WTB: USA - Socket 370 board with Tualatin PIII-S 1.4/512/1.45V support or adapter

[retro-pc_user]

Howdy. I'm currently looking for a Socket 370 board that supports PIII-S 1.4/512/1.45V Tualatin processors that has AGP (no i810 chips, please). I already have said CPU, except for a board.

Another piece I'm looking for is a Socket 370 adapter that supports Tualatin CPUs for boards that only support up to a certain speed. Either an Upgradeware Technology 370GU or PowerLeap PL-Neo/T would be fine for my Shuttle AV18E2 (AV18V31) VIA Apollo Pro 133T (supports Tualatin 1.4GHz Celeron, not PIII-S anything), or a Slotket adapter for Tualatin CPUs for an ASUS P2B-F board (i440BX), which will get a recap in the future.

[Unknown_K]

Does the motherboard have to have AGP? I have some Tyan S2518 dual socket 370 motherboards forsale in the off topic forsale thread.

[retro-pc_user]

Yes. The board must have AGP as PCI video cards slow down if more than 1 PCI slot is populated, plus, no way to disable onboard graphics with a PCI card.

[Unknown_K]

I have Tyan S1854 Trinity 400 Socket 370/Slot 1 board that should work with a slot 1 adapter.

[Agent Orange]

Yes. The board must have AGP as PCI video cards slow down if more than 1 PCI slot is populated, plus, no way to disable onboard graphics with a PCI card.

I used to have a FIC 370 mobo (1.4 Tualatin) but with the 810 Intel chipset that you don't want, all PCI and no AGP. The board had onboard video which could be toggled on/off in the BIOS. I never did any benchmarks but I used it as a tweener for a long time. It had a Zotac 610 PCI video card running XP and DOS with no problems. I'm puzzled (doesn't take much these days) as to why you are insisting on a AGP version only. Another member here on the forum has that board now and he may pop in with some currently info for you if he still has it.

[GiGaBiTe]

I'm puzzled (doesn't take much these days) as to why you are insisting on a AGP version only.

Because even the slowest variant of AGP is twice as fast as PCI and it's a dedicated bus that doesn't have to share bandwidth with any other devices.

[Agent Orange]

Because even the slowest variant of AGP is twice as fast as PCI and it's a dedicated bus that doesn't have to share bandwidth with any other devices.

True - a little faster but I think 2 x is a stretch.
https://pc.net/helpcenter/answers/di...en_agp_and_pci
If overall speed is the main concern, I'd be going with a P4 or some AMD K (working on one now) variety. As long as I had that PIII I never used it as a gamer. This is not to say you wouldn't be satisfied, but there are better options IMHO. But realistically, if all of the parts suddenly drop in your lap, that's what you do.

[GiGaBiTe]

True - a little faster but I think 2 x is a stretch.

No, it's not a stretch.

Bog standard PCI which was used on 99% of consumer boards ran at 33 MHz and had 133 MB/s of shared bandwidth. AGP 1x (the first variant of AGP) ran at 66 MHz and had 266 MB/s of dedicated bandwidth. In reality, you could expect significantly less available bandwidth on the PCI bus due to other bandwidth heavy devices like disk controllers. AGP had no such restriction, it communicated directly with the north bridge.

AGP 2x - 533 MB/s
AGP 4x - 1066 MB/s
AGP 8x - 2133 MB/s

There was a 66 MHz variant of PCI which could match AGP 1x, but it was rarely used outside high end servers and workstations and required card support for it to negotiate a 66 MHz link to the PCI bus controller. PCI-X could match and exceed AGP bandwidth in later 533 MHz variants, but these were rarely implemented on any motherboard because a 64 bit high speed parallel drop bus was an engineering nightmare to lay out on a board and have it work reliably. By the time PCI-X reached these speeds, PCIe had already been introduced which could match the performance with a drastically simplified serial bus. There were very few video cards that were made specifically for PCI-X because there was virtually no use case for them. PCI-X was mostly engineered for high bandwidth network and disk controller devices.

[Agent Orange]

No, it's not a stretch.

It's all in the eye of the beholder. You can toss up AGP specs but for the casual user of the day, it would be hard to discern any great advantage, benchmarks notwithstanding. I think this is especially true of the average PIII's; i.e., the video card isn't going to make or break that system. Just my opinion as I've been there and done that.

[Unknown_K]

He sounds like a gamer looking for a gamer board but doesn't list what he is really looking for. AGP would be needed for that.