I would recommend you keep your P3 system, and upgrade its CPU to use a Powerleap adapter, running a 1.4GHz Celeron socket 370 CPU. You can gently overclock the i440BX chipset to around 112FSB without too much difficulty. If however, you would like to investigate an ISA based Athlon system, I wrote about 2 good mobos in this thread -

ISA PCI AGP mobos showdown: Intel 440 BX versus AMD 751/756 versus VIA KT133A :-)

In it, I discuss a mobo with 2 ISA slots that can go up to about 1.3Ghz, and another mobo with 1 ISA slot that goes beyond 2Ghz. Both mobos are capable of running a T-Bird @ 1Ghz, and even accept Durons if you need to use them. Also, both mobos can use the 3.3v Voodoo5 AGP card.

There were a few boards based around the KT133a that had AGP and ISA... I'm pretty sure those worked with 3.3V AGP cards. The Epox 8KTA3, Abit KT7, and Iwill KK266 come to mind, and I believe Soltek and Soyo had a couple as well.

Those KT133a boards generally work decently enough, if you can find one with good capacitors (or don't mind doing some soldering).

Following on from Old Thrashbarg's post, QDI released a board called Kinetiz 7E-A that was also based around the KT133A chipset and it had 1 ISA slot. The Abit board is a good one. The QDI is a budget board that can support mobile bartons with it's 2004 dated BIOS file. The Epox board can also support mobile bartons. The best of the entire bunch is the Epox board in its "Pro" version - it's well made, it can overclock well, it can support XP-M CPUs. The only problem with all of them is that the caps are usually rotten, and subsequently will not allow the FSB to be overclocked much before it becomes unstable. The QDI doesn't overclock much if at all, if I can remember correctly. The Soltek's don't support mobile bartons, neither does the IWill. I just thought of another mobo: I think Jetway did one, but it doesn't support XP-Ms.

Yeah I'm really not interested in going beyond 1GHz I think it is just fine as it is, thanks for the link though 😀
I've got a Slot 1 machine btw with the CPU's bus working at 133MHz so the 440BX doesn't work really well unfortunately. I used to have a lot of problems and hangups using a Geforce 2 Ti with it, because the AGP gets overclocked.
So I'm using a DFI motherboard now utilising the VIA Apollo PRO 133 chipset and it seems to be quite decent!
I'll try to search ebay for some of these boards thanks guys!

Regarding the Abit KT7A mobo - the most powerful and flexible version is the harder to find 1.3 PCB version. It will run a T-Bred 2400 @ the mobo's native FSB speed of 133. All other versions of that board will run the T-Bred 2400 @ 100 FSB. That's still really fast, but not so much fun!

Regarding the Asus A7V133, I believe this mobo has no ISA slots.

By T-bred 2400, you mean T-bird 1400 right?
I'm really not interested in anything faster than 1GHz it's already a bit too fast for my needs anyway and I'm not all for performance. I want to achieve good compatibility with DOS,Glide, early Windows games and 2002 and prior games.

Also - as you are using a 1Ghz CPU on the Apollo Pro 133 chipset, you'll almost certainly want to replace this type of CPU with a 133FSB Athlon equivalent. Eg -

http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/K7/TYPE-Athlon.html (Click on the FSB 266 filter option)

This means that the Gigabyte 2 ISA slot mobo mentioned in my "ISA showdown mobo experiments" Vogons thread mentioned earlier won't be any good. This is because it won't run at 133FSB. It's top speed is 100-115FSB. So, you'll need to go down the "left hand path" and embrace the dark side by getting a KT133A based mobo. 😉

F2bnp wrote:

By T-bred 2400, you mean T-bird 1400 right?
I'm really not interested in anything faster than 1GHz it's already a bit too fast for my needs anyway and I'm not all for performance. I want to achieve good compatibility with DOS,Glide, early Windows games and 2002 and prior games.

Sorry, I got a bit carried away. I did mean T-Bred.
OK, let's stick to 1GHz. Please see my other post above, regarding the 133FSB/266DDR 1GHz T-Bird CPU. That should work well on any KT133A based mobo.

Hang on a minute! I was right to get carried away. 😉 You can get a mobile barton 2400. If you shove one of these babies in the Epox mobo, you can run it at 6x multi @ 100FSB (600Mhz CPU speed), all the way up to 13x multi (and up to 16x multi and beyond if you unlock it) @ 133FSB. All you've got to do is mess about with the BIOS settings for the lower multi options, or use a CPU speed controlling utility inside Windows, eg CPUMSR.exe for the higher multi options. So, with just one CPU you can easily have your preferred 1GHz @ 133FSB, but you can also underclock the CPU down to 600MHz, and overclock the whole system and still maintain almost perfect stability up to approximately 2.1/2.2 GHz. It's just a thought. I mean, if you need the extra speed, you can have it. If you don't need the extra speed, you can decrease it. No need for any CPU changes.

Thing is, finding a KT133A board that gives me ISA and AGP2x support, as well as the cpu you mentioned is not going to be easy and it is going to cost me. I'll look into it though. Again thanks for your interest and advice!

OK, good luck! 😀
Consider doing an ebay saved search for:
(8kta3pro,8kta3+pro)
It's unlikely you'll have to wait more than about 6 weeks for one, but ask the seller to describe how flat the capicitor tops are.

Here's the CPU -
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewIt … em=190404565178
I know it's not cheap, but it's new so it won't have been overvolted and so will last for many years. I've bought one from this seller in the past. Actually 2, because I accidentally killed the first one. 😦

The cpu is roughly 12 euro which is a good price I think.
Anyway,I'll try my luck with those 8kta3pro mainboards and see what I get.

Are there any differences between the KT133 and KT133A, outside of these listed in their specification? I would like to make a KT133 based PC and would like to know, if there are any compatibility issues (especially with a Voodoo 5500 and Monster Sound MX300).

Sorry, I can't help with any info about the KT133 (non A) mobos because I have never owned one.

KT133A Mobos, some with ISA:

http://desc.shop.ebay.co.uk/i.html?_nkw=KT133 … 3286.m270.l1313

http://desc.shop.ebay.com/i.html?_nkw=KT133A* … 3286.m270.l1313

* * *

KT133 vs KT133A chipset:
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1009892

GL1zdA wrote:

Are there any differences between the KT133 and KT133A, outside of these listed in their specification? I would like to make a KT133 based PC and would like to know, if there are any compatibility issues (especially with a Voodoo 5500 and Monster Sound MX300).

I don't think so. The only thing I can think of is the Soundblaster Live bug though that had more to do with the southbridge, not the northbridge.

There could be some other (minor) bugs but I'm not aware of them atm.

I have just seen this thread. I have worked with both P3 and Athlon TB retros and I do own pretty much the machine you consider:
I have a QDI Kinetiz 7E-A, with a V5 5500 and an unlocked Athlon 1400 as well as other more modern Chips, like Duron 1800 and Geode.

In a nutshell: Why would you want to do it? I've tinkered around with it for quite some time, but then I pretty well abandoned the project.

The Athlon draws power like crazy. There is no really quiet solution possible. At the same time, it is pretty inconvenient to throttle it down. You would need a board with bios multi configuration, which my Kinetiz doesn't offer. I could wire some jumperes to switch to 500 MHz, but where is the gain?

On the other hand, what is there, that a P3 900 at 100 or 112fsb can't handle?

Perhaps I just have the wrong board, but in my search for an all in one, I always return to the option to swap in an unlocked P2. With the Athlon, I found no way to go under 500 MHz in pure DOS.

I don't need to go below 500MHz. I use DOS for certain games that work just fine even with the cpu at 1GHz. Anything that won't work there I just run it on DOSBox on my main PC.
If anything, I was just kinda bored with the P3 and want to try a different set up just for shit and giggles (we all do that sometimes don't we?).

testing testing
(tried posting some ebay urls etc earlier, but just keep getting blank page, & no preview ??)

- have now edited in parts of the the post below, seems like Vogons didnt agree with my (long) direct ebay search links!

<removed 2 links>

But just use the following search string on ebay to find some ISA boards:
(tick the "Include title and description" box as well)

1KT133A* -"Honorific buyers" -"WE WILL NOT LIST THE SYSTEM MODEL "

*

KT133 vs KT133A chipset:
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1009892

Basically only differs on support for 266mhz bus, methinks (?)