Wow so much effort!

Thanks for sharing...

A crumbled cpu die surely isn't a good thing! I guess that's why most cpus come with these heat spreaders. The crumbeling likely comes from mounting the cooler.

Great scaling with clock speed!

Crumbling is indeed usually caused by mounting and unmounting a cooler. It doesn't have to mean the cpu is broken, theres an edge of unused die material surrounding the die itself (atleast there is with Athlon XP).

I'm not sure if using an extra adapter would make overclocking more susceptible to instability

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Wow so much effort!

Hehe, yeah it was quite time consuming. Please note - I've cleaned up the links section.

Tetrium wrote:

Crumbling is indeed usually caused by mounting and unmounting a cooler. It doesn't have to mean the cpu is broken, theres an edge of unused die material surrounding the die itself (atleast there is with Athlon XP).

Do you know if a "crumbling" CPU die edge can be caused by other factors, such as "over volting" a CPU?

Unfortunately, several images in the original post had broken links. These have been fixed now. These images show the hardware being tested.

I like that powerleap adapter!

Very nice overclock on the Coppermine! I am ATM also experimenting with overclocking Coppermine chips to see how far they go past 1ghz.

So far I managed to get a 1000Mhz cD0 to 150Mhz fsb for a clock speed of 1125Mhz, using 2.05v. Previous to this my max stable oc was 1050Mhz at 150fsb using a 933Mhz cD0, at 1.85v. Since my motherboard (AX33) does not have any voltage options, I used Anders Petersen's excellent Coppermine wire-mod guide on overclockers.com.

This is the max my mobo can do from bios options. Maybe I'll try cpufsb or some other windows clock generator to push higher. I've seen many Coppermines pushed to 1.125ghz, but 1.24ghz puts you in the epic category.

Why only a Celeron?

sgt76 wrote:

Very nice overclock on the Coppermine! ... ... 1.24ghz puts you in the epic category.

Thanks a lot! 😀 OC'ing is a lot of fun - good luck with your experiments.

TheLazy1 wrote:

Why only a Celeron?

I think that a 1.4 GHz Celeron 100 FSB CPU is the fastest you can use in a Powerleap adapter, for use in an i440BX chipset based mobo.

Yep, I love my Powerleap adapter. My best retro machine has one. 😁
Pair of Retro PC's

retro games 100 wrote:

you can build an excellent retro machine.

Stupid question, perhaps, but what exactly makes this so excellent? Does the i440BX chipset do something that isn't possible on a socket 370 motherboard? Wouldn't you want a retro machine to go slower?

Jorpho wrote:

retro games 100 wrote:

you can build an excellent retro machine.

Stupid question, perhaps, but what exactly makes this so excellent? Does the i440BX chipset do something that isn't possible on a socket 370 motherboard? Wouldn't you want a retro machine to go slower?

BX = Intel chipset with ISA slots

The next Intel chipset with a s370 I think was the i815EP which had no ISA slots. You can get a non-Intel S370 (like VIA), but I'd take a i440BX with a Powerleap over a native S370 VIA motherboard any day.

valnar wrote:

BX = Intel chipset with ISA slots

So... It's good because it's fast, has ISA slots, and doesn't use a VIA chipset? But like I said, wouldn't most things that could take special advantage of an ISA card be designed for a lower CPU speed?

The next Intel chipset with a s370 I think was the i815EP which had no ISA slots. You can get a non-Intel S370 (like VIA), but I'd take a i440BX with a Powerleap over a native S370 VIA motherboard any day.

A quick Google suggests there are s370 boards with the 440ZX chipset.

It's worth noting that it takes a Coppermine Pentium 3 to smooth out the frame rates in some very demanding DOS games. It's also worth noting that there aren't hundreds of speed sensitive DOS games. 😉 Typically, an i440BX chipset based mobo can accept a "slow" Celeron 266MHz or Pentium 2 233MHZ, up to a faster Coppermine Pentium 3 800MHz or 1 GHz (as examples), and beyond that using a fast Powerleap adapter. You've got a useful range of speeds there, to play both DOS and Win9x games. There's an extremely long thread on Vogons here, discussing the topic of underclocked Pentium 2 CPUs, for use in these types of mobos. So it's possible to extend this speed range even further, by having an even slower P2 CPU to use for old DOS games.

A i440BX mobo is a good "all rounder", and it's one that I would recommend if you only want one retro machine. Get one of these, and combine it with DOSBox on a modern machine to play the relatively low number of speed sensitive games which may be in your games collection, which don't work perfectly on the i440BX retro box, and you've covered a lot of ground using a small amount of hardware.

retro games 100 wrote:

It's worth noting that it takes a Coppermine Pentium 3 to smooth out the frame rates in some very demanding DOS games. It's also worth noting that there aren't hundreds of speed sensitive DOS games. 😉

Surely there aren't hundreds of those very demanding DOS games either? Whatever, I'll shut up now.

Jorpho wrote:

So... It's good because it's fast, has ISA slots, and doesn't use a VIA chipset? But like I said, wouldn't most things that cou […]
Show full quote

valnar wrote:

BX = Intel chipset with ISA slots

So... It's good because it's fast, has ISA slots, and doesn't use a VIA chipset? But like I said, wouldn't most things that could take special advantage of an ISA card be designed for a lower CPU speed?

The next Intel chipset with a s370 I think was the i815EP which had no ISA slots. You can get a non-Intel S370 (like VIA), but I'd take a i440BX with a Powerleap over a native S370 VIA motherboard any day.

A quick Google suggests there are s370 boards with the 440ZX chipset.

The BX is good because it's extremely compatible and stable. The same cannot be said of a VIA platform.

I never saw a 440ZX before. But another google search suggests it is a watered down version of the BX.

Jorpho wrote:

retro games 100 wrote:

It's worth noting that it takes a Coppermine Pentium 3 to smooth out the frame rates in some very demanding DOS games. It's also worth noting that there aren't hundreds of speed sensitive DOS games. 😉

Surely there aren't hundreds of those very demanding DOS games either?

Hehe, that's a good point, you're right! But it's nice to play any 3D DOS game, knowing that your CPU isn't going to be any kind of bottleneck, and that your FPS rate is maxed out, and so providing the best looking performance.

Whichever way you look at building a retro PC, it's hard to cover all bases using one machine. I'm suggesting that an i440BX mobo can cover most options. If you decide that covering the speed sensitive games is more important, and that DOSBox is not a satisfactory solution, then your best option is to get a 386 or 486 mobo. But if you do, then the SVGA DOS performance won't be as good as the i440BX system, and Windows 95/98/etc won't look too good either.

Haven't you guys run into the pickyness of 440BX PCI yet? Watch out for those 3Com NICs, PCI IDE cards and/or sound cards.

swaaye wrote:

Haven't you guys run into the pickyness of 440BX PCI yet? Watch out for those 3Com NICs, PCI IDE cards and/or sound cards. They tend to get very angry if they are sharing an IRQ and on 440BX there are only 4 INTs to go around, I believe (meaning only 2 PCI slots are truly separate).

That's really interesting. I haven't come across this problem, because I've not used any NICs, and also I haven't used any PCI IDE cards either. I've tested PCI IDE cards on a 440BX mobo, but never used one on a daily basis. As far as sound cards are concerned, I've only used one PCI based sound card in conjunction with either a PCI or AGP graphics card, and luckily not encountered any problems. (I use ISA sound cards, but I don't tend to install their Windows based drivers.)

My Abit BF6 is very sensitive about which card goes where. It's probably partly the mobo's fault but is undoubtedly also related to the limitations of the 440BX PCI bus.

From BF6 manual: (a great manual btw)

! PCI slot 1 shares IRQ signals with the AGP slot. ! PCI slot 2 shares IRQ signals with the PCI slot 5 ! PCI slot 3 shares IR […]
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! PCI slot 1 shares IRQ signals with the AGP slot.
! PCI slot 2 shares IRQ signals with the PCI slot 5
! PCI slot 3 shares IRQ signals with the PCI slot 6.
! PCI slot 4 shares IRQ signals with the USB controller.
! If you want to install two PCI cards into those PCI slots that share IRQ each other at
the same time, you have to make sure your OS and PCI devices’ driver support IRQ
sharing.
! PCI slot 6 is fully bus slave. Thus you can’t install a PCI card that needs to use bus
master signals into PCI slot 6. But you can install voodoo 1 or 2 that doesn’t need to
use bus aster signals into PCI slot 6.

You see that it quickly becomes difficult to keep cards from sharing an IRQ. But in my experience this isn't always the cause of problems. For example, I've found that sound cards seem to work best on slot 4 which shares with USB! Also, the board seems to be less picky when using Windows XP and I've attributed that to better PCI management in some way.

440BX isn't really different from other old chipsets in this way though. It's not worse than its predecessors or anything like that.

An interesting thing here is that the BF6 and BE6-II are the same board but the BF6 gets a 6th PCI slot whereas the BE6-II has a Highpoint UDMA chip.