Well done!

Stull wrote:

Nyan cat i815T Motherboard (S2080) Pretty simple board with no bells or whistles -- the way I like it. Who needs onboard sound, video, or NIC?! 😀

I had to read this twice...

ugg, an 815 chipset board... I would have set it on fire before using it in a system. Same thing goes for a 810. Other than that little gripe, you have a very nice setup!

The i815 is a decent chipset just so long as you don't use the integrated video (it significantly cripples memory bandwidth). Considering the chipset and CPUs it supports wouldn't be doing serious modern tasks anyways, the RAM limit is somewhat moot; it'd be like complaining you can't go over 16mb on a 286.

With that said, while this may not have held true with software available in 2000, as things are today, you can get noticably better performance with a machine using the 820 chipset and a good amount of RDRAM.

That computer's configuration is pretty similar to what I used every day back in the mid 2000s. Looks nice.

Absolutely nothing wrong with an i815EP. Had several motherboards with them over the years and never had any trouble with them.

One possible negative is that there are no ISA slots. But that doesn't matter if you don't care about ISA. 😀

A very nice system! That is definitely the limit of the P3 platform.

I have some tyan 1854 with P3-100 MHz processors and they have been very reliable. One is still in use as my internet box.

got a motherboard off ebay that came with one of those orb coolers. You are rights - it is LOUD. I replaced it. 😦

I honestly had no idea there were any issues with the 815 chipset. Good to know. Before buying the board I searched around for some reviews, but most of them seem to be gone (or mangled) since they're ~11 years old. I saw the board on eBay and saw that it supported Tualatins, so I went for it. Seems to be working fine so far. What chipset would be ideal for a PIII-S 1.4? Does everyone agree with the 820, like GXL750 said?

swaaye wrote:

One possible negative is that there are no ISA slots. But that doesn't matter if you don't care about ISA. 😀

I considered finding a board with ISA, but I figured the only reason I'd need ISA would be for an older Sound Blaster card (for DOS), and if I'm going to go that route, I'll probably just build a dedicated DOS machine. 😀 I drew the line at Win9x games for this one.

ncmark wrote:

A very nice system! That is definitely the limit of the P3 platform.

I have some tyan 1854 with P3-100 MHz processors and they have been very reliable. One is still in use as my internet box.

got a motherboard off ebay that came with one of those orb coolers. You are rights - it is LOUD. I replaced it. 😦

I've only owned one other Tyan board (socket 939 S2866), but it's been rock solid.

As for the cooler, I have been considering hooking up a 120mm fan that blows directly on the heatsink (there's a vent right above the CPU) and unplugging the fan on the Orb. I'm not sure if this is a good idea. I guess it couldn't hurt to try, right?! Heh heh. Does this CPU downclock when it gets too hot? Or does it fry?

leileilol wrote:

Stull wrote:

Nyan cat i815T Motherboard (S2080) Pretty simple board with no bells or whistles -- the way I like it. Who needs onboard sound, video, or NIC?! 😀

I had to read this twice...

I had to read THIS twice. And then Google it. Now I know..

As far as I know, there never was a motherboard with the 820 chipset that supported Tualatin so you'd need either a PowerLeap adapter or to pin mod the Tualatin chip for it to work. However, if either were done, you'd have the fastest of the PIIIs paired with the extra bandwidth of RDRAM. If you're running XP and use the internet with the computer, the extra bandwidth would help a bit. However, for the ideal PIII chipset, I would say one of those fabled motherboards that takes the PIII and uses DDR memory. I've never seen such a board but I hear about them from time to time; apparently they exist. However, whether it be RDRAM or DDR, both should be pretty cheap to get nowadays. The 820 and RDRAM suggetion comes from personal experience.

GXL750 wrote:

As far as I know, there never was a motherboard with the 820 chipset that supported Tualatin so you'd need either a PowerLeap adapter or to pin mod the Tualatin chip for it to work. However, if either were done, you'd have the fastest of the PIIIs paired with the extra bandwidth of RDRAM. If you're running XP and use the internet with the computer, the extra bandwidth would help a bit. However, for the ideal PIII chipset, I would say one of those fabled motherboards that takes the PIII and uses DDR memory. I've never seen such a board but I hear about them from time to time; apparently they exist. However, whether it be RDRAM or DDR, both should be pretty cheap to get nowadays. The 820 and RDRAM suggetion comes from personal experience.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Gigabyte-GA-6RX-Mot … -/120770075970?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/INTEL-STL2-DUAL-P-III … -/110374026549?

dual tualatin motherboard

http://ixbtlabs.com/articles/rounduppro266aug2k1/

I remember Redhill had an article about the 810 chipset (or was it the 815)? Apparently there were a *lot* of problems. That was when they were trying to force everyone into Rambus RAM.

http://www.redhill.net.au/c/c-g.html#i820

There's nothing wrong with 810 or 815 to my knowledge. 810 was intended for emachines-like budget boxes with Celerons. It was fine for that. The IGP was even pretty nice at the time, if bandwidth starved. You could game on it. It is similar to a Riva 128 or Voodoo 1 in speed.

They both have the 512MB RAM limit. This was pretty obviously forced product segmentation in the case of the 815. They wanted people to buy P4 instead. But still it's a very fast, very reliable chipset that is excellent for a 98SE/ME retro box. 512MB isn't useless for 2K either (most people didn't have even 256MB back then).

820 probably should have been DDR but they guessed wrong on RDRAM taking over, I suppose. Why strap it to a P3? Maybe they thought that AGP 4x would benefit from it. Intel was pretty excited by AGP texturing back then. The chipset is fine but the cost of RDRAM made people hate it. They switched to DDR in Jan 2002 with the 845.

I've used the 810, 815E and 820 chipsets- they're all pretty speedy. If I had to choose the two best P3 chipsets, they'd be the 815E and Apollo Pro 133A (694X). 150mhz fsb no probs. w00t!

Nice build BTW!

I had some Tyan 1854 boards with the apollo pro chipset - I could never get voodoo video and awe64 to co-exist. The boards were very reliable, but that combination would not work. I eventually switched to radeon video in one machine and a PCI sound card in the other.

As far as I'm concerned, there is nothing really wrong with the 8XX series P3 chipsets. most of them do work, except the first batch of 815's... Its just most 810's ended up in cheap wallmart systems and the 815 soured me to intel pretty bad. the 440bx was PERFECT. Its the basis of just about EVERY virtual machine! They should have just updated the 440bx for agp 4x and pc133 and left it alone.

Now if you want something awesome, look for the HE-SL chipset. Its tualatin only, and its a server chipset, but it holds nothing back. I had one on an intel board. I wish I hadn't sold it... looks like this: http://lh4.ggpht.com/fanwengang/SFUfRmaAcxI/A … aQ/DSCN0409.jpg

I had mine with 6gb of ram. ^.^

Stull wrote:

Thermaltake Golden Orb? for Socket 370 (FC0370) This thing looks cool but it's LOUD AS HELL. I wish I'd grabbed the low CFM StarTech cooler from Newegg instead, because the loudness isn't dampened much by the case I chose.

Nice clean looking rig, looks like a fun build.

Is the Golden Orb new or used? I had one at one time but it's been so long ago I can't remember it being loud or not. Course in the late 90's early 2000's much of the cooling was loud, and that's just the way it was. So glad the tech now is so much quieter.

OK, I'm feeling better about the 815 now. For a second there I thought I might be in for some unhappy surprises. 😉 My only other P3 experience was with a Gigabyte Pro133A board, way back when the P3 was what all the cool kids had.

The Golden Orb is brand new, or supposedly brand new. I snagged it from a seller on eBay. It sure looked clean/new and came in an official box. It's not rattly or anything, it just has a tiny, high-RPM fan. I think that cases had fewer vents in them back then, so loudness didn't matter as much.

Just rewire the fan for 5 or 7 volts.

The 815EP chipset is great, slightly slower than a 440BX chipset (although 133MHz on 440BX overclocks the AGP bus). Only issues I say are the 512mb limit and lack of ISA.

Good build, very similar to what I built not long ago and want to post pics of my machine once I trick it out a touch more.

You can drop in a 56ohm 2w resistor to drop to around 9volts. or just buy a 5 pack of them for cheap: http://www.dealextreme.com/p/3-pin-pc-cooling … piece-set-35818
Using a couple in my current machine on the scythe slipstreams to keep the bearings from going out.