They all have caveats.

Virge will probably be the most compatible DOS card but they are definitely not as nice of a GUI card as the others.

Radeon 9200SE will be the best D3D/GL/GUI card, assuming it's not a blurry one and you don't need D3D3-5 fog table or pallettized texture support, or want to play an OpenGL game that uses NVIDIA extensions.

Rage 128 Pro will do fog table. Keep in mind these are from ATI's worst driver period.

G450 and Kyro are not really ideal for more than GUI use.

I'd go with S3+V2...

get a different motherboard and use a AGP card. Get a FIC PA-2013 (2mb L2) or an Asus P5A (comes in both AT and ATX)

A gem K6-3+ needs to sit in the best board. Accept no substitutions.

How about a Tyan S1598C2? I got one of these with 2 MB L2 and am waisting it on a Cyrix MII @ 300 MHz. I figured the Cyrix would benefit more from the L2 cache than a K6-3+ would. My FIC PA-2013 only has 1 MB L2.

How much benefit is there from AGP 2x compared to PCI on a SS7 board for the same graphics card (e.g. Matrox G200 SD PCI vs. Matrox G200 SD AGP)? Graphics card aside, the 430TX seemed to perform slightly better than the MVP3 chipset using a K6-3+.

well the idea is 2mb L2 with the MVP chipset (tyan 1598 & pa2013) or the Aladdin V (asus p5a)

Go with the Radeon 9200SE.

You can always use the Voodoo2 for DX5 fog table games (if that ever become a noticable problem).

The real problem here is being the bit about the Super Socket 7 motherboard 😜
They're madly expensive on eBay, and I haven't managed yet to buy one as they routinely end well over 50 euros shipped. On the other hand, I have a bunch of K6-II+/K6-III+ just lying around which are essentially worthless now 🙁

I go and check almost every day for another PCI card - I'll settle even for a RIVA TNT from the period. "New" and cheap VGA cards from Chinese vendors give me the creeps because most probably they'll have horrible picture quality.

Really I wouldn't worry about not having AGP. AGP on these boards is almost always unstable with most cards other than 3dfx. I'm not even sure there is a performance advantage, considering how K6-3+ will bottleneck even Voodoo2 in some cases.

shame. there are asus p5a boards on ebay (us) right now for $5 plus shipping...

Haha, more like $180. And people are paying these prices.

d1stortion wrote:

Haha, more like $180. And people are paying these prices.

wait... what?

Wow look at the prices for some of those P5A boards! Insanity. I don't see any sold ones that went for over $90 however.

There is that one cheap one!

Of course you didn't see them because you were only looking for regular P5A's. Here you have the super special awesome best of the best, last of its kind, rarest of the most rarest P5A... in Rev. 1.05!!!!!111 😁

No onboard sound included

speechless. 😀

Is the P5A-B 1.05 the best of these revisions? Refer to, Super Socket 7: VIA MVP3 vs. ALi Aladdin V

This revision has issues with using the K6-2/3+ chips, but does not have issues with the chacheable range. The earlier revisions do not have issues with the K6-2/3+ chips, but had issues with the cacheable range.

It seems like I was meaning to try the P5A-B 1.05 board with a K6-III chip (non-plus) to see if they were a good mate, but I never got around to it. Anyone else know if the roomer is true that the non-plus K6-III chips will work fine on the P5A-B 1.05?

Note that cacheable RAM isn't an issue with the K6-III and K6+ CPUs. Their L2 caches up to 4GB. Maybe you are aware of this though. The chipset L3 will be limited to the usual cacheable range, but the L3 has negligible performance impact anyway.

That's right. However, if you are lookig for a multi-purpose testing motherboard, pre-1.05 revisions will be limited to caching 128 MB of RAM when using non K6-2/3+/III CPUs. So if you wanted to setup a K6-2-600 or Cyrix MII and run Windows with more than 128 MB of RAM, you'll be using uncached RAM. If you intend to stick with the K6-2/3+, it seems pre-1.05 boards are the way to go, because, as you pointed out, we wouldn't really care about L3 performance.

For the multi-purpose ALI SS7 testing board, I'd still be curious if anyone has determined if the P5A-B 1.05 board has issues with the original K6-III. If it worked fine, I'd say the 1.05 and later revs are better for multi-purpose testing. It seems like when I was testing the P5A-B, my K6-III hadn't come in yet, so I moved on. I can confirm that the P5A-B had serious performance issues with the K6-2/3+ chips though.

If one is going to use a K6-2/3+ and wants a cheaper motherboard alternative, the 430TX boards are almost as fast and can use up to 256 MB SDRAM.. Refer to U6BC.

As a matter of fact, I remember advice back in the day where Pentium III Tualatins where the thing, that K6-2/III owners should disable L3 (motherboard) cache in order to achieve better results.

i got to admit that mvp3 actually has less agp compatibility issues than ali5, at least in win2000.
and, while ali5 has superb memory performance, it still can't beat mvp3 with 2mb cache, with the latter having about 5% advantage in most cases.
i have never been a big fan of p5a, the gigabyte 5ax seems to have less issues, although agp support is still a pain in my ass.