>The board has 4 PCI and 4 ISA slots. It also has 4 72-pin SIMM slots,
>(supposedly) 2 IDE controlers, 2 serial, one parallel, and one floppy.
>There are no names of companies on the board, other than "SI54P-AIO Rev.
>1.0" and a SIS 85C501, 502, and 503. It has a Phoenix MB bios.

No idea...

>What experiences do folks have w/ Samsung and Fujitsu EIDE drives? I can
>get either a 2 GB Samsung or a 1.7 GB Fujitsu. Are they both equally good?
>Both lousy?

In general, my experience with Samsung is _lowest_ quality, for lowest
price.

However, I've never even seen one of their hard drives.

>I need to get a CPU. I was tending towards a Cyrix 6x86 but I'd appreciate
>input. The motherboard is kinda old (which is why I'm getting it). It can
>be jumpered for 50, 60, and 66 MHz. Woo Hoo! 

If it's an older unknown board, with a potentially non-upgradeable
BIOS, you should forget about the Cyrix chip.  Your BIOS needs to know
what it is, before you can make effective use of it.

>So I gather the max this puppy will do is 66 MHz then? Are there CPU's
>which will internally chirp the clock?

All Pentium-class CPUs run with a maximum bus clock of ~66MHz.  The
200MHz Pentium runs internally at 66.7MHz * 3, for example.  A 166 is
66.7MHz * 2.5.

>As I can't seem to set the CPU voltage, I gather it's whatever an old P5
>would be. Is that 3.3V or 3.6V (or something else)?

... however... the original Pentium (the 60MHz through 90MHz, if I
remember correctly) chips were 5v.  A current generation Pentium uses
a totally different socket, and voltage, than the first generation.

You must know which socket the board has on it.  Pretty much any new
chip should work on a board designed for the 3v chips (100MHz and up).

Only an old, 5-volt, 60 or 66MHz (or possibly 90) will run in a board
with the old 5-volt socket on it.

Note that there could be some overlap in these MHz numbers, I'm just
speaking from general memory, and not from specific specs.

>Is a PCI640B IDE controller good?

A what? :-)

>What is a 37C655? It has one on board. The floppy?

You want fries with that?

>Is an ECP mode parallel port the one which can be bi-directional?

I think so.

>Even though a 66 MHz CPU sounds slow, it would be faster than my 20 MHz
>68030 at home. :-)

Especially if it was 66MHz * 3. :-)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Michael L. VanLoon                           michaelv@MindBender.serv.net
        --<  Free your mind and your machine -- NetBSD free un*x  >--
    NetBSD working ports: 386+PC, Mac 68k, Amiga, Atari 68k, HP300, Sun3,
        Sun4/4c/4m, DEC MIPS, DEC Alpha, PC532, VAX, MVME68k, arm32...
    NetBSD ports in progress: PICA, others...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------