necroware, any recommendations where to buy the BIOS?
  Also will be great a video regarding BIOS types and possible replacements.
  Tanks a lot for your great work!!!

• Always joy when a vintage board comes back to life 🙂

• Im currently selling this board, im not a fan, the jumpers and dip switches to set fsb and multiplier are unpredictable, trying to run a K6-2 500 for example refused to set x5 multiplier and instead automatically goes to x6 multiplier meaning it sets it self to 600 stead of 500, getting 500 means dropping the fsb which then kills the performance gains of the chip. for some reason JP16 mentioned in the manual is omitted in this version of the board meaning fsb is automatically switched between frequencys ie the same dip switch setting for 95mhz is also the same as the 100mhz setting without JP16 theres no way of setting which fsb it uses. yeah F7b is the lastest bios all it does is enabled drive support larger than 64GB the original Gigabyte page for this motherboard still exsist no need to go to third party websites. interesting that you used the K6-2 350 as setting for the K6-2 300 is also problematic but is correct for the 350 chip, the 300 will set lower or higher than 300 but not 300. Although it doesnt have AGP my favorite board remains the PCChips board with SIS530 chipset, despite the lesser chipset everything is done in Bios not Dip switches or jumpers needed to configure the CPU. My biggest annoyce however was finding a cpu cooler that is beefier than aluminuim with a 50mm fan on top cause the Caps surrounding the socket get in the way of installing backwards compatible socket370/A cpu coolers. i tried modding a copper heatsink to fit instead but that actually performed worse oweing to less surface area.

• I am glad to see you are not of the mind re-cap for the sake of re-capping old hardware. There are a bunch of creators that annoy me by saying they are future proofing the hardware by replacing components where there is not sign of faults.

• Thank you so much for this video! The other day I gave up as I tried to get a mainboard PCChips M559 up and running. It started to post, but stopped instantly with a code D3D1. Of course I did not insert memory modules, since it should indicate the missing modules later. But as I saw your video, I instantly tried it again and it worked perfectly fine. Cool! Otherwise I had scrapped this great board.

• Love these videos.

• I have the same board and can confirm X=OFF and O=ON

• Nice video, as usual. May I ask – how this board handles powering of AGP? I suppose 3,3V are generated just by quite weak on board regulator, right? I have similar board (Gigabyte GA-5AX) in ATX form factor and even this board has AGP connected to regulator. Luckily in latest revision there is jumper to switch to 3,3V in ATX power connector instead.
  With on board regulator used, there is risk with more power hungry AGP cards to be damaged. I was wondering why even ATX only super socket 7 boards does not simply use 3,3V from ATX power suply and only reason I found is support of very old (IDT) 3,52V CPUs.

• Great video as always sir.

• Amazing! SS7 is truly the most flexible DOS platform.

• The line "Windows 7 confirmed working on this motherboard…" caught my attention… somebody installed and got Windows 7 to run on a computer maxing out at 133MHz on the FSB and like 450 MHz on a processor (that I remember being obtainable)… I want to see Win7 boot on whatever configuration they got working on that board.

• Super socket 7 is my favorite. My first pc was a IBM with the SIS530 chipset. I miss that pc. I had it with 3 256 MB ram sticks and a K6-2 at 550mhz. Windows 98 was rock solid on that rig.

• Nice looking board! My criticism with the layout would be the floppy/ide cables would have to stretch over the cpu, which would block natural venting to the back of the case. Maybe they thought ducting upward would be ok as it's going to the PSU, often the only bit of airflow for lower end PCs? I would still prefer ribbon cables towards the front of the case though.

• Well done on the board as it looks like new! Thank you for sharing your journey with this one 👍

• I loved SS7 boards. I had around 30 Socket 7 and Super Socket 7 boards at my job from 2000-2003 timeframe. Almost all of them got updated from P54, P55 and 6×86 chips to K6-2 400 and 450Mhz chips. Barely any of them had fsb frequencies above 100Mhz but those were my favorites. There was 1 board(I can't remember the model sadly) that I got to run stable with a 3x133mhz setup, but it didn't make a huge difference versus 4x100mhz. I'd still like to get my hands on a motherboard that supports higher fsb clocks though as I do have a K6-2/533 in my collection that runs fine at 550mhz that I would love to experiment with it. I still kick myself for never picking up a k6-3 back in the day though.

• What EEPROM chips do you use for these older boards?
  Can you provide various makes/models that are compatible?
  Thanks.

• Love it! A Super Socket 7 board is on my wish list for retro systems.

• Very cool motherboard. It has connections for ATX and AT power supplies. This board reminded me of my FIC VA503+ that I had with AMD K6II500. Congratulations on the video and success to the channel. Hugs from Brazil.

• Both of my K6-3+ cpus are 1.6V parts so it is difficult to find a motherboard where you dont need to have over voltage of 2.0V with them.

• Imnsho, replacing caps on a 20-40yo mobo is like changing the motor oil, its probably ok but its a easy/cheap service to do.

• This channel is damn fun! I maybe selfish and probably am, I don't want you to grow, lol. I've seen several channels devolve into bs that doesn't represent its continents. I know I'm selfish, but thank you! I love this space. God bless.

• 5:39 until this point I honestly thought I was the idiot not understanding X and 0 on this board. Thanks for pushing me up!

• Your little component tester complains about not being calibrated. Just gotta tie all the pins together, let it check itself, then put in a capacitor in the value range it asks.

• I have similar board that behaves on POST exactly the same. No signs of life without ram gave me a headache one day. I also had to downgrade BIOS to make it work with CF card.

• Finally a self explanatory error code -> d3d 🙃

• quake slow on a geforce 4???

• The go to board in the day, v2 had ata133

• Capacitor plague in 1999? Didn't it start slightly later, approx. 2001..2002?

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