You pretty much nailed it 😀

Games that run on a 233, usually run happily on a 1.4 GHz 😀

Games that are speed sensitive, usually don't run well on either of those machines.

Now you can turn off the L1 cache, that will give you a slow 386SX. But still with fast graphics and memory, which can also cause issues.

Bottom line, a Slot 1 machine isn't that great for old DOS games. Socket 7 is much better for this task.

Have you ever tried to run your Pentium III Coppermine or Tualatin at 66,6mhz?
For example a Pentium III 1.0EB Coppermine works at 133,3X7,5 if you set FSB speed at 66,6mhz ,you will run its at 500mhz (66,66X7,5)

There are speed sensitive games on Windows as well. Betrayal in Antara becomes unplayable on really fast systems for example.

and Birthright, and Wipeout 2097/XL, and Interstate '76 (broken missiles and 'throwers != fun) and SimCopter (and its shitty street cousin), and even Quake 2's initial release. Sometimes even early Lithtech games can be affected by processor speed making gameplay buggier/worse even if you have a reasonable GPU bottleneck.

Despite philscomputerlab's constant quest for an anachronistic full framerate on old PCs, sometimes 15-30fps is really what they intended.

F2bnp wrote:

There are speed sensitive games on Windows as well. Betrayal in Antara becomes unplayable on really fast systems for example.

another example is Grim Fandango and Final Fantasy VII. In Grim Ive noticed that playing the game on anything faster than a 700Mhz PIII causes an odd issue where the menus become very unresponsive, like moving around them becomes nearly impossible (have to use shortcuts for that). FFVII has a bunch of issues with the mini games in particular.

For dos games you really need to stay in the socket 7 platform, a pentium II 233Mhz would definitive be to faster for dos games..

If i would build a socket 7 system for dos games i would go for an 75 pentium or 100 mhz one.. Those are fast enough to play dos games on..

Darkman wrote:

F2bnp wrote:

There are speed sensitive games on Windows as well. Betrayal in Antara becomes unplayable on really fast systems for example.

another example is Grim Fandango and Final Fantasy VII. In Grim Ive noticed that playing the game on anything faster than a 700Mhz PIII causes an odd issue where the menus become very unresponsive, like moving around them becomes nearly impossible (have to use shortcuts for that). FFVII has a bunch of issues with the mini games in particular.

Huh, never really noticed that on Grim Fandango and I've played this game countless times. Good to know 😀.

When the 50MHz FSB option (available on a few i440BX motherboards) is combined with the unlocked multiplier of an early deschutes Pentium II, you can get as slow as this:

That is 100MHz, not 633MHz as diagnosed top left. The L2 cache dropped out for some reason.
Combined with an earlier Klamath core Pentium II: Same thing, but then L2 cache can remain functional.

A VIA C3 Nehemiah can also be installed on a i440BX with the right slotket. It maxes out at 1400MHz which is comparable to a Pentium III 700MHz, but with the benefit of a software adjustable multiplier for speeds below that.

Edit / Note: The SE440BX-2 probably won't cooperate with any of this. It has no jumpers and a restricted BIOS.

All very interesting info, thanks.

I don't believe that my SE440BX-2 has the option to change the CPU's bus speed, so I'm stuck with the default speed of the CPU. (Great info, gerwin. Now I want another Slot 1 board.)

I do have a 486DX2-50 as a dedicated DOS box, but it would be convenient if I could just switch out a Slot 1 CPU for another. I have a small range right now: 333MHz PII, 700MHz PIII, 1000MHz PIII, and 1300MHz Tualeron. I'd like to add a 233MHz PII.

I had no idea that Windows games could be speed sensitive. That's as good a reason as any to keep a Slot 1 system around.

Slot 1's cache disabling can make an interesting bottleneck for those old (read: OLD!!!) DOS games where a lower end Pentium or even a 486 with a turbo switch can't apply.

Don't forget your options for slow ISA video cards! 🤣

The SE440BX-2 motherboard is an awesome board. It is not an overclocker's board but it is the standard for a quality and stable slot 1 motherboard. Depending which games I wanted to play I would simply pick a Pentium III Coppermine of appropriate speed and call it done. I am not a fan of slocket adapters but that is just me. The board officially supports a Pentium III 850 and I just tend to trust the Intel engineers on this point. Perhaps it had to do with the voltage regulator circuit or perhaps the quality of the signal at high speeds on the slot 1 platform. It may have just been a marketing decision but I doubt it. That isn't to say that a Pentium III 1000 or a PowerLeap with a 1400 Celeron will not work without issue, it's just that I err on the side of caution and I am not overclocking, or otherwise going outside of specifications, like I once did. I am really liking your build and I am trying to decide right now which parts make it into my new SE440BX-2 build. I must say I was tempted to grab a PowerLeap off eBay recently hehe.

There is bugger all difference past 800 MHz or so. Anything that really struggles on a Pentium III 800 GHz, is likely still going to struggle on a faster Pentium III. As most of us will use Windows 98, and not XP, on our Pentium III machines, there is a natural ceiling that way.

Doesn't stop many of us from wanting to have the fastest option 🤣

The main reason I prefer the slot 1 adapters is the cooling. I've got a nice copper S370 cooler from StarTech and it's so much better than the stock standard Slot 1 coolers.

But, at least for me, one huge motivator is that I can use gear that was totally unaffordable for me back in the day. And that makes the whole thing very special. Often you need to pay double the price for that very best part, compared to the second best, but I don't care 🤣 In the bigger picture, these parts are still cheap as chips. And the top parts always hold their value, I can tell you that.

squareguy wrote:

The SE440BX-2 motherboard is an awesome board. It is not an overclocker's board but it is the standard for a quality and stable slot 1 motherboard. Depending which games I wanted to play I would simply pick a Pentium III Coppermine of appropriate speed and call it done. I am not a fan of slocket adapters but that is just me. The board officially supports a Pentium III 850 and I just tend to trust the Intel engineers on this point. Perhaps it had to do with the voltage regulator circuit or perhaps the quality of the signal at high speeds on the slot 1 platform. It may have just been a marketing decision but I doubt it. That isn't to say that a Pentium III 1000 or a PowerLeap with a 1400 Celeron will not work without issue, it's just that I err on the side of caution and I am not overclocking, or otherwise going outside of specifications, like I once did. I am really liking your build and I am trying to decide right now which parts make it into my new SE440BX-2 build. I must say I was tempted to grab a PowerLeap off eBay recently hehe.

I like the Seattle too -- despite its BIOS having fewer options than an OEM BIOS. Whenever I need to test a new component, it goes into the Seattle first because it has the best compatibility of any motherboard I have.

Was 850MHz the limit because the 900MHz+ Coppermines had not yet been released?

Have to say that the Powerleap is working great (except for fan noise). I had to flash the BIOS back to P13 to get the board to post, however. The P13 BIOS recognizes the Tualeron 1300 as a "Pentium Pro 1000," but it is clearly outpacing my Slot 1 1000MHz P3.

boxpressed wrote:

Was 850MHz the limit because the 900MHz+ Coppermines had not yet been released?

The P3 800 was the fastest Intel CPU released in 1999.

Im soon going to post alot of information on the topic of Intel 440BX and CPU scaling.

I can already say now though that Phil is right on the money, for stuff like Quake III and Unreal a Katmai 600 MHz is as slow I would go with a Voodoo 3 or Voodoo 2 SLI while the Coppermine 800 seems more or less perfect.

PCI Voodoo 3 @183/183

Quake III @ 640x480 demo001

Katmai 600(100): 67.3 FPS
Coppermine 800(133): 94.9 FPS

Unreal Gold 640*480

Katmai 600(100): 82.5 FPS
Coppermine 800(133): 106 FPS

Yup, the V2 SLI scaling project came to a similar conclusion. Sure, at 512 x 384 resolution, a Tualatin will do better, but who is going to honestly play at that resolution? 🤣

Pentium III 1000 was released almost a year before the latest specification update for the SE440BX-2. I'm not saying Intel just didn't want to test it for compliance but I like to stay pretty conservative these days.

FWIW, I have a different Intel board where they issued an errata/bulletin/whatever to explain to people that support for 1GHz CPUs depended on the board's serial number. As I recall, they made some change to the Vcore caps to officially support 1GHz. So it does seem Intel considered 850MHz to be a limit for the power circuitry on some of their boards.
Of course Intel's standards were very high, so I wouldn't be surprised if the "lesser" boards could still handle 1GHz without any detectable issue.

233 MHz is not quite fast enough to trigger Runtime Error 200 in TP7 applications (Jazz Jackrabbit is the first one that comes to mind); 1000 MHz is certainly fast enough. But then, Runtime Error 200 is trivially bypassed.

233Mhz it too fast for Jazz on my SE440BX-2. I thought the same thing that you did until I discovered a Slot 1 233MHz PII that I'd forgotten about. I got the runtime error with Jazz and Tyrian setup. One Must Fall runs way too fast at this speed. I believe that you will need to adjust multipliers in order to get a Slot 1 build to work with these Epic games, and I don't know if that is possible. Killing the cache will make the system too slow.