Last week I encountered a problem that I have never seen before with a recently acquired Socket 7 motherboard. The board was a Gigabyte GA-586HX (Rev. 1.58), a relatively uninteresting older Socket 7 board based on the well-regarded Intel 430HX chipset.
Apart from automatic voltage detection, the one distinguishing feature of this board is six memory slots rather than the usual four. That makes memory upgrading easier, although in order to get the full 512MB, one would still need at least two of the somewhat hard to find 128MB SIMMs.
What made this particular board much more interesting was that although it wasn’t in original packaging and had memory and CPU installed (four 4MB SIMMs—worthless; a K5 PR133 “goldcap” CPU—at least interesting), it looked completely unused. No signs of wear, no discoloration, and rather tellingly, no dust.
The board as such appeared to work well, but it had one very strange problem: It wouldn’t remember any BIOS settings. No matter what I changed in the setup, on next boot the old settings were back. The only thing that I could change was the date and time. Continue reading
