Hi folks,

Just inherited an old PC with a Cyrix 6x86-166 CPU and 32Mb RAM. I know, you can't believe anyone was still using such a thing until last weekend, but it's true - it ran Win98 with a 56k dialup modem and all was hunky dory (if a little slow!).

But they (my in-laws) were using AOL. So naturally I had to do something. So I gave them a newer PC (my last-but-one, a colossal 500MHz with 512Mb RAM and a decent pair of hard disks), and they are now enjoying broadband, with a different ISP of course. Ok so it's not going to run any 3D games, but it's lightning fast to them!

Anyway, I'm reconfiguring their old box as a linux router (a great use for old hardware - stop your friends buying hardware routers now!), and I can't ID the motherboard. It's an SiS chipset, with onboard IDEx2, VGA and sound. The lspci output is as follows:

0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 5597 [SiS5582] (rev 02)
0000:00:01.0 ISA bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS85C503/5513 (LPC Bridge) (rev 01)
0000:00:01.1 IDE interface: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 5513 [IDE] (rev d0)
0000:00:14.0 VGA compatible controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 5597/5598/6326 VGA (rev 65)

The sound chip is a SoundPro HT1869V+ (I'm reading this directly off the board) - does anyone know if there's a linux driver for this?

It has four 72-pin SIMM slots and two SDRAM DIMM slots. I currently have the four SIMM slots in use.

It has both AT and ATX power connectors, and an old-fashoined AT (not PS/2) keyboard connector. It has a PS/2 mouse connector on a backplate which plugs into the board.

Is that enough info? Is there a web site which allows you to plug in this kind of info and look up a mobo?

Thanks in advance,

CC

If I understand it all correctly, you don't need to know who made your motherboard, you just need to know who made the chips.

True, to a certain extent - I have linux installed and working. But I'd still like to ID the motherboard so that I can find a manual for it, look up jumper settings etc. etc.

So I'd still be interested in hearing from anyone who recognises the board, and from anyone else who knows of an internet repository where you can look them up.

CC

Now I understand why you want to I.D. your motherboard.

Are their any names on the board such as ASUS, AMI, Soyo, MSI? Just to name a few. There are many different motherboard manufactures that all use the same chips.

Sadly there's very little silkscreened onto the board, certainly nothing I recognise as a manufacturer's name. I'm kind of hoping that the sound chip will be the key to IDing it - you're right that lots of people made boards with that SiS chipset, but the sound chip is not very common.

Got it! It's an M571. There's a picture at http://m571.com/m571/ - it seems to have been made by up to a dozen different small manufacturers, so no way to tell which one, but it doesn't really matter - all the info I need is on that site.

Excellent.

If you have access to the bios number, you can do a search at this motherboard ID site