Can anyone identify this old motherboard???

[Daikaiju]

Ok, here's the story. I have just been given an old computer to "fix" and so i open it up and can hardly believe what i am seeing. I have never seen a motherboard like the one this is using, and i have absolutely no idea what it is, so i am hoping someone might recognise it from this description. I'd be very grateful if you could help out...

The first thing you notice is the size, this motherboard is HUGE! It practically fills the entire panel of the case it is sitting on. Also, it is on the opposite side to where motherboards are housed in modern systems, if you are looking at the case from the front, the motherboard is located on the left hand side, not the right. The real panel is like very elongated ATX panel, and includes (from top to bottom), serial port 1, serial port 2, 2 USB ports (next to each other), VGA port for onboard video (more info in a moment), PS2 keyboard connector, PS2 mouse connector, printer port.

The board is for Slot 1 processors (currently housing a P2 266mhz) which is located at the top left hand corner. Next to it, in the right hand corner are 8 ram slots for EDO or Fast Page ram. The integrated video comes in the form of a Matrox vga chip, i'm assuming Matrox Millenium onboard, probably 8meg at the most. It also has onboard sound (no idea what codec or sound chip) and onboard LAN which comes in the form of a small additional board which is connected to the motherboard and fits on the top right hand side at the rear of the case. The onboard sound works in the same way, a small additional board that connects to the motherboard and fits at the rear of the case at the top right hand corner, next to the LAN "card". The power supply is fitted about half way down the case, but the board design seems to have this in mind as it does not obstruct any ports or slots.

Closer inspection lead me to discover that this board is effectively in 2 halves, as if the northbridge and southbridge or on 2 seperate PCB's, connected by 2 (maybe 3) long connectors. The bottom half of the board houses the PCI and ISA slots (no AGP) and they are arranged in an unusual way, (from top to bottom) PCI, ISA, PCI, ISA, PCI, ISA, ISA. The power connector is a standard ATX power connector, located just above the first PCI slot. The 2 IDE connectors and FDD connector are to the left of the PCI/ISA slots, though neither of the IDE connectors were used on this system, it was using a SCSI hard drive via a SCSI adapter card in one of the PCI slots (no onboard SCSI that i could see).

The chips are all marked Intel (with the exception of the Matrox GPU chip), and i am assuming it is using an Intel chipset.

Does this description sound familiar to anyone? I am completely stumped, if anyone could shed some light on this, i would very much appreciate it. Thanks in advance as always...

 

[CrazySaint]

Could you post some pics? Also, could you write down exactly what the north and south bridges say? Definitely a weird sounding board.

 

[AndyHui]

Sounds like a Compaq Deskpro. They do come in configs like that.

There's only one chipset supporting early systems like that: 440FX. Unlikely to be a 440LX, since it would feature an AGP slot.

Forget fixing it. The whole thing is proprietary. Buy a new one.

 

[Daikaiju]

I'm afraid i have no pics, or i would post them. That's why i tried to describe it as fully as i could. I checked what i think is the northbridge chip, this is what's written on it

PCIset
SB82441FX
87310390
SUO53
Intel '95

Also, does the name Digital PC 5000 mean anything? This is what is written on the front of the case.
I agree that fixing this thing seems a bit pointless, this old dinosaur is well past it's use by date. I'll put it to him (my father-in-law) and see what he thinks... I mean, a Duron 1ghz with 256meg SDRAM will blow this old fossil away.

Thanks again...

 

[Sunner]

Well, Digital, unless that's just some marketing name someone at some "shop at the corner" type place up with, sounds like DEC.
That is Digital Equipment Corporation.

They got bought up by Compaq a few years ago, and then Compaq got bought up by HP to form HPaq

If you really really wanna know what it is, I suppose you could dig into HP's site and look for info on DEC stuff.

 

[fiream29]

Sunner is correct, you have a DEC system and a Google search for PC 5000 will net you a ton of info. This link to DEC at the Compaq site should be of some help.: http://www.compaq.com/legacysupport/digital/desktop.html

 

[Macro2]

check for an FCC number. Then Google that.

 

[dszd0g]

Yeah, it sounded like a Digital PC to me even before I read the "DEC PC 5000" part. I've worked with a bunch of Digital PCs. They make O.K. office machines, but they are a pain to try and upgrade. I doubt you will get anything that is useful out of it. Yank the memory, grab the CPU, and pull out any PCI cards that were installed in it and add them to your hardware collection I doubt anything else would be useful.