Officially you would need a T variant of crap^^^Via chipset. Personally I find $60 downright offensive for a VIA board, even if its funny Australian money 😀.
There was a FIC FA15T + tualatin celeron for sale a week ago on Polish auction house for ~$10US and nobody even bid on it.

Alas parts are expensive down here. Shipping is crippling and the local supply of parts is low. $60 dollarydoos for socket 370board isn't a terrible deal here. I didnt mention it earlier but it also comes with a 1ghz p3 and 256mb of ram. The reason i was drawn to this board is it is a black pcb.

I have heard the via chipsets are not the best. Would it effect performance that much?

Cesora wrote on 2022-11-30, 21:33:

...
I have heard the via chipsets are not the best. Would it effect performance that much?

The mainboard is based on VIA VT82C694X. IMO, it's a decent chipset contrary to VIA VT82C691/VIA VT82C693!

rasz_pl wrote on 2022-11-30, 10:41:

Officially you would need a T variant of crap^^^Via chipset. Personally I find $60 downright offensive for a VIA board, even if its funny Australian money 😀.
There was a FIC FA15T + tualatin celeron for sale a week ago on Polish auction house for ~$10US and nobody even bid on it.

Nobody wants to buy here on local classifieds one of a good for versatile retro-rig mainboard ASRock 775I65G for ~$5US .

Cesora wrote on 2022-11-30, 21:33:

Alas parts are expensive down here. Shipping is crippling and the local supply of parts is low. $60 dollarydoos for socket 370board isn't a terrible deal here. I didnt mention it earlier but it also comes with a 1ghz p3 and 256mb of ram. The reason i was drawn to this board is it is a black pcb.

Be aware that AOpen had awful capacitor issues around this time. If the caps haven't (all...) been replaced, assume you will need to do so to get it stable. Your Tualatin will stress it more than the P3-1000EB.

I have heard the via chipsets are not the best. Would it effect performance that much?

Compared to what?

The 694X (ApolloPro133A) was a lot faster than its Via predecessors but not on par with Intel's offerings. The difference wasn't huge though, less than 10% clock-for-clock vs i440BX or i815, smaller difference vs i820 etc.

Here's a comparison: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/showdown … fsb,170-12.html
(note: does not contain Serverworks IIIHE, i815 or SiS 635T as they didn't exist yet - all will beat 694X on some or all metrics, but good luck getting a working board with one of them for a decent price)

And the feature set of the 694X was better overall:
- native 133MHz support (unlike i440BX which had to be overclocked and lacked the necessary 1/2 AGP divider)
- AGP 4x support (again unlike i440BX)
- SDRAM support (unlike i820/i840)
- >=1GB RAM support (unlike i815)
- native ISA support (unlike i8xx)
- cheap (when new and still today, compared to almost all Intel-based solutions)

Main drawbacks:
- a lot of early issues were due to poor Via 4-in-1 chipset drivers. These improved a lot over time.
- most remaining issues were due to user error, installing AGP video card drivers before 4-in-1 chipset drivers. That was a recipe for disaster. The fact that Windows included native Intel drivers by default and not Via ones was political, not technical.
- lower PCI bandwidth
- PCI implementation/compatibility issues between 686B southbridge and Creative SBLive/Audigy chips (and some TV cards) that could lead to instability and HDD corruption

Bottom line: install OS and drivers correctly and Via 694X will work fine for desktop/gaming, unless your board has a 686B southbridge and you want to use an SBLive/Audigy. In that case, change board or sound card.

dionb wrote on 2022-11-30, 22:53:

- PCI implementation/compatibility issues between 686B southbridge and Creative SBLive/Audigy chips (and some TV cards) that could lead to instability and HDD corruption
unless your board has a 686B southbridge and you want to use an SBLive/Audigy. In that case, change board or sound card.

it can only handle one PCI bus master without glitching?

rasz_pl wrote on 2022-12-01, 06:03:

dionb wrote on 2022-11-30, 22:53:

- PCI implementation/compatibility issues between 686B southbridge and Creative SBLive/Audigy chips (and some TV cards) that could lead to instability and HDD corruption
unless your board has a 686B southbridge and you want to use an SBLive/Audigy. In that case, change board or sound card.

it can only handle one PCI bus master without glitching?

No, it's something more subtle; other bus mastering devices worked fine. Tbh I've heard at least three mutually exclusive explanations - Via claimed Creative's chips were putting too much electrical noise on the bus, Creative claimed Via hadn't implemented PCI spec fully and there was also talk of Creative's design requiring certain PCI spec extensions which were Intel-proprietary and therefore not present in other implementations. None are totally convincing IMHO, and I suspect both sides were playing fast & loose with PCI spec and assuming no one else would.

In any event, the issues were mitigated with 4-in-1 driver 4.37 and later, and not present in later Via southbridges, so whatever the root cause, changing something on the Via side stopped the issue.

I've never had issues with the Via 694X 694t chipsets. In fact I prefer them over the 815t due to slightly faster AGP implementation (vs the 810 and 815*) and the fact that most VIA boards using this chipset have an ISA slot. I have, however had plenty of issues with the KT133 (non A) KX133 and 496G (socket 3).

Via made some pretty decent chipsets (and some crap ones). My favorites are the aforementioned 694t, the CLE266 (socket 370 DDR), KT880 (socket A), KT400A, the MVP3 and the VP3.

*I'm comparing to the 810 and 815 chipsets because the 440bx does not support correct AGP divider for 133MHz FSB operation and I use AGP cards almost excursively in my builds.