Kiwi wrote:

My own experience with a 440BX was terrible. I had trouble with every kind of video card and audio card that I tried in mine (P2/400)

That is surprising. Since the 440BX is about the most famous mainboard in the 1998-2000 period, and videocards from that era should therefore be thoroughly tested to work well with it. They usually do.

Kiwi wrote:

Wouldn't the P2/400's FSB have been 100 MHz?

Officially the 440BX chipset has a maximum FSB of 100MHz, unofficially you can go beyond that with most mainboards build on this chipset. Whether your Processor, AGP-bus and PCI-bus agrees with that is another thing.

-You can overclock slightly, like a 110MHz FSB, With a Celeron or pentium II or III. Your AGP and PCI bus will be slightly out of spec.

-You can overclock to 133MHz, Using Celeron or a Pentium III, preferably the 133MHz Pentium III'EB'. At 133MHz you can put the PCI bus back to spec, but unfortunately the AGP bus remains overclocked.

-When you really want to push things to the limit... On many mainboards you can put your FSB even higher; beyond 150MHz.

Most 440BX mainboards are slot-1 models. In that case you can use slotket adapters to put in certain socket 370 Celeron/Pentium-III/Tualatin processors.

But even without all that, a 440BX with a Pentium-IIIE (full speed L2 cache) at the normal 100MHz FSB should make a very streamlined system.

While I was trying to get mine to run the Icewind Dales games, and failing miserably, it seemed I was the only one having trouble. I got no encouragement from Creative or Intel, and rather weak support from ATI at that time, while it seemed the nVIDIA people (or the parters, at least), when I tried their product, were being more cooperative.

I didn't buy anything from ATI, Creative, or Intel for the next several years, and still don't think of Intel first for anything. Now, though, I prefer Radeons, and hardly any other company seems to even make audio cards besides Creative.

Admittedly, I'm seeing an opposite view the last few months, trying to work up a retro PC based on Socket 7, and getting grief from the ALi Aladdin5 chipset (but once again, NOT from Via's MVP3 chipset).

[quote="Kiwi"]While I was trying to get mine to run the Icewind Dales games, and failing miserably, it seemed I was the only one having trouble. [quote]

I never had any problems getting Icewind Dale, with or without expansion packs, running in a Intel 440BX system with a Geforce 4 Ti 4200 and a Sound Blaster Live! card and a Pentium III Socket 370 Coopermine OCed from 600MHz to 800MHz. I was using the Abit CUBX motherboard at the time.

This was before the various Titaniums, GF3, even, were on the scene. Same for any "numbered" Radeon (I think). I believe that s370 for P3 was still quite new, so I was using a Riva from an nVIDIA partner, and the Geforce256 would still have been priced pretty steeply. The ATI card would've been from the Rage128 series.

The only Internet then was straight ASCII text, so everything was either long distance phone calls, or bulletin board systems, again, long distance, for the most part. I cannot recall what the audio problems were, or what Sound Blaster card I had, but I'd bet on an AWE32. When IW2 came along, I might have tried upgrading to the original Riva TNT, after the TNT2 came out and the TNT's price was lowered.

The only major issue I've had with 440BX is with PCI IRQ sharing. Sometimes it takes a little time to figure out the arrangement of PCI cards that works. Of course if you try pushing it 33% out of spec by running a 133 MHz FSB, any number of things can go wrong.

Kiwi, I just think you had a bum BX board.