where is the ISA slot?

[TimeKeeper]

Anyone know any XP/ P4 class mobo still has ISA slot?

Please don't ask me why, but it is MUST have.

 

[Tripleshot]

Man, I gotta ask why. ISA 8 bit? Kinda like putting a governor on an engine, restricting performance.

 

[Budman]

Here you go.

http://www.soyousa.com/products/proddesc.php?id=194

 

[smp]

I believe that a Abit KT7a (kt133a, remember those?) rev 2 will do that (support XP and have ISA, albeit only one). Although, SDram of course, don't quote me on that either, I've just been told that KT7a rev 2 does support XP with 133 FSB.

edit: why?

 

[TimeKeeper]

Gotta love you guys..thanks.


soyo seems like a great idea.. wonder if it also OC-able?

The holter monitor's fiber optic card is ISA format. And NO, this company does NOT yet come out w/ USB or PCI connection yet. New holter monitor will cost us 20K, so.....


BTW SY-845PEISA is no where to be found ...

 

[Sunner]

I can't help but thinking it would be completely impossible to make money of such a product?

I mean seriously, who the **** (cept TimeKeeper) would want a modern rig, P4, GeForce, etc etc, and a friggin ISA slot?

I wonder if anyone sells those, maybe all the three people who wanted one have theirs already?

 

[Lord Evermore]

There are probably plenty of cases where people use custom hardware that uses an ISA card and who either don't want to pay for a redesign or can't afford it, but still need the PC itself to be as fast as possible for other uses. ISA isn't exactly going to KILL the performance of the system, it'll just cause a slight slowdown of the PCI bus access.

There's also 16bit ISA, nobody said he was using 8bit.

The KT7A series is a good choice, great performance.

 

[dullard]

Anytime you see a computer controlling or monitoring a piece of scientific/industrial equipment it most likely is using an ISA card (or possibly serial port for small pieces of equipment). Think of all the factories in the world, and imagine all the computers in them that are hooked up to equipment. There are now PCI equivalents which are not as good (slower due to driver issues) and replacing each card carries a $1000-$10,000 price tag. Why should these people be forced to pay thousands of dollars to get slower equipment, simply since you don't like ISA slots?

 

[thorin]

You could get something like the MRCPCI2I onthis page.

Thorin

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: dullard
Anytime you see a computer controlling or monitoring a piece of scientific/industrial equipment it most likely is using an ISA card (or possibly serial port for small pieces of equipment). Think of all the factories in the world, and imagine all the computers in them that are hooked up to equipment. There are now PCI equivalents which are not as good (slower due to driver issues) and replacing each card carries a $1000-$10,000 price tag. Why should these people be forced to pay thousands of dollars to get slower equipment, simply since you don't like ISA slots?

I don't work with that kind of stuff myself, but I have friends who do, one used to work at a company that made liners, and they used nothing but custom built stuff for controlling those machines.

Anyways, Im by no means doubting there are uses for them, but 99% of those uses are probably custom stuff, and extremely low volume, and hence no regular retailer will carry the mobo's since a big industrial shop is unlikely to shop there anyway,

 

[dullard]

I don't work with that kind of stuff myself, but I have friends who do, one used to work at a company that made liners, and they used nothing but custom built stuff for controlling those machines.

Anyways, Im by no means doubting there are uses for them, but 99% of those uses are probably custom stuff, and extremely low volume, and hence no regular retailer will carry the mobo's since a big industrial shop is unlikely to shop there anyway,

Most of it is custom controlled - you don't want Windows crashing and your nuclear plant blowing up do you. That is why I specifically mentioned "anytime a computer controls equipment", and not ALL equipment. There is a big difference. You won't see computers on the mission critical stuff. But there are computers, and there are uses for them. When these computers were bought, all the cards were ISA. Now the computers are dying, and if replaced they still have the ISA card and the programs already written for that card.

I'm in chemical engineering and all the professor's labs have equipment that runs off of ISA cards. The undergraduate lab work runs on machines that use ISA cards. My own research started on a borrowed ISA card - but we forked over the money for a PCI card version. I really wish it was ISA since the PCI drivers for these cards suck - but since I want to eventually have this sold to the public, it cannot be ISA. I guess that is the manufacturer's choice, not a PCI limitation, but it is still bothersome. For example, a 100 MHz computer with an ISA card can measure 100,000 - 1 million points of data per second. The fastest PC available today with a PCI card is stretching to get 1000 datapoints per second.

I'm just saying that there still is use for ISA, and I hope some motherboards continue to use it for those of us who need it. Now I have seen posts for people saying they have an ISA modem or ISA sound card and are looking for a motherboard for that. That is silly, you can get a PCI modem for free in the hot deals section, and sound cards cost next to nothing. Its those of us who have spent years working on programs and have equipment that would cost thousands of dollars to replace, that really need ISA to live longer.

 

[Wintermute76]

Popular science or popular mechanics said that NASA is looking for old computer systems like 8086 and 8088's and so forth to replace stuff for the booster test rigs. I thought it was a bit strange myself, I used to have an 8088, ran at a blazin 4.77 MHz.

 

[TimeKeeper]

Well.. like I said earlier, there is NO other way around as our holter monitor equipment still using ISA fiber optic card.
And I don't think our P1-class rig can network properly now, or handle multitasking too well under win2k setting.
It will be cheaper for our office to upgrade the PC instead of the medical equipment.

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: TimeKeeper
Well.. like I said earlier, there is NO other way around as our holter monitor equipment still using ISA fiber optic card.
And I don't think our P1-class rig can network properly now, or handle multitasking too well under win2k setting.
It will be cheaper for our office to upgrade the PC instead of the medical equipment.

One workable idea would be to get an old Compaq Proliant or something similar?
For example, we have a whole bunch of ProLiant 1600's at work, ranging from 400-600 MHz, they all have 3 or 4 shared PCI/ISA slots.

Will run Windows 2000 just fine if you just make sure it has enough memory, and they're reliable to boot.

 

[magomago]

If you really want the PC I'm using has a 550k6-2 chip and I have 3 ISA slots

 

[majewski9]

IWILL KK266 has one good old ISA slot! Supports AthlonXPs as well.

 

[John P]

There are some AMD-761 motherboards with 1 ISA slot, Biostar makes one:

M7MIA Motherboard Specification at Biostar

Only $65 at Directron

I know it supports Athlon XP's, not sure how fast though.

 

[erikistired]

Originally posted by: dullard
Anytime you see a computer controlling or monitoring a piece of scientific/industrial equipment it most likely is using an ISA card (or possibly serial port for small pieces of equipment). Think of all the factories in the world, and imagine all the computers in them that are hooked up to equipment. There are now PCI equivalents which are not as good (slower due to driver issues) and replacing each card carries a $1000-$10,000 price tag. Why should these people be forced to pay thousands of dollars to get slower equipment, simply since you don't like ISA slots?

i think it's called "progress".

~erik

 

[HokieESM]

i think it's called "progress".

~erik

That's not really "progress". Actually, one could argue that PCI was a step backwards because of immense manufacturing costs. ISA cards can be manufactured very cheaply and very easily without nearly as much trouble. It depends if you consider the computer itself the "product" or the computer as a tool to make your product.

dullard is right-on about it mostly being controller cards for scientific equipment--MOST of the PCs in a scientific laboratory have ISA cards... so there is still a market for them. When I used to work in precision engineering, we had the capability to manufacture an ISA card in-house.... and frequently did so for ourselves and customers alike.

There are a FEW motherboards out there (mostly multi-processor MBs that are non-ATX size) that have ISA on a separate bus completely (to avoid slowing down the PCI bus). The Soyo board linked above is in the most recent "cheap" machine that the busting lab uses here.... but most boards with an ISA slot around here are actually workstation-class motherboards (and yes, they tend to be horribly expensive).

Best of luck finding one--I know I had a bunch of trouble finding the Soyo board!