The i815 and i820 (heralded as "the best" by intel with the flagship 1.0 GHz PIII) deserve a spot as well as the Via Apollo Pro 266 DDR chipset.

I think only a few boards carry an ALI/ULI PIII chipset, but I've never seen one of these elusive boards in the wild.

I've tested the PIII chipsets available to me with the 1,4 Tualatin-S. It will be interesting to see how much the Coppermine 1Ghz fares. Enjoy the benching!

flupke11 wrote on 2021-04-23, 13:55:

The i815 and i820 (heralded as "the best" by intel with the flagship 1.0 GHz PIII) deserve a spot as well as the Via Apollo Pro 266 DDR chipset.

I think only a few boards carry an ALI/ULI PIII chipset, but I've never seen one of these elusive boards in the wild.

I've tested the PIII chipsets available to me with the 1,4 Tualatin-S. It will be interesting to see how much the Coppermine 1Ghz fares. Enjoy the benching!

I've always considered the i815 chipset a step back compared to the evergreen 440bx, that's why I have no motherboard with this chipset. The apollo pro 266 ddr could be interesting, unlucky again I lack a proper motherboard 😀

Correct me if I'm wrong but 440BX had problems when bus was faster that 100MHz? I had P2B, P3B and some others.. running in around 150MHz always ended in corrupted files in WIN 98, WIN ME.

Using TUSL2-C with 815(p?) had not problems..

sacri wrote on 2021-04-23, 15:59:

Correct me if I'm wrong but 440BX had problems when bus was faster that 100MHz? I had P2B, P3B and some others.. running in around 150MHz always ended in corrupted files in WIN 98, WIN ME.

Using TUSL2-C with 815(p?) had not problems..

Every BX board I have works fine at 133 mhz (and except for the first released motherboards, from what I read almost every bx board works at 133), the main quirk is that it lacks the proper agp divider, that could give issues with older video cards (but also give higher perfomance).
The pci has the right frequency at 133 mhz.
I never pushed my motherboards to 150, i'm not a fan of higher overclocks.

To run at 133 MHz the PCI bus would have to be PCI-X.

majestyk wrote on 2021-04-23, 20:18:

To run at 133 MHz the PCI bus would have to be PCI-X.

I believe he's talking about the FSB being 133MHz and the board having the correct divider to run PCI at the usual 33MHz.

Yes

yep sorry I meant 33 mhz for pci bus 😀

So here are the results:

What to say.
I'm really undecided which motherboards to keep.
The QDI has a crippled dos performance (there is another topic talking about it here on vogons, apparently no solution, the culprit I suppose it's the Via chipset), while in windows it's not so bad (this motherboard also gave me some issues with the 3dfx v2 sli it's another known problem).
The ECS P6S5AT which is one of the best motherboards thanks to the ddr support, prove that the pentium 3 hardly needs more memory bandwidth as stating during the review of esotical chipset back in time.
About the 440bx chipset there is no a clear winner, but there is a clear looser, the Gigabyte is always a bit slower compared to Abit and MSI, the only advantage is that it has 3 isa slots.
I will try to get a 815 chipset to add it to the comparison.

Nemo1985 wrote on 2021-04-24, 18:45:

So here are the results: photo_2021-04-24_20-35-13.jpg […]
Show full quote

So here are the results:
photo_2021-04-24_20-35-13.jpg

What to say.
I'm really undecided which motherboards to keep.
The QDI has a crippled dos performance (there is another topic talking about it here on vogons, apparently no solution, the culprit I suppose it's the Via chipset), while in windows it's not so bad (this motherboard also gave me some issues with the 3dfx v2 sli it's another known problem).
The ECS P6S5AT which is one of the best motherboards thanks to the ddr support, prove that the pentium 3 hardly needs more memory bandwidth as stating during the review of esotical chipset back in time.
About the 440bx chipset there is no a clear winner, but there is a clear looser, the Gigabyte is always a bit slower compared to Abit and MSI, the only advantage is that it has 3 isa slots.
I will try to get a 815 chipset to add it to the comparison.

BE6-2, CUBX and BX master are all legendary and up there when it comes to best BX boards ever.
And while I usually go for ABIT when I can, the CUBX is cool because S370 BX boards are kinda rare (and Coppermines in S370 are not).
The DDR board is a no brainer IMO, deserves a spot in any collection.

Just my €0.02 =)

If you can get good versions of p2b-d or p3f and work them up to 1575/150 with Tualatins, that will simplify your selection process.
For reference in dos Quake1 320x200 300fps, Doom 200fps.
With p2b-d quake3 1024x768 260fps.

BUMP, after 2 years let's update the comparison.
In a very unsuccessful topic, I briefly explained the difference between Abit ST6 against Asus TUSL2-C, then I decided to take them out from closet again and do the very same testing (with same configuration) as the other motherboards.
Next step if I will be ever able to find them will be to try the Intel i820 and the Apollo pro 266 motherboards.
Here is the updated chart: