Ah, this is interesting! I've been using a TUSL2-C with a 800Mhz PIII as server machine for some years now. The machine runs W2K3 Server at amazing speed, but the 512MB RAM limit is a serious issue with server usage. I was thinking about throwing the board into the garbage can and get something recent, but i guess after reading this i'll keep it and maybe build a retro machine. The Tualatin CPU's are not too expensive, should be interesting to see how the board performs with this CPU.

Question: what kind of CPU cooler can be used with the PIII? My 800Mhz had the cooler already attached, so i never had to fiddle with cooling. I wonder if modern coolers could fit on the CPU/board.

I managed to fit one of these on it without trouble. 😉
http://www.thermaltake.com/product/cooler/com … 06/cl-p0006.asp

There's a lot of room around the socket. I just ended up using a simple OEM AMD Athlon cooler though and undervolted the fan. Tualatin chips run cool. You don't need anything fancy. Socket A, Socket 7, Socket 370 coolers will all fit as long as they don't hit anything around the socket and ASUS left quite a bit of open space.

The TUSL2-C was the best P3 motherboard made IMO. If anyone *thinks* of throwing one away, send it my way instead. 😘

If only Intel wasn't so devious with their limiting 815 to 512MB RAM!!!!!!!!!

What's interesting is I can put 768MB into it and the BIOS counts all of it but then it freezes after the count.

swaaye wrote:

If only Intel wasn't so devious with their limiting 815 to 512MB RAM!!!!!!!!!

What's interesting is I can put 768MB into it and the BIOS counts all of it but then it freezes after the count.

This is just incredible. To think that lousy K6-II/III boards support up to 768MB and a board that came two years later cant support that much... Thats difficult to accept. Epitome of crappiness. 😒

It just comes down to them wanting people to spring for 820 or 850 for their "high-end" desktop needs. It was the same with 430TX and its crazy 64MB cacheable limit and lack of AGP for Pentium MMX. Third parties came to the rescue there too.

The problem is that the 3rd parties can't make a chipset like Intel can. 3rd party P2/P3 and Super 7 chipsets terrify me. 😉

Do you really need over 512 MB with a P3?

Do you really need 1GB on a 440FX/BX mobo?

With XP, it's pretty easy to come up with something that will eat up all 512MB. I tried playing Guild Wars on it and it was swapping like crazy. I actually had my 440BX mobo running the game better because I could run 768MB. 😀

But yeah it's no show stopper. I don't plan on playing games that need that much RAM. It's just disgusting to see Intel manipulate things like that. Effectively, 815 is not a replacement for 440BX, it's a replacement for 440EX/ZX.

I had a CUSL2-C and uite enjoyed it at the time. The only downside of the thing was that the USB controller had some issue that made USB usage a pain (especially my scanner ha problems all the time). Only when I upgraded to a P4 board did I ruly enjoy the USB world (I never knew it wasthe board, I always assume my scanner and other equipment were P.O.S....).

i think i can't follow you to fun together. 😢
i have P3, 815EP chipset, and 128MB RAM.
my problem is: i cant install win XP sp3 on it. is that really if i upgrade RAM to 512MB, win XP can install on it? i need your suggestions to fix my problem.

edowski wrote:

i think i can't follow you to fun together. 😢
i have P3, 815EP chipset, and 128MB RAM.
my problem is: i cant install win XP sp3 on it. is that really if i upgrade RAM to 512MB, win XP can install on it? i need your suggestions to fix my problem.

There shouldn't be any restrictions except that it'll run slow with ust 128 megs of ram.

Can you please describe the problems you encounter when you try and install winxp?

I absolutely love my TUSL2-C w/ 1.4GHz PIII-S. I don't use it that much, anymore, but I can't bear to part with it either. It has always seemed extremely fast in windows, faster than even my long-gone P4 (NetBurst) 2.8GHz.

Nowadays, I pretty much use it as my DirectX 8 rig. Most directx 8 games didn't need more than 512MB. I have a GeForce 4 Ti4600 in it which rounds out the 3D side nicely.

does this mobo have 4x agp? EDIT: it does, gotta get me one of these!!! my asus cuv board setup doesn't work right.

Wikipedia has a fairly comprehensive list of all the intel chipsets and their support features:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intel_chipsets

The 512MB limitation aside, I can't say a bad thing about the Tualatin's... except how rare they are nowadays.

Besides the 512MB limit, the i815 boards were some of the most stable P3 around (beside the 440BX). I had my mind set on a FC-PGA2 converter adapter a while back (so that I could use a P3 Tualatin with my older VIA Apollo Pro 133 Socket 370 board), but the idea never ended up pulling through.

Remember it's not the CPU that has a 512MB limit. It's good for 4GB. The 815 chipset is the problem. Intel artificially limited it to get people to buy RDRAM instead for the "high performance" segment.

If you run a Tualatin in a mobo with 820, 840 or even 440BX, you can run much more RAM. 440BX and 820 support up to a gig of RAM while 840 is good for 4GB.

Unfortunately 820 is just a stupid piece of hardware designed by marketing. 840 is for expensive server/workstation mobos. 440BX needs a special Slotket and was definitely starting to look a bit out of date. So you can see why 815 became the popular one. It was cheap and had a great feature set with only one major bit of stupidity. In many respects, 815 is just an 810 with higher FSB and a AGP slot.

This TUSL2-C is definitely the best P3 mobo I've ever used. It is stable, easy to setup (no weird PCI sharing problems), up to date for its time, and overclocks quite well. It's more stable and faster than any 440BX mobo I've dealt with including my "beloved" Abit BF6 (PCI pains-R-us and not-really-likey-133FSB).

Have done the same overclock on my Abit ST6 Raid 😀
Have the same memory modules..cpu etc so I though I'd give it a try too....it came out very well

Have you done any benchmarks with this setup yet? 3dmark 2001se...SiSoft Sandra etc comes to mind as bench utils

I can't help but noticing the people on the Evil Inside page blanked out the result of the memory test on the post screen.

Did they find a solution to breaking the 512mb barrier they are not sharing?

interesting question. I doubt that they did though.

I can put 768MB into my board and it will recognize it but it won't get through POST.