VOGONS


First post, by kreats

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So the next thing I want to do is max out a abit bf6 (p3 based bx board) - but I've heard there are stability problems when using a 1.4GHz p3-s on a slot-t?

I was wondering if that was due to the overclocking of the AGP bus when running at 133MHz - if so could it be solved by just using a PCI card?

Alternately, If the 1.4 is out - what is next best option (underclock the 1.4 to 100MHz FSB?).

Reply 1 of 6, by valnar

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I have a couple ASUS P2B boards pretty much maxed out. I got a lot of information from here:
http://homepage.hispeed.ch/rscheidegger/p2b_p … pgrade_faq.html

See my PC's here:
Pair of Retro PC's

I just keep everything at 100FSB and don't push it to 133. Playing DOS or Win9x games at Tualatin speeds is plenty fast. I'm not sure what voltages that Abit supports, so you may want to find a Powerleap PL-IP3/T v2.0 to be safe. There are usually some for sale on eBay with the fastest Celeron 1.4Ghz included.

On a related note, if you are building a retro-rig, the ASUS P2B is a much better choice. They have more ISA slots. 😁

Reply 2 of 6, by kreats

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Ah yep have seen those pages before - seems some pretty comprehensive info out there for that board. But as I've already got a bf6 and they're somewhat similar (nicer bios IMO) I'm going with that.

BF6 is a late BX board of about the same vintage as the p2b so shouldn't have any probs with the voltage (already got the slot-t also). Can get a p3-s 1.4 for about 10 shipped.

Not sure about it being a "retro" rig as I've already got a 486 for that, most windows games don't really benefit from ISA cards (well I'll probably stick an awe64 gold in there).

More about making such ancient hardware do cool things. Using it as a HTPC (with an xcard) at the moment and it does surprisingly well 😜

Reply 3 of 6, by batracio

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kreats wrote:

So the next thing I want to do is max out a abit bf6 (p3 based bx board) - but I've heard there are stability problems when using a 1.4GHz p3-s on a slot-t?

I was wondering if that was due to the overclocking of the AGP bus when running at 133MHz - if so could it be solved by just using a PCI card?

Alternately, If the 1.4 is out - what is next best option (underclock the 1.4 to 100MHz FSB?).

I have here an Asus P3B-F with a Pentium III-S Tualatin 1.4GHz, installed on a Slot-T adapter, and absolutely stable @133MHz FSB. The tricky part was to disable SBA on GeForce4 using Rivatuner. The same thing works too on a P2B with a Pentium III Coppermine 1.0 GHz (133x7.5). I still haven't found out how to disable SBA on Radeon cards, so this is only valid for GeForces.

Reply 4 of 6, by swaaye

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Well, I am actually still in possession of my Abit BF6 from 1999 and I have a Slot T in it with a P3-S 1.4. 😉

It does work, but the system is somewhat flaky. Really though, I think that the mobo was always rather flaky in general. It is especially picky about which PCI slots you stick where. Put PCI sound cards in slot 4 (yes it shares with USB but that's ok) and don't use PCI 6 for anything other than maybe Voodoo cards because it is a slave slot. And, of course the PCI slot right below AGP shares IRQ with the AGP slot. I've spent hours dealing with problems with PCI conflicts and boot problems.

And when the AGP is at the resulting 89 MHz of a FSB @ 133 MHz, even the most resilient AGP cards become flaky. Don't even bother with ATI cards at that speed. Only NV stuff seems to have a chance. Not even my Voodoo5 is reliable.

Sticking with 1 or 2 DIMMs is almost a requirement too. The board and chipset simply were not designed for a 133 MHz bus speed.

Run the latest BIOS because there were major ACPI problems with earlier revisions.
link

Reply 5 of 6, by kreats

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Nice advice swaaye - forgot about the bios. I think shared slots are a problem typical of boards of this era - esp when they tack on an isa slot. Also, I hear swelling/leaking caps get to be a problem on boards like these - responsible for all kinds of mischief.

So if agp causes problems, is pci the solution? I have a pci voodoo5 I could use.

What issues do 3 dimms give? I've been running a p3 600MHz @ 133 with 3 dimms without problems so far. Was planning on maxing out to 768.

The only issue so I've had so far is this board refuses to let my digital tv tuner work 🙁

Reply 6 of 6, by swaaye

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Yeah I've had problems with some PCI cards not working at all. I have some cheap USB 2.0 PCI cards that refuse to show up at all in this board (sometimes won't power on at all). The problem with these old chipsets is that they only have 15 IRQs (today we have APIC and many more IRQs) and the PCI bus only has 4 to go around. So sharing is inevitable, but that's not usually a big issue unless the cards/drivers are very poor or the board isn't the best. So I blame 1) old OS's 2) Abit's board quality 3) Intel's chipset limits. By the way, XP is better than 98SE at managing IRQ sharing.

Running 3 DIMMs increases the load on the memory controller. It's the same with modern systems. More DIMMs means that the signal isn't as strong, more electrical noise, etc. This is the reason that Abit set the 3.3v I/O voltage to 3.5v instead, by default. More volts gives a better signal. RAM latencies almost always have to go up with 3 DIMMs.

And about the capacitors, I actually replaced all of mine with a set from badcaps.net (or whatever it is). I had a few that were bursting and even though the board was working alright I figured it would be a fun little diversion to replace them. It's not a trivial task though, desoldering all of those old caps. The board doesn't really work better now than before either so I guess a few bad caps isn't the end of the world.

As for the AGP clock problem, a PCI vid is probably the best bet. 440BX has a 1/4 multiplier for PCI so you can keep PCI at 33 MHz with a FSB of 133MHz. Why on earth they didn't throw in a 1/2 multiplier for AGP is beyond me... I do have a couple of GeForce cards that are almost perfectly functional on the 89 MHz AGP speed, but they aren't perfect. My GFFX 5950 Ultra actually is pretty reliable at this speed. It's also the fastest AGP card you can put in this board with its AGP 2x 3.3v slot, aside from Radeon 9800 XT perhaps but I really doubt from my experience with Radeon 9700 that it would work at all at 89MHz.