SICOMPUTEK YH-945A6 Motherboard with 2 ISA, 5 PCI, Intel 945GV ICH7 chipsets, Support Socket LGA775 Pentium/Celeron /Dual core CPU up to 3.2 GHz

This board is pretty solid I guess, but I've found several design shortcomings that folks might want to be aware of:1. The PCIex16 slot is pretty useless and the manufacturer seems clueless about this. According to Intel's 945G literature, the 945+82801GB (ICH7) chipset on this board ONLY supports connectivity with PCIe VIDEO CARDS! I have no idea of who is going to buy an "Industrial Motherboard" with Onboard Video and then want to add a video card. (IOW: No one in their right mind buys an "Industrial MB" for gaming use...) I've tried putting many different controller cards in the PCIe slot but every last one of them cause the system to hang during post. This includes SCSI Cards (2), and USB Controllers (4). If you want to use the PCIe slot for something other than a Video Card you need to look elsewhere!2. Neither of the OnBoard NICs have bootrom support. Even though the CMOS has the ability to select "LAN" booting, the onboard NICs don't support it. If you want to PXE boot, your going to have to install your own NIC. ...and its going to have to be PCI based cause nothing seems to work in the PCIe slot. (I'm using an Intel Pro 1000 GT).3. Only 1 floppy drive supported. I was hoping for dual drive support (5.25 and 3.5) but, unfortunately, this board only supports a single floppy drive.Other than the above, the board seems solid enough. But I am trying to build a PC capable of reading many old storage formats, drives, and devices. As such, I wanted to have IDE, Floppy, Serial, Parallel, ISA, PCI, PCIe, etc support. I also have an Asus P5WDG2 WS Pro board which seems to meet all these criteria (other than ISA slots) and at least its PCIe slots work...

The motherboard seems very stable with supported CPUs. However, the main point with this MB is the ISA slots. Unfortunately it does not support DMA. So any ISA card that requires DMA will not work. Reserving DMA in the BIOS does apparently absolutely nothing. ISA cards that do not require DMA works just fine. At least the ones I tested. IRQs can be reserved in BIOS without problems. MB works fine with old OS like MSDOS6.22, Windows 3.11 and WIndows 98. Except for the DMA problems with ISA cards.

Originally advertised to be Windows 98SE compatible but was not. Support was great and they recommended returning for credit.

I have purchased this for making replacement of old industrial PC with Windows 2000 where the CPU used to be on PCISA card. That has changed no normal LGA775 Intel processor but some of the expansion cards this PC used were ISA cards, which is why I've picked this board. There was a minor issue regarding BIOS setting which was cleared after speaking with manufacturer (they speak good English).