If you have a Geforce as your main vga card, very likely it'll work just fine at 133fsb

By GeForce, do you mean the GeForce 256 or the series in its entirety? I'm planning to use a GeForce2 MX400 with it.

Exactly which i440BX board do you have? And which RAM?

The BX was famous for being able to overclock well past 100MHz, frequently up to and beyond 133MHz, but you have a few dependencies:

- the Coppermine (E-series Pentium 3) CPU runs at 1.65V-1.75V (depending on CPU), which is a lower voltage than the old Katmai P3 and Deschutes P2 CPUs (~2V) . Only later BX boards support Coppermine voltages.
- To get the CPU to work well, it needs BIOS support. So you need a board with Coppermine support in BIOS (or an update that offers this)

If you have these, the CPU will definitely work, worst case at 100MHz FSB, so with its 4.5x multiplier it will run at 450MHz

To reach 133MHz FSB and 600MHz CPU clock, you also need:
- RAM runs at full FSB speed on the BX, so your RAM needs to handle the higher speeds too. If it's PC133 you should be OK. Some PC100 will overclock to 133MHz, but not all.
- The BX only supports 2/3 AGP dividers, so at 133MHz you'll also be overclocking the AGP bus to 89MHz. As stated, AGP speeds aren't usually a problem, but if you hit trouble, try a different video card.
- The BX chipset itself does support a 1/4 PCI divider, which allows the PCI bus to stay at 33MHz when you overclock the FSB to 133MHz, but not all boards implement it. If not, you'll be running the PCI bus at 44MHz. That is pretty fast and will probably cause problems. RAID and SATA cards are particularly sensitive to high PCI clocks. If you can't get a 1/4 divider on your board, be prepared to run that CPU at less than 133MHz FSB (or get a different BX board that does).

PKFreeZZy wrote:

By GeForce, do you mean the GeForce 256 or the series in its entirety? I'm planning to use a GeForce2 MX400 with it.

Haven't tried anything newer than a Ti4800 in a 440BX mobo, but in my experience anything Geforce up to that works just fine at 89MHz AGP.

The problem is that the 440BX only offers 1/1 and 2/3 AGP dividers, which means the AGP bus will run overclocked at 89 MHz at 133 MHz FSB speed (133 * 2/3 = 89). Specced speed is 66MHz. The Geforce series generally handles this really well, even managed to run my Ti4600 at 100MHz AGP for months without a hitch before discovering my mistake 😁

The 440BX itself is a very good overclocker. If the mobo got the 133MHz FSB option, you're almost guaranteed the chipset itself won't give you any problems.

The Motherboard is a P2B from ASUS, I just hope it'll work. Pretty sure all 3 of my RAM modules are capable of running at 133Mhz, confirmed by CPU-Z.

I ordered the EB version of the Coppermine architecture, am I done for?

PKFreeZZy wrote:

The Motherboard is a P2B from ASUS

I didn't say "exactly" for nothing - there are quite a few revisions of the P2B 😉

Fortunately it's one of the best documented boards of its era, so if you can check which version it is, this site will tell you what will work with it:
http://homepage.hispeed.ch/rscheidegger/p2b_p … ficial_upgrades

I just checked everywhere, on the board and in CPU-Z, there's no letter in the name, just a plain P2B Revision 1.02 with the C1 revision of the BX chipset.

Look at that link, it will tell you all you need to know.

In short: wrong revision board so it will not work.

The good and informative link dosn't tell you all there is to know about the P2B + Coppermine CPUs but in ths case enough and meljor is right, it wont work without doing a "pin-mod" on the CPU edge connector.

Long version...

Rev 1.02 is the very first revision of the vanilla P2B. It should have the correct PCI-divider for operation at 133 MHz FSB (my 1.02 at least does) and it should be stable at 89 MHz AGP clock with most video cards (my board at least is). It does not support voltages below 1.8V so if you want to run a Coppermine CPU regardless of FSB you need a FC-PGA Coppermne and a FC-PGA ---> Slot-1 Slotket with VID selecton. Jumper the Slotket for 1.8V and update the BIOS and it "should" work fine. If your CPU is Slot-1 (and I guess it is?') it will "probably" not work without modification (isolation and/or shorting of VID pins on the CPU edge connector).

Disclamer: Your milage may vary...

...ok

Can I even underclock the thing to run at 100Mhz FSB or is the overvoltage too much for the board?

And yes, it's a Slot 1 P3.

PKFreeZZy wrote:

...ok

Can I even underclock the thing to run at 100Mhz FSB or is the overvoltage too much for the board?

And yes, it's a Slot 1 P3.

The issue is that the CPU will ask the board to provide 1.65 or 1.7V and the motherboard do not support those voltages and will probably provide 0V.

Should the motherboard for some reason provide the minimum 1.8V then thats fine and it will work. The issue isnt that 1.8V is too much, the issue is getting the motherboard to understand that it should provide said 1.8V. It can be solved by a CPU VID pin mod but it's not super easy.

I guess I'll try that once I've gathered enough courage.