Hi! I have lurked the forums for a long time, now I am ready to post something about my project. No PC pictures for now... I am not sure if that makes a lot of sense for a bunch of standard PC parts in a generic white case...

Before getting into retro PC I was, and still am, into Commodore Amiga. But I am not here to talk about Amiga 😀

My current quest is to build the ultimate 440BX PC. This is to be my one and only go-to retro PC for DOS, Windows 98 and early XP stuff. Initially I wanted it to be just the ultimate Pentium III, but after playing around with the VIA Apollo Pro 133a chipset, I couldn't help thinking the 440BX is simply the better platform. Back in the day it was considered the absolute best, most stable platform. Yes it is missing the AGP divider to run AGP at a proper speed, but all cards I have thrown at it are fine with an overclocked bus anyway. Also the VIA chipset just didn't do it for me even if it has the proper dividers. I could never get it to run just right. I would always have some microstutters or other strangeness which I just don't want to deal with. Granted I did have the VIA MVP3 chipset back in the day which was pretty horrible and has tainted my opinion about VIA chipsets forever...

For old times sake I wanted an Abit board, as Abit was my favourite brand back in the day. I had a BH6 2.0 back then, running a 100MHZ FSB Slot 1 Pentium III-850, but now I wanted the ultimate Abit board, the BX133 RAID. I found one with what seems to be the original caps in pristine condition, pretty unbelievable that the caps are still good (enough?) but it is stable as a rock even at high FSB. I might still recap it at some point though. I put a Pentium III-S 1400 Tualatin on it after modding it, using the PCB that needs to be soldered to the bottom of the CPU. I experimented with graphics cards to land on an FX 5900 XT, installed a SATA-150 card to be able to run an SSD without IDE-SATA converters which are always trouble in my experience. I searched and found a total of 512MB CL2 RAM that runs stable at 145MHz, haven't tried any higher as I think running at 145MHz on a 440BX with AGP card is already a pretty insane overclock to the AGP bus. For DOS compatibility I installed an AWE64 gold into the ISA slot. However I have not tried a single DOS game on it yet. As far as Windows XP goes, it runs games up to about 2003 pretty well. Need for Speed Most Wanted 2005 is what I really wanted to achieve smooth gameplay with, but that is a bridge too far as I was already afraid of. But that game is still good to play on modern PC for me.

I think hardware wise I am happy for now and I will do some more stability tests to see if 140MHz FSB is good for everyday use. Yeah I want a bit of an overclock, just because I can, but nothing too crazy. If all is stable, I will start to configure the OS'es and stuff.

So that's where I am at now, thanks for reading, any questions or suggestions then let me know!