kolderman wrote on 2020-01-09, 00:31:

Does 430TX come with ATX? I had a look on feeBay they were all AT.

More than enough ATX out there - this was a 1997 chipset, around the time the transition to ATX got going.

Are they much better than the Ali and Via chipsets on most other SS7 boards? I have about 10 S7/SS7 and they are all Ali/VIA.

Depends very much o on how you define 'better'. Clock-for-clock Intel's memory controller (the same as in the i440EX, incidentally) is about 10% faster than Via's in the MVP3 and marginally faster than ALi's in the Aladdin V. Its PCI throughput is better and it is considered less quirky - not because it objectively is, but because Intel wrote the standard so its quirks became the norm.

Conversely it doesn't support AGP (which avoids AGP compatibility issues...), doesn't run at 100MHz (or above), which negates the clock-for-clock advantage, it only has one (1/2) PCI divider, so runs PCI out of spec on anything over 66MHz FSB, max L2 cache is 512kB and (much) worse, it can only cache 64MB RAM.

That makes the i430TX a good match with Intel So7 CPUs, with K6-3, where the internal L2 cache negates the lack of chipset caching ability and compensates the slower bus a lot. It is also fine for DOS and low-RAM Win95 stuff not needing the last drop of performance and not exceeding the 64MB limit.

It's a terrible choice for high-RAM K6-2 builds where you need the motherboard caching and high FSB for cache performance. It's also no good for touchy PCI cards that don't like speeds over 33MHz in combination with CPUs that run at bus speeds over 66MHz. And bottom line, if you want the highest So7 performance, you need either a high-cache MVP3 board or a very overclockable Aladdin V. No TX system will come anywhere near the performance of say a P5A running a K6-3+ at 4.5x133MHz.

I dont care about high performance, the opposite in fact. I detuned my P5A by disabling external cache and setting bus speed to 66mhz. I can get a k6-3+ down to slow 386 speeds with setmul, and it plays all DOS games just fine. I do sortof care about AGP as I use S3 Virges on the AGP and I have lots of them but few good PCI 2d cards. Seems interesting tho...I found a BNIB 430TX ATX on ebay for >200$, they aren't cheap.

kolderman wrote on 2020-01-09, 00:31:

Does 430TX come with ATX? I had a look on feeBay they were all AT. Are they much better than the Ali and Via chipsets on most other SS7 boards? I have about 10 S7/SS7 and they are all Ali/VIA.

You can get an ATX version of every single S7 chipset starting with 430FX. Granted, in some countries (like here in Russia, for instance), 75% of these boards will be Intel-made. These boards often have severe HDD limitations, don't take non-Intel CPUs (so no K6 or Cyrix) and don't have overclocking options (so the FSB will be limited at 66MHz). Otherwise these boards are pretty nice, actually.

Second, almost all 430TX AT boards I've seen have ATX power connectors. I've never tried putting an AT board like that in an ATX chassis, but I imagine that the only thing you'll need is an I/O shield with an AT port cutout. Some shields even have cutouts for typical AT board ports like COM, LPT, PS/2 mouse and other.

appiah4 wrote on 2020-01-09, 06:30:

[...]

I have recently switched from using a K6-2 400 at 66x6 to 100x4 after getting an MVP4 motherboard, and the boost I got in memory bandwidth constrained games was substantial even though the change to 3DMark scores did not reflect my perceived performance uplift.

Sounds like you are using the integrated VGA in the MVP4... the chipset's raw memory performance is the same as the MVP3 - about 10% below i430TX, but with 50% higher clock, you'll still get ~35% higher bandwidth...

...buuuut that bandwidth is shared with the VGA core, so as soon as you simultaneously stress the VGA (as you do in 3DMark), you drop back to half the mem bandwidth for the CPU - 33% less than i430TX@66MHz. However L2 cache is still dedicated to the CPU, which masks a bit of that drop. So I'm not surprised to read that in the end performance is about the same as with 66MHz FSB on a dedicated memory bus.

(so integrated VGA also cripples performance 😉 )

kolderman wrote on 2020-01-09, 08:20:

I dont care about high performance, the opposite in fact. I detuned my P5A by disabling external cache and setting bus speed to 66mhz. I can get a k6-3+ down to slow 386 speeds with setmul, and it plays all DOS games just fine. I do sortof care about AGP as I use S3 Virges on the AGP and I have lots of them but few good PCI 2d cards. Seems interesting tho...I found a BNIB 430TX ATX on ebay for >200$, they aren't cheap.

Then you would be best off with an MVP3, as those Via chipsets offer the most options to slow down parts of the system.

And as for those prices, BNIB pushes it up, but if you just want a working one, take a look in Amibay, there's an i430TX board - Gigabyte GA-586TX2, tested working - going now for EUR 35 / USD 39.

It won't load at 75mhz FSB, it just hardlocks trying to boot

Tested 68mhz fsb as well, it's unstable. I guess I've got to figure out which pci card is thenproblem

Moot point saw a new shuttle 951p on eBay and bought it.