Superb story, superb ingenuity and superb machine. Well done!

P.S. I would keep the 9600Pro, it's a nice card. BTW I'm also a proud 4600Ti owner - it's a beast. 😁

Yes I have 4600Ti but it's unfortunately broken 🙁. I bought it for a price as crap (10PLN) on Allegro, it was working for 4 days and then artifacts showed up.

I'm going to buy someday a Quadro 900XGL, I think it's high-end card for this system year 😀.

install win7 on it! it should run nice and smooth. and a newer video card. i know they have 150pro or 1650 that will work with agp 4x

You're ready for Duke Nukem Forever for sure 😀

^Sigh... I was supposed to be playing Duke Nukem Forever before I was even a teenager and now I'm mid-20s.

@haker, that's a nice looking computer. I'm sure that configuration would have cost more than a decent used car back in 2001. That Radeon you have should be sufficient for Aero if you decided to try Vista or Win 7. My last Pentium III system was a ThinkPad T23 which had a 1.13ghz Tualatin chip and I ran Vista on that and with the exception of graphics performance, everything was just as responsive as with XP.

Whoa, just bought Gainward Bliss 7900GS 512MB Golden Sample for AGP, for 100PLN (25dollars) 😀 With this GPU, I'm going to test some newer games like Oblivion - in destination this PC will propably have oldschool Ti4600 and I'll give 7900GS to my brother dual Athlon MP rig (udam_u Vogons registered) 😀.

Nice setup, love hearing about other P3 builds. I'd love to find some Dual Tualatin mobo on the cheap as I have more than enough PIII-S 1.4GHz now!

I won a lot of 10 P3-S 1.4GHz w/bent pins on ebay for $22 Shipped. I just got them friday and the seller sent 12! Most of them barely have bent pins at all! So now I have 14x P3-S 1.4GHz in total. Might also Pin-mod a few to work with other chipsets 😀

I also use a Ti4600+V2 12mb's in SLI in one of my Tualatin machines, I'm still wondering what can max that card out. The other build uses a Voodoo 5 5500 AGP.

RogueTrip2012 wrote:

Nice setup, love hearing about other P3 builds. I'd love to find some Dual Tualatin mobo on the cheap as I have more than enough PIII-S 1.4GHz now!

I won a lot of 10 P3-S 1.4GHz w/bent pins on ebay for $22 Shipped. I just got them friday and the seller sent 12! Most of them barely have bent pins at all! So now I have 14x P3-S 1.4GHz in total. Might also Pin-mod a few to work with other chipsets 😀

I also use a Ti4600+V2 12mb's in SLI in one of my Tualatin machines, I'm still wondering what can max that card out. The other build uses a Voodoo 5 5500 AGP.

Just be careful when bending them back. These pins break very easilly compared to the PPGA pins and earlier.
These P3s 1400's are going real cheap nowdays...now if only the same could be said about the mobo's...
It seems much harder to find Tualatins non-s 🤣!

I think all of the P3 servers must be finally being retired and that's the cause of the cheap Tualatin influx....

Obviously those servers weren't using the motherboards we would want though so those aren't showing up en masse. Although I think an i840 mobo would be nice to have compared to the 512MB-limit 815 stuff. It's also too bad that the 830 chipset was notebook only because it supports 1GB.

swaaye wrote:

I think all of the P3 servers must be finally being retired and that's the cause of the cheap Tualatin influx....

Obviously those servers weren't using the motherboards we would want though so those aren't showing up en masse. Although I think an i840 mobo would be nice to have compared to the 512MB-limit 815 stuff. It's also too bad that the 830 chipset was notebook only because it supports 1GB.

VIA 694T is the solution. Over here we rarely used any Intel chipsets for P III's past year 2000. Thus, all the old available Socket 370 mobos are VIA chipsets. Currently, my S370 rig is using a Soyo 7VBA133U with 694T/696B northbridge/ southbridge and supports a max of 1.5gb ram (high density no problem). It also has AGP 4x and sockets for front usb headers. Max fsb I've been able to boot this board to is 153mhz- though this may be cpu limited as I've heard others exceeding 160mhz.

VIA 694T is the solution. Over here we rarely used any Intel chipsets for P III's past year 2000.

Except, I think many of us would consider the Via Apollo to be more a problem than a solution. The Via boards became more common than Intel chipsets over here, too, but I think it was more due to cost rather than any technical merits of the things. While I don't consider the Via boards to be quite as bad as they're often made out to be, there is definitely good reason for their poor reputation.

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

VIA 694T is the solution. Over here we rarely used any Intel chipsets for P III's past year 2000.

Except, I think many of us would consider the Via Apollo to be more a problem than a solution. The Via boards became more common than Intel chipsets over here, too, but I think it was more due to cost rather than any technical merits of the things. While I don't consider the Via boards to be quite as bad as they're often made out to be, there is definitely good reason for their poor reputation.

There was also a SiS solution. The Via 694T was higher production than the 815EP B-step it seems as I have only found a few boards equipped it. Add the issue of the Tualatin being overshadowed by the Pentium 4 on purpose by intel which means very short production of Tualatin capable boards. I'm more confused why they choose to make it incompatible with older chipsets as modders have proven it is capable to make them work.

I now have 2 Via 694T and one of them I have gotten working now (have caps to do on the other one now) and a broken 815EP B-step that won't POST even with a new BIOS chip installed.

I did find some interesting info about the Northbridge and Southbridge that the 815 supposedly implemented that Via didn't copy until the KT333 chipset and V-Link. Can't find the info on it again to make sure which chipsets got it.

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

VIA 694T is the solution. Over here we rarely used any Intel chipsets for P III's past year 2000.

Except, I think many of us would consider the Via Apollo to be more a problem than a solution. The Via boards became more common than Intel chipsets over here, too, but I think it was more due to cost rather than any technical merits of the things. While I don't consider the Via boards to be quite as bad as they're often made out to be, there is definitely good reason for their poor reputation.

After owning a fair number of these boards, some were poorly executed - yes.

But there are quite a few gems too, with capabilities outstripping most Intel boards. I can think of 3 boards in my possession alone that fit the bill - the Aopen AX33, MSI 6309 and previously mentioned Soyo 7VBA133U. All take up to 1.5gb ram, have AGP 4x and overclock at least to the 138-150mhz region.

Maybe the bad rep due to them was people comparing high end INtel baords against budget VIA boards? I dunno. I'd say most of the VIA's I've seen are better than budget INtel chipsets like the 810 😜

The VIA boards of those times tend to have major problems with PCI performance and even AGP compliance to varying degrees. I've seen it first hand. Some boards are far worse than others though.

The PCI performance problems show up with hardware-accelerated sound cards that require reliable bus latency and with RAID cards that suffer when the bus bandwidth is subpar. Believe it or not but the problems were often poorly programmed BIOSs and they could be mostly remedied by reprogramming chipset registers (look up the PCI Latency Patch).

So part of VIA's problem was that the companies that implemented their chipsets tended to build low quality boards. I've been wondering if Intel and NVIDIA provide better implementation support.

One thing I remember when I went to nForce2 was how much more responsive the whole system felt than my KT266A board... I'm sure a lot of that came down to the superior NV memory and IDE controllers.

If 815 had just not had that 512MB limit it would've been an absolutely unbeatable chipset. There is nothing else disappointing about it and my P3 1400 sys feels incredibly responsive overall. It is without a doubt superior to 440BX (less quirky).

swaaye wrote:

If 815 had just not had that 512MB limit it would've been an absolutely unbeatable chipset. There is nothing else disappointing about it and my P3 1400 sys feels incredibly responsive overall. It is without a doubt superior to 440BX (less quirky).

I have to say, I like the i815 chipset a LOT, but the 512MB limit really 'kills' it.
Imo it's exactly this limit which make the 694T boards very much worth considering, along with it's support for higher density chips.

There's also the 'Apollo Pro 266', which looks even more interesting for me, nice for having a board to put my spare crappy DDR ram into 😁

Well the thing is when I need more than 512MB, I start thinking about the nForce 2 AthlonXP that I could throw together, or the VIA K8T800 board + Athlon 64 + AGP that I now have too 🤣

Or even that I could put a 440BX machine together with 768MB with 3x256 DIMMs.. (Hell a K6 for that matter too)

I don't need to buy more retrojunk!!! 😁

BTW I recently blew up my 865PE + P4 3.2 + 6800GT box. The AGP card slid out of the slot partway while on and it lit up with a short!!!!!! Ooops!!!!! At least it was that 6800GT and not my treasured 5950 Ultra!! 😉 I enjoy seeing how badly a GF5 runs games.

Yeah, I think that Via Apollo Pro present in my MoBo is real good chipset as for PIII Tualatin. It supports AGP4x, 1,5GB of RAM, so I don't need anything else 😀. Also, it runs nicely with Linux - for example, my bro MoBo MSI K7D Master based on AMD760MPX have some bug with IDE subsystem on newer kernels.
On some motherboards, VIA chipsets aren't performing the best, but they are definitely most flexible chipsets for PIII. For example, you can set asynchronous DRAM/FSB clocks etc. .
A few days ago I've installed BFG GF6800GS borrowed from my brother. I've said before that I bought 7900GS for AGP - but seller sent me card with artifacts, BTW he was 12 😀, so it wasn't serious business. Hopefully, I didn't sent him money before I checked if card's working.
Also, I've discovered that my CPUs runs at different steppings! Based on Linux /proc/cpuinfo, CPU no1 has stepping 1, while other stepping 4 😀. Strange thing, but it's running very stable.

swaaye wrote:

The VIA boards of those times tend to have major problems with PCI performance and even AGP compliance to varying degrees. I've […]
Show full quote

The VIA boards of those times tend to have major problems with PCI performance and even AGP compliance to varying degrees. I've seen it first hand. Some boards are far worse than others though.

The PCI performance problems show up with hardware-accelerated sound cards that require reliable bus latency and with RAID cards that suffer when the bus bandwidth is subpar. Believe it or not but the problems were often poorly programmed BIOSs and they could be mostly remedied by reprogramming chipset registers (look up the PCI Latency Patch).

So part of VIA's problem was that the companies that implemented their chipsets tended to build low quality boards. I've been wondering if Intel and NVIDIA provide better implementation support.

One thing I remember when I went to nForce2 was how much more responsive the whole system felt than my KT266A board... I'm sure a lot of that came down to the superior NV memory and IDE controllers.

If 815 had just not had that 512MB limit it would've been an absolutely unbeatable chipset. There is nothing else disappointing about it and my P3 1400 sys feels incredibly responsive overall. It is without a doubt superior to 440BX (less quirky).

Ahhh, I think I get your hate for the Via chipsets now 😁

Just stumbled across the PCI latency patch last night, I have the last beta .20beta21 that acually causes issues when installed on my Gigabyte GA-6VTXE (Pro133T). I'm gonna try the .19 set next. I also see Via's official attempt which looks like 1.01 and 1.04 (can't find 1.04 for download, gotta a link?) and dunno which one is better to run or if I should even be trying it. I don't use raid but 2x Voodoo2 12mbs in SLI, would it help them out? Also USB2.0 card and a PCI Nic.

As for the 815EP B-step boards, is it really worth it to run them? My ASUS TUSL2-C won't post and found another one but don't really care for the price as I now have 2 Pro133T boards. Also 512mb really only kills you when going for win2k-winXP. Windows98se works great on 512mb.

I once worked on a VIA Apollo Slot 1 board that had such horrible PCI operation that I literally could not get a SBLive to function at all. No exaggeration here. It would not put out a clear sound. But then I installed that PCI Latency Patch and it started to work fine. 😀

As for the 815 boards well they aren't THAT exciting. I bought one because I'd never used one (got the TUSL2-C myself). But if you are happy with your VIA boards I wouldn't bother to spend the money on a 512MB gimped 815. It's hard for me to deal with the fact that my old 440BX mobo can out-equip the newer 815 board. But that 815 sure feels faster than my 440BX....until it starts swapping!