I should think any slocket would work with Mendocino, yeah. Don't have to worry about FCPGA support either with those. Not sure about the AGP though.

I have very similar 440ex and not 440bx, yes the Celeron 533 Mendocino is the way to go, i can boot up even with Celeron 766 Coppermine, but it wont work normally, so i have older Celeron 533 (mmx).
Slot1 to Socket370 converter has jumpers. I use this for my ATi Rage Pro / XL mainly. If you afraid about AGP power consumption, then take GeForce2 MX or MX400 (MX400 comes also with 64MB VGA).

Intel 440 drivers and bios settings

marxveix wrote on 2026-04-02, 07:24:

I have very similar 440ex and not 440bx, yes the Celeron 533 Mendocino is the way to go, i can boot up even with Celeron 766 Coppermine, but it wont work normally, so i have older Celeron 533 (mmx).
Slot1 to Socket370 converter has jumpers. I use this for my ATi Rage Pro / XL mainly. If you afraid about AGP power consumption, then take GeForce2 MX or MX400 (MX400 comes also with 64MB VGA).

Intel 440 drivers and bios settings

Cool, my system came stock with an ati rage pro. I'm not sure what games show it in it's best light though, it seems to not be so well regarded.

I'm hopeful that with the celeron 533 and an appropriate GPU that I will be able to run Evil Twin (Ubisoft, 2001). That's probably my target game.

My system is P2/333, 440LX, 128MB RAM, 10GB HDD, ATI RAGE128, DVD-ROM, Yamaha YMF724 with SB-LINK sound and DVD/MPEG4 PCI decoder.
Works nice with DOS/W98 games of its era.

Rage Pro was a solid 1997 chip. It's certainly fine if you want the 1997 experience. You can find a massive amount of info about it if you search this forum.

I'd put the ideal video card for such a system, from the standpoint of maximum game compatibility for what you'd play on there, as probably a Voodoo 2 / Banshee / Voodoo 3 2000/3000. It doesn't matter if you get a PCI or AGP model.

Have an Intel AL440LX with a Celeron 433, no slotket, graphics cards are an AGP S3 Savage4 Xtreme 16 MB combined with Voodoo Graphics (I didn't know where to put the Savage, so...). Remembered when my brother had this board then and used it with a Rage Fury Maxx, so I wanted to test the board (but without the Maxx, because I don't have one). Unfortunately the board I have misses the onboard sound with OPL3 (was called something like Yamaha OPL3 sax...). I tried/benched some games. Quake 1 has good frame rates in 800x600 on the Savage, MDK2 could be playable. 3DMark99 default gave 3066 (GPU) / 3789 (CPU). But overall I think for DOS stuff it is most of the time too fast and for a bit more demanding games on Windows it hasn't enough power. Maybe with 533 and Geforce 2 MX or similar you're better of for Windows.

dukeofurl wrote on 2026-04-01, 16:54:

I recently got one of these inside an OEM PC. It currently has a pii 266 and a pci ati 3d rage pro. I'd like to upgrade it to increase the capabilities.

The board seems limited to a 66mhz fsb and as far as I've read, it is likely that it provides a non adjustable 2.0 v for cpus. I think the bios is also likely to be too early to support coppermine cpus, so I'm thinking the reasonable price best performance CPU I could run on this would be a 533 Mendocino celeron in a slocket. I'm new to messing around with slot 1, but my thought is I should just be able to get a cheap slocket without any jumpers as the CPU should take the same fsb and voltage that the motherboard already provides for the piis. Does that sound right?

I think upgrading the GPU would be very helpful for playing games. Conventional wisdom is that an agp GeForce card like a GeForce 2, would probably be the best bang for my buck, but as I research this board, I've seen comments that it is one of the earliest boards with an agp slot and may have issues with certain cards that draw more power than others. Nvidia was also cryptically mentioned in ancient forum posts as a manufacturer whose cards may have issues with the agp slot. Before I buy a card, does anyone have 2 cents on this matter? Should I just get a pci version to avoid this potential incompatibility?

GeForce2 GTS/Ti is equivalent to a GeForce4 MX with 128bit memory, which can be cheap because the market doesn't distinguish between 64bit and 128bit layouts.

I'm not an LX user. The only hardware compatibility issue I know of is voltages such as trying to force a 1.5v AGP card into a 3.3v AGP slot, and it doesn't fit - but that situation is more likely to emerge with DX9 cards. AFAIK, all GeForce2-4 have universal keying and support 3.3v AGP slots.

I'd guess the more likely compatibility issue is software drivers - which OS are you using?

Windows 98

there was something about 440LX + coppermine celeron not being able to initialize AGP card? but thats far outside officialy supported hardware.

dukeofurl wrote on 2026-04-02, 22:42:

Windows 98

That's the most widely supported OS and I'm not aware of any constraints. see see

Intel AL440LX
Best graphics card for AL440lx

Both threads suggest DX5/DX6 era AGP cards are more robust on i440LX, with some connection to power stability rather than voltage.

Lots of cards to choose from. Are you using CRT or LCD screen?

dukeofurl wrote on 2026-04-02, 15:59:

Cool, my system came stock with an ati rage pro. I'm not sure what games show it in it's best light though, it seems to not be so well regarded.

I'm hopeful that with the celeron 533 and an appropriate GPU that I will be able to run Evil Twin (Ubisoft, 2001). That's probably my target game.

There are many games to play with it Rage Pro, but you want probably faster one. Your board has both AGP and PCI? Geforce3 is also option, but it costs more than Geforce2 cards i think.
You can overlock cpu by tiny amount with 68/75fps if you are lucky. There are no SSE,it has MMX. For what it is,Celeron 533 is maximum and be happy with it, its faster than PII@66mhz.

GeForce3 adds DX8 orchestration that the current P2 would have to work hard for, and a lot of the other threads on this topic suggest GeForce3 is a no-go for electrical reasons.

MattRocks wrote on 2026-04-03, 09:51:

GeForce3 adds DX8 orchestration that a P2 would have to work harder for, and a lot of the other threads on this topic suggest GeForce3 is a no-go for electrical reasons.

Old Nvidia 7.76 dirvers cant be good with Geforce 2/3, like they are with slower AMD K6-II/III machines?

marxveix wrote on 2026-04-03, 09:55:

MattRocks wrote on 2026-04-03, 09:51:

GeForce3 adds DX8 orchestration that a P2 would have to work harder for, and a lot of the other threads on this topic suggest GeForce3 is a no-go for electrical reasons.

Old Nvidia 7.76 dirvers cant be good with Geforce 2/3, like they are with slower AMD K6-II/III machines?

GF2/3 use the same installer, but not the same drivers.

Even raising GF3 highlights multiple architectures over multiple generations that I group by power like this:

• Early AGP: i740, Riva128
• PCI/AGP transition 128 bit VPUs: Banshee, Voodoo3, TNT, TNT2 Pro
• Low power DX7 256bit GPUs: GeForce 256, GeForce2 MX
• High power DX7: GeForce2 GTS, GeForce2 Ti, GeForce 4MX
• DX8: GeForce3, GeForce4 Ti, Radeon 8500+

The threads linked above suggest problems on i440LX slots start with DX7 and relate to power delivery. The anecdotal evidence from Vogons suggests all those GPUs are over sensitive to something not defined in compatibility specifications. Notice also those are 256bit GPUs so maybe more sensitive to ripple or some such. As the evidence never seems to go deeper than anecdotes, it might be something silly like the GPU fan drawing power from the AGP slot and causing interference on the AGP signalling.

power problems are solvable by soldering a thick wire between ATX connector and AGP 3.3V pins. Back then some people even called it a "voodoo3 mod", including Gigabyte 😮
Re: Geforce4 Ti4200 - Black screen

Gigabyte: "On our old version M/Bs, for example GA-6BXE PCB 1.9, we used LVD regulator to generate 3.3V power for AGP card. Because Voodoo3 card drains too much power from 3.3V, the LVD regulator can't stand too much current and offer enough current to Voodoo3. On GA-6BXE PCB 2.0, we implement JP18 and JP19 connectors which directly connect the 3.3V from power-supply to AGP device. At beginning, the system uses 3.3V power from LVD regulator. When the regulator can't offer enough current for AGP card, the power-supply will provide the 3.3V power to AGP card immediately."

http://www.plasma-online.de/index.html?conten … gabyte_tnt.html

ASUS P2L97 & P2L97-S Fix for Riva-TNT Voltage http://www.plasma-online.de/index.html?conten … x_asus_tnt.html

Awesome - that post deserves the thumbs up reaction that we don't have!

I bought a GeForce2 MX. Curious to see if it will have issues.

dukeofurl wrote on 2026-04-01, 16:54:

I recently got one of these inside an OEM PC. It currently has a pii 266 and a pci ati 3d rage pro. I'd like to upgrade it to increase the capabilities.

The board seems limited to a 66mhz fsb and as far as I've read, it is likely that it provides a non adjustable 2.0 v for cpus. I think the bios is also likely to be too early to support coppermine cpus, so I'm thinking the reasonable price best performance CPU I could run on this would be a 533 Mendocino celeron in a slocket. I'm new to messing around with slot 1, but my thought is I should just be able to get a cheap slocket without any jumpers as the CPU should take the same fsb and voltage that the motherboard already provides for the piis. Does that sound right?

I think upgrading the GPU would be very helpful for playing games. Conventional wisdom is that an agp GeForce card like a GeForce 2, would probably be the best bang for my buck, but as I research this board, I've seen comments that it is one of the earliest boards with an agp slot and may have issues with certain cards that draw more power than others. Nvidia was also cryptically mentioned in ancient forum posts as a manufacturer whose cards may have issues with the agp slot. Before I buy a card, does anyone have 2 cents on this matter? Should I just get a pci version to avoid this potential incompatibility?

Basically the LX chipset is limited to 66 MHz. The EX chipset is the low cost variant with just 2 DIMM slots. Intel repeated that with the BX and ZX chipset for 100 MHz.
I use this for my Covington troll build.

Intel "Covington" Celeron 300 MHz
64 MB RAM (2x 32 MB)
ATI Rage 128
40 GB HDD
Sound Blaster 16
3Com 3c905
Windows 98 SE

I should add that I was able to increase the fsb with softfsb. According to the program, the machine will switch up to a max of an 80mhz fsb. I read about how this will probably give issues to peripherals due to the pci and agp buses running too fast, but when I tried it out for an hour or two, I didn't encounter any crashes or other unusual issues.