are there modern motherboards with ISA slots for *AMD*processors?

On Aug 25, 9:26*am, Paul wrote:
Dan Lenski wrote:
On Aug 25, 1:26 am, Benjamin Gawert wrote:
* Dan Lenski:
* I'm in charge of a piece of scientific equipment that uses an old
* Pentium III computer (running Windows 2000) as its controller. *The
* computer is, needless to say, slow and annoying to use.

Have you considered just upgrading it? Parts for a P3 should be
obtainable for almost free today. Or get a better P3 computer.

Yeah, I mean it's not THAT expensive to do a full upgrade. *We can go
from P3 clunker to screaming Core 2 Quad beast with 4gb of DDR3 RAM
and dual NICs and 500gb hard drive in about $750. *Also, did I mention
the horrifically noisy PSU and ugly case which we'd be replacing as
well? :-)

* We'd like to upgrade to a newer computer, but here's the catch: it
* needs to have 3 PCI slots and 1 ISA slot (yech) to interface with the
* instrument. *The equipment manufacturer is okay with us replacing the
* computer, by the way. *(Replacing the ISA interface card would cost
* $10,000, so that's pretty much out of the question for us.)

* So does anyone know where I can get a modern motherboard with ISA
* slots?

Yes. Kontron (www.kontron.com) does make several ISA-based solutions.
However, they are not cheap.

Sadly you didn't provide more details as to what card you want to use.
Maybe it is cheaper (and in the longer term more cost effecive) to just
replace the ISA card and use a standard mainboard without ISA.

It's one of these awful custom cards, seemingly unique to the
instrument manufacturer. *It is basically a glorified GPIO port, as
far as I can tell... but it's *their* glorified GPIO port, and no one
else knows exactly how it works. *They want $10,000 to replace the ISA
card with a newer PCI version. *Yes, $10,000. *Scientific equipment
manufacturers are ridiculous, especially when they choose to use
custom cards. *Thankfully, that's becoming less prevalent as standard
serial/USB/Firewire interfaces are increasingly provided. *Either that
or GPIB... which is basically a glorified serial port with an
extremely bulky cable, costing "only" hundreds of dollars for the
interface card.

/rant

Here's another oddball product: ISA to USB. *http://www.arstech.com/item--usb2isa.html
Any guesses about possible compatibility pitfalls with such a beast?
Thanks for the advice so far!

Dan

According to this, the ISA bus can run at 6MHz or 8MHz, and
at 16 bits wide, that would make the maximum transfer rate about
16MB/sec. USB2 can manage about 30MB/sec transfer rate to a
hard drive, so it sounds like for large block transfers, there
is enough bandwidth. If you needed to "peek" and "poke"
individual registers on your ISA card, that might be slower
with the USB concept, because each peek or poke could take
separate USB packets.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industr...d_Architecture

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...A_Bus_pins.png

I notice arstech also mentions powering, and I notice in the pinout
for the ISA connector, there is a pin available for -5V. On modern ATX
power supplies, -5V has been removed, and you'd find one pin on
the ATX connector that is not being used. That would be where the
-5V used to be. Now, there isn't a strong reason to be using
that rail. It might be convenient for something like wiring up ECL
chips. Or perhaps some of the really old DRAM technologies. So that might
be an item to check as well.

Considering your scientific card costs $10000, you might want to
start your project, by using a throwaway ISA card for testing, and get
that running with any adapter first. For example, I have an old Soundblaster
of some kind, in my first computer, and I think that might be the
only ISA card I've got. If I could get that working, then I'd
switch over to the real card and give it a try.

Obviously, if the bridge is from USB to ISA, the environment it is
used in, is going to have to understand USB. I don't know what
shape official USB support is in for Win98 or ME.

* * "Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Server 2008"

One other thing to consider, is the software on the old machine.
Can the software that drives the ISA device, operate on a more
modern operating system ? Can the new computer operate with an
older OS ? You have a lot of mixing and matching to do.

This is my current motherboard. I run a Core2 dual core processor
in it (E4700). I've actually installed Win98SE on this motherboard,
using an IDE hard drive. I used a five year old video card that has
Win98 drivers. The video card was AGP type, and this board has
an AGP slot. You'll find more modern boards, where the
Device Manager would have things in it that might not be
recognized. When Win98SE runs on my computer, only one core of
the processor works (since Win98 doesn't support multiple cores),
but I still found the box to have snappy performance. The install
was more of a joke than anything, but I was surprised how easy it
was to do. (I had to stop the install half way through, to make
a tweak to prevent the 512MB memory limit from getting in the way.)
A lot of other motherboards, would not have allowed this to work.
About the fastest processor that runs in this board now, is an
E7500 (the charts don't mention support for E7600, but logically
it should work as well). This board does not support FSB1333 processors,
so an E8600 would be out of the question.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813157115

I suspect you have a lot of mixing and matching to do in any case,
so there are bound to be some less than ideal choices you have to
make, to get it all to work.

* * Paul

fwiw win98 supports usb perfectly with 3rd party nusb3.3 drivers

More directly, I'm wondering whether the slowness may be due to
something other than hardware. IME it nearly always is.


NT