On Mon, 11 Dec 2000 00:03:16 -0500, you wrote:

>Date:    Sun, 10 Dec 2000 09:02:59 -0500
>From:    RiverRouge <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: New HD installation
>
>Date: Dec 11, 2000
>Subject: New HD Installation
>From: William Patton
>
>Hello. I am about to purchase a 10gig WD HD.  I am wondering about what
>limitations to be aware of.  I have an Asus m/b with HX chipset, bios 5/97,
>200MMX, win98SE.  Someone said there may be a 8gig limit of some sort.  I
>did not want to use the special software that comes with them.  If this
>limit is a function of the bios and I use it anyways and then later get a
>new m/b will that bios recognize the drive differently so that I will not be
>able to read the drive as it would be with this m/b?  Thank you, William

You probably have one of the classic and very stable Asus T2P4 family
of boards.  Intel HX support chipset was and  is so stable, and
supports ECC and large cached memory so  that Intel made sure that the
later VX and TX chipsets were deliberately crippled by not supporting
these features lest people use them for small servers and thus cut
into sales of the flagship launch of the premium price Pentium II.

If you flash the BIOS your board should support hard drives each a bit
more than 30GB. I have seen 20GB many times. Early revisions of the
Award BIOS for this board MIGHT have limitations about 8GB.

Other folks put in an inexpensive  Promise controller card so they can
fully support UDMA 33 and 66 transfer rates. Then you can have more
IDE devices.

Though Intel "killed off" making ant Socket 7 CPUs after Pentium
225MMX.... AMD made a line of processors K6-2 and K6-3 that work fine
in Asus  and other HX boards.  Especially the 400Mhz and 450MHz with
CTX core interpret the 2x clock  jumper setting as 6x clock.
Even quite complex and "loaded" systems built around  Asus HX boards
don't usually object to 75MHz.

HX chipset needs EDO RAM but won't use SDRAM.  There is no particular
advantage to SDRAM until later bus speeds like 100MHz became possible

Your  board should last until the  battery in the soldered in Dallas
clock chip dies. Probably no time soon.

So you could fairly easily without much expense  double the CPU, use
hard drives and more RAM.

 It can also take some fairly new  PCI video cards like Voodoo 3 3000
PCI or Voodoo 3 5500 PCI that support large monitors and clear sharp
text very well.  


The ultimate Asus T2P4 that I have personally seen had:

*  AMD K6-3 450MHz 2.2 volt CPU (at 6x75)

* 128MB EDO 60ns RAM ECC

*  4 IDE hard drives including one IBM 10GB,   2 of them 20GB IBM
7200RPM running at ATA 66 on a Promise controller card, Plus an IDE
CD and CDR.

* Voodoo 3 5500 PCI 


More reasonable probably would be to add storage (like you are),
flash the BIOS and drop in a AMD K6-3 400 2.4 volt with a good fan and
heat sink properly applied. and  get the memory up to 64MB or more and
maybe a Voodoo 3 3000 PCI 16MB and a monitor that will run at 1024 x
768.

Avoid if possible winprinters, winmodems, software DVD decoders but do
it with more efficient hardware peripherals and cards rather than your
CPU.

If you don't have the board manual should download it for your exact
model  board and revision from Asus.

There will be no particular mention of AMD  K6 400

The BIOS and latest flash is usually most easily downloaded from the
Asus German server. Generally Asus refers to any BIOS revision issued
after board production ceased "beta" - forever. Since they don't use
them in the factory they usually never change this status. Don't let
that bother you.

All of this applies equally well to Asus TX97 family of boars and many
other brand TX based mainboards.

In other words systems with these mainboards are prime candidates for
inexpensive upgrades doubling their speed and power.  These 400-450MHz
systems stand up to most practical and fun uses very well!  

There is a huge body of knowledge about the Asus HX chipset boards

for instance http://www.jump.net/~lcs/kalle/index.html

However since you would likely be using a K6 400 or 450 with CTX core
you would not need do any exotic modifications that were once
necessary.

Hope this helps.

Mark Paulson

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