Arbys Guy wrote:Houston,.... We've got post! .. BUT it only displays the p3 as a P2 mmx 500mhz
Nice that you got it working already. Yes, That CPU string is probably a BIOS recognition issue, it won't affect performance.
Arbys Guy wrote:is it just the pentium 2s that have out of the box support?
Possibly. The Katmai Pentium 3 is pretty similar to the Pentium 2 so it is easy to run. But coppermine core Pentium 3s require a CPU Voltage Regulator that can supply 1,65 to 1.75 Volt. So don't plug in a coppermine CPU without verifying support for these voltages.
Arbys Guy wrote:and do you think it would be worth it to try and get the machine running at 133 MHz fsb , i have the supported ram, but i read somewhere online these boards are wonky at that fsb speed.(and do voodoo 2 cards support that fsb?)
I have two Rev 2.0 boards, and I used them plenty of times at 133MHz FSB. But the AGP divider must be set to 2/3 and not 1/1. This is the 4th switch on the FSB switch-block. Otherwise your AGP bus speed will be 133MHz instead of 89MHz. For AGP video cards 89MHz is already rather high. This is a limitation of the intel 440BX chipset in geneneral.
Arbys Guy wrote:And lastly after reading through these manuals i just realized there are 5 different revisions of this motherboard, do the switch configs tend to differ amongst different revisions? i really wish i had the PCB Ver : 2.0 🤣, it has a turbo jumper and voodoo 3 support!
Gigabyte kept the GA-6BXC board rather classic throughout production and revisions. So no Jumperfree rubbish and such. They also kept the PLL chip the same, so every revision supports the same bus speeds of 50..133MHz. There is a DOS tool to control this particular PLL chip, written by Rayer. Very practical.
I don't recall the turbo button/jumper doing much, but the voodoo3 jumpers are a nice feature. I suppose one could modify the board manually to do the same thing as the voodoo3 jumpers, which is to connect the PSU 3,3 Volt plane to the AGP 3,3 Volt plane directly.
Arbys Guy wrote:i am kind of tempted to flash the bios....
In case you do feel the need to try and flash the BIOS, here is my collection for the GA-6BXC, including older ones and unofficial ones. It would wise to save your old BIOS before overwriting.
https://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fil … &menustate=28,0