Simon wrote:

IRRC intel never did a chipset that supported 133fsb did they? Despite the cpus sporting it?

i815 boards...

Hmm, Well what was all the fuss over the via apollo 133?

None of the i815 boards have isa do they?

Simon wrote:

Hmm, Well what was all the fuss over the via apollo 133?

None of the i815 boards have isa do they?

VIA BIOS could be quirky and sometimes unstable in boards from that time period. Most people avoid them these days. I haven't had any bad experiences with them myself, but horror stories abound.

Well, if you need ISA, you're right, i815 is probably out. There are a couple 815 boards that have an ISA slot, but it's bridged off of PCI, and I don't know how well it works. For practical purposes, you're limited to either Via Apollo boards or one of the BX boards with a 133fsb option.

The Vias can be a little flaky, though, like sliderider, I also have had little trouble with them. The BX will be a solid, nicely performing platform, but will limit your choice of AGP card due to the 89mhz AGP speed when running a 133fsb.

My personal reccomendation would also to go for a BX (though I've had little trouble using the VIA P3 chipsets myself...not that I used them very much) with 4 DIMM slots and as many ISA as you can get.
Also try not to get a non-standard ATX board.

And about the chipsets, it basically comes down to this:

BX usually means stable performance, easy to set up and often come with tons of ISA and DIMM slots but no official 133fsb, no AGP 8x cards support, ATA-33 only and only low density SDR (256MB with 16 chips and no fewer!) will work with it correctly.
Also 100fsb Coppermines are much less common and not all BX boards support Coppermine
VIA P3 usually means official 133fsb, AGP 4x slot, usually ATA-66, supports high density SDR DIMM's but requires a bit more work to set up correctly.
The best advantage would be that you can basically plug any CPU in the board and it will work.
Also I noticed VIA chipsets are a bit slower then BX when using the same hardware.

In the end it comes down to doing a little research before putting the bugger together 😉

And it may also depend on how much spare parts you have kicking around.
If you have basically nothing to start with you may have a harder time trying to get it all to work. If you have 1 of everything and 1 part doesn't work, it'll be much harder to determine what part is broken.

What OS are you going to be using?

Anyway, good luck 😉

My Asus P2-99 with the ZX chipset can run my coppermine at 133MHz, problem is you get no vcore adjustments along with a bit of chipset limitations like memory size/ect.

Aside from that it's a pretty good board, has a sb-link connector too 😀

Abit BF6 or BE6-II (they differ only in having a Highpoint chip)
ASUS P3B-F ?

133 MHz FSB on a BX is asking for trouble but it is quite speedy. In my experience you can basically count out the AGP slot regardless of card. Some cards will seem fine but aren't stable for long periods of gaming. The BX chipset itself may be the problem.

133FSB is overrated. Remember, you are building a retro rig so raw speed is not the most important factor - compatibility is. If you want to make up for that "deficiency", just put in a faster P3 to compensate.

I also recommend a BX board.

133FSB is overrated. Remember, you are building a retro rig so raw speed is not the most important factor - compatibility is. If you want to make up for that "deficiency", just put in a faster P3 to compensate.

133fsb is indeed overrated... the trouble is, it's harder to "put in a faster P3" on a 100fsb board, since most of the faster P3's were 133fsb.

However, there are other options. Most BX boards get along fine with the upper-end Coppermine Celerons, which are 100fsb parts. The 1ghz Coppermine Celerons are easily available, and would be at least equivalent, and in some cases faster, than a 700-800mhz P3. Or there's always Tualatin Celerons, which are even better, but the downside is that the Tualatin-capable slotkets are harder to find for a reasonable price.

Watch out for bad caps btw. Try to get some decent photos of the board before buying it.

Oh yeah, forgot about that. There's another reason to go with a BX board... except for a few of the really late-production ones, they generally predated the 'bad caps' era.

Got an abit bh6 with a BX440 chipset and a 667 p3 on it.

Any good?

Being a 667 i think it will be a coppermine core yes?

I plan to install either 256 or 128mb

What would a good period agp card to use? to match up with this system? Voodoo3? geforce ddr? tnt2?

Abit BH6 is good and yes that is a Coppermine P3. I had a BH6 at one point. The only quirks that I recall are sometimes it didn't want to power up and the FSB settings are somewhat limited.

I'd grab a Voodoo3 or 5. They have the best compatibility with 3D games from those days.

Here are mine.
Pair of Retro PC's

I got plenty of speed out of BX boards with some slot adapters.

Cool. Ill post some pictures when its arrived and all hooked up.

I cant find a manaul or bios updates for the motherboard. I'm not sure what revision it is. Does anyone have either of these?

I'll second the Voodoo 3, it's the best choice for optimum compatibility and they are easy to find (Voodoo 5 will be expensive to find).

Only thing I have with the Voodoo 3 is that the little heatsink next to the GPU heatsink can get VERY hot, especially when using a PCI Voodoo 3.
If you're gonna be using an AGP version, you'll probably have to underclock that 667 CPU of yours.

Well if you see a Voodoo4, it might be neat to have too. 😀

Yup, but the Voodoo 4 brings little extra's over the Voodoo 3 while the latter is WAY more available (and much cheaper), and it's passive too 😉

Yeah the fans do make me unhappy, indeed.