First post, by SirNickity
OK, be forewarned -- this one is full of silly self-imposed constraints. There's nothing sensible about this, and logic has no place here. 🤣
I have a Gateway tower that, at some point, held a 486 - but when I got it, it had an Asus socket 7 motherboard in it. The case badge on front says "4DX2-66", which is the defining factor in one of the silly constraints that I'll get to in a sec.
Since this tower has tons of room in it, I want to dedicate it as a multi-OS bench computer. It will multi-boot:
* BeOS r5 - because I love BeOS, and because it's a dream to code in
* Gentoo Linux, of a recent build - mostly for cloning and testing old IDE HDDs that don't work on my USB adapters, but also for coding and poking at hardware
* Win9x / DOS - also for coding and poking at hardware
The tower is an AT form factor (obviously... 486), but has been upgraded with an ATX supply and a momentary front panel switch.
I don't have any early P3 machines, and I thought.. hey.. the case badge says 4...66... why not a 466MHz P3? I would kind of like to go with a slotted processor, since I have a S370 Tualatin, but I did jump on a pair of S370 boards with VIA 691 and 693 Apollo Pro chipsets because they were cheap, and have a baby AT form factor and optional ATX support. I also have an Asus P2B-B and a Totem board that is nearly identical -- both i440BX slot 1 boards. The Totem manual seems to imply it'll support a 66x7 CPU, while the others... well, may depend on BIOS and/or board revision, etc.
Where I'm really stuck is, I'm just too fuzzy on this PII / PIII crossover era (I went directly from a PII-350 to late S370 700 or 800MHz builds back in the day), plus some of the board manuals make mention of "P2 or Celeron" but not P3. I'm not sure if that's a rule, or suggestion...
I'm also a little uncertain about whether I want to limit myself to a 66MHz bus. With a Celeron, I may be forced to. But I could also go for a slight overclock at 103MHz FSB x 4.5, or maybe even 133 x 3.5 -- although that's really pushing those early chipsets.
So, help me out.. with 440BX and VIA 691/693 chipsets, what are my options? Any known issues I should avoid? Are there any baby AT boards with a real P3 chipset? (I *would* kind of like this to be faster than my PII-350, since it'll have a later processor and all..)