HELP!!!! Please! or... The student in over his head!

[Whadawa]

I am trying to upgrade 2 HP Vectra's...they are the 486/ 66xm's. I am having a problem...that's an understatement...with the motherboard. The motherboard has this weird layout!! It is shaped like an "L"!! If you take the longest leg of the L and make that the bottom...that would represent the main part of the motherboard..with the cpu, memory, ext. If you take the short foot of the L and have it sticking up in the air that would represent the expantion slots!! What motherboards have that config??!!!!! I am trying to find either a Pentium 2 or Celeron motherboard...nothing more than 200mhz-300mhz. But I know of no motherboards like that!! Please help me!! Thanks.

[Peter M]

The radical solution would be to use an all-in-one board that brings VGA, sound, LAN, modem and whatnot, so you don't have to stick anything into its expansion slots. All the integrated stuff goes onto slot brackets on ribbon cables, and these don't mind horizontal mounting at all.

This of course requires that a standard BAT board at least fits in its base footprint.

Example: PC-Chips M598LMR
http://www.pcchips.com.tw/M598LMR.html

(Here, the modem is not ribbon cable mounted, but plugs directly into the board. If that doesn't suit you, you'd have to resort to an external modem on a USB or serial line.)

Those slots-on-a-riser form factors were popular in the past, yet I can't think of anyone making boards for that anymore.

Regards, Peter

[TOAD6147]

Why do you feel you need a board configuration "like that"? Besides the fact that you won't find one in a Slot 1 or Socket 370 or anything for that matter that isn't 5+ years ancient. What are you really gaining trying to use any of that stuff? If you went Socket 7 you might be able to use some of the old memory but then you'd have to find an older Super 7 (1-2 years ago). All that leaves you for re-use is maybe the case, floppy, HDD, and CD-ROM. Like Peter said, get a BAT All-In-One and maybe a K6-3 CPU like the following:
Amptron 598LMR, AT/ATX , 8MB AGP 3D Video,3D Sound ,56K Modem, 10/100 LAN ,3Dimms, UDMA 66, 2 PCI, 1 ISA with cpu - AMD® K6-2/266 3DNow! w/ Cooling Fan & Heatsink Pretested and configured $ 95+ $14.95 S&H Anywhere In mainland USA 8/1/00 7:23:00 PM CST compunanza.com 877-737-8795/316-303-1022
Of course, with this mobo yopu'd have to buy new RAM so search for a deal with the SIMM slots as well