P3B-F imo 😀

P3B-F
It can do everything and more than the other boards can, except for the 133FSB support of the 4100, but personally I still like 440BXs better than i815s. It's mitigated by the overclockability of the P3B-F, so you can likely run a 133FSB CPU in that anyway.
The MicroATX board can use a smaller case, true, but IMO the bigger case for the P3B-F would be worth it for the ability to put anything you want into it.
But really just use whatever you find most appealing. If the P3B-F isn't calling to you, it's a well known board with good resale value so it's a good choice to sell.

P3B-F thirded!

What rev. board you have? I've seen variants with one ISA slot (later rev I guess) and two slots.

Asus P3B-F with the ISA. Wish mine had the ISA.

Seanix... ew, frankly. Have had P1, Celeron 600, P4 1.6. The view I took away is they were a cheesy outfit that liked to slap "Made In Canada" decals all over the imported parts, and push names like "Patriot" a lot. Each box was as meanly spec'd as possible. Company seemed to get by on government contracts.

They did have interesting heavy-duty steel cases if you're into that sort of thing. And their ATX versions were sized to fit where an AT had vacated.

But other than the cases Seanix is "least interesting to even open" if I was sniffing though cast-offs.

Another for the Asus, But I admit Asus and BX motherboards are in my top 10 favourite things, so very biased!
I agree with Shamino though. If the Seanix is more interesting for you then build a system on that, it's definitely different.
And if doesn't work out You can just move everything across to the Asus anyway

Another for the Asus - I've not used that specific board, but I've never had bad luck with Asus over the years.

I have an asus P2BF the little brother to this board, its also SLOT 1 BX, I have a PIII 700 in currently a GF2 Pro64mb and an SB16 CT1740.
An annoying mobo, the thing loves to assign IRQ's wrong despite telling it to use a specific IRQ in the bios, sometimes it will just change its PCI IRQ assignments for no reason too after a reboot\restart, I have the last available bios on it. Very annoying if you have it fully loaded, As you can see I have it bare min now, Just a Vcard and an NON PNP ISA sound card. I actually got fed up with it constantly changing the IRQ's sometimes taking over the Soundcards despite ISA rules in the bios stating it can't take that IRQ.

Once you get it working tho its a stable board, with ISA slots.
I dunno if they fixed that issue in the 3bf that everyone seems to love, I hope so 🤣 .

I think I'll go with the P3B-F then. Now, the only Slot 1 CPUs I have are Pentium IIs, but I do have a few Socket 370 P3s as well as the aforementioned Tualeron.What would you guys suggest for a slocket?

Also, what are some AGP cards that can tolerate being run at 133MHz FSB? I know if you set a BX board to run at 133MHz, that it will overclock the AGP bus, which a lot of cards can't tolerate. The only semi-decent cards I have around are a couple of Geforce 2 MXes, and some Radeon 9000s. I have a few Dell OEM Geforce FX 5200s, but I'm junking those since they seem to be more trouble than they're worth. Not only that, but I'm not going to be playing any DX9 games on this thing.

Check the manual specific to your board version, but in jumper mode you ought to be able to set AGP at 1x or 2/3x.

(And if I may, can I add my cards to this "will it blend?" question?: TNT2 Vanta & Radeon VE. thx)

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

Also, what are some AGP cards that can tolerate being run at 133MHz FSB? I know if you set a BX board to run at 133MHz, that it will overclock the AGP bus, which a lot of cards can't tolerate. The only semi-decent cards I have around are a couple of Geforce 2 MXes, and some Radeon 9000s. I have a few Dell OEM Geforce FX 5200s, but I'm junking those since they seem to be more trouble than they're worth. Not only that, but I'm not going to be playing any DX9 games on this thing.

Based on the web discussions I remember reading, it seemed the Geforce2-3 basically always worked at 89MHz, the Geforce4 usually did, and the Geforce5+ usually didn't. I'm not sure about the Geforce 256 or older models.
I don't know much about the ATI side but people talked about them being less tolerant. I do remember people saying the Radeon 8500 could handle it, but I've never tried it. I don't know how the 9000 would do.

My personal experiences with BX 133MHz, AGP 89MHz were with 3 different machines.
Asus P2B-F 800/133 Geforce2 MX Hercules (1 year before sold)
Asus P2B-F 800/133 Ti4200 128MB AOpen (about 1 year used)
ABit BX133-RAID 866/133 Geforce3 early model unknown mfg (about 2-3 years used, and they played Sims 2 on it a lot)

Two of those went to relatives, one was mine. In that time there was never any problem with those machines, and the video cards never died. I forgot I was even overclocking them, and in one instance got real confused when some other, newer video card wouldn't POST (I think that was an FX5700).
Both of the P2B-F builds actually got tested at 140MHz, AGP 93MHz, but I didn't do any 3D stress in that configuration.

Fine, I'm getting a bit tired of this AGP overclock problem so many is talking about with no facts to document it with. This weekend I'll test all my AGP cards (and I have alot) in my ASUS P3B-F Tualatin 1400mhz (FSB at 133mhz). I've never had any problems I can remember. Normally a FX5950 Ultra is installed in this system.

Shamino Does your P2BF boards do what the one I have does?
Swap IRQ's around for no reason after a reboot or cold boot?
I have the last beta bios loaded for it, 1014f.
Its really annoying when you want to use the system fully loaded down.

I was digging through more of my stuff earlier on, and I seem to have lost my tualeron. Oh well, I still have a few high-clocked Coppermines, and if I'm really desperate I can steal one of the 1GHz Coppemines from my dual P3 box, but I'd rather not.

I also managed to stumble across a card I believe to be a non-OEM FX5200. I'll have to test it in another system to identify it though.

I'm just curious: what's wrong with the OEM 5200s? Are they just dinky 64bit cards or is there something more nefarious?

AlphaWing wrote:

Shamino Does your P2BF boards do what the one I have does? Swap IRQ's around for no reason after a reboot or cold boot? I have […]
Show full quote

Shamino Does your P2BF boards do what the one I have does?
Swap IRQ's around for no reason after a reboot or cold boot?
I have the last beta bios loaded for it, 1014f.
Its really annoying when you want to use the system fully loaded down.

It's been a few years since I was using it, but I don't remember having any issues like that. I don't think I was manually setting any resources though, so I probably wouldn't have noticed. I didn't have things randomly breaking, anyway.
I was using that same BIOS. The cards I had were an AGP Nvidia video card, an ATI PCI TV tuner, a PCI Promise ATA100 card, a PCI Adaptec 2930 SCSI card, and an ISA SB AWE32.. I think that was all of it.
I do remember needing to move things around a bit until my video captures worked smoothly. Drive cabling for sure, but I don't remember if that also included needing to swap any card positions around.

obobskivich wrote:

I'm just curious: what's wrong with the OEM 5200s? Are they just dinky 64bit cards or is there something more nefarious?

They are dinky 64-bit cards, and back when I didn't know any better, I ran them in a bunch of P4 systems because my friends and I were able to scavenge them from some old Dells from the local schools. I thought they were an upgrade over the Radeon 9000s I used before, but they're not. Crap drivers, crap DX9 support, crap performance even in games they should be able to tolerate like MOHAA... I got better performance out of a PCI FX5500. 🤣

I've never had the chance to use any of the higher-end FX cards, but from my experience with the FX 5200/5500, they just tend to suck.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

They are dinky 64-bit cards, and back when I didn't know any better, I ran them in a bunch of P4 systems because my friends and I were able to scavenge them from some old Dells from the local schools. I thought they were an upgrade over the Radeon 9000s I used before, but they're not. Crap drivers, crap DX9 support, crap performance even in games they should be able to tolerate like MOHAA... I got better performance out of a PCI FX5500. 🤣

I've never had the chance to use any of the higher-end FX cards, but from my experience with the FX 5200/5500, they just tend to suck.

Yep - sounds like 64-bit FX 5200 to me. 🤣

The "real" FX 5200 (AGP, 128-bit, etc) will perform a little better than MX 440 but will do PS, higher-end cards are more capable and nicer. On drivers being bad - did you go with "newest possible" or did you pick something from 2003-2005? The newest control panel drivers are kind of superfluous with FX, whereas the older drivers tend to give you a good range of options/features. 😀

But yeah, I would 110% agree with recycling those cards. If you want an FX, get a 5600, 5700, or 5900XT. I don't know about running them with the AGP bus OC'd, but vetz's post seems to indicate it isn't a problem with a 5950 (5700 is most similar to that), or you could just run without the 133FSB (if you're going with a Coppermine it'll want to default 100FSB). 😊

On MOHAA I don't ever remember trying it on an FX card, but I know it worked well on a 6600 Vanilla, so I'd expect the upper-tier FX cards to do alright with it as well.

Nvidia should be charged with fraud with the way they released the FX 5200. That card is absolutely terrible.

vetz wrote:

Fine, I'm getting a bit tired of this AGP overclock problem so many is talking about with no facts to document it with. This weekend I'll test all my AGP cards (and I have alot) in my ASUS P3B-F Tualatin 1400mhz (FSB at 133mhz). I've never had any problems I can remember. Normally a FX5950 Ultra is installed in this system.

Uber interesting. Will hold out on buying a Tualeron 1400 and maybe buy an actual Tualatin 1400. Been thinking of installing one on a P3B-F.