ISA Slots....

TerrorFirmer

Can anyone tell me what the "newest" motherboard would be that has ISA slots? I've been secretly stealing PC's from the inside out at work, leaving only the shells behind....:cool:

(these are ancient computers that will never be used again, just to clarify, I'm not nicking modern gear )

Problem is, most of them had ISA sound cards and ISA ethernet cards. I'm looking to build a good few cheap computers over the summer but the cases and mobos at work, they won't let me take, even though they are permantly stored away, and even on similar old machines I can't find a single motherboard with an ISA slot, so I am going to have an absolute mountain of obsolete ISA cards that I really want to be able to use....

Just if anyone knows what older models of desktops that have ISA slots.....as I said, I can't seem to find any, even though alot of the pentium 2's even have them here at work...I can't even steal the motherboards, they are the strangest mobo's I have ever seen, they kind of...have the mobo, then a load of pci/isa slots stuck vertically in the board on a seperate shelf? Making them a bit hard to remove without attracting attention

Stephen

Sounds like some old dell optiplexes/compaqs. They have the riser board for the isa cards just to save space in those slim cases. Can't think of anything remotely modern that would have an ISA slot. The first machine I built myself was an AMD XP1600+ and that was all-PCI. Before that I had a P3-866 and that had no ISA slots either.

8T8

The only boards I can recall last having ISA slots where some Intel 815 chipsets that had a single ISA slot on them those were P3 supporting motherboards and also some of the KT line of VIA's Athlon XP chipsets along with the AMD 750 chipset.

I had a quick check on Google and there are P4 supporting Intel 845 motherboards available with ISA slots for manufacturing/industrial setups where such old cards would still be common place. But I don't think such boards come cheap.

Triangle

but if you need to buy a MB, Then you'll have to buy Ram and a Processor too.
And most MB's have a ethernet port and Sound internal now too.
So you wouldn't be saving too much from using these parts.

not too mention you can get them very cheap for PCI.

TerrorFirmer

Thanks lads, I knew they wouldn't be commonplace but I was mainly wondering what brand desktops had them....so I can start looking for models to salvage for compatiable motherboards.

When I Said looking to build a few old computers this summer, I quite literally meant old as in Pentium I/II's - not anyway modern systems! Therefore I won't really be looking for spend anyway, so would love to be able use all these ISA cards I got....I did not realise they came in mobos as recent as those support Athlon XP or anything above Pentium 2, hence why I asked for "Newest", I assumed it was a predeccesor to PCI mainly and therefore disappeared in the P2 era or thereabouts...

Was there ever such thing as ISA video cards? Even in my first computer, a Pentium I, I didn't have an ISA slot so I've never encountered it before now to be honest.

Thanks for all the help.

Tobias Greeshman

Havok wrote:

Was there ever such thing as ISA video cards? Even in my first computer, a Pentium I, I didn't have an ISA slot so I've never encountered it before now to be honest.

Yeah there was I think... My first PC was a 386 with a 20Mhz intel in it, and it had this massive graphics card in it (massive as in the size of the card, not the amount of memory on it), as far as I know it was an ISA socket it was plugged into. I'm guessing as graphics cards became more powerful ISA sockets weren't quick enough to do graphics processing so they went down the route of PCI sockets instead.

Khannie

Last time I saw one was in a Dell P3-450 (possibly a P2...can't remember when the changeover occured).

niallb

HavoK wrote:

Was there ever such thing as ISA video cards? Even in my first computer, a Pentium I, I didn't have an ISA slot so I've never encountered it before now to be honest.

Oh yeah. Have a few if you really want them! 256k to 1MB cards
Even have one somewhere that has VGA and ISDN built on to one card.
Combination cards happened because you needed so many slots.
Network, hard drive controller, serial ports, printer ports, often even
mouse ports all needed to be loaded into slots on the Motherboard.

The only thing I miss about ISA cards is being able to change the
interrupt on a card with a soldering iron :-)

NiallB

Ruu_Old

I have a dell dimension xps D333, Pentium 2 333mhz and it has 2 ISA slots.

SeanW

Yikes! ISA! That was old fashioned and in "legacy" mode as far back 1997! You won't get anything decent today that supports ISA - it's totally obsolete.

As has been said, modern mainboards have sound and ethernet onboard these days and even when they have to be bought as PCI cards, can be got cheap enough.

TerrorFirmer

I managed to get a good few spare pci network cards, video cards, etc at work today, so guess I'll be not using the ISA stuff after all in any case....thanks for all the help anyway guys!

Ruu_Old

SeanW wrote:

Yikes! ISA! That was old fashioned and in "legacy" mode as far back 1997! You won't get anything decent today that supports ISA - it's totally obsolete.

As has been said, modern mainboards have sound and ethernet onboard these days and even when they have to be bought as PCI cards, can be got cheap enough.

Manual jumper setting ftw.

SeanW

Well, if you're looking to build a load of cheap computers I'd reccommend looking at the obsolete items and having a rummage through the B-Grades of Komplett.

You might find this board interesting AMD Socket 754, costs €53, has LAN, Sound and a VGA controller onboard, get a cheap case, a Semperon processor, low-end PSU, perhaps a second hand hard drive. Bit of Ram and a cheapo DVD+/-RW, and Bob's you're uncle, got a machine for probably €400 ish.

Crappy, but for a guy who was thinking of using ISA cards ...

Also have a rummage throught the B-Grade section, might find some bargains
there.

Ruu wrote:

Manual jumper setting ftw.

Lol yeah I stuck with ISA too until the bitter end, but for different reasons.

pred racer

ive got a dual P11 board at home that has isa slots on it, youre welcome to it if u want.... porbably got the processors somewhere too.

Dunno if any of it works anymore though:rolleyes:

TerrorFirmer

Thanks pred racer, but I managed to get a few pci sound cards yesterday so I think I'll just be keeping all my ISA cards in storage.

Question though - would Win2K/WinXP automatically install drivers for ISA cards like they do older pci sound/video cards?

mathias

The way I read it , ( from upgrading and repairing PC's vol. 10 ) the one big advantage of moving to PCI was plug and play , i.e. the OS or another piece of software could configure and install drivers ,

This was not possible with ISA cards and one of the biggest jobs with PC's those days was manually handling and managing all the resources.
So no , I dont think modern OS's can handle ISA cards in the sense of automatically installing drivers.

TerrorFirmer

Thanks mathias - now all these ISA cards are definately going in the bin so!

^whitey^

I have three ISA slots in this machine

michaelanthony

Here's a link to a PCI ISA bridge/adapter

http://www.costronic.com/Ev71p.htm

Gurgle

HavoK wrote:

Problem is, most of them had ISA sound cards and ISA ethernet cards.

Oh man, were you ever wasting your time

PCI Sound card: €8
PCI Network card: €7
And those cards would kick the ass off any old ISA trash.

I'm pretty sure you'll have to go a lot more than +€15 to get an ISA-supporting motherboard these days.

& second-hand stock is rare to non-existant as so many '90s machines in industry used custom ISA cards for HW interface.

TerrorFirmer

Not really, I'm getting all the mobo's/cases/parts mostly for free its just I have LOADs of ISA cards and about 3 pci sound cards so...

zilog_jones

All full-size ATX Pentium II boards I've seen had at least one (if not three) ISA slots - it was a lot less common on micro-ATX boards though. And my PIII (Via Apollo Pro 133A chipset) has one too.

And regarding PnP - a lot of later ISA cards did have some form of support. I have a silly amount of spare 3com NICs, and have no trouble getting them working in Win98/2k - Windows detects them automatically. Same goes for my kick-ass Sound Blaster AWE32 (possibly the biggest sound card in the universe).