your probably going to be looking for something with a SiS chipset, although finding one that'll work and have an AGP slot might be a challenge. The board I found that had both best performance and compatibility wit hte VIA chips was a ECS but that had no AGP.

BSA Starfire wrote:

your probably going to be looking for something with a SiS chipset, although finding one that'll work and have an AGP slot might be a challenge. The board I found that had both best performance and compatibility wit hte VIA chips was a ECS but that had no AGP.

Thanks for the quick response. Yeah, it looks like I might be limited to PCI slots only. The CUSL2-C has an 815e chipset, so I'm not sure if it will work.

Man, that stinks since my CUSL2 is already on the way.

I suppose I can pick up a cheap VIA C3 and use that instead, yeah? Something like this

I do have a CUSL2, it does not correctly identify any C3 and didn't work with a Cyrix 600, VIA 866 or 1200A, been ages since I tested this stuff so you might want to wait for a more knowledgeable member to chime in.

In my [somewhat limited] experience, most C3 chips works just fine with 440BX boards, as long as the VRM can supply whatever voltage the CPU wants. Looks like your chip got "2.0V" printed on the top side? As long as it wants above 1.8 volts, just about any 440BX board should work, no need to specifically look for VRM 8.4 guidelines compatible ones.

My suggestion is that you get a Slot1 440BX board and a slotket with voltage clamp jumpers. Might sound strange to go for a non native solution, but the slotket introduces additional control; if the mobo can't identify the CPU correctly, you can always force the correct voltage, bus speed, etc from the slotket. My favourite model is the MSI MS-6905 Master, haven't ever been let down by those. For your CPU, the earlier revisions should work fine too, since you got no need for anything below 1.8V.

kaputnik wrote:

In my [somewhat limited] experience, most C3 chips works just fine with 440BX boards, as long as the VRM can supply whatever voltage the CPU wants. Looks like your chip got "2.0V" printed on the top side? As long as it wants above 1.8 volts, just about any 440BX board should work, no need to specifically look for VRM 8.4 guidelines compatible ones.

My suggestion is that you get a Slot1 440BX board and a slotket with voltage clamp jumpers. Might sound strange to go for a non native solution, but the slotket introduces additional control; if the mobo can't identify the CPU correctly, you can always force the correct voltage, bus speed, etc from the slotket. My favourite model is the MSI MS-6905 Master, haven't ever been let down by those. For your CPU, the earlier revisions should work fine too, since you got no need for anything below 1.8V.

Thanks for the help! Do you know why the 440BX chipsets would accept these C3s but other models don't? Just out of curiosity.

And just to clarify - if I picked up the slotket + a cheapo 440BX board like this one here, I should be OK?

As an alternative, I could pick up a more common VIA C3 chip that works with the ASUS CUSL. That might be a cheaper and less convoluted solution to this since SiS Socket 370 boards don't support AGP cards ):

VIA once released a list of officially compatible motherboards and a copy of this list is saved here.

The problem is that it (afaicr) never specified which variant of C3 (or Cyrix3) was compatible with which exact motherboard, but my guess would be this had to do at least partially with the voltages that the motherboard was able to supply.

Perhaps this could be of some help 😀

I did mess around with various examples of this odd CPU and the results were a bit unpredictable.

Perhaps the much newer s370 boards that were incompatible with s370 Mendocino were also incompatible with this C3 chip (it's basically an early C3 running at the same voltage as mendocino).