lol wow, talk about a blast from the past. I have a few 503+ revision 1.2. Absolutely love that board, so many options, so much abuse you can do to socket 7 chips =D
Yea, I'll look around and see if I can find a manual, or at least an online copy of the jumper section. Hopefully I can find my manual where I wrote in all the "reserved" settings too... heheh (if not, there are only like 2, and they're 124 and 133). While many didn't like the "ton 'o jumpers" that's also why the board was so awesome - so many combinations of FSB, ratios, etc to mess with. Things like you can set memory speed to the AGP clock (so say you run 112FSB, and your EDO SIMMs at 83Mhz - which is awesome BTW). Or lawlz EDO at 112 - it almost loaded windows, never mind the random characters for the POST screen.
(for those who don't know, this board supported both EDO and SDRAM - which was hilarious cause that means you could select frequencies from 40mhz to technically 133mhz withOUT regard to the memory type. Though in my experience I could never stabilize 124mhz {lol, chipset volt-mod anyone?} and 133 was lucky to post). Still, OPTIONS. Also while using BOTH EDO AND SDRAM isn't officially supported, it does work... problem is nobody could ever give a straight answer if by doing so, you're blasting your SDRAM with 5v if you did this. Hrm. I think max memory is still "only" 512MB anyway, but ... get a multimeter, and finally prove/bust this myth!
Stupid things like a "pentium MMX" running at... 300Mhz (3x100mhz) bahaha, good times! And if you think about it, that might have been roughly equal to the original dumpy Slot 1 Celeron (with no cache) @ 233Mhz. So many good times. Miss those days. Also this board has working 1MB of L2 cache! Many only had 512MB. I think max was 2MB. But that's also likely what starts to limit FSB speed (board cache runs at FSB).
Anyway yea, I'll dig. And definitely give us updates on this!
(lastly, if you want a real retro-hotrod, beta BIOS + see if you can find a K6-2+ or K6-3+ ... note the "plus" ... 616Mhz or if you're really lucky, more {my board never liked more than 112FSB})
EDIT ADD: ugh, went nostalgic mode and forgot to answer the original post from... 13 years (!!!!) ago.
Yea most PCI soundcards will crackle with HDD activity, but fortunately (unlike the later EARLY VIA socketA southbridges) it doesn't corrupt your HDD. So... it's just part of the charm =)
EDIT2: the bios:
Ugh, so the link is super sketchy, but at least this gives a filename to look for. The beta bios with K6-2/III+ support was JE4333
http://www.filewatcher.com/m/JE4333.ZIP.127758-0.html
again, if you find a less ... wierd ru trawling mirror or even if you can find a bios at FIC (fica) you might want to go with that.
So while I couldn't find a beta BIOS on FIC proper (no update they claim! bah!), they at least seem to have the manual
http://www.fic.com.tw/support/motherboard/motherboard.aspx?model_id=19
Lastly, even if your board isn't rev 1.2, the beta BIOS *might* still work (probably), but again I can't test that myself. Do research that if you're not 1.2!!! (possible different clock gen, more important possible different VoltID chip *fry* but NOT CONFIRMED). Again, 1.1 and 1.0 might work fine, but I'd hate for you to break your board for that.
But see, I bought 3 of those boards over 3 years, and they were all 1.2. Also I think 1.0 and 1.1 lack things like... the ATX connector isn't soldered on (1.2 has both ATX and AT power connectors - but that's NOT a definitive way to identify) but look on the board itself, i think along the edge under the last ISA slot (maybe???) it should say hopefully.
