I don't think the AGP aperture size is a problem, iirc that's just if your gpu has no more free memory, it can store stuff in the main memory and this is the maximum size you can reserve.

Your biggest problem will be the 2x 3.3v agp slot, not the aperture size. There are 2 kinds of AGP cards : 3.3v and 1.5 cards which are keyed and one won't fit in the other. Though there are several universal cards (those which have 2 notches)

I'm not sure if a pentium 2 400MHz will be great for DX9 games, that computer is perfect for windows 9x games, but not really for things newer, even if you upgrade it as far as it can go, you should be considering buying a pentium 4 or an athlon 64 for such thing instead

I know the pentium 2 will not be great for DX9, I just really wanna try messing around with the PC. It's a slot 1 machine so you can't really upgrade it to anything further than a pentium III, but i honestly love the weird limitations of the Pentium II 400MHz

What i don't love is the blown up PS/2 ports. Why would a mouse accidentally placed in the wrong port blow it up

As Deksor said its the 2x AGP that's the limiting factor not memory.
Ti4600 from Nvidia camp or Radeon 9700 Pro from ATI are the final 3.3v and therefore work no problems, both are 128MB
Of course both of these are total overkill for a P2 but gives you an idea how far up the graphics food chain you can go.

A good page on BX motherboard is here, but basically it comes down to not all 256MB sticks or greater will work and outdated documentation.
http://homepage.hispeed.ch/rscheidegger/ram_bx_faq.html

andreja6 wrote:

What i don't love is the blown up PS/2 ports. Why would a mouse accidentally placed in the wrong port blow it up

I don't know if that would blow up the port, I thought that just wouldn't work. What does damage PS/2 ports is hot-plugging, they are just not designed for that. (Has that experience myself.)

chinny22 wrote:

As Deksor said its the 2x AGP that's the limiting factor not memory. Ti4600 from Nvidia camp or Radeon 9700 Pro from ATI are the […]
Show full quote

As Deksor said its the 2x AGP that's the limiting factor not memory.
Ti4600 from Nvidia camp or Radeon 9700 Pro from ATI are the final 3.3v and therefore work no problems, both are 128MB
Of course both of these are total overkill for a P2 but gives you an idea how far up the graphics food chain you can go.

A good page on BX motherboard is here, but basically it comes down to not all 256MB sticks or greater will work and outdated documentation.
http://homepage.hispeed.ch/rscheidegger/ram_bx_faq.html

There are some R360 cards (including 9800Pro) that have both keys on the slot. These were made by some of the major Chinese OEM manufacturers and are indeed the last ones usable on Bx based boards.
However, unless using a modded Bx with a top-end Tualatin, the difference between the R350 and the R360 cards should be irrelevant.

idspispopd wrote:

andreja6 wrote:

What i don't love is the blown up PS/2 ports. Why would a mouse accidentally placed in the wrong port blow it up

I don't know if that would blow up the port, I thought that just wouldn't work. What does damage PS/2 ports is hot-plugging, they are just not designed for that. (Has that experience myself.)

Ironically, I never knew that you couldn't hotplug PS/2 ports. I used to do that all the time back in the day and didn't seem to have a problem. Nowadays I'm much more careful.

Just out of curiosity, is there a way to revive the PS/2 port?

For DX9, I'd just get a Radeon 9600, 9700 vanilla or Fire X1/Z1 variant. They are plentiful and cheap (Z1 for less than $10 US shipped).
Otherwise you could go for a FX 5700 or the Quadro variant for cheap.

If you could enter the BIOS and enable the USB legacy option, you could use a USB keyboard instead of PS/2 (obviously if the option isn't enabled by default, you need a working PS/2 keyboard...).

Single-sided 256 Mb sticks likely won't work, or will be detected at half their capacity.

DX9 games can work, depending on the game (RTS games certainly do). Just get a DX9 compatible AGP card that fits (Asus TNT Riva with 32 Mb RAM does).

AGP cards can be a bit tricky with 440BX chipsets given its slot being 3.3V and potential issues between AGP Aperture Size and ACPI implementation.

Up to GeForce 6200, or some 6600 with the 3.3V key will work with the 440BX, and it's possibly the best you can get (they are the first ones to support DirectX 9.0c). However, with some boards (like my old FIC VB601), you may need to set AGP Aperture Size to 32MB or less in order to get it functional under Windows, as with larger AGP Aperture Size, the video card drivers might complain about some memory range conflicts with the ACPI, and refuse to function.

However, this depends on what types of programs you intend to use with the 440BX build. Back then I did some benchmarks with a 6200 and some FX-series cards (like FX 5200 and 5600), I found that, against the earlier generation (FX-series), 6200 performs better in tests using DirectX 9, while worse in tests using earlier versions of DirectX.

Adrian_ wrote:

chinny22 wrote:

As Deksor said its the 2x AGP that's the limiting factor not memory. Ti4600 from Nvidia camp or Radeon 9700 Pro from ATI are the […]
Show full quote

As Deksor said its the 2x AGP that's the limiting factor not memory.
Ti4600 from Nvidia camp or Radeon 9700 Pro from ATI are the final 3.3v and therefore work no problems, both are 128MB
Of course both of these are total overkill for a P2 but gives you an idea how far up the graphics food chain you can go.

A good page on BX motherboard is here, but basically it comes down to not all 256MB sticks or greater will work and outdated documentation.
http://homepage.hispeed.ch/rscheidegger/ram_bx_faq.html

There are some R360 cards (including 9800Pro) that have both keys on the slot. These were made by some of the major Chinese OEM manufacturers and are indeed the last ones usable on Bx based boards.
However, unless using a modded Bx with a top-end Tualatin, the difference between the R350 and the R360 cards should be irrelevant.

I've seen one single 7800GS that was 3.3 keyed on eBay and several 6800s that were. The 7800GS may have been an ES, I'm not sure.

Galaxy 7900GS is keyed as universal AGP, but very hard to find. Quite easy to find is 6600GT with universal AGP (Sparkle, Galaxy, BFG). Also ASUS GeForce 6800GT/6800GE are electrically compatible with 3.3v boards, but not physically. Fortunately can be reworked (if you dare) and not that hard find. Unfortunately all listed cards has driver issues with 440BX boards.

Nonsense i have Gigabyte BX2000 board, it not shine with great CPU support, but it have BX440 chipset and it have x4 memory slots, and it can run 1GB of memory no problem.. So you just need to find bigger size modules, not sure if the BX440 supports sticks of 512MB on module, i have here some and i think most motherboards with BX440 did support 512MB on one stick memory, but need to test that don`t remember if i did test or not, but i think i did, and it was working.

For the AGP card you just need card that have x2 chops on the connector, the first is for the old AGP slots that are 3.3v, and the new one that is for 1.5v AGP.

LSS10999 wrote:

AGP cards can be a bit tricky with 440BX chipsets given its slot being 3.3V and potential issues between AGP Aperture Size and ACPI implementation.

Up to GeForce 6200, or some 6600 with the 3.3V key will work with the 440BX, and it's possibly the best you can get (they are the first ones to support DirectX 9.0c). However, with some boards (like my old FIC VB601), you may need to set AGP Aperture Size to 32MB or less in order to get it functional under Windows, as with larger AGP Aperture Size, the video card drivers might complain about some memory range conflicts with the ACPI, and refuse to function.

However, this depends on what types of programs you intend to use with the 440BX build. Back then I did some benchmarks with a 6200 and some FX-series cards (like FX 5200 and 5600), I found that, against the earlier generation (FX-series), 6200 performs better in tests using DirectX 9, while worse in tests using earlier versions of DirectX.

Thanks, tried to start 6600 with p-iii 500 and 440bx. Your advice set agp aperture size to 4Mb helps me to run windows.

I had no issues running a 9500PRO with my P2B

a Geforce 2 MX 400 worked fine in my ASUS P2B, same with a Geforce 3 TI 500 and a Geforce FX 5200.

I cant run 3D Mark 99 with 6600. With MX440 - no problem.

I have changed speed of Intel P-III 500 CPU from 5x100 to 5x66 and 6600 works fine with AGP Aperture 64 Mb and 3D Mark 99 runs fine. I will try different BIOS versions to solve this issue.

I have a slot 1 intel bx 440 motherboard With a pentium 2 400mhz. I tested 3 graphics cards 2 agp 3.3v ( a riva tnt and a geforce 2 ti) , and a pci card , (a matrox milenium g450) the results are the following :

matrox and riva tnt very close together with riva ahead , and geforce 2 ti at the top but.... With a very narrow margin to tnt. The 2x agp compine with p2 400mhz gave a huge bottleneck to gf2 ti.
I hope my test been usefull