rec.autos.simulators

As a somewhat regular contributor to this group, I apologize for the
off-subject post.

The reason I am posting this question here is that I know many of you
have upgraded to a 200MMX with a TX motherboard to race our favorite
sims.  I was already to go buy a Shuttle 569 TX board and 200MMX chip
today, but I read a repost from a PC article on Shuttle's support site
tonight about the TX chip set 3,3 voltage design not being compatible
with older 5 volt IDE hard drives. Specifically mine (Seagate ST33240A),
I also have a even older Maxtor drive.

So the question is this. Has anyone had this problem when upgrading
their systems? Or, who has installed a MMX / TX combo with an older 5
volt IDE drive successfully? Please respond here or to my e-mail. Thanks
in advance! Hopefully I'll be racing faster tonight!

John
--
"...because only if you have been in the deepest valley,
can you ever know how magnificent it is to be at the highest mountain"

- Richard M. Nixon - White House Staff Farewell Speech, August 9, 1974

I don`t know of any other MB other than Spacewalker Shuttle 569 that has
this problem, I have a 565 MB (also TX) in my own PC, and it has no
problems at all with any harddrives, but I`m not sure if this is a
coincidence(correct spelling???), I know however that the ASUS TX97-E
has no problems, so I`m jumping to the conclusion that this is something
specific for the 569 MB :-)

Beers and cheers
Goy

Thanks Guys! Over to iWill and Asus!

- Richard M. Nixon - White House Staff Farewell Speech, August 9, 1974

It is correct that the 569 MB doesn`t run with the older Seagate 3,2Gb
harddrive, at least not on primary IDE controller, sometimes it will on
secondary though. How do I know ? We just returned 20 of those drives
because we couldn`t get the 569 MB that we use in our line of PC`s to
recognize them, it will run with 1,2Gb and 2,1Gb drives though, as far
as I know. Bad luck because it is a very good MB for it`s price :-(

Beers and cheers
Goy

I just bought an Abit AX5 motherboard with the TX chipset. It didn't seem
to have any problem with an older drive(170 meg).

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Your problem is the combination of the TX chipset your harddrive and
your power-supply.
All the chipsets previous to the TX used the 5V for the reverence for
the HI signal. Because you can't always have an exact 5V signal, the
definition of a high signal is everything over 2.8V (I'm not sure if
this is correct, but let's take it as an example.).

The TX chipset uses only 3.3V because intel wanted to use it in desktop
PC's AND notebooks (lower powerconsumption).The TX now defines also
2.8V(example) as the lower end of the high signal. If you now have a
good power supply for your harddrive, let's say 12.2 V instead of 12.0
V, the internal reference for the 5V high level is now 5.1V and so the
minimum voltage for your high-signal is 2.85V. As you can see the HD may
not recognize the signals from the chipset and so the chipset itself
can't recognize the harddrive. This is something that can happen to
everyone with an older HD(one of mine is sometimes recognized, sometimes
not).
The problem with your Seagate drives is, that they used on some HD IC
which require 3.2V (also just as an example) for a High level. There was
no problem for older chipsets but ,as you can see, for the TX.
Seagate knows this problem (they use now new IC's which have no problem
with the TX)and maybe they replace it (I can't quarantee you that).
If not, I would by a new HD because that problem can happen with ever
TX-board.

I hope I could have helped you and sorry for all the gram and spell.

                                      Holger