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Author Topic: Asus TX97 featured a VLB slot? no its media bus  (Read 2466 times)

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Offline chrisNova777

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Asus TX97 featured a VLB slot? no its media bus
« on: December 05, 2018, 04:29:36 AM »
http://www.amoretro.de/2013/11/asus-tx97-intel-tx-socket-7-motherboard.html


Quote
The TX97 was the last pure PCI board that brought ASUS to market. It relies on the very stable Intel Triton III chipset, the Intel 430TX, called "Intel TX" for short. In contrast to the Intel HX, the cacheable area is only 64MB instead of 512MB, which hints at Intel's plans to phase out the Socket 7 series as a pure consumer product. The performance of the chipset is very good, the memory throughput is very high for 66MHz bus clock. As a special feature to this board, it should be mentioned that ASUS, in contrast to Gigabyte, allows bus clocks outside the Intel-specified ranges starting with the HX chipset. So even with this board 75 and 83MHz bus clock is possible, which gives the system a better performance, partly of course to the detriment of stability.
At the bottom PCI slot there is a short additional brown slot ASUS called "Media Bus". The own cards are for example combined PCI graphics + sound cards or SCSI controllers with soundcard extension on Creative Vibra basis with OPL3 chip from Yamaha.
The TX97 from ASUS is also able to provide 2.2Volt for AMD processors, even K6-III and K6plus CPUs with on-the-cache running smoothly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_Media_Bus
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The Asus Media Bus is a proprietary computer bus developed by Asus, which was used on some Socket 7 motherboards in the middle 1990s. It is a combined PCI and ISA slot. It was developed to provide a cost-efficient solution to a complete multimedia system. Using Media Bus cards for building a system reduced slot requirements and compatibility problems.[1 1] Expansion cards supporting this interface were only manufactured by Asus for a very limited time. This bus is now obsolete.

While similar to PCI-X in appearance, the extension contains 4 additional pins (2 on each side) for a total of 68. The divider between the PCI slot and Media Bus extension is too wide to support a properly-keyed PCI-X card.

Despite the very short lifespan, there were at least two revisions of Asus Media Bus - revision 1.2 and 2.0. The difference between them is that the latter revision has 72 pins instead of 68 so it does not have to use any PCI slot signals reserved for PCI cards and PCI slot shared with the Media Bus slot becomes standards compliant. The gap between PCI slot and Media Bus extension is 0.32 in. for revision 1.2 (pictured) and 0.4 in. for revision 2.0 so expansion cards designed for two revisions are mutually incompatible.[1 1]

Expansion cards designed for this interface included primarily combined audio and video cards, but also some combined SCSI and audio cards. The (possibly incomplete) list of Media Bus expansion cards presented here (all cards manufactured by Asus):[1 1]