cde wrote on 2021-07-27, 21:00:

I have just received and tested a VIA C3 Nehalem @ 1.2 GHz, and I am very impressed by the ease with which I can bring down the speed on the fly. At 4*66 = 266 MHz and L1 disabled, it is about as fast as a 386 DX-40 according to speedsys, perhaps even slower. And it can run up to 1.4 GHz overclocked (11 * 133) which roughly corresponds to a P3 @ 800 MHz. Also runs very cool with 1.45V voltage. I highly recommend it! I am using it with an Abit VH6 (Apollo Pro 133 VT82C693A and VT82C686A).

Yes, it's definitely more flexible than a Super Socket 7. It can go slower, down to about 386-SX25 equivalent speed, or much faster, up to ~ Pentium 3 800 MHz equivalent speed (at least when used on a 440BX motherboard). On VIA Apollo Pro 133 it's much slower (at its fastest speed), and overall stability is an issue on many motherboards.

bloodem wrote on 2021-07-28, 06:21:

cde wrote on 2021-07-27, 21:00:

I have just received and tested a VIA C3 Nehalem @ 1.2 GHz, and I am very impressed by the ease with which I can bring down the speed on the fly. At 4*66 = 266 MHz and L1 disabled, it is about as fast as a 386 DX-40 according to speedsys, perhaps even slower. And it can run up to 1.4 GHz overclocked (11 * 133) which roughly corresponds to a P3 @ 800 MHz. Also runs very cool with 1.45V voltage. I highly recommend it! I am using it with an Abit VH6 (Apollo Pro 133 VT82C693A and VT82C686A).

Yes, it's definitely more flexible than a Super Socket 7. It can go slower, down to about 386-SX25 equivalent speed, or much faster, up to ~ Pentium 3 800 MHz equivalent speed (at least when used on a 440BX motherboard). On VIA Apollo Pro 133 it's much slower (at its fastest speed), and overall stability is an issue on many motherboards.

It's funny that the VIA C3 performs worse on a motherboard with a VIA chipset 😉

So I'm inclined to buy a mATX 440BX motherboard, so far I could only find the RC440BX. Do you have an opinion on this motherboard? Can the onboard VGA be disabled and a PCI graphics card be used instead?

EDIT: I think I'll buy the MSI MS-6156 instead due to its AGP port.

I remembered these old articles about using WPCREDIT/WPCRSET to improve the memory performance of Via chipsets. The conclusion from these articles was that these changes improved the performance and significantly narrowed the performance gap between the VIA Apollo Pro A and the Intel BX, and that a significant issue with the Via was that the BIOS were not as optimized as those for the BX.

https://www.overclockers.com/wpcredit/

https://web.archive.org/web/20000815205643/ht … tweakguide1.htm

cde wrote on 2021-07-31, 09:43:

It's funny that the VIA C3 performs worse on a motherboard with a VIA chipset ;) […]
Show full quote

bloodem wrote on 2021-07-28, 06:21:

cde wrote on 2021-07-27, 21:00:

I have just received and tested a VIA C3 Nehalem @ 1.2 GHz, and I am very impressed by the ease with which I can bring down the speed on the fly. At 4*66 = 266 MHz and L1 disabled, it is about as fast as a 386 DX-40 according to speedsys, perhaps even slower. And it can run up to 1.4 GHz overclocked (11 * 133) which roughly corresponds to a P3 @ 800 MHz. Also runs very cool with 1.45V voltage. I highly recommend it! I am using it with an Abit VH6 (Apollo Pro 133 VT82C693A and VT82C686A).

Yes, it's definitely more flexible than a Super Socket 7. It can go slower, down to about 386-SX25 equivalent speed, or much faster, up to ~ Pentium 3 800 MHz equivalent speed (at least when used on a 440BX motherboard). On VIA Apollo Pro 133 it's much slower (at its fastest speed), and overall stability is an issue on many motherboards.

It's funny that the VIA C3 performs worse on a motherboard with a VIA chipset 😉

So I'm inclined to buy a mATX 440BX motherboard, so far I could only find the RC440BX. Do you have an opinion on this motherboard? Can the onboard VGA be disabled and a PCI graphics card be used instead?

EDIT: I think I'll buy the MSI MS-6156 instead due to its AGP port.

The board I recommend is the Gigabyte GA 6bxc because it is one of the few boards that is VIA C3 ready (with a proper slotket adapter), it is compatible with third party utilities that allow you to set the FSB at run time, and it has a huge FSB compatible range from as low as 50mhz all the way to 133mhz.

Make sure to get a board with the latest revision (1.9 I believe).

With the latest bios it is also compatible with 128gb HDDs, works fine with my startech IDE-> SATA adapter, and I haven't had any AGP clock problems on it with any of the GPUs I have trieh. The C3 Nehemiah is what I recommend over the Ezra T - much faster floating point performance and just as speed flexible. I have over 300 DOS games in my library and I can play all but two of them. The ones I can't play are both from the early 80's and they don't work because of conventional memory issues not CPU speed issues.

The VIA motherboards and AMD K6 and Duron are good for gaming and tweaking the speed of the CPU, But If you want a well supported platform. The Intel CPU/Bx440 motherboard combo is hard to beat.

It Pretty solid and very reliable.

Thanks all for your advice! I appreciate it.

i remember that nvidia's driver documents mentioned that gigabyte 440bx mainboards' agp power regulator didn't comply with agp standard requirements, thereby causing unstabilities, something that the driver couldn't fix.

Repo Man11 wrote on 2021-07-31, 16:21:

I remembered these old articles about using WPCREDIT/WPCRSET to improve the memory performance of Via chipsets. The conclusion from these articles was that these changes improved the performance and significantly narrowed the performance gap between the VIA Apollo Pro A and the Intel BX, and that a significant issue with the Via was that the BIOS were not as optimized as those for the BX.

https://www.overclockers.com/wpcredit/

https://web.archive.org/web/20000815205643/ht … tweakguide1.htm

Yup, I used wpcredit back in the day of K6-2/Celeron as I always had VIA chipset based boards. VIA chipset was common on budget boards made by PcChips, Matsonic, QDI etc. which naturally didn't want to expose too many settings in BIOS as those required additional testing driving up cost. A tuned VIA chipset was very competitive with Intel chipset. 30-50% memory performance boost was possible using wpcredit. I still have PCR files for various chipsets should anyone need them. They seem to be very hard to find nowadays.

I think putting the PCR files on vogonsdrivers.com or on archive.org and linking to them here would help plenty of users for a long time!

If think its definitely the quality of the motherboard plays a big factor with BX. My two main machines are running on BX boards and I've found them to be rock solid stable.

Gigabyte 6BXC V2.0, Via C3 Nehemiah 1200 on a MSI Sloket, V3 3500, Matrox M3D and a boat load of sound cards. Never really gave me any problems and this thing is pretty much full of cards! Software FSB and Multi as its big plus features.

DFI-ITOX GCB60-BX/C1 (S370), Tualatin 1.4ghz (Modded), Leadtek GF4 Ti4600, boat load of sound cards! This has been solid also, even with the 133mhz 89mhz AGP bus. Its actually a really fast system.

Both these machines were pretty easy to set up and the fact they just seem to work is why I think BX is highly regarded. Also with BX normally having a number of ISA slots allows you to build a really fast Win98 machine with that multiple ISA option.

I do have a Abit VH6T which I really want to try out in the future, but pretty much everyone of the Teapo's has leaked and I haven't got round to ordering new caps!

Well the ASUS P2B series is legendary. The 440BX chipset is merely "awesome".

I have three ASUS P2B-B motherboards. Two are backups. Two of the three had their caps replaced proactively. I run a Slotket thingy to get up to a 1Ghz Celeron Tualatin. I stick with 100Mhz FSB for maximum compatibility. After all, if I need to go faster than that, then I'm not really playing Win98 period games anyway.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180205052849/ht … pgrade_faq.html

I used to have an ASUS P2B with a PII-300 back in the day. Later I had an SUS CUSL2-C with a PIII-600 (if memory serves). Both boards were absolutely rock solid. My sister had some cheap VIA Apollo 133 board from a company like.. I don't know, Askey or something? Anyway, it ran a Celeron 300A at the time and it was nothing but constant trouble. Granted, the internet was still new and fairly slow for us and the only VIA drivers we had available were the ones in the box. I'm sure we could have achieved stability with better newer drivers, but they just weren't within our reach at the time. I think a lot of people were in the same boat. VIA's Apollo 133/Pro chipsets were not bad but their drivers took their sweet time to mature. Today you can probably build a rock solid system with these things, but at the time it was the 440BX that just worked out of the box.

I love 440BX for my retro systems because it is last chipset with full ISA support from Intel and the fact I don't need to install any chipset driver on Windows 98.
Otherwise Intel unfortunately quickly killed ISA and even PCI signals used for sound cards compatibility in DOS making anything faster for DOS necessarily come from other chipset company like VIA or SiS.

Otherwise for P6 I am not sure there exist really good non-Intel chipset and at this point it might be better to go Socket A. At least this was my impression at the time that AMD got a bit better quality of chipsets at least from VIA.

BTW. Netburst CPUs are absolutely terrible at legacy and 16-bit code performing much slower than comparable P6/K7/K8 CPUs so for that reason alone I would recommend going either P6 (including Tualatin) on 440BX or something from AMD and ISA compatible chipset.

----
As for 440BX and compatibility/stability - it is obvious that one board is not equal to other board as board design and its noise matters. Also different boards configured chipset differently with different timings. Engineer making board had lots of timing knobs to tweak and given board might have issues with specific hardware because said timings are too tight... and/or noise levels are too high for signal integrity. All this however mean that just having 440BX board doesn't give bullet proof stability. Even the same type of e.g. GPU can itself differ between models and if someone sees stability issues with some combinations doesn't mean 440BX stability was poor. Heck, even if said hardware can work better on some Via chipset or even BXCell or something.

Vast majority of users have very good experience with 440BX systems.