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question about old P3 duallie boards, Intel chipsets

C

cdoasis

Junior Member
Hey everyone,

I've been in the mood lately for a different type of build--a best-of-the-best of 1999 PC. Don't ask--it's been interesting me lately.

I remember the Intel 440BX chipset being very fast and reliable in its day, and the 440GX being the same thing except it supports 2GB of RAM over 1GB.

Anyway, my question is, does anyone know of or is there a way of finding out if any company ever produced a motherboard that has the 440GX chipset, 133mhz FSB, and can support dual Slot 1 P3's up to 1Ghz (or more)?

I've searched high and low and found plenty of good looking old boards; many are either duallies with 440GX but only 100mhz FSB (like the Supermicro boards), or they'll have the coveted 133mhz FSB but can only support 1GB of RAM because of the 440BX chipset.

Any ideas? 🙂


ninja edit: On the flip side, I've also considered ditching the notion of a 440GX, and searching for one of these babies:
http://tyan.com/archive/products/html/thunder2500.html
 
oops, sorry, forgot ebay links not allowed. I thought this was "for sale/trade" forums only?

Anyway, do a search on ebay for 'Tyan Thunder 2500' and you will come across it.
And if you are wondering, I'm NOT the one selling it🙂.
 
Neither GX nor BX natively support the 133MHz bus. There were some with limited overclocking that would allow it, but it also overclocks the AGP from 66 to ~88MHz and some ran PCI at 44MHz.

The bad thing about the Thunder 2500 and most older Serverworks boards is the IDE was pretty lackluster in performance. I also remember issues with AGP, but it's been a while so I can't really remember what they were. It does have good spacing between the slots, a lot of those dual slot one boards wouldn't allow much more than the stock Intel heatsinks.
 
The IDE on the Thunder 2500 is basically ATA33, which sucks. Thats why if you can find a good IDE controller to put on those PCI slots, then the better. The built-in ones you can use for CD/DVD drives. Or why not use SCSI? You should be able to find a few 18gig, 68-pin 15krpm Ultra LVD 160 SCSI drives for cheap.

As far as the AGP is concerned, there were problems especially with ATI cards but things got better with updated chipset and card drivers as well as BIOS updates.
 
Thanks guys!

Randum, I actually already saw that Thunder on ebay 🙂 Just wasn't sure if that's what I should choose.
You're right about the ATA33, I realize that, so I was already planning the PCI card route.

http://tyan.com/archive/products/html/thunder2500.html
I guess the answer is a no-brainer then--the Thunder 2500 looks sweet, it's 133Mhz FSB, and supports a ton of RAM. That should blow any other P3 duallie board out of the water, unless you guys say otherwise or know something I don't.

The ServerWorks chipsets, are they pretty reliable? That's why I was considering BX's in the first place.

Widefault, about replacing the HSF, did you mean to say they didn't have much space between slots? I was hoping to use one of those tank HSFs!
 
Do you really want to stick to 'circa 1999'? If you want to stick with PIII, you can go with dual socket 370. If the mobo supports Tualatin CPU's, then you can go with two PIII 1.4ghz Tually core, with 133fsb and 512k cache.

If you want to stick with dual Slot-1, there are dual Slot 1 mobos based on the Intel 820 chipset. It supports 133fsb as well. The only problem is it uses RDRAM (although you can probably get cheap RDRAM sticks used) and max memory is only 1 gig. Pluses are AGP 4x, ATA66.
 
I agree with the s370 idea. Running dual Tualatins would be a pretty nice retro setup even though it is more circa 2001, a lot better than the early P4s
 
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