Early intel 440 chipsets - oh god the hours I spent trying to get some machines to work correctly - fussy about ram and poor AGP compatibility. The only 440 board I ever liked is my Abit BE6-II, the rest of my 440 boards I consider mediocre at best. I remember trying to get 3dmark99 to run on a 500MHz PIII with the 440BX chipset - it would freeze 5 seconds in. I also remember trying to get Unreal to run on 440 boards with no luck whatsoever (it would only work in GLIDE mode with a voodoo card, nothing else - not even software).

Really? There exist people who don't like the 440BX?

Anonymous Coward wrote:

Early intel 440 chipsets - oh god the hours I spent trying to get some machines to work correctly - fussy about ram and poor AGP compatibility. The only 440 board I ever liked is my Abit BE6-II, the rest of my 440 boards I consider mediocre at best. I remember trying to get 3dmark99 to run on a 500MHz PIII with the 440BX chipset - it would freeze 5 seconds in. I also remember trying to get Unreal to run on 440 boards with no luck whatsoever (it would only work in GLIDE mode with a voodoo card, nothing else - not even software).

Really? There exist people who don't like the 440BX?

My own BX was crazy unstable for years, sometimes I'd boot into Windows, click a shortcut on the desktop and BAM...BSoD right there....I barely even touched the bugger 🤣! At some point I replaced 98FE with ME and it was pretty much smooth sailing from there.
I probably even played Unreal on my BX, though theres a chance it was on my Celeron 400 rig instead but that Celeron ran on 440LX.

Are you sure it was the chipset, and not counterfeit electrolytic capacitors that plagued most consumer electronics in the late 90s?

Pretty sure it wasn't the chipset 😀

Sometimes though, the chipset can be complete trash, but the right motherboard/BIOS can make it work okay anyway.
For example, I had an Abit KT7A, with VIA KT133A chipset. No matter what I tried, it was unstable.
Then I exchanged it for an MSI K7T Turbo, which had the same chipset, and pretty much the same features. But that board was 100% stable.

It was slow though. USB was pretty horrible, and trying to use USB for audio devices with DAW was not really possible, because you couldn't get latency under ~30 ms reliably. The same devices would get ~5 ms on a much slower system with Intel chipset with ease.
Likewise, the AGP bus wasn't great. I had an Athlon 1400 CPU in there. But when I tried my GeForce2 GTS card in an Celeron 1000 machine with Intel chipset (I think it was an i815 or something), the AGP bus speed was considerably higher, despite just having a 100 MHz FSB instead of the 266 MHz of the Athlon.
I'm not sure how much of that was a problem with the chipset itself, and how much of that was the result of a bug in the Athlon CPU though.
Namely, the Athlon CPU could only use 4 KB memory pages. Windows prefers using the much larger 4 MB pages for the AGP aperture, because you get better performance that way, less overhead with translations and such.

But yea... my experience with that Athlon system taught me that raw benchmark numbers of CPUs and GPUs don't tell the full story. They didn't warn me about the USB problems, and although the GPU performance in the Athlon wasn't bad, the Celeron indicated that there was still quite some untapped potential left on the table.
The Celeron CPU might not have been that fast, but apparently the chipset worked hard to extract as much performance as possible from all the components.

Were TOMATO motherboards already mentioned? I remember them as being the cheapest thing that passed as motherboards around here. Some models even had the CPU soldered-in.

Biostar is pretty good, even though no one talks about it too much. Cheap and stable. Just don't use bad PSUs and they will live forever.

I've seen my fair share of bad ASRock boards from my time as a PC tech to not recommend them. Too many problems like bad caps (probably due to their poor choice of parts) and general unreliability put it on my "black notebook".

For modern moderboards I recommend staying away from cheapest families (like Gigabyte's D3* series). They can't handle serious VGAs or anything more than a daily, office-usage scenario with a i3 CPU. The VRM implementation on those is pretty awful and even I didn't delve into it I'm pretty sure it's the root of the problem. As general rule: Never buy parts with a high price difference - if you're going for a i7 and a GTX 980 don't skimp on a $80 motherboard.

Tetrium wrote:

I replaced 98FE with ME and it was pretty much smooth sailing from there.

Seems like software problem. Newer chipset drivers would be good to try.

Tertz wrote:

Tetrium wrote:

I replaced 98FE with ME and it was pretty much smooth sailing from there.

Seems like software problem. Newer chipset drivers would be good to try.

In my case it was definitely software!
I didn't have Internet at that time, so I had to make due with the drivers from the ASUS driver disk for some years. It was my first computer and back then I knew hardly anything about hardware...or software for that matter. Heck, I was even afraid to open up the case for fear of doing something that would render my only PC helpless, thereby rendering myself helpless....boy, how times have changed 🤣!

For me 440BX (and 440LX too btw) was always some sort of staple, it kinda just works, like many of the P6-architecture chipsets that came after BX, like the single i820 and the sseveral i815 systems I used. Can't remember if I ever build one with a VIA chipset though, as I always had an Intel chipsetted board of my preference at my disposal.

I do admit I have a bit of a soft spot for LX (especially if it's socketed instead of slotted), to me it's kinda a fool proof Super Socket 7-like rig with all of Intels stability

emosun wrote:

Packard bell! Dealing with their crappiness every day! But I like them.

Surprisingly, Packard Bell seems to have a good reputation in the UK and in South America for some reason.

sliderider wrote:

Surprisingly, Packard Bell seems to have a good reputation in the UK and in South America for some reason.

My only experience with Packard Bell is an old Celeron Northwood 1.6 GHz laptop. It appears to be built by NEC.
The only thing that doesn't work on it anymore is the battery, but that seems to happen with all laptops at some point. I still use it from time to time, because it still has a 3.5" floppy drive and a COM port, so I can transfer files to/from vintage systems.

sliderider wrote:

emosun wrote:

Packard bell! Dealing with their crappiness every day! But I like them.

Surprisingly, Packard Bell seems to have a good reputation in the UK and in South America for some reason.

Packard Bell kept on selling in Europe after it left the US so maybe they cleaned up their act a bit.

Unknown_K wrote:

sliderider wrote:

emosun wrote:

Packard bell! Dealing with their crappiness every day! But I like them.

Surprisingly, Packard Bell seems to have a good reputation in the UK and in South America for some reason.

Packard Bell kept on selling in Europe after it left the US so maybe they cleaned up their act a bit.

If memory serves Packard Bell was acquired by NEC computers in the mid-90's, and then later around 2007 or 2008 branding in the UK was acquired by Acer/Gateway/eMachines/etc. Definitely aligns with a late 00's quality upgrade.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

Are you sure it was the chipset, and not counterfeit electrolytic capacitors that plagued most consumer electronics in the late 90s?

Some boards are just crap. Like I said, my Abit BE6-II does the chipset justice - but most 440 samples I came across (mostly OEM stuff) are fidgety about ram and AGP video cards, so the 440 does not make it to my favorite chipset list. It's "meh" at most.

sliderider wrote:

emosun wrote:

Packard bell! Dealing with their crappiness every day! But I like them.

Surprisingly, Packard Bell seems to have a good reputation in the UK and in South America for some reason.

Brits are dummies, they simply don't know any better. At least, that's the impression the local people have given me.

I suppose, the other thing to keep in mind, is that we also had Time and Tiny, at least one of these had their own store and marketed heavily... You know, "Think big about your PC, Think Tiny!" and all that shit. Ain't like the TV was setting them the best example of what to buy, I don't remember PB advertising so heavy so these people probably started on Tiny machines, I imagine the Packard Bell was probably like a first class piece of kit after that.

Edit: A Time commercial shows that they had their own store and that I am not pulling things out of my arse; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LSdnYAeTp0
- I like to verify information when I can.

HighTreason wrote:

Edit: A Time commercial shows that they had their own store and that I am not pulling things out of my arse; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LSdnYAeTp0
- I like to verify information when I can.

Reminds me of Gateway 2000 in the US, which, at one point, had their own set of stores throughout the country:

And, just like Time, the brand no longer exists, which is a shame, considering Gateway seemed to have made pretty decent systems in those days.

I have an eMachines eTower 366c from 1999 and it's a hunk of junk. I know eMachines was founded in 1998 and I don't have any other experience with any other eMachines computers but this one is notoriously known for being terrible.

BrAlZy wrote:

I have an eMachines eTower 366c from 1999 and it's a hunk of junk. I know eMachines was founded in 1998 and I don't have any other experience with any other eMachines computers but this one is notoriously known for being terrible.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/129857/article.html?page=4 🤣

Packard Bell 1st : http://www.pcworld.com/article/129857/article.html?page=11 🤣

Shame about Gateway, their old Gateway 2000 systems were some of the best built OEM machines around in the 386/486/Pentium days. They even made some decent keyboards and sold decent monitors.

My dads Dell from 1997 (XPS 233... D233?) has survived to this day on all original parts, and has outlasted the case (which was at one point bent so badly out of shape it was just bare metal chassis), and the monitor + all other external stuff. Yet it still works just fine, and that AWE64 sounds so good 😀.