Help identify this motherboard...

[Xtremist]

My work was throwing out some old PC components and I thought it might be nice to pick some up. My grandmother has an old P75 and I'm figuring this board will be a "good" upgrade for her Here's what I've surmised so far:

- The motherboard was made by ZDS (Zenith Data Systems?)
- The CPU is a P55-200 (which I believe is a P200 MMX?
- It has an Intel SB82437VX chipset as well as an Intel SB82371SB (south bridge I believe)
- 4 PCI / 3 ISA (one of each is shared)
- 2 168-pin DIMM slots

I'm trying to determine where drivers and such would be for this board, and probably a BIOS update too There is one slot that I can't identify however. It is directly under/near the CPU socket and has a PCB in it with four SEC chips on it. From what I can tell, the motherboard says this is the "COAST" slot. Anyway, if anyone has ideas or something to point me in the right direction, I'd appreciate it. BTW, I think the system it was in originally was a Gateway box... Not 100% sure though.

 

[AndyHui]

COAST = Cache On A STick....

That's the L2 cache. Back in those days, L2 cache was upgradeable, and a feature of the motherboard rather than the processor as it is today.

All modern 32-bit OSes (Win9x, WinNT/2K/XP) have support for the Intel 430VX chipset. You should not need any drivers at all.

You are correct in that a P55C-200 is a Pentium MMX 200MHz.

This motherboard will accept a maximum of 128MB of RAM, but the maximum size of each SDRAM DIMM is supposed to be 32MB. I have heard of boards supporting 64MB SDRAM DIMMs. If you are lucky, you might also find EDO RAM DIMMs (rare).

 

[Mavrick007]

Yes, that would be a Pentium 200MMX. It would be a very nice upgrade for your granny.
The slot you described sounds like the external cache. Since it's full, your board has 512K cache.

 

[Xtremist]

Sweet, thanks for the help. One last question just to make sure before I dive into this...

It should accept regular PC66 DIMM's correct? If so, I've got a whole crap load of those laying around She's only got 24MB RAM now anyway running Win95/98 so I could easily make her happy with 64MB, or possibly 128 Thanks for the help!

 

[Mavrick007]

If that board will accept 168pin dimms, then that's probably the only thing that they will accept Pc66 dimms. You could probably try pc100 dimms but if they work they will only go to pc66 anyway.

My old pentium boards(except my Super 7) will take only 72pin simms so I don't have one like that, but it will probably take just about any kind of sdram dimm, you'll just get pc66 out of it though if the board doesn't take more than a 233 or 266 cpu. 64Megs or 128Megs will be perfect for that board. Good luck!