The K7S5A/Duron 1400/1GB core served as an Internet Workstation at my parents house between 2003 and 2009. Their machine has been upgraded with a new PSU, a spare 300GB Western Digital SATA disk, a donated Asrock S939Dual-SATA2 motherboard and the AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ and 2GB RAM modules from Tydirium. The existing case, floppy and DVD/CDRW drive were kept.

The old core has been rebuilt as an experimental machine from spare and eBay'd components in September 2009.

The Via VT6421A controller does not have a boot rom on it, so the motherboard is unable to boot the SATA drive natively. To work around this problem I was able to hack the VT6421A PCI boot rom into my BIOS, enabling the boot/raid features.

In February 2010 the ECS K7S5A Pro board was swapped with an MSI KT4V-L board. The same modification was applied. The board does not like DDR400 ram when installed in multiple slots (only one slot is supported), but DDR400 modules work fine when running at a lower speed (BIOS setting).
The main reason to swap the motherboard was to enable Soundblaster 16 emulation in DOS, which the ECS board does not support.

At the end of July 2010 the machine was upgraded with components received from stardust: an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ CPU, an Asrock 939A785GMH/128M motherboard and 4GB Hynix DDR400 memory.
The previous setup (AMD Athlon XP 2400+ CPU, MSI KT4V-L V1.0 (MS-6712) motherboard, 2x512MB Corsair TwinX CL2 DDR400 memory, Gigabyte GV-N62256DP2-RH GeForce 6200 256MB AGP, Intel PRO/1000 MT PCI and a Soundblaster Live! Value PCI (CT4670)) has been transferred to stock.
The card reader was found to be defective and binned.

BIOS Modification References (AGP setups):

K7S5A Pro (V5.0)
- K7S5A Pro (V5.0) (ECS Web Site)
- K7S5A Pro 5.X Motherboard BIOS's
- HoneyX OC Bios HX0811 (used as the basis for modification)
- AMINF336 (to flash the BIOS)
- AMIBCP75 (to modify the BIOS)
- VIA_RAID_V410a.zip Download (contains 6421v431.rom)
- K7S5APRO_MOD.ZIP (My modified BIOS image, 1158KB)
K7S5APRO_MOD.ZIP contains HX0811.ZIP, AMINF336.EXE, AMIBCP75.EXE and 6421V431.ROM.

KT4V / KT4V-L (V1.0)
- KT4V / KT4V-L (V1.0)
- KT4V-L Help and FAQ
- KT4V_MOD.ZIP (My modified BIOS image, 1008KB)
KT4V_MOD.ZIP contains A6712VMS.1C0, AMIFL827.EXE, AMIBCP75.EXE and 6421V431.ROM.

Click here to view a picture.