Repo Man11 wrote on 2024-06-07, 00:36:
Finding a driver that works with the card rather than a BIOS that works with the driver was an interesting solution, very good.
I was wondering about the speed; my Soyo 7VMA-B has the same chipset with the 686B southbridge and with a Startech adapter and an SSD, it also had very good drive speed. To my surprise, it was measurably faster with Windows 2000 and NTFS (not by much, but it did show in ATTO) than it was with Win98.
I noticed on the P3 boards that not just the chipset but the manufacturer seems to make a big difference. I originally did this build with a DFI CA64-EC with p3 1GHZ VIA 694X and my memory speed benchmarks were on par with PC100 even though my FSB was 133. After upgrading the motherboard to a Shuttle AV18 v4.1 which is a VIA 694T chipset it was night and day. 3d mark went from 5250 to 7200 with my memory benchmarks at least being in the PC133 range but not as good as some intel's which was to be expected. All other parts were equal. I did the upgrade after reading how some motherboards had bad performance even with the same chipset. I didn't think a chipset could make that big of a difference. I thought the 694T over the 694X just added Tualatin support. Since my new board supported Tualatin I figured why not add one and now 3d Mark 2001se is 9750. I'm pretty happy now. I went with via because I wanted an ISA slot for a sound card. I'm trying to build a computer that can handle pretty much everything up to XP where my main rig can take over. I think this is about as good as it gets if you want compatibility on the video card and an ISA slot.
My full specs are
Shuttle AV18 v4.1
Intel Tualatin 1.4
ATI Radeon 9800 XT 256MB
Creative Voodoo 2 8MB upgraded to 12MB. I soldered on the ram chips. Purchased a 12MB card and received 8MB. Lucked out and the person refunded me like $100 so paid $120 for card and $20 for the memory.
1GB PC 133 CAS 3
Sound Blaster Awe 64 Value with 32MB ram upgrade
Startech GB network adapter
Cheap Amazon 128GB Verbatim ssd
Promise S150 TX4 debating if I even need it. I could do raid 0 to make it feel like there was a reason for adding it.
Originally I had one of those SIS Sata controllers which worked great on the DFI motherboard after flashing it to IDE. It corrupts disks with the Shuttle so it seems to just be incompatible for sure in some systems.
2 PCI slots left that can be used for SLI and a second sound card for OPL3 if I thought that would matter.
Only thing I don't like about this motherboard is I would rather have one with the Audio Modem Riser AMR slot between the AGP and PCI instead of next to the ISA slot. That would give you a gap between the GPU heatsink and first PCI card. Currently I'm just leaving the first slot open. If I wanted to use all the slots I could put the promise or network card in there which will only block 20% of the heatsink but still.
