Mendocino Celeron is the best CPU for 66FSB boards as it performs quite well at 83Mhz FSB and works up to 550Mhz. PII 450 is very rare and expensive. Celeron at 100Mhz FSB is basically the same thing but can reach higher clock speeds. It also costs a small fraction of PII as nobody wants it.

While the Mendocino celerons can play tag with the PIIs and early Katmai PIII, more noticeable before SSE software became common, the PIII arch really suffered from the cache cripple and 66 bus on the coppermine celerons, with the result that you needed one 30% faster to be equivalent to a PIII coppermine. Now CC0 up steppings tended to have a lot of overclock headroom, so you could close up the bus speed gap, either at 83Mhz on an LX that had BIOS and vid support, or 100 on a BX or Via Apollo. Closer to 1Ghz the headroom was less though. You might get late stepping 733 Celeron to 1100, but that's near the wall. I think it's hard to find low enough multi, late enough steppings to get 133Mhz FSB on them though.

Abit BH6 ..The best motherboard for Slot1 CPU 😁
You can overclock your Mendocino 300@450 and support P3 whit 100MHz FSB 😉

Anonymous Coward wrote on 2021-10-02, 01:01:

Aopen AX6BC was another popular one.

The reason Abits were so nice is because they were jumperless. Especially on the BH6 and BX6 (rev 2), you could control pretty much everything in the BIOS.
I'm not sure how long it took other manufacturers to catch up, but for a while it seemed like it was rare to find a board that let you set the core voltage in the BIOS.

I also can recommend the AOpen AX6BC. Using it with a Pentium III at the moment. But also did some testing with a Pentium II a couple of weeks ago (@233 Mhz).

Very stable and it has a SB-Link connector as well.

Mendocino Celerons can be clocked up to 550Mhz. I just tested 3 of them. Celeron 366 - boots at 550Mhz. Celeron 400 boots at 600Mhz. Another Celeron 400 boots at 500Mhz. All stock voltage. At 83Mhz FSB they aren't too bad either. Back in the day I switched from K6-2 to Mendocino Celerons because they were so much better even for gaming at 83Mhz FSB.

I also have a few Coppermine Celerons and those boot between 900-1000Mhz, late steppings more. Celeron 566 - boots at 850Mhz, Celeron 633 boots at 950Mhz, Celeron 733 boots at 1100Mhz, Celeron 1000 boots at 1240Mhz. Voltage set to 1.75v.

If you aren't fussed about overclocking options, don't rule out Intel boards. They aren't always as feature rich with overclocking/memory timings but they are usually rock solid stable from my experience.

Hey guys

My apologies for not replying sooner, real life been getting in the way of my hobby. The CPU is a Pentium II 350Mhz, I did a search for the chip and it’s this one https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Pentium ... 512E).html

I was doing a little reading and from what I gather on the forum, the PII’s are ok for late 90s gaming but not so great for early 90s, late 80s DOS games. The thread I was reading WAS ten years old, so I don’t know if things have changed. I think I read there are apps you can use to slow down your system.

Also what do you guys think about a Gigabyte GA-6VXE?

Some boards will default the multi to 2x when you set the multi wrong, so you can do that, and set it to 66mhz bus for 133 then take out the L1 and L2 in BIOS and see how slow that gets you for games that are picky.

I just watched a youtuber down clock his P2 to run Monkey Island. So thas reassuring to know with a little tweak of the BIOS, it can run some older programs.

Has anyone any experience with the Gigabyte GA-6VXE ?

Damn near all the boards with the i440BX chipset were great...

ASUS had P2B and the P3B-F
Abit had BH6 and BX6
AOpen had AX6B, AX6BC, and AX6BC Pro
EPoX had EP-61 BXA-M
MSI had MS-6119

Check out round-ups from around the time such as this one from Tom's Hardware.

I had a P2B with a PII 350 MHz and a RivaTNT2 and that system _rocked_...

Well I was looking at the Gigabyte board, which was being offered to me for about £75 (inc shipping) by a guy in Poland. However I found an MS-6119 along with a GeForce4 MX 440-SE here in UK for £48. I have plenty of 66 and 133 ram from the days my father and I ran these machines, so the only thing I really need to think about is maybe a SoundBlaster 16 ISA card. Which should keep all those DOS games happy.

Hiddenevil wrote on 2021-10-08, 23:33:

Well I was looking at the Gigabyte board, which was being offered to me for about £75 (inc shipping) by a guy in Poland. However I found an MS-6119 along with a GeForce4 MX 440-SE here in UK for £48. I have plenty of 66 and 133 ram from the days my father and I ran these machines, so the only thing I really need to think about is maybe a SoundBlaster 16 ISA card. Which should keep all those DOS games happy.

The MS-6119 is a fine board. We had two systems running those at one point - super solid and dependable boards. You'll be happy for sure!

What I've noticed recently with some of this stuff coming back into fashion under the guise of retro or vintage is that some stuff gets ridiculously overpriced. The mobo + a Geforce for £48 isn't terrible.

Yeah, I mean these boards weren’t cheap the first time around. But they are fetching some crazy prices now and it annoying how many are missing their I/O shield.

I was looking at the Gigabyte board, but so many had mentioned the MS board, plus it was significantly cheaper, it was a no brainier.

I’ve spent the last five years looking after my father during his declining dementia, so I’ve not had time or opportunity to play about with old computers. Cleaning through his office I found the P2 and knew i had to do something with it. It was something me and my father did all the time, so it’s going to be cathartic building this new machine and remembering all the fun times we had in the past 😀

Oh man, I'm sorry for that...lost my dad 1 1/2 years ago.

So...performance doesn't seem to be very or even extremely important. I guess, it's more important to you to feel "all the fun times" you had with your dad. You can take nearly every Intel BX (or VIA Apollo Pro) board to do so. Therefor the MSI MS-6119 should be a good choice, if you're fine with the price. But be careful, eventually there are some OEM versions - be sure to get a retail board!

kind regards
soggi

My father is still with us in body, but the dementia has claimed his memories of those times. It's only been a month since he went in the nursing home, but it's been very difficult not having him around. I guess building this old P2 is my attempt to remember the good times we had building computers, going to computers fairs in the 90s and early 2000's. I know he would have laughed at me for building an old P2 system. "What the heck are you going to do with that old thing?"

Yeah I can run pretty much anything I want from a RPI running DOSbox, but it totally lacks the experience of having a beige box on your desk, humming away running the games as they were meant to be run. Plus it's been a blast so far, trying to remember all this stuff. Like I couldn't remember if I used to install 6.22 on the C: drive before putting Win98SE on. Talking to other members, this is probably what I did back when i had Win95, NOT 98! So that saved me making a huge error.

In addition, I have my old man to thank big time. Under his desk I found a collection of IDE hard drives, we also have a box full of various old RAM, 32,72 pin simms, SDRAM, DIMM's you name it. It all seemed to enter my dad's office and either stay there or go up in the attic. Honestly, we have so many old motherboard, mostly 939, IDK if those are now considered vintage 🤣