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Intel slot 1 agp port differences

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First post, by sydres

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Currently I have two slot 1 boards 440ex with a 400mhz celeron and a 440bx with a pentium 3 650mhz. When I received the 440ex (compaq deskpro board) it came with a matrox g1o0 card which appears to be dead so I started digging through my collection trying various cards, mostly known working cards. One card an Elsa Erazor iii a32 which would not work at all on the 440bx board worked perfectly on the 440ex board. I thought this was interesting so I tried a Number9 sr9 that produced sparkles on the 440bx that I figured was from bad ram, on the 440ex it seems to work perfectly.
To be fair I haven't done any significant testing to see if other issues arise but it's on my list.
Both motherboards agp slots are 3.3v keyed and 2x, both cards are 3.3v and 1.5v keyed. Other than the 440ex being a low cost chipset and running at 66mhz which shouldn't effect the slot how do these have that different compatibility.

Reply 1 of 2, by dionb

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Some very early AGP boards were struggling to deliver the specified current on their voltage lines. the FIC PA-2013, for example, was notorious for not being able to run a Voodoo3, for example. That could be the case on your boards. Also, it's possible that the VRMs on your boards are not delivering the correct voltage under load due to tired capacitors.

There shouldn't be a difference in terms of specs between AGP on i440EX and i440BX, but there can be differences in implementation of those specs.

Reply 2 of 2, by sydres

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The 440bx runs my voodoo3 normally and has ran up to a GeForce 4 mx440- 8x without any issues but it refuses to post with the Elsa Erazor tnt2,and with the number 9 savage 4 the output is corrupted on LCD and CRT. Both cards work appear to work perfectly on the 440ex.
My 440bx is a Fujitsu Siemens board has been awesome other than not being able to change CPU because of microcode and the agp thing. I haven't yet spent enough time with the 440ex because I need an atx cable extension for the little PSU in an "enormous" mid tower case I put it in.
Obviously I'm going to have to test further on these and I have a 440lx with a pentium ii on the way for further comparison.

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