VOGONS


First post, by appiah4

User metadata
Rank l33t++
Rank
l33t++

I'm considering building a Celeron Socket 370 system, and I have two boards I can use for this. One is a 440LX (ZIDA Tomato LX98-CT) and the other is a Via Apollo Pro (ASKA SST-5830). There are many comparisons of the 440BX vs Apollo Pro 133, but I can't find much comparing the LX vs Pro. Is either of these chipsets better than the other by a good margin?

Retronautics: A digital gallery of my retro computers, hardware and projects.

Reply 2 of 15, by Munx

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

LX is a very good and stable chipset limited by a slow 66Mhz FSB.

Apollo has support for 133FSB and some other nice stuff, but from what Ive read there are issues with the AGP bus in certain motherboards.

My builds!
The FireStarter 2.0 - The wooden K5
The Underdog - The budget K6
The Voodoo powerhouse - The power-hungry K7
The troll PC - The Socket 423 Pentium 4

Reply 3 of 15, by lazibayer

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie
Munx wrote:

LX is a very good and stable chipset limited by a slow 66Mhz FSB.

Apollo has support for 133FSB and some other nice stuff, but from what Ive read there are issues with the AGP bus in certain motherboards.

Only Apollo Pro 133A has official support for 133MHz FSB. Apollo Pro only supports 100MHz, but still beats LX's 66MHz.

Reply 4 of 15, by kanecvr

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

The Apollo pro supports faster CPUs, so if you're going for performance it's the obvious choice. Zida 440LX/440BX boards are a bit of a mess, I'd stay away from those.

lazibayer wrote:
Munx wrote:

LX is a very good and stable chipset limited by a slow 66Mhz FSB.

Apollo has support for 133FSB and some other nice stuff, but from what Ive read there are issues with the AGP bus in certain motherboards.

Only Apollo Pro 133A has official support for 133MHz FSB. Apollo Pro only supports 100MHz, but still beats LX's 66MHz.

Nope. All Apollo Pro 133 chipsets have 133MHz FSB support. OP's board is a regular VT82C691, so it's the non-133 version. The regular Apollo pro 133 is VT82C693A, and the 133A version is VT82C694X - the difference between the two is AGP 4X support, witch the 133A has and the 133 non A does not. The 133A also supports up to 2GB of ram as opposed to 1.5GB for the non-A version. The VT82C694T has official tualatin support (Pro 133T).

There are Apollo PRO VT82C691 boards that can handle FSB 133, and have options in BIOS for it - including a divider to run PCI at 33MHz and AGP at 66MHz.

Reply 5 of 15, by Koltoroc

User metadata
Rank Member
Rank
Member
lazibayer wrote:
Munx wrote:

LX is a very good and stable chipset limited by a slow 66Mhz FSB.

Apollo has support for 133FSB and some other nice stuff, but from what Ive read there are issues with the AGP bus in certain motherboards.

Only Apollo Pro 133A has official support for 133MHz FSB. Apollo Pro only supports 100MHz, but still beats LX's 66MHz.

You are mixing up VIA chipsets. its the Socket A KT133 that only supports 100Mhz FSB with the KT133A being required for 133Mhz FSB.

Reply 6 of 15, by kanecvr

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie
Koltoroc wrote:
lazibayer wrote:
Munx wrote:

LX is a very good and stable chipset limited by a slow 66Mhz FSB.

Apollo has support for 133FSB and some other nice stuff, but from what Ive read there are issues with the AGP bus in certain motherboards.

Only Apollo Pro 133A has official support for 133MHz FSB. Apollo Pro only supports 100MHz, but still beats LX's 66MHz.

You are mixing up VIA chipsets. its the Socket A KT133 that only supports 100Mhz FSB with the KT133A being required for 133Mhz FSB.

akcktually.png
Filename
akcktually.png
File size
21.48 KiB
Views
1740 views
File license
Fair use/fair dealing exception

You are technically correct,

butt.jpg
Filename
butt.jpg
File size
23.1 KiB
Views
1740 views
File license
Fair use/fair dealing exception

some KT133 non-a boards like low end stuff made by Acorp and Jetway do "support" FSB133 via BIOS update. It also has a FSB 133 jumper on the motherboard. With the bios update, the board supports all FSB 133 (266) cpus - w/o it, it refuses to post @ 133MHz fsb with anything other then a Duron CPU (overclocked of course).

Reply 7 of 15, by Koltoroc

User metadata
Rank Member
Rank
Member

Considering the KT133 is officially only specified for 100Mhz FSB, any 133Mhz "support" is overclocking the chipset. In my experience Kt133 stability gets REALLY iffy once you go past 115Mhz, if it even gets that high. But when has questionable stability and compatibility ever stopped any budget board maker?

Reply 8 of 15, by kanecvr

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie
Koltoroc wrote:

Considering the KT133 is officially only specified for 100Mhz FSB, any 133Mhz "support" is overclocking the chipset. In my experience Kt133 stability gets REALLY iffy once you go past 115Mhz, if it even gets that high. But when has questionable stability and compatibility ever stopped any budget board maker?

Precisely 😀 I do have a KT133 acorp board witch can do 133MHz right. You jumper it for 133 (it has a JP19 - open = 100MHz closed = 133MHz), and it will post at 133MHz with PCI Clock = 1:1/4 and AGP clock = 1:1/2 witch I find a bit wierd for something designed with 100MHz fsb in mind. The earliest KT133 board I have has jumpers for AGP and PCI clocks like a super socket 7 board. Weird.

Reply 9 of 15, by lazibayer

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie
kanecvr wrote:

Nope. All Apollo Pro 133 chipsets have 133MHz FSB support. OP's board is a regular VT82C691, so it's the non-133 version. The regular Apollo pro 133 is VT82C693A, and the 133A version is VT82C694X - the difference between the two is AGP 4X support, witch the 133A has and the 133 non A does not. The 133A also supports up to 2GB of ram as opposed to 1.5GB for the non-A version. The VT82C694T has official tualatin support (Pro 133T).

There are Apollo PRO VT82C691 boards that can handle FSB 133, and have options in BIOS for it - including a divider to run PCI at 33MHz and AGP at 66MHz.

It's a shame on me... I had owned a pro133 board around year 2000.

Reply 10 of 15, by kanecvr

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie
lazibayer wrote:
kanecvr wrote:

Nope. All Apollo Pro 133 chipsets have 133MHz FSB support. OP's board is a regular VT82C691, so it's the non-133 version. The regular Apollo pro 133 is VT82C693A, and the 133A version is VT82C694X - the difference between the two is AGP 4X support, witch the 133A has and the 133 non A does not. The 133A also supports up to 2GB of ram as opposed to 1.5GB for the non-A version. The VT82C694T has official tualatin support (Pro 133T).

There are Apollo PRO VT82C691 boards that can handle FSB 133, and have options in BIOS for it - including a divider to run PCI at 33MHz and AGP at 66MHz.

It's a shame on me... I had owned a pro133 board around year 2000.

That's a long time ago. I forgot most of this stuff myself - thank good for datasheets.

Reply 11 of 15, by appiah4

User metadata
Rank l33t++
Rank
l33t++

Well, this discussion appears to have veered into mostly Apollo Pro 133, but I believe the board I have does not have a Pro 133, just a regular CT82C691Apollo Pro?

Retronautics: A digital gallery of my retro computers, hardware and projects.

Reply 12 of 15, by tayyare

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie
appiah4 wrote:

I'm considering building a Celeron Socket 370 system, and I have two boards I can use for this. One is a 440LX (ZIDA Tomato LX98-CT) and the other is a Via Apollo Pro (ASKA SST-5830). There are many comparisons of the 440BX vs Apollo Pro 133, but I can't find much comparing the LX vs Pro. Is either of these chipsets better than the other by a good margin?

I have no idea about the ASKA one, but I have the same Zida/Tomato board on hand and it is very... unsatisfactory to say the least. Very very limited CPU support (only supports Mendocino Celerons if I remember correctly), picky about RAM, etc. It was a cheap impulse buy when the PIII class hardware was already dirt cheap and even then it was a waste of money in my opinion.

GA-6VTXE PIII 1.4+512MB
Geforce4 Ti 4200 64MB
Diamond Monster 3D 12MB SLI
SB AWE64 PNP+32MB
120GB IDE Samsung/80GB IDE Seagate/146GB SCSI Compaq/73GB SCSI IBM
Adaptec AHA29160
3com 3C905B-TX
Gotek+CF Reader
MSDOS 6.22+Win 3.11/95 OSR2.1/98SE/ME/2000

Reply 13 of 15, by dionb

User metadata
Rank l33t++
Rank
l33t++

Purely looking at the chipsets, I'd go with the LX. It's limited to 66MHz (in-spec, and no great overclocker either) FSB, but it's a very efficient design with few stability or compatibility issues. Also, it can handle twice as much SDRAM as per official Intel specs - Intel states max 128MB per DIMM for 512MB total, but it can handle the same 16Mx8 chip 256MB DIMMs the i440BX can for a total of 1GB with 4 slots.
The ApolloPro was clock-for-clock much slower, with iffy drivers at the time. I believe you can use later 4-in-1 drivers to improve that a bit, but it remains slow,

As for the boards - only supporting Mendocino is pretty obvious when you have a PPGA socket and a chipset incapable of more than 66MHz FSB. That's not a board limitation but a platform limitation. That said, given you have Mendocino CPUs up past 500MHz, their performance was fairly competitive with their big P2/P3 brothers, and the LX is much more efficient than the ApolloPro, it's entirely possible that the fastest CPU you could stick on the LX board (assumedly a Celeron 533) would be in the same ballpark in terms of performance as whatever Katmai you could stick on the ApolloPro board.

Neither Zida nor Aska are exactly high-end brands. I'm aware of Zida's less than stellar reputation on their later Intel boards, but I'd hardly consider Aska a step up in any meaningful terms. Tbh, I'd just go by whatever CPU you want to run. If Mendocino, go ZIda, otherwise go Aska.

Reply 14 of 15, by appiah4

User metadata
Rank l33t++
Rank
l33t++

Thanks for the insights; Ive come to the same conclusions since I had started this thread a year ago (it got necroed by an off topic post) and sold them both off 🤣

Retronautics: A digital gallery of my retro computers, hardware and projects.

Reply 15 of 15, by tayyare

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie
appiah4 wrote:

Thanks for the insights; Ive come to the same conclusions since I had started this thread a year ago...

🤣 🤣 🤣

GA-6VTXE PIII 1.4+512MB
Geforce4 Ti 4200 64MB
Diamond Monster 3D 12MB SLI
SB AWE64 PNP+32MB
120GB IDE Samsung/80GB IDE Seagate/146GB SCSI Compaq/73GB SCSI IBM
Adaptec AHA29160
3com 3C905B-TX
Gotek+CF Reader
MSDOS 6.22+Win 3.11/95 OSR2.1/98SE/ME/2000