Old ISA Soundblaster AWE32

[MadEye2]

Last year I found an old pentium tower that was thrown out. Most of the components were taken out - RAM, harddisk etc, but there was a soundblaster 32 left behind.
As far as I can tell the machine hasn't got any rain damage inside, though i was raining a bit when I saw it so I don't know - I can't test the machine because there's minimal components.
I want to put this SB AWE32 into another machine, but I'm worried that it may damage it's motherboard. IS there a way to test it is working before I install it?
Also, the card doesn't have any SIMMs on it. Will it work without them?

 

[MadEye2]

The machine I want to install it on has an onboard legacy AC97 compatable soundchip thingumy, Creative ES1373 - it's a VIA Apollo MVP4 chipset on an MS-5187 mobo. Should I enable onboard sound chip? The machine is slow already and onboard soundchips are resource hogs, but it probably gives better performance than the AWE32 card.

 

[VirtualLarry]

The Ensonic-based 1373 wasn't a bad card. I think those were usually bridged to the PCI bus, so it's probably more system-efficient than the ISA AWE32 is, although the AWE32 might be slightly more compatible with old DOS games that demanded a "true" SB-compatible card.

I think that you can use the AWE32 as an SB16, but you need to install some 30-pin SIMMs in order to use the MIDI/SoundFonts feature.

 

[MadEye2]

Thanks - yeah, the review I found for the mobo said it was a PCI bridged chip. I'll just enable it then.

Do you reckon the tower I found will work if I buy some RAM for it? It was sat there for probably only a couple of days, but it had rained - inside though it was very dusty. All I need to do is find the manual for it and some RAM. As far as I can gather it's a 7502 mobo, according to the pdfs i've downloaded, but it's got a fair few revisions - none of which have 4 ISA slots, only 3, so I'm kinda stuck there. Assuming the jumper settings for all of them are the same there then I'm confused as to what memory it takes.
It has 2 sets of slots for 72pin SIMMs and 168pin DIMMS - According to one of the manuals it's says SDRAM DIMM @3.3vs and EDO DRAM/Fast Page DRAM DIMM @ 5V. Is this all the information I need? Will it accept PC100, 125 and 133?