BSA Starfire wrote:

The Cyrix 6x86 200 was a 75 MHz FSB part and that was before the Intel TX chipset.

And?
You expect Intel to update the years-old Pentium/socket 7 platform just because some competitor launches some new chip?
Intel defined the Pentium/socket 7 platform years earlier, and FSB speeds were 50/60/66.
Intel never asked competitors to use socket 7, it's technically not even an 'open' platform or anything (which is why with later chipsets/buses, Intel had some legal stuff in place, so not everyone could just design CPUs or chipsets for their buses).

Intel TX socket 7 chipset was released in 3rd quarter 1997, the Cyrix 6x86 200 (75mhz fsb) was 1996.

BSA Starfire wrote:

Intel TX socket 7 chipset was released in 3rd quarter 1997, the Cyrix 6x86 200 (75mhz fsb) was 1996.

Again, what's your point? Intel is under no obligation to change their platform just because competitors want to raise the FSB speed.
Socket 7 (not to be confused with Super Socket 7) is Intel's platform. Intel never made any socket 7 CPUs with any other FSB speeds than the 50/60/66 MHz supported by most of their chipsets.
Why would Intel make a chipset that supports an FSB that none of Intel's CPUs for that chipset will ever use, because it's not part of that platform's spec?

Scali wrote:

And? You expect Intel to update the years-old Pentium/socket 7 platform just because some competitor launches some new chip? Int […]
Show full quote

BSA Starfire wrote:

The Cyrix 6x86 200 was a 75 MHz FSB part and that was before the Intel TX chipset.

And?
You expect Intel to update the years-old Pentium/socket 7 platform just because some competitor launches some new chip?
Intel defined the Pentium/socket 7 platform years earlier, and FSB speeds were 50/60/66.
Intel never asked competitors to use socket 7, it's technically not even an 'open' platform or anything (which is why with later chipsets/buses, Intel had some legal stuff in place, so not everyone could just design CPUs or chipsets for their buses).

No, my point was that motherboard makers adapted the intel chipset's to run these chips with varying success, as I said earlier, I have two different DFI motherboards with 430TX chipsets, both the same age and updated BIOS, one model is great upto 83MHz, the other is not OK with anything above 66 Mhz.

BSA Starfire wrote:

No, my point was that motherboard makers adapted the intel chipset's to run these chips with varying success, as I said earlier, I have two different DFI motherboards with 430TX chipsets, both the same age and updated BIOS, one model is great upto 83MHz, the other is not OK with anything above 66 Mhz.

So? Motherboard vendors still do that today. The fancier motherboards allow for all kinds of out-of-spec settings to overclock your chipset, memory, CPU etc. 'With varying success' of course.

In retrospect it is just rather disturbing that Cyrix and AMD sold these CPUs when the platform was not really designed for them. Maybe they had lists of approved motherboards. One would hope so.

swaaye wrote:

In retrospect it is just rather disturbing that Cyrix and AMD sold these CPUs when the platform was not really designed for them. Maybe they had lists of approved motherboards. One would hope so.

Well, 'you get what you pay for'. They probably figured it was some low-hanging fruit to boost the FSB.
When Intel came out with their PII/slot-1, they gave you a properly certified bus, chipset and CPU capable of 100 MHz FSB (and yes, my Asus P2B-LS board allows me to run that at 112 MHz if I so choose).

A similar thing happened with the Athlon vs Pentium 4 MHz-race.
Where AMD continued pushing the old socket and HSF past 70W TDP, Intel gave you a new platform, where you had a direct 12v connection for the CPU power, to remove the strain from the rest of the motherboard, and a new spec of HSF, which allowed for larger/heavier coolers to be mounted properly.
So Intel's platform was actually reliable, AMD's was not (I had one of those TBird 1400 MHz monsters, and with some motherboards you literally burnt the traces out).

OK, I'm not sure why you are jumping down mt throat on this, I thought we were discussing the stability of non intel standard FSB speeds on socket 7 boards, not the corporate rights of intel or it's marketing practices. your right that intel was no obliged to support these CPU's, but motherboard manufacturers were in 1997/98 to make sales. I'ts well known that the TX was a cynical deliberately crippled release both in FSB speed and cached memory size. Probably part of the incentive for AMD/Cyrix/IBM to start the super7 push and why all fast socket 7 systems use a VIA, SIS or ALI chipset.

Scali wrote:

swaaye wrote:

In retrospect it is just rather disturbing that Cyrix and AMD sold these CPUs when the platform was not really designed for them. Maybe they had lists of approved motherboards. One would hope so.

Well, 'you get what you pay for'. They probably figured it was some low-hanging fruit to boost the FSB.
When Intel came out with their PII/slot-1, they gave you a properly certified bus, chipset and CPU capable of 100 MHz FSB (and yes, my Asus P2B-LS board allows me to run that at 112 MHz if I so choose).

wow! Do you work for Intel???? Or did you just read too many adverts from them back then? Because slot1 was the way to go right? Platform of the future............

BSA Starfire wrote:

I thought we were discussing the stability of non intel standard FSB speeds on socket 7 boards

The way I read the question was how PCI was affected when you use an alternative platform with different FSB speeds.
I didn't feel the question was even particularly about socket 7 (eg NexGen Nx586 also runs at 'strange' speeds, but doesn't even use socket 7 at all). The socket isn't relevant here. Just the FSB:PCI ratio.

BSA Starfire wrote:

wow! Do you work for Intel???? Or did you just read too many adverts from them back then? Because slot1 was the way to go right? Platform of the future............

Oh wow, what the hell is this?
And what's your point about Slot1? It worked fine while it lasted.
I already explained why clinging to the same socket type is a bad idea, in light of drastic changes in CPU technology.

There's no denying that Slot 1 was typically a lot more reliable than the budgety assortment of Super 7 stuff. Or any of that early Athlon hardware as well.

swaaye wrote:

Or any of that early Athlon hardware as well.

Ah yes, SlotA 😀

Scali wrote:

Well, 'you get what you pay for'. They probably figured it was some low-hanging fruit to boost the FSB. When Intel came out with […]
Show full quote

swaaye wrote:

In retrospect it is just rather disturbing that Cyrix and AMD sold these CPUs when the platform was not really designed for them. Maybe they had lists of approved motherboards. One would hope so.

Well, 'you get what you pay for'. They probably figured it was some low-hanging fruit to boost the FSB.
When Intel came out with their PII/slot-1, they gave you a properly certified bus, chipset and CPU capable of 100 MHz FSB (and yes, my Asus P2B-LS board allows me to run that at 112 MHz if I so choose).

A similar thing happened with the Athlon vs Pentium 4 MHz-race.
Where AMD continued pushing the old socket and HSF past 70W TDP, Intel gave you a new platform, where you had a direct 12v connection for the CPU power, to remove the strain from the rest of the motherboard, and a new spec of HSF, which allowed for larger/heavier coolers to be mounted properly.
So Intel's platform was actually reliable, AMD's was not (I had one of those TBird 1400 MHz monsters, and with some motherboards you literally burnt the traces out).

Well I suppose if I had a good enough and loud enough cooler, (Like 80mm high rpm fan and copper base heatsink) Then I should be fine with a 1400C? Mobo is the Abit KT7A.

Just found a 9000rpm case fan for the cpu cooler on Newegg.. tehehee 😀

computergeek92 wrote:

Well I suppose if I had a good enough and loud enough cooler, (Like 80mm high rpm fan and copper base heatsink) Then I should be fine with a 1400C? Mobo is the Abit KT7A.

My 1400 burnt through 2 of those (as I said, it's the board that is the problem. The PCB traces, voltage regulators and caps aren't designed to deliver 70+W to the socket. No amount of cooling is going to fix that). Then I got an MSI K7T Turbo, which still survives today.
If you read the small print in the KT7A manual, it says it supports CPUs of 1000 MHz max. I found that out the hard way (sadly the shop didn't warn me about that either. I just bought one of the most popular boards at the time, and the fastest chip for that socket. Even after I returned the board for the second time, they didn't seem to think there was something wrong, but eventually they swapped it for the MSI instead of another Abit, which worked).

I bought a Silverado cooler btw, which was one of the best and most expensive coolers at the time (because I originally got one of those Dual Orb coolers, which was the best the store had to offer at the time. I had to specifically order a better cooler online somewhere, because decent coolers for high-end Athlons weren't readily available at most stores).

I didn't truly understand what "Intel Inside" meant, until I had this Athlon system with VIA chipset (don't get me started on the performance shortcomings and weird glitches of that chipset, or the bugs in the CPU itself, for that matter).

Jepael wrote:

computergeek92 wrote:

K6-2 mainboards also used 83, 95 or 97 fsb bus speeds. (As well as the standard 66 and 100) Did the odd bus speeds cause hardware problems or incompatibilities due the mobo's clocks being on a synchronized bus?

I had Asus T2P4 motherboard. It officially supported FSB speeds up to 66 MHz, but with jumpers there were also undocumented 68, 75 and 83 MHz settings. I think I never got it to POST at 83 MHz, and it was quite unstable at 75 MHz. It was either the onboard IDE controller or the IDE drives, but helped a bit to limit PIO/UDMA modes to be a bit slower.

Strange, my Asus P55T2P4 runs quite stable at 83MHz.

computergeek92 wrote:

Just found a 9000rpm case fan for the cpu cooler on Newegg.. tehehee 😀

Great. Be sure to invest in ear protection 🤣

Anyway, did the OP specify if he was talking about Socket 7 or Super Socket 7? I'm assuming SS7, no S7 chipset I know of can do 95MHz.

Scali wrote:

My 1400 burnt through 2 of those (as I said, it's the board that is the problem. The PCB traces, voltage regulators and caps aren't designed to deliver 70+W to the socket. No amount of cooling is going to fix that). Then I got an MSI K7T Turbo, which still survives today.
If you read the small print in the KT7A manual, it says it supports CPUs of 1000 MHz max. I found that out the hard way (sadly the shop didn't warn me about that either. I just bought one of the most popular boards at the time, and the fastest chip for that socket. Even after I returned the board for the second time, they didn't seem to think there was something wrong, but eventually they swapped it for the MSI instead of another Abit, which worked).

I've ran a T-Bird 1300 on a KT7 for over ten years, even with blown caps (which I didn't know at the time), without the slightest problem.

Strange that the KT7A, which came out later and supports 133MHz FSB, wouldn't support anything over 1000MHz.

I believe PCI was originally specced to run between 25 and 33MHz. The only socket 7 type boards I remember using an asynchronous bus were those with VIA chipsets.

I do not believe AMD ever released CPUs based on 75 or 83MHz FSB. The ones that used 95 and 97MHz FSB were designed to run on 100MHz motherboards (at 95 and 97MHz) with a 1/3 PCI divider, so those were still in spec as long as they used the Super7 platform. Cyrix was the company that really pushed for the weird non-standard FSBs. I believe their first chip to cause a problem was the 6x86 P200+ that ran at 2x75. They didn't put much effort into making sure a stable platform was ready for it at release time.

I do not agree that Intel not supporting higher FSBs was some kind of big conspiracy against Cyrix. At least from my point of view at the time (I wanted a 6x86), I felt that Cyrix was trying to cheat with the higher FSBs to make up for the fact they they didn't have the fabrication facilities to ramp up the clock speed enough to compete with intel.

computergeek92 wrote:

K6-2 mainboards also used 83, 95 or 97 fsb bus speeds. (As well as the standard 66 and 100) Did the odd bus speeds cause hardware problems or incompatibilities due the mobo's clocks being on a synchronized bus?

One thought I had on this in terms of compatibility is that one might think they could run all socket 7 CPU on a SS7 board. Not if said board has a minimum 60MHz clock and a multiplier of 2x you can't!