I use a Coppermine Pentium III 600(E) MHz on a SOYO SY-6BA+III (440BX chipset). This mainboard is just great. Everything just always works. It is easy to configure and quite fast too. If necessary you can slow the system down to 200MHz in the bios. Currently I run it overclocked at 660 MHz, with the FSB at 110. The only downside is an FSB higher than the official 66 or 100MHz (max 155MHz) raises the AGP frequency as well (default 66MHz). Two other downsides are a max UDMA of 33 and no Suspend to Ram sleep mode.
Other than that it is a perfect board. It has two ISA slots for older devices and Two USB slots (USB 1.0) for new devices.

if you want to use a 133 MHz FSB chip (the B variant of P3), you'll want an i815-based mobo with its proper AGP divider. A 440BX at 133 will have a hugely overclocked AGP slot (88 Mhz vs. 66 MHz) and video cards will usually not work quite right (if at all).

I'd dig around for a Tualatin-compatible i815-based board. Tualatin P3s are very nice because they are 130 nm and run cool and clock fast.
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=1512

You could also look for a i820 board, but you'd need RDRAM then. Ick 😀

swaaye wrote:

I'd dig around for a Tualatin-compatible i815-based board.

I agree with Swaaye. I have a Asus TUSL/2 motherboard with a Tualatin 1.4Ghz chip in it, and it's rock solid. But it will also handle any Socket370 Pentium3. It has served me well.

You should be able to find the TUSL/2 just by searching eBay.

Thanks for the advice guys -- I think I will go with the Tualatin. One question -- the 815e chipset review I read talked about the ASUS CUSL2 motherboard -- what's the difference between the CUSL2 and the TUSL2?

There seems to be a lot more CUSL's readily available on ebay....

Thanks!

They are very similar, except for the chipset revision. The TUSL2 works with Tualatin core CPUs, while the CUSL2 only supports up Coppermine.

I don't know if it's possible to trick a CUSL2 into accepting a Tualatin, I was more into Athlons back then... 😉

In case you want to play DOS games with this machine, I'd reconsider the BX chipset option, because most of these boards still have ISA slots.

In case you want to play DOS games with this machine, I'd reconsider the BX chipset option, because most of these boards still have ISA slots.

Nah, I have the Pentium-100 running Dos 6.22 and Win 3.1 for the old Dos Games. I think at some point I'll use some of the leftover parts and get together a dual-boot P2 system. The P3 system will run either 98 or XP -- Back when I was sure I was using a coppermine, 98 seemed the natural choice, but with Tualatin, maybe XP's the way to go? Who's got OS suggestions?[/quote]

@kneedragger37
If I understand correctly your requirements are:
1) Intel pentium (III or later)
2) Windows-gaming, no dos gaming
3) Speed
Sounds pretty mainstream, That leaves a wide range of systems to choose from 😉
In the timeline between my intel PIII 600 and the arrival of the intel Core Duo's I personally also had my eye on AMD CPU's. They were told to be the better buy at that time. And some of the earlier PIV's have been told to be quite lame (hot and slow).

Well, thanks for muddying the water, gerwin! 🤣

Seriously, if it were 1999 or 2000 and I were looking for a serious workhorse computer, I might be thinking AMD as well (I think I actually did back then).

Right now, I have an AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual core based machine and a Sempron laptop that I'm typing this on right now. They're my workhorses -- this one's just for fun.

That said, I've been researching intel CPU's and chipsets -- getting into AMD's at this late date doesn't really hold too much attraction for me.

[quote="kneedragger37"]98 seemed the natural choice, but with Tualatin, maybe XP's the way to go? Who's got OS suggestions?/quote]
I have XP SP2 on my Tualatin. In fact, it ran in many respects faster than a P4-2.8 I used to have and easily smokes older Willamette-based P4's... but that's not much of a surprise. The PIII uArch was always more efficient than NetBurst.

You probably wouldn't have much of an issue running 98SE on it. However, I chose XP because I'd have less of an issue with finding stable drivers and the i815e-b was recent enough that 98SE doesn't make full use of all it's chipset features as I recall.