Arctic wrote:

A dual cpu P3B-F? What is the model name of it? P3B-DS? http://www.falconfly.de/yabbfiles/Templates/Forum/default/shocked.gif […]
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Maraakate wrote:

[...]
There is a 2 slot P3B-F when I did more research but naturally everyone wants $200 for the damn thing.

A dual cpu P3B-F? What is the model name of it? P3B-DS?

2 ISA slot sorry.

If you don't want to mess with replacing capacitors, then the Gigabyte and MSI boards would be candidates to get rid of. The Asus boards have good caps that you shouldn't need to worry about.
If you don't mind replacing caps, and you don't feel attached to the Asus boards, you can probably get more from selling those than you can from the MSI or Gigabyte.

Between the Asus boards, a big consideration would be which of them have a Coppermine capable VRM. Sometimes boards have this prior to the official minimum revision.
The P3B-F, P2B-D, and I think P2B-S boards have 4 DIMM slots which is a bonus compared to most BX desktop boards.
The P3B-F has BIOS based overclock settings, which could be convenient if you change things around very much or need to slow it down for old games.

I'd probably sort out the Coppermine capable boards and then compare how well they can overclock their FSB, preferably some would reach 133MHz or slightly higher. Even if you don't plan to overclock, I'd infer that a highly overclockable board is probably in healthy condition.

thanks for your responses!
A lot of my msi boards need recapping. That will be the next big project. I can't do it myself yet but I am learning 😀
I need to find a list of revisions of the different asus boards to check for cumine compatibility then

The AOpen AX6BC is a great Slot 1 board, often overlooked. I've got three now. All of them have Japanese capacitors.

Maybe I still have one in my attic, thanks for the heads up phil.
I have to clear it out soon and I need to check what to keep and what's just old junk.

For example I still have a pile of refurbished 5 1/4 drives, C64, a complete Amiga 500 and several Atari STs
And a Tandy TRS/80 from when it came out.

I just got an Asus P3B-F after reading all of this. Biggest gripe is only one ISA slot, but i see it has solder points for a second one. Maybe I can try sacrificing a dead 486 boards ISA slot and swapping out the last PCI slot and hope and pray 😖

I got one and it is much faster but it was a pain in the ass to get everything to not clash on these boards. I had problems for a good while with any DMA locking up the machine from the sound cards in DOS.

The only goofyness currently is that it says -5v is -6v as a warning in the BIOS on startup. Should I be worried about this?

Little bit of necroposting here.

brontozaur wrote:

However, if you want the best BX of all times - it is def ABIT, BF-6 or BX-133. They let you go by 1 MHz and are stable as hell.

ABIT BX-133 have problems with various memory and it's pretty much impossible to run stable with two ram sticks on 133 mhz FSB or higher. So all this tweaking potential is just wasted.

ABIT BE6-II best there is, no since in arguing it, unless if it still has the original caps.

I believe later versions had ata-100 support if I recall.

ABIT BE6-II

One ISA slot for any revision though. Need to use riser card.

No need for a riser card unless if you have a funky case, and more then one ISA slot is mostly useless on such a new platform.
That's like wanting two or 3 pci slots today. Not much of a use for pci today and not much of a use of Isa in a late 90s high end system.

Asus p3b-f, abit bx6 2.0. The bx age was the golden period for the abit, it was the most popular manufacturer for the overclockers.

Any P2B or P3B. I had P2B with PII 350 since new. Was donated to me for the work for a person. Very stable.

Next in quality is Intel made BX boards and 815.

Cheers,

Agree that the Asus P2B-f and P3B are probably the best BX boards overall. Have a Abit and as The Serpent Rider says they can have various issues 😀

Ima annoy everyone and say the P2-99 is the best "BX" because it strips out everything you don't need and keeps you sensible on the RAM config (And out of trouble, P2B only hid the 3rd slot problems better.), ZX really isn't very crippled unless you manage to find a different board with ZX-66, then you may as well have an LX. Also everything else is a refinement of P2B designs. Anyway, it's a good "one thing" pure late 90s gamer, if you're trying to load it up with two voodoo 2s, SATA card, powerVR, high speed networking etc, for some multi api monster that does DOS, 9x to XP then you're out of masters, so need the P2B.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-07-08, 03:53:

Ima annoy everyone and say the P2-99 is the best "BX" because it strips out everything you don't need and keeps you sensible on the RAM config (And out of trouble, P2B only hid the 3rd slot problems better.), ZX really isn't very crippled unless you manage to find a different board with ZX-66, then you may as well have an LX. Also everything else is a refinement of P2B designs. Anyway, it's a good "one thing" pure late 90s gamer, if you're trying to load it up with two voodoo 2s, SATA card, powerVR, high speed networking etc, for some multi api monster that does DOS, 9x to XP then you're out of masters, so need the P2B.

The ASUS P2-99 is one of the best motherboards with the Intel 440ZX chipset (seriously) and feels closer to the real P2B configuration-wise. It is also surprisingly capable of using the latest P2B BIOS without negative side-effects to get support for Tualatin CPUs.

shamino wrote on 2015-08-28, 08:54:

boards have 4 DIMM slots which is a bonus compared to most BX desktop boards.

There are legends that someone has seen BX boards running at 133MHz FSB with 1GB of RAM.
This is possible, but so problematic that 4 RAM slots can be ignored.
OR look at boards that have buffers installed directly on the board itself.
And this, including abit

shevalier wrote on 2023-07-08, 07:27:

There are legends that someone has seen BX boards running at 133MHz FSB with 1GB of RAM. This is possible, but so problematic th […]
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shamino wrote on 2015-08-28, 08:54:

boards have 4 DIMM slots which is a bonus compared to most BX desktop boards.

There are legends that someone has seen BX boards running at 133MHz FSB with 1GB of RAM.
This is possible, but so problematic that 4 RAM slots can be ignored.
OR look at boards that have buffers installed directly on the board itself.
And this, including abit

I had a cherry picked P2B-F that I ran this way. It had a Coppermine 600/100 CPU and 4x 256MB PC133 CL2 RAM in it, and it passed stress tests at 840/140. I had several P2B-F and P3B-F boards at the time and based on this testing, I picked 2 of them to keep and ran them at 800/133 with 1GB PC133 CL2.

They did not reliably POST the full memory though. Frequently they'd only detect anywhere from 512MB-800-something MB RAM at POST. I'd have to hit Reset until it detected the full 1GB. Once that was done though, it was totally stable in operation. The only quirkiness was at POST.

According to official 440BX specs, if you use more than 4 rows of RAM (2 double sided modules = 512MB) then you're supposed to use Registered memory, and that's at PC100 speed. Using 8 rows (4 double sided modules) of Unbuffered PC133 CL2 was really pushing it too far. That board was a champ though. Yeah it was temperamental to start in the morning - but any good hotrod is like that.

My previous CUBX-L ran 1 GB of RAM at 133 MHz. Which is now - not, moreover, the memory is the same. Only 124MHz.
Why play probabilities when ABit AB-BX6 2.0 already has soldered buffers?

In the end, what will I get.
If I'm lucky - 1GB RAM, SBLink & ISA. Maybe some kind of video card from FX will start.

What I got on nVidia Crush51 under Windows 2000.
Athlon/Sempron/Turion (yeah, 1MB L2 cache) under 2.2GHz, 2GB RAM DDR400
Radeon X600 (excellent compatibility by the way) and Diamond Monster MX300 at Vortex.