Possibly odd reply but the answer depends a lot on which sound and video card you intend to use.

In general I'd go for the GA-7IXE4 as it's a bit quirkier and the Athlon CPUs it supports are a bit faster than the P3 on the other one.

In terms of sound, if you want SBLive, don't choose the 6VXC7, as compatibility with the Via southbridge is dodgy.
In terms of VGA, the 7IXE4 only has AGP 2x where the 6VXC has 4x. Performance difference will be negligible, but if you have an AGP 8x Card, only the 6VXC with it's universal AGP slot will be able to supply it with the needed voltage.

If you don't have an SBLive or AGP 8x Card, both will work and it's a matter of personal preference.

dionb wrote on 2024-04-05, 12:24:

Possibly odd reply but the answer depends a lot on which sound and video card you intend to use. […]
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Possibly odd reply but the answer depends a lot on which sound and video card you intend to use.

In general I'd go for the GA-7IXE4 as it's a bit quirkier and the Athlon CPUs it supports are a bit faster than the P3 on the other one.

In terms of sound, if you want SBLive, don't choose the 6VXC7, as compatibility with the Via southbridge is dodgy.
In terms of VGA, the 7IXE4 only has AGP 2x where the 6VXC has 4x. Performance difference will be negligible, but if you have an AGP 8x Card, only the 6VXC with it's universal AGP slot will be able to supply it with the needed voltage.

If you don't have an SBLive or AGP 8x Card, both will work and it's a matter of personal preference.

I want to use ATI Radeon 9200SE for this build

And yes, I want to use Sound Blaster Live
Of course, I don't have the sound card, but it is in the shopping list

One of the reasons I avoid motherboards have VIA chipsets is the incompatibility with ATI graphics cards.
But I am looking for a motherboard with an Intel chipset
But they are rare and expensive

Radeon 9200SE is an AGP 4x card so will work fine on either board. Given you also want the SBLive, the AMD750 chipset (with AMD southbridge) on the 7IXE4 definitely seems the better choice.

You're not going to find many Athlon boards with Intel chipsets, AMD is as close as you can get 😉

Also note that Intel chipsets around this time (i.e. the generation after the i440BX) were also something of a trainwreck due to Intel trying to steer the market where it didn't want to go. Even if you leave aside the low-end i810, everything involved some kind of compromise:
- i815 artificially limited to 512MB RAM (not an issue with Win98, but bad news with Win2k/XP)
- i820 with Rambus RDRAM. Post-Caminogate and MTH debacles it was decent enough, but unless you really needed that 4x AGP slot, there wasn't much of a reason to choose it over i440BX
- i840 - actually pretty great, but very expensive in the day and hard to find now.
- i850 - first-gen P4 chipset, limited to 100MHz FSB
- i850E - pretty decent Rambus P4 chipset, but rare due to eye-watering price in the day
- i845B - bandwidth-hungry P4 paired with SDR-SDRAM. Overtaken by asthmatic snails
- i845D - finally a DDR chipset for P4, but still not delivering the bandwidth the CPU needed

Apart from the rather niche i840 and i850E, the first Intel chipset after the i440BX to excel on all fronts were the i865P and i875P, and they weren't released until early 2003.

Yeah that generation Radeon mixed with VIA chipset gave me struggles back in the day, when I worked in a computer shop mid 90s to mid 2000s. Safer to go with AMD chipset for sure!