Thanks a lot for the excellent info people! 😀

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Wow those adapters aren't cheap anyway...

That's the truth. I got very lucky about 2 years ago to find a seller with two of them fully loaded with 1.4ghz PIII's for $30 each and that was cheap. $100 was more the normal price then, I can only imagine what it is now.

sliderider wrote:

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Wow those adapters aren't cheap anyway...

That's the truth. I got very lucky about 2 years ago to find a seller with two of them fully loaded with 1.4ghz PIII's for $30 each and that was cheap. $100 was more the normal price then, I can only imagine what it is now.

I wonder if I got mine from the same seller? There was a guy on ebay a year or two back, who had an entire box full of them. His ebay photo showed this box, with dozens of them inside. He sold them seperately for $30, or in a group of 3 for $90.

The ones I saw are 60 bucks buy now and include a 1.4 GHz CPU.

Actually the story was more complex than that. You see, the i815 northbridge was just an i810E northbridge hacked with a new memory controller upgraded to support PC133 SDRAM and an AGP interface.

You're probably going to end up stuck with a Via chipset no matter what... i815 boards with ISA slots were slim on the ground anyway, and Tualatin supporting ones are even rarer.

Of course, because like all other i8xx chipsets it is based on the hub architecture which replaced the ISA with an LPC bus.

And if all fails, just stick with a Slot 1 440BX system + Tualatin adapter.

If you got the skills and looks like you have more than 1 1.4ghz chip, you could try the Tualatin pin mod to make it work with older 440BX/693A/... chipsets without the extra adapters.

I have a couple 694T chipsets. When installing the PCI Latency patch on my Gigabyte GA-6VTXE I usually induce stutter and lag that won't go away until it is removed and that was with a AWE-64 Gold ISA card even. This makes me wonder if they fixed the issue with this later chipset. Most info I've pulled up seems to relate to the KT133A/Pro133A being affected.

Be warned about SBLive issues still though, I tried one on my GA-6VTXE and couldn't for the life of me get dos emulation happening. dunno if it was a NMI or other things. Other issues seems that I can't pull off CL2 with my Crucial PC133 that is rated at true CL2 (this is on both GA-6VTXE and Epox EP-3VSA2). One last thing about the Via boards can't do AGP 4x, will be stuck in 2x which still isn't much of a issue performance wise. My Geforce Ti 4600 won't do 4x for nothing even with registry trick or rivatuner.

I recently got 2x Soyo TISU (i815EP B-Step) that will do CL2 just fine. Just got another ASUS TUSL2-C as well that I'm waiting on. I'd love to get my hands on a Via Pro266 but too expensive for my blood.

What's the pin mod?

sliderider wrote:

What's the pin mod?

440BX pin mod (dunno which other chipsets it could work on but assume others will work)
http://digilander.libero.it/grandecigno/Tua_BX.htm
http://digilander.libero.it/grandecigno/Tua_BX_41.htm

Theres differenct types of mods, this should just make the chipset compatible, there were other pin mods to make the tualerons run at 133mhz and at higher voltage.

I had bought a 1.3GHz Tualeron off ebay and the seller actually removes some pins and soldered in some resistors across others. I haven't taken any time to figure out what he did, also haven't even tested it since I got a box of 12x 1.4GHz PIII-S for $22 (slight bent pins). So far I've revived one of them. All of them look fixable.

RogueTrip2012 wrote:

I had bought a 1.3GHz Tualeron off ebay and the seller actually removes some pins and soldered in some resistors across others.

Oh that's classy of him. Probably a permanent pin mod instead of a socket mod. Dumb.

Oh that's classy of him. Probably a permanent pin mod instead of a socket mod. Dumb.

How exactly is that a bad thing? It's not really feasible to do such a mod without permanently modifying something. What would you rather have, a modified board that will no longer take a regular Coppermine, or a modified CPU that you can easily swap in/out and will work in just about any board you want?

Let me rephrase what I said 😁 - by classy I meant he was a clown for selling a modified CPU on ebay without stating that it was modified. At least that's how I took it.

Now, if I had to choose a mod, I would mod the board because it would be unlikely I would ever downgrade it again. I do sometimes use my P3 1400 in my 440BX board via Slotket too so modding the CPU isn't the best approach IMO. But if I was really dieing to get into Tualatins in 2011, and I didn't already own a TUSL2-C, I would probably just buy a Tualatin board at this point and be done with it instead of perhaps destroying either/both.

Yup, at this point it's easier to try and find a Tualatin board. Problem with them is, lots don't have an AGP slot and many don't have ISA (not a problem for many, but I think significant enough for many of us).
Another problem I noticed is, it's in the caps plague era. When monitoring a sale, have a good look at the pic. I've gotten burned once because the seller had included a non-original picture. The TUSL2-C I got had leaking caps, but on the pic (which was obviously from a different board) the caps were fine.

swaaye wrote:

Let me rephrase what I said 😁 - by classy I meant he was a clown for selling a modified CPU on ebay without stating that it was modified. At least that's how I took it.

It was said to be modified, the seller sells many of them modded this way. I was wanting to use it in a older Pro133A motherboard, just not using them currently.

@Tentrium
Do you still have your TUSL2-C, I can fix it if it is just bad caps. Unfortunately I live in the states. Shipping it back an forth would be costly.

I know what you mean though. So far on ebay I've bought a few boards that have bad caps and didn't know. Lets see...
EPOX EP-3VSA2
Gigabyte GA-6VTXE
Soyo TISU (just got it and found like 2 so far)
MSI-6309

Also have a crapload of bad SocketA boads but knew they had issues.
I've had a TUSL2-C that doesn't work but caps look good. I'm still going to try and ESR the caps and see whats up as it is a Rv. 1.04 which seem like the last rev.

Yes, I still have it. I put it aside but don't know exactly where it is.

Actually, I once bought a board and the seller had a pic of the boards and a couple cards laying on the board. I was annoyed of the cards covering part of the board. Anyway, I won the set cheaply...low and behold, exactly where the cards were covering the board, one of the caps was partly torn off -_-

Tetrium wrote:

Yes, I still have it. I put it aside but don't know exactly where it is.

Actually, I once bought a board and the seller had a pic of the boards and a couple cards laying on the board. I was annoyed of the cards covering part of the board. Anyway, I won the set cheaply...low and behold, exactly where the cards were covering the board, one of the caps was partly torn off -_-

Well that sucks, that would make me wonder if it happened in shipping. I recently bought a Diamond Monster MX300 that looked in perfect shape in the picture. Once I received the item I found the seller sent a "bonus" item (Adaptec 50pin scsi pci card) that scratched up few of the capacitors on the MX300 board, board still works but would be in perfect shape if not for this bonus item that I didn't ask for or even bid on 🙁

As for the Tualatin, I'd already been doing some searching of supporting boards, while this list isn't finished (still missing alot of info and even chipsets I'm sure). This doesn't breakdown ISA, PCI or anything, just Tualatin supported AFAIK.

1815EP B-step chipsets
2---------------------
3MSI 815EPT
4ASUS TUSL2-C
5ASUS TUSL2-M (Micro ATX)
6AOpen AX3SP-U
7ABIT ST6-RAID
8Soyo SY-TISU
9DFI CS62-TC (Full ATX)
10DFI CS32-TL (Micro ATX)
11Gigabyte GA-6OXET
12ECS P6IPAT
13Tyan Tomcat i815T
14Intel D815EEA2U
15
16Via Apollo Pro 133T
17---------------------
18EPoX EP-3VSA2
19EPox EP-3VSA
20Gigabyte GA-6VTXE
21Gigabyte GA-6VTX
22Gigabyte GA-6VTXE-A
23SOYO 7VBA133U
24ASUS TUV4X
25Shuttle AV18ET
26QDI ADVANCE 10T
27ABIT VH6T
28Soltek SL-65KV2-CT
29Biostar M6VCT
30DFI CA64-TN
31MSI MS-6309LE5
32MSI MS-6368 (micro ATX)
33
34SiS 635T
35----------------------
36ECS P6S5AT
37
38
39
40Via PLE133T
41-----------------------
42BIOSTAR M6VLR

RogueTrip2012 wrote:

Well that sucks, that would make me wonder if it happened in shipping.

No, definitely not. In the pic the sticker with the serial number was placed differently and also had a different number. It was definitely a different board.
When I told the seller the board was different (without telling him how I found out) he told me that it was an older pic of the board but he had removed a couple stickers since. I hadn't told him how I knew it was a different one. The sticker was still there but was on the board at a different angle and had a different number.

I just got the Soyo SY-7VBA133U mobo, and it works! Even though the downloaded manual says that it only supports up to a 1.2 GHz Tualatin, I put in a 1.4 hoping that it had a later BIOS and would support it, and it did! Now I've got a convenient way to test any PIII CPUs in this socket 370 board.

It's my first socket 370 board, and I'll find it much easier to test CPUs in it, rather than use a Powerleap adapter. It's awkward to unplug those things, and surprisingly awkward to remove the CPUs from them. Thanks everybody for the great retro information! 😀

BTW, the board has crazy overclocking potential. The BIOS allows you to go from 66 to 255 MHz for the FSB! That's using 1 MHz increment values. I'll try a few mad experiments tonight!

BTW, the board has crazy overclocking potential. The BIOS allows you to go from 66 to 255 MHz for the FSB! That's using 1 MHz increment values. I'll try a few mad experiments tonight!

Well, 255mhz sure as hell isn't going to happen, but I have seen 185mhz done before. You'd need a low-multi chip, like a 1.13ghz PIII, and some really good RAM, but it is potentially doable.