sfryers wrote on 2023-09-27, 07:23:
I don't own a Banshee, but I've used Voodoo2 and Voodoo3 cards with a VIA C3 on i815 and Apollo Pro 133A boards without any issues at all, so I'm inclined to believe that a Banshee would work fine too. Game performance with a 1GHz Ezra is comparable to a 500MHz P3 Katmai.
I've not (yet) managed to get a C3 working on a 440BX board- at best, my ABIT-BX6 2.0 posts with a slightly corrupted BIOS screen, allowing access to the BIOS setting menus, but then freezes at the PCI device listing screen. It shows the correct voltage of 1.35V for the EZRA, but the CPU identifier is just garbled characters and pixels.
My MSI MS-6119 v1.1 440BX/Slot1 board works perfectly with C3 processors in a MSI MS-6905 Master slotket. Can't remember if I modified the BIOS with microcode for those, or if it's unmodified, though.
IIRC that board might also come with different VRMs, not all of them being Coppermine ready, allowing voltages < 1.8V. Not sure if the VRM can be different within the same revision, or if it only applied to 1.0 boards.
Would guess the symptoms you describe with the BX6 board are microcode related. If you got some kind of standalone EEPROM flasher, or are comfortable with hot flashing in case something goes wrong, you might want to look into that.