Last Updated on December 30, 2024 by Dave Farquhar
I saw some discussion about the Asus SP97-V motherboard recently. This happens to be one of my favorite socket 7 motherboards, and I used it in a good number of builds in 1997 and 1998. Initially, I was nervous about this board and the SIS 5598 chipset, but in the long run, it didn’t give me any problems. I share the opinion that it is a very underrated board.
What made me nervous
The Asus SP97-V was the king of mixed signals. On the one hand, it was made by Asus, a premium brand that people in the know paid extra to get.
On the other hand, on most examples of the board, the SIS 5598 chipset on the board had a gaudy green heatsink on top of it obscuring what it was. Mine had “Super TX” silk screened onto it.
This was a tactic that bottom of the barrel motherboard makers would use. They would take random chipsets, and either relabel them or put a heatsink on them, and take the name of common Intel chipset from the time, add the word “super” or “pro” to it, to make them look like something they were not.
It came off as sleazy and dishonest. It also left you with no way to verify actual capabilities of the chipset you were getting, and it raised a serious question about whether you could buy another example of the same motherboard and it actually be functionally identical to the first one you bought.
And in this case it was completely unnecessary. Not everyone knew about SIS, but they were the first chipset maker to go out of their way to produce a chipset that paired well with the specific capabilities of the Cyrix 6×86 series of CPUs. Fans of those CPUs absolutely knew who SIS was.
Asus SP97-V
In late 1997 and early 1998, I had a problem. I was working for an IT department with a very limited budget. We had a fleet of aging 486 PCs that did not run Windows 95 well at all, and they ran Windows 98 even worse. We desperately needed to upgrade those machines, and we had very little budget to do so.
The SP97-V seemed like a great solution. It was inexpensive, it included integrated video, it was compatible with inexpensive Cyrix and IDT CPUs, and it would work with the memory and network and sound cards we salvaged from the 486s, as long as we could come up with matched pairs of RAM.
I wasn’t looking to set any performance records. I just needed to come up with something that could run Windows 95 and Office 97 and not lag if you had real-time spell checking enabled.
The Asus SP97-V in combination with whatever Socket 7 CPU was cheapest when I placed my order fit the bill. It allowed me to modernize the fleet very inexpensively, and it wasn’t a total dead end when it came to the possibility of future upgrades.
The built-in video wasn’t great, but it was adequate and it saved me $40. In those instances where I needed better performance, I could disable the built-in video and install a better card.
Way back in 2010, I wrote a bit more about my experience with the SP97-V in the 90s.
The Asus SP97-V today
The Asus SP97-v doesn’t have the best reputation today because it was a board we used in low end builds when it was new. But that doesn’t mean it was a bad motherboard at all. The SIS 5598 performs about as well as the Intel HX chipset did. It doesn’t have as high of a memory limit as the Intel HX chipset had, but if you are running DOS or Windows 98 SE, that is not a problem. It is better than an Intel TX or VX chipset because it will cache more than 64 MB of memory, unlike either of those chipsets.
The built-in video is a liability because it reduces memory bandwidth. But when you disable the built-in video and plug in a separate video card, it performs very similarly to an HX-based board. And it will probably cost less.
Even though I used it with IDT and Cyrix CPUs in the 90s, it works perfectly with a Pentium MMX CPU, and that’s what I would recommend today. With a Pentium MMX, you can slow the system down to 386 speeds, allowing you to run a very wide range of software on a single machine.
Getting an 83 MHz bus from an Asus SP97-V
If you want the ultimate in socket 7 performance, this board does have an undocumented 83 MHz bus you can get by putting jumper FS0 on 2-3 and FS1 and FS2 both on 1-2. You can use this to reach higher clock speeds, or you can do what I did, and run the CPU at very close to its rated speed, but with a faster bus, providing faster access to memory. And unlike Intel chipsets, you didn’t overclock the PCI bus by doing so. If you set jumper FS3 to 2-3, the PCI bus still runs at 33 MHz even though your CPU is using a faster bus speed.
Depending on the other parts in your system, you may be able to reach better speeds with better stability than you could with an HX board.
I will always have a soft spot for the Asus P55T2P4 and the Abit IT5H. But the Asus SP97-V really isn’t far behind, it just wasn’t what power users were buying for themselves that year.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
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