PARKE wrote on 2021-07-14, 15:29:This observation:
[[A typical 440bx board supplies 2v for a pentium 2 chip.]]
is not accurate.
Only the very early 440BX board […]
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This observation:
[[A typical 440bx board supplies 2v for a pentium 2 chip.]]
is not accurate.
Only the very early 440BX boards that were designed to support Pentium 2 generation cpu's were limited to voltages between 1.8v and 3.5v (2v is what they were supposed to deliver for CPU's that ran on 2v.).
I'm not claiming to be very knowledgeable about this platform - in fact I haven't played around with it as much as I do with socket A or 370 rigs, but this has kind of been my experience with the platform so far... I have over 10 440bx boards in my collection - out of all these, the only ones that can supply less then 1.8v are my Abit BE6-II and my Asus CUBX witch is a socket 370 i440bx board making it somewhat of an oddity. The rest (oem compaq, acorp, biostar, msi, shuttle, oem IBM, chaintech, jetway, etc) can only do 1.8v with the exception of the MSI witch can do 1.7v and is able to run correctly with my 850MHz p3 coppermine out of the box.
Also, I didn't say they provide 2V exactly - I said:
Socket3 wrote on 2021-07-14, 10:31:
A typical 440bx board supplies 2v for a pentium 2 chip. Some can do as low as 1.7.
- typical as in most common, witch happen to be OEM boards ripped out of gateway, fujitsu, compaq etc. Perhaps I should have worded it differently.
PARKE wrote on 2021-07-14, 15:29:
And even on those boards Coppermine CPU's are run at 1.8v by fanciers. Later 440BX boards (1990-ish)come with voltage regulators that allow voltage adjustment between 1.3 and 2.05 volts and between 2.1 and 3.5 volts.
A 1.75v chip will happily run at 1.8v - but try that with a Tualatin and it won't end well - learned that the hard way trying to overclock various 1200 and 1300 MHz tualatin celerons to 1.6 and 1.72GHz respectively.
In any case, my point is the 440bx platform is not practical for anything that requires a 133Mhz fsb (PCI/AGP divider) . Sure, they're fun to mess around with, but performance/cost/convenience wise they're just not worth the hassle compared to simply sourcing a decent socket 370 motherboard. Oh and did I mention cost? Had a look at ebay prices for 440bx boards lately? or for a good slotket? Same as the K6-2+ and K6-III, prices have gone up significantly. The only slot 1 boards I've been able to find lately for less then 50$ are either VIA based or OEM motherboards, and even those are becoming scares in my neck of the woods.
I get the feeling lots of users recommend these boards out of nostalgia more then anything. Some have stated it's the first high performance motherboard they bought. Others said it paved the way for overclocking. Another was saying in the "show off you retro rig thread" that his first PC as a kid was a hand-me-down pentium II with a 440bx board - but I fit in none of those scenarios, and I believe I'm looking at the platform objectively. Don't get me wrong - I like the platform just fine, and I love the look of slot 1 and slot A CPUs for some reason - got one on my desk right now on a little plastic stand. The 440bx platform - it is incredibly stable and easy to use. In fact I have a 850Mhz P3 system (using the afformentioned MSI 6163? motherboard) that is in use every weekend as one of my guest retro gaming rigs and it's been going strong and stable - but I don't understand why people would recommend a 440bx slot 1 motherboard + slotket to a novice in the hobby who just wants to build a simple retro gaming PC.