CT4170 is an el-cheapo PnP Vibra16 XV with CQM-emulated OPL3, you might want to use another sound card.

What games do you want to play? This will help in giving tips 😀

Gotta Love the rock solid 440BX and Slot 1 was so neat and tidy (if somewhat limiting)
P3 will happy let you play late dos thanks to the isa slot fos sound and Nvida's cards having good dos support (or later 3dfx cards) up to the 1st generation of Win98 games where you can more suitable sound better sound and take advantage of whatever 3d accelerator you get.

But as others have said depends what you want to play, that will decide which parts are best.

My BX build is here if your interested, Its designed to be roughly the latest supported parts for a BX board that allow me to play in both dos and windows, but does have some dos compatibility issues because of this
Dell makes surprisingly good retro PC's

I was trawling through ebay and spotted a 440BX board which was new old stock. I kind of got the gist that the 440BX board is the best for compatability and took a plunge. So I've been getting parts to build around it and I read somewhere that the SB16 is really good. I want to be able to play DOS games without issues e.g ultima 8 but have decent sound for win98 games.
I have noticed that the slot 1 chips run hot. The ones I bought on ebay had heatsinks on them which are huge, not somethihg I was familiar with as I hadn't used these types of CPU's before but the system runs really quiet.
I have played wolfenstein 3d and it looks gorgeous on my IBM p260 monitor. I have noticed that the sound card is horrible especially when I played age of empires 1 demo, yucky sound. Should I keep the ISA board or should I resort to the AWE64 chip integrated on my motherboard?
The board is fussy with memory and even though I put in 256mb into a slot, it reads it as 128mb. The gpu's I have are the ati rage 128 ultra and mx420 which are passive cooled. I am currently using the rage 128. can anyone recommend a gpu for compatability e.g voodoo or matrox I should look out for. Also what soundcard I should look out for

I think the 440BX doesn't like high-density memory, mostly likely that's why you're only seeing 128mb. It'll run up to 1GB of memory provided you use low-density RAM. Is that stick double-sided or single sided?

The Slot-1s don't run that hot in my use, but I usually like to ensure there is some half-decent airflow over the heatsinks. Generally if the system is stable you're probably ok where temperature is concerned, but if you're not comfortable with how hot your processor is running, you can always ghetto a 60 or 80mm fan in place to get some air moving over the heatsink. Slot-2s though, they run hot, especially if they're the older P2/P3 Xeons that run off-die cache. Had to brute-force some cooling on my XG-DLS build because the processors would run so hot otherwise.

As m1919 said, your Ram issues is most likely due to it being double sided.
All the stock slot 1 cpus I've used have a fan built into the cartridge. Big brand OEM's like Dell, Compaq, Gateway used passive heatsinks but the case fan was usually close by or ducted to increase the airflow round it. They get warm but never too hot to touch.

Never seen a BX board with AWE on board. In theory this should be perfect for dos games as its just a SB16 with better midi, Fair chance its on the PCI bus though so bit of a pain in real dos But a 500Mhz machine might be fast enough to play dos games from within windows where even a PCI Awe should behave.

The Awe (or any isa based card) should sound ok in Windows games if a bit basic. A SB Live! or better will improve things greatly. (my favourite is the Audigy 2 ZS as it supports all the EAX versions and more easily to come by then a Audigy 4 which doesn't offer much more improvements

If you play glide games then any Voodoo card will work but if you play Direct 3D games (say AOE) I'd go with a Gforce card which still work with Dos games paired with a couple of Voodoo 2's in SLI. This will give you a rig that can do mid-late dos games and pretty much any Win9x game you can think of

chinny22 wrote:

Never seen a BX board with AWE on board.

Because there are none with an AWE32/64.
This chaintech CT-6BTA3 is said to have a Creative/Ensoniq ES1373 PCI sound chipset.

The ram is single sided. The manual does say each slot supports upto 128mb. The reason I said AWE64 is because the software from the driver disk loads up a splash screen while it installs saying creative AWE64. I'll keep a look out for a voodoo 2, they do pop up on ebay once every often. there's currently a voodoo 3 3000 agp,

maverick85 wrote:

The ram is single sided. The manual does say each slot supports upto 128mb. The reason I said AWE64 is because the software from the driver disk loads up a splash screen while it installs saying creative AWE64. I'll keep a look out for a voodoo 2, they do pop up on ebay once every often. there's currently a voodoo 3 3000 agp,

I believe that stick is probably high-density. If you can find a double-sided 256MB stick, it should be low-density.

time flies. i may have to pick things up again regarding this project as i've taken a liking to the stability of windows 95 (never thought i'd say this). it's been in storage for a while. the tusl-2 died on me so want to get an mt-32 dos machine sorted out.
question: what's the slowest slot 1 processor for the 440BX?

maverick85 wrote:

question: what's the slowest slot 1 processor for the 440BX?

The slowest possible for slot 1 I think is a downward unlocked P2. These can set their multi to 2x iirc.
Usually LX has lower FSB options (some should be able to do 50MHz FSB)

Tetrium wrote:

maverick85 wrote:

question: what's the slowest slot 1 processor for the 440BX?

The slowest possible for slot 1 I think is a downward unlocked P2. These can set their multi to 2x iirc.
Usually LX has lower FSB options (some should be able to do 50MHz FSB)

so what do i search on ebay? pentium ii slot 1 233MHz?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_P … microprocessors
hmmm... ideally something that's not toasty, want to run it fanless

a cacheless celeron from the 1st generation 😁

maverick85 wrote:

so what do i search on ebay? pentium ii slot 1 233MHz? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_P … microprocessors hmmm... i […]
Show full quote

Tetrium wrote:

maverick85 wrote:

question: what's the slowest slot 1 processor for the 440BX?

The slowest possible for slot 1 I think is a downward unlocked P2. These can set their multi to 2x iirc.
Usually LX has lower FSB options (some should be able to do 50MHz FSB)

so what do i search on ebay? pentium ii slot 1 233MHz?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_P … microprocessors
hmmm... ideally something that's not toasty, want to run it fanless

If you want to go fanless, then go underclocked Deschutes 😀

The only problem is that it's not very easy to predict if any particular Deschutes is unlocked or not, except maybe that afaik the 350MHz ones and up were never unlocked.
My guess is that if you want to increase your luck on getting an unlocked Deschutes, go 300MHz or lower (many 333MHz Deschutes CPUs weren't unlocked and you mentioned you wanted a lower CPU multiplier anyway) and the earlier the date code, the better your chances are of receiving an unlocked one.

I may have missed some other details, but I simply can't tell you for sure.

My guess is that this also depends on your motherboard btw, but details are sketchy and I don't know of any definitive list anywhere.

mrau wrote:

a cacheless celeron from the 1st generation 😁

🤣!

So true 😁

But iirc those don't come unlocked and afaik you can disable the cache of the P2 anyway 😁 (please correct me if I'm wrong)

maverick85 wrote on 2013-12-22, 08:27:

Hi peeps. I've been able to source a new old stock Chaintech 440BX motherboard (CT-6BTA3) and I'm looking to build around it. Thankfully its able to post and is shiny new. I have also bought a new beige case (Inwin A500) and two slot 1 processors (PII 350MHz and PIII 500MHz). The PII came with a tall heatsink which causes fitting inssues in the inwin A500 as the PSU blocks tall heatsinks so will have to do with the PIII and the retention clips removed as its heatsink is wider but shorter. I have also sourced an ISA soundblaster 16 (CT4170). Any feedback on what I should do with it, what components would go around it for best compatability?

🤣 googled 6BTA3, looks like I bought this NOS. Its been neglected and put in box with components stacked in the past, yet it still lives and is now part of my top three main retro builds atm