Elpina clones?

[Bazango]

I picked up a motherboard advertised to be an Amptron dual PII. The photo that went with the ad matched what I found at the Amptron site, (www.amptron.com) but when I got the board, I found it labeled "Elpina" on the back. When I checked out the Elpina site, (www.ability-tw.com) I found that it was actually the Elpina M-720.

The top speed for the Amptron is supposed to be 533 mhz and 333 mhz for the Elpina. Also the Elpina swaps a PCI slot for an ISA slot. The price was very right for a dual PII board and so I'm not complaining. (assuming the board works) Still, can anyone tell me of any more differences between these two boards? They look, chip for chip, jumper for jumper, almost exactly alike. Neither site seems inclined to offer any information on them.

[Peter M]

Hi!

All that "Elpina" board discussion has been following false traces - they are all PC-Chips boards, no matter who sold them, be it Ability, Amptron, Eurone, Matsonic, Protac, Eaglemax ... (to be continued).
Elpina seems to be the subcompany making most of the printed circuit boards, that's all.

When you see similar but not identical boards under the same numbering, that's just plain normal - motherboards get revised every now and then just as with any other manufacturer.

Regards, Peter

[Bazango]

I'm afraid I really don't understand. What is a PC-Chips board? What do you mean by numbering? Do you mean model numbers? What do you mean by revised? I haven't seen anything that suggests revision. What I am seeing is two apparently identical boards offered by different companies.

My Elpina M-720 dual PII board is nearly identical to the Amptron PM-2200 (B or A depending on whether it is single or dual). I'm not even really curious about why this is. I'd just like to know what the differences are. Should I treat one board like the other? Another clue here: The clock setting on the board's table go to 8.0x. For a 66 mhz board this suggests that it will take a chip over 500 mhz. But Ability's site says that the M-720 only goes to 333 mhz.

Thanks for the tip, though.

[Peter M]

Hi Bazango!

PC-Chips is the group of companies that actually make the boards.

Amptron, Eurone, Protac, Eaglemax, PC-Chips, PC-Ware, Matsonic, Aristo and many other companies are just resellers.

Most of these use the same or similar model numbers, so if you look at a Eurone M5598, a Protac M5980 and a PC-Chips M598, they are all the same.

Boards do get revised - PC-Chips boards have their revision numbers printed near the keyboard connector. This causes the boards to look slightly different, and sometimes even use a BIOS incompatible to older board revisions.

Regarding the multipliers: The frequency multiplication is never done by the motherboard. The board just supplies a static setting (of four jumpers for a slot-1 board), and the processor interprets this and sets its internal multiplication circuitry into that mode.

While Intel originally documented settings up to 8.0x, they actually never got beyond 5.0x on processors that care about those jumpers.

Celerons, as well as later P-II and P-III, don't even read the jumper setting, and have their multiplier set to a fixed value externally.

Bottom line: A board "supporting multipliers up to <whatever>x" is a totally pointless statement.

Regards, Peter

[Bazango]

Again, I leave it to the rest of the readers. I have what I believe to be an Elpina model number M-720 that looks nearly exactly like the Amptron model number PM-2200. What, if any is the functional difference between these boards?