Nemo1985 wrote on 2021-03-23, 14:44:

Is there any good reason I should keep the gigabyte and the other s370 unidentified board?

Just curious, can you post a photo of the unidentified board ?

It depends a bit on what you want to do in terms of software, but personally I'd be inclined to keep the GA-6BXC over the BE-II and BX-Master.

Why?

Because you already have So370 for late P3-era, so the value of the Slot 1 build is earlier stuff. That third ISA slot is more important than one or two extra PCI slots, and the SBLink on it (and the BE6-II) could also help. Conversely, those ATA-66 controllers are a waste of board space and resources, and if activated slow down boot. ATA-66 is hardly any faster than ATA-33 in practice (latencies, not throughput are key to how fast drives feel), and if you really want faster, you'd want ATA-100/133/SATA-150 instead anyway.

In fact while I was typing this the postman came and delivered a board essentially identical to the GX-6BXC (a Tekram P6B40-A4X), which I bought precisely because my current BX board only had two ISA slots and I really wanted a third so I could run an AWE64, EWS64XL and GUS in the same system. So yes, I'd choose that 😉

As for So370, P6S5AT all the way, at least, if it works nicely after re-cap.

The 6BXC is the PERFECT partner for a VIA C3 CPU, so I'd keep that along with probably the ABIT board. The Advance 10T is Tualatin compatible along with an ISA slot and the P6S5AT is just a unique board which i'd keep also. Ditch the rest.

PARKE wrote on 2021-03-23, 15:01:

Just curious, can you post a photo of the unidentified board ?

It's not really unidentified, I called that way because it's inside a case and I was too lazy to open it, from what I remember it's a second tier brand, nothing special.

dionb wrote on 2021-03-23, 15:58:

It depends a bit on what you want to do in terms of software, but personally I'd be inclined to keep the GA-6BXC over the BE-II […]
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It depends a bit on what you want to do in terms of software, but personally I'd be inclined to keep the GA-6BXC over the BE-II and BX-Master.

Why?

Because you already have So370 for late P3-era, so the value of the Slot 1 build is earlier stuff. That third ISA slot is more important than one or two extra PCI slots, and the SBLink on it (and the BE6-II) could also help. Conversely, those ATA-66 controllers are a waste of board space and resources, and if activated slow down boot. ATA-66 is hardly any faster than ATA-33 in practice (latencies, not throughput are key to how fast drives feel), and if you really want faster, you'd want ATA-100/133/SATA-150 instead anyway.

In fact while I was typing this the postman came and delivered a board essentially identical to the GX-6BXC (a Tekram P6B40-A4X), which I bought precisely because my current BX board only had two ISA slots and I really wanted a third so I could run an AWE64, EWS64XL and GUS in the same system. So yes, I'd choose that 😉

As for So370, P6S5AT all the way, at least, if it works nicely after re-cap.

That's an interesting point of view, I'd use the bx with the p3 1000 on slocket, just to have one of the fastest cpu with the best chipset (440bx). So let's say a very speedy slot1 rig, even leave some space for overclock (I suppose abit would be better but it is a guess).
I agree that those ata-66 are source of problems (I opened a topic like a year ago because windows stopped working after installing the ata66 drivers), in this matter the one on abit can be disabled while it doesn't on msi (or I didn't find how to do so).
Despite of that, I usually pair the slot1 build with pci sound blaster (anything after pentium is, in my opinion best used on windows 98SE), so hardly need more than 1 isa slot.

Bancho wrote on 2021-03-23, 16:14:

The 6BXC is the PERFECT partner for a VIA C3 CPU, so I'd keep that along with probably the ABIT board. The Advance 10T is Tualatin compatible along with an ISA slot and the P6S5AT is just a unique board which i'd keep also. Ditch the rest.

I have a c3 cpu laying around but, why you say it would be perfect? I'd need to use another slokets (that I do not have), in that matter, why do not mix the QDI with the C3 cpu? If the ECS will work, i'm more inclined to keep that one compared to the QDI, since I only have 1 tualatin cpu.

Thank you all for the interesting point of view

Well, it all boils down to what you intend to do with the systems. If you already have a Tualatin, what's the point of a second system that's >75% as fast?

The advantage of the C3 on BX is old DOS stuff, assisted by the SBLink if you choose PCI audio. If you just want to run Windows 98SE, I'd say get rid of all the Slot 1 stuff, because the Tualatin can do it better than all of them.

Nemo1985 wrote on 2021-03-23, 19:04:

I have a c3 cpu laying around but, why you say it would be perfect? I'd need to use another slokets (that I do not have), in that matter, why do not mix the QDI with the C3 cpu? If the ECS will work, i'm more inclined to keep that one compared to the QDI, since I only have 1 tualatin cpu.

The Gigabyte board is compatible with Rayers SMB tool which allows you to change the FSB from the dos prompt. That and Setmul or CPUSPD allows all sorts of CPU speed adjustments. I guess its all depend what you want out of a machine.