Reply 40 of 63, by dionb
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- l33t++
rasz_pl wrote on 2022-03-24, 14:56:[...]
brain aneurysm, I meant to write cheapest actually fast option 😀.
That explains a lot 😉
Alternatives are so bad you might as well not bother with tualatin at all. 810 and SiS is pathetic,
SiS pathetic? Take a look at the 635, it's arguably the fastest of all the So370 platforms. Even the SiS 630S is pretty decent. The SiS integrated solutions are crap, but that's just because integrated stuff is awful, regardless of whether it's SiS, Intel, Via or ALi.
most VIA 133 boards still have stability/AGP problems. I think only Pro 266 was refined enough to not be destined for bottom feeder supermarket builds.
There were some pretty high-end Via ApolloPro133A boards, stuff like the Asus TUV4X. Apart from slower memory performance, all the other "Via" issues were releated to the southbridge, and the Pro266 could (and did) use exactly the same ones as the 133A. A lot of that was also driver problems, fixed after a few versions of 4-in-1. Only remaining issue was poor PCI performance and incompatibility with cards that used Intel proprietary PCI stuff (SBLIve, a lot of TV cards), but that was an issue on any non-Intel chipset.
815E/815EP are optimal, but rare, expensive and therefore hard to get.
My EUR 15 B-stepping 815E says otherwise. Biggest issue with i815 is 512MB RAM limit, and that's only a problem if you don't want to run Win9x. Also no native ISA for people who don't want a separate DOS build.
Modded BX board running at 133MHz with carefully selected PCI/AGP cards will deliver same speeds in majority of workloads while being problem free (minus the getting OC stable part).
True, BX is epic, particularly in terms of how long it lasted in a time of massive change and performance improvement.
Still, for ease of actually finding boards, Via ApolloPro133A is hard to beat, and for top performance I prefer SiS 635 or i840 (although I can't get mine to run with Tualatin...)