Slot versus Socket

quozl

Hi guys,
i live with ages old technology so I havent yet had a slot 1 motherboard. I'm thinking of buying an abit bx mb and a slow p3 chip. But I want my motherboard to be able to take a decent chip in a year or so when they're old technology.
Should I get slot 1 or a socket board? Any problems with abit? And how can I tell from the mb name whats the fastest chip it will likely support (ie will it support a 933+ intel).
Thanks,
Greg
Nobody suggest an athlon chip/mb combo please. I really do want to buy an oldish chip, but decent mb

SickBoy

Get a slot board.
Get an ABit BE6.
Get a sloket converter if you want to use socket CPU's.

Chubby

Socket and slot1 don't really matter at this stage. FC-PGA socket is the standard now for intel chips but you can run any fc-pga chips on a slot1 motherboard with a socket to slot1 adapter. And any new-ish motherboards can support up to 933+mhz cpus.

Why do you want a BX mb instead of the newer chipsets like via apollo 133a or the intel thingy? You know with a BX mob you will be stuck on 100mhz fsb unless you want to overclock you agp bus which might cause stability problems.

What's your budget like? Instead of getting a cheap/old p3, get the slower speed p3 with cb0 stepping cause they overclock very well. Most 650mhz will do 866 with no problems.

[This message has been edited by Chubby (edited 16-08-2000).]

quozl

I'm getting a bx because they overclock much better than vias. Hence the 100fsb wont be a problem. And i intend to overclock the chip as much as I can. Newer abit bx motherboards have 1 mhz increments too. Seems the cheapest way to get a slightly better than p2-450 which i can later improve. I want my old p2-450/mb for a server elsewhere.
Greg

Chubby

Originally posted by quozl:
I'm getting a bx because they overclock much better than vias. Hence the 100fsb wont be a problem.

The mb with the 1mhz increment is the ABIT BX133-RAID i440BX Socket-370 ATX motherboard which is probably going to be expensive and I haven't seen anywhere that sells it yet. The other BX mobos don't overclock any better than other chipsets.

You didn't understand what I was saying about the fsb limitations. The BX chipset does not have 1/2 divider for the apg bus. When you run the fsb at anything higher than 100mhz you will be overclocking it. It's really just a small risk as most new graphics card runs fine on an overclocked apg bus. Also, the memory will also be overclocked if it's pc-100 and might cause problems. The solution would be to replace it with pc-133 sdram. You don't have any of these problems with the newer chipsets.



[This message has been edited by Chubby (edited 16-08-2000).]

_CreeD_

Quite a few BX motherboards supoport 1Mhz FSB increments, and multiple AGP dividers....

quozl

indeed, check out scan.co.uk
they have a number with the 1mhz increments. And I did know what you meant about the 100mhz fsb. I dont have a problem overclocking a bx board because they're usually very reliable overclocked and the agp shouldnt be a problem as I'll be sticking in a decent card. But I'm open to suggestions about specific via or intel boards. They seem to be more expensive for nothing extra, they worth getting? And dont some of the intel chipsets have a preference for rambus memory and perform ****e with sdram?
Greg

Chubby

Originally posted by _CreeD_:
Quite a few BX motherboards supoport 1Mhz FSB increments, and multiple AGP dividers....

Okay, what other mobo supports 1mhz increments? And did I say they don't support multiple agp dividers? No BX mobos have 1/2 agp divider.

Chubby

Originally posted by quozl:
indeed, check out scan.co.uk
they have a number with the 1mhz increments. And I did know what you meant about the 100mhz fsb.

Which BX mobo in the scan site supports 1mhz fsb? The via chipset is not that expensive and is actually cheaper than the bx boards.

You can get whatever you want but I just don't see any advantages the BX board has over via apollo 133a and the via one is cheaper and has more useful features.

[This message has been edited by Chubby (edited 16-08-2000).]

PhilipMarlowe

I don't know what it is, but I have this one in my newly upgraded puter...is it any good?


More details here... http://www.tyan.com/products/html/trinity400_p.html

Seems that is is slot1 and socket370...whatever that means...

---

Don't even think about it...™
www.licksy.net
info@licksy.net

Chubby

Originally posted by Licksy20:
I don't know what it is, but I have this one in my newly upgraded puter...is it any good?

That board used the via apollo 133a chipset. It's a good board but this one would not be one of the best. http:\\www.anantech.com has a comparison between all the makers of this board a while ago if you want to read it. The best one was the Asus, Soyo and Abit board.

Kali

isnt anand actually 16?
i mean ffs he must be like the biggest nerd gimp on the planet ..
(poor lad gets stick on every message board on the net.. thought i might add some here)
spice things up

elexes

hmm looks at bios my bord has 2/3 agp divider . is bx true since its old cant reely support higher then 600 and its a abit bord i did have it overclocked and ran a bit buggy but then i lowered the ammount i had it oc and it seemed fine .
but i am looking for a newer bord so i can overclock the next chip i can get so keep posting lads .

Gerry

look, I have an abit be6-2 bx board, and a p3 600e (which is now very cheap) and it runs at 1000mhz, no probs, saved a lot of cash, and is much faster than a "real" p3 1ghz because the bus speed is 167. This board supports 1 mhz increments. If you use any decent graphics card from the last two years, at least a tnt1 or a voodoo 2000 you dont have to worry avout the agp bus. If you go over 133 the geforces are best. My geforce ddr is running on a 112 mhz agp bus ( as opposed to 66mhz normal) and its running quake3 no probs. The via boards are crap, dont touch them, they are slower, and buggy, and you are right, they dont overclock as well. you will have to buy pc133 ram as well, although u can run most good pc100 ram at 133 no probs. Once you get over these little problems, it is well worth it to run the bx, as it is much faster and more stable. I'd go with the p3 600e or 650e. I can get the 650 for about £230, and the last one I got overclocked to 930mhz, with just a crappy standard fan.

Chubby

Gerry:
1). I don't believe your system is completely stable
2). You don't have a problem with your graphics card probably because you don't even make use of it. Sure you can run quake3 but you turn almost every graphics option off and make it look ugly. Play it at high res like everyone with all the eye-candy turned on and see how stable it is. And yes, 60-70 fps is ****ing playable.
3). I can tell you've never used a via apollo 133a mobo from what you've said about it.
4). You can get a p3-650 cpu with cb0 stepping cheaper than that.

[This message has been edited by Chubby (edited 17-08-2000).]

quozl

chubby that just made you look ignorant.
A lot of us here have seen and played on various incarnations of gerrys overclocked pcs at lans. And they're stable and very impressive. If I was getting a new pc now, it'd be from gerry.
And he even plays high res. Shock horror.
And visit overclock.co.uk and see what kind of board they recommend for overclocking, vias are not as good as bxs at overclocking.
Greg

Chubby

Not believing what someone tells me at face value until I've seen it is not being ignorant. I am not saying Gerry's overclocked machines are not stable. I am saying I don't believe the 1gz machine he has is stable. Was his 1gz machine at those lans? How many cpu did he had to go through to find one that does 1gz anyway? If I was getting a new machine I'd build my own because it's very simple. Overclockers.co.uk don't recommend any bx over a via mobo unless you are referring to what someone said in the message boards. And please explain why the BX is better than the via board for overclocking because I am admittedly quite ignorant and wants to know.


[This message has been edited by Chubby (edited 17-08-2000).]

Chubby

Lo Sam

The older via mobos do suck and again, you've never had a via apollo 133a mobo which is what I am talking about here. It is shown to be slightly slower than a BX board in games when running at ultra low settings like what Gerry is doing. Unless you have the top of the range cpu and graphics card, game speeds in high res has no difference. It is not much worse for games.

Not all mobos are the same and that's why I prefer the apollo 133a over the BX. Speed is not everything, what's 5fps when the game is running at 70+?

The via apollo 133a board is just as overclockable as any BX boards with a lot more overclocking friendly features like asynchronize memory speed etc. That's all I am trying to say because everyone is under the impression that BX is the best for overclocking. It's not.

[This message has been edited by Chubby (edited 17-08-2000).]

quozl

Where are you getting this that gerry is running in ultra low settings? When I've seen him at lans he normally has about 10 times my detail and a much higer res.
Greg

Chubby

Originally posted by quozl:
Where are you getting this that gerry is running in ultra low settings? When I've seen him at lans he normally has about 10 times my detail and a much higer res.
Greg

Go read the "Overclocking - Good Upgrade" thread. He was only benchmarking with ultra low res. He did say at the end of it that he uses high res with just vertex off. My mistake. He never reviewed what speed the setting he plays with is running at and it's probably as fast as a celeron2 850mhz which is what the other discussion was about.


[This message has been edited by Chubby (edited 17-08-2000).]

Excelsior

i'm just re-reading this and its amazing how stupid chubby comes off. hey, he may be a really sharp guy who knows his stuff, but its accepted round these parts that gerry knows his stuff. its like you have some kind of grudge against him and a love of via mobos as if they were your siblings. get over yourself.

oh and quozl, you wont go far wrong getting your stuff off of phil. he is very slowly but incredibly cheaply upgrading my pc for me and the results are brilliant without fail.

---

It is so lonely here in my indecipherable tower of speech impedimency

[This message has been edited by Excelsior (edited 17-08-2000).]

Chubby

Originally posted by Excelsior:
i'm just re-reading this and its amazing how stupid chubby comes off. hey, he may be a really sharp guy who knows his stuff, but its accepted round these parts that gerry knows his stuff. its like you have some kind of grudge against him and a love of via mobos as if they were your siblings. get over yourself.

I come off as stupid because I am questioning some stuff Gerry was saying? Oh yeah, Gerry's never wrong, me bad. Gerry might know his stuff but he's using his 1gz machine as bragging rights and not giving valid reasons for saying "The via boards are crap, dont touch them, they are slower, and buggy, and you are right, they dont overclock as well". Did I ever make such claims about BX mobos? All I said was there are better alternatives and everyone and his granny just jump right in and claims bx is the king without any ****ing legit reasons and then there are people like you who just goes for personal attacks and never contributes to the discussion. This is the last time I'll express my opinions here when people ask for suggestions because it looks like if you're not known here, then your opinions are worthless.

[This message has been edited by Chubby (edited 17-08-2000).]

sam

chubby via motherboards suck,
i bought one, returned it cos it was so bad in games

apollo pro 133
gave me half the performance of the bx board in games

i know apollo pro 133a isnt that bad, but why should he buy a motherboard that performs 10-15% worse than a similar bx system, with the same processor.. whats the point in buying a p600 if its only going to perform as well as a p500 would on any other board?

there was a lot of **** over the via agp drivers etc, but theyre still worse than bx boards (much worse) for games


what you might have heard 2 years ago about all motherboards "being the same" as regards performance, was because all the motherboards for p2/p3 chips were basically intel 82440bx based boards.. this is not the case anymore

sam

hahah wing, even i run quake3 at 1024*768 res at home (but i make sure i get 90-100 fps almost all the time still, and still challenge anyone to beat me using 30 fps when i get 90)

Gerry

Ok, chubby, my basic point is that the via is not a better alternative. I have used a via 133a, 133 and various other via chipsets, and I have had nothing with problems with them. For example: Machine would not run stable in win95, tried every patch, and via driver in existence, had to install win98, on a very important business machine. They wont work correctly with some old isa cards, again I am speaking from personal experience. These are relatively minor problems, alongside lacking performance, and the stability which has improved a lot, but is still not up to bx. My pc is only fully stable now, as I have finally sorted out the last few settings. To get a p3 600 working at 1000 is never going to be easy. The machine is now 100% stable, its has been running rc5 for a few days now, before that prime95 torture test, before that quake3 from a bot pov with no timelimit. It required much messing around with bios settings and cooling, but now the machine is running with the case on, with the fan speed turned down, so its not really very much louder than any other pc. You are getting "high detail" now chubby. The pc was unstable because of a few small things. The 235w psu could not cope with the cpu and a geforce. In my foolishness I set agp to 1x also, thinking this would cure it. I recently bought a 300w psu, seemingly to no avail. I then set agp back to 2x, and voila, it works perfectly.

The machine was not at 1ghz at any lan, because it didnt think it was stable enough. Even clocked down it caused some problems, which I think now was the 1x agp setting causing quake3 to freeze.
It then ran fine at 900 at other lans.


With regard to quake3,

Do you play quake3? . If you did, you would know that aim is important, anthing that improves your aim is good. I dont play at very low detail settings, I merely benchmarked with them. I play at 1024 * 768 with some detail turned off, but what you dont see is that I play better with *some* of this detail turned off. The game does not look ugly. As for the game being unstable if I played on full detail, thats a bit of a ridiculous theory. I played with full detail, and it does look pretty damn good. However, I gradually saw that this detail makes other players blend in with the background, and can distract you. So I play better with *some* of the detail turned down. The game still looks pretty damn good.
With regard to fps, the more the better. I play better with 200-300 fps as opposed to 60-70.

I happened to get lucky with that cpu, it was one of the first of the new cb0 stepping. Dont be ****ing stupid by suggesting that I would get more than one. After testing the cpu when I first got it, even with my pc100 ram, it was stable at 1 ghz in rc5 ( an application that only stresses the cpu) I knew it was only a matter of getting the rest of the system up to speed. If the machine is at a lan at some time in the future, you are welcome to have a look at it, and see if you can crash it. I even have ut installed! And the £230 for the 650 is what I would sell it for, I have to make a profit on it. For you though, special deal, £220.

FINALLY,

chubby, your opinions are not worthless, far from it , but I feel you are being unfair with "no ****ing legit reasons" and also unfair in general. Thanks.


[This message has been edited by Gerry (edited 18-08-2000).]

Chubby

An intelligent post at last explaining why you think the via 133a is a piece of crap. If you had problems with it in the past then fair enough but the drivers have matured somewhat and myself and a few others I know are using this board without any problems. What ****es me off are the claims by everyone that the new via boards is not as good as the bx for overclocking.

Yes, I agree it's very hard to get a p3-600/650 at 1gz with 100% stability which was why I was sceptical about your earlier claims without more details. And it sounded like you weren't stressing your graphics card at that agp speed from the other thread cause I never read the last post til yesterday.

Quake3:
no I don't play it but I do play a fair bit of FPSs. Frams per second does improve your aiming but I think 200-300 is just excessive. And no, I don't need a p3 upgrade just yet but thanks.

As for me being unfair. I was quite reasonable I thought until everyone jumped in saying it's a piece of crap when it looked like none of them apart from you have used it. You might have drivers and incompatability issues in the past but that hardly makes it overclock any worse than the BX board. I bet most people following this thread still don't even know why I think the extra features are better for overclocking.


[This message has been edited by Chubby (edited 18-08-2000).]

Hecate

have a via board running for the past month, rock solid.

sam

my post was intelligent!!

i know apollo pro 133a isnt that bad, but why should he buy a motherboard that performs 10-15% worse than a similar bx system, with the same processor.. whats the point in buying a p600 if its only going to perform as well as a p500 would on any other board?

that was my main point

by the way, one thing about overclocking..
room temperature can make a big difference to the stability of your chip..
during the winter, when i bought the chip off a friend(for cheap), my p600(katmai core) used to run reasonably stable at 674, not rock solid, but reasonably stable.. at the default clock speed of 600, it was rock solid.
during the first few weeks of the summer, general temperature rose, and the chip was barely booting windows at 600mhz, it didnt even get fully through the POST at 674, and even at 600 (its rated speed) it was unstable.. crashing a lot in games

temperature went down again for a few weeks in the middle of summer, and the chip started working fine again, and booted windows at 674 again..
so basically to stop it getting really unstable even at its rated speed of 600mhz during the summer, i had to put on a better heatsink+2 fans

a p3-600 that works at 1ghz at home may not work at 1ghz at lans, etc. where the general temperature is going to be warmer (because of lots of pc's)

sutty

sam are you saying that you o/c your chip with out extra cooling???? as for the lan being hotter, that wont realy matter to much if it's cooled right phil's (gerry) pIII is cooled very well and even the ge-force is cooled better than an every day one. knowing phil now for near 3 yeas i would have to say that with this motherboard he has (the BX one) he has the most stable one of all the others he's had.

---

Ciaran Sutcliffe
aka: sutty
[HIV]sutty
For a good time goto:
http://www.hotinternetvirgins.com

Chubby

my post was intelligent!!

Oh yeah, sorry, your post was intelligent too sam etc. But from the various benchmarks I've seen, you'll only see about a 10% difference in performance when you're using the top of the range parts like p3 1gz on 133mhz fsb, gts, etc. The performance hit is very small. In fact, I have exactly the same system as a mate except the mobo (he has an abit bx6r2, I have this via thing, both got celeron2 566@850, geforce ddr etc) and my system is slightly faster. Probably because of my pc-133 sdram. ummmm...asynchronize ram rocks.

Yes, room temperature does make a big difference. Was in a lan about a month ago when I was still using my celeron 300@450, it was a very very hot weekend and it was crashing like mad. my makeshift retail heatsink with 2 superglued on fan wasn't doing it's job. Had to clock it at default speed and open the case and problem solved. Maybe Gerry should go for extreme cooling solutions like water petier like them american kids to get the stability he needs for lans. Oh wait, won't you need to run a hose to the nearest water tap?


[This message has been edited by Chubby (edited 18-08-2000).]

sutty

Chubby i sapose your right, i mean me and gerry have been to two lan's with our comps that we have at the moment. mines a Athlon 550@750 1.70v .23au 1/2 L2 and ge-force ddr and i'v never had a crash over heat at a lan and i run it with my case on. as for water cooler's and PELTIERS they are not only for "american kids" they are in fact a very good way to cool your cpu or gpu. and if you need to down clock you comp to its set speed at a lan, your chip may be a little fuped, try a new one. Gerry's run's fine and is very well cooled(no home made heatsink's in that system) what where you thinking??????

---

Ciaran Sutcliffe
aka: sutty
[HIV]sutty
For a good time goto:
http://www.hotinternetvirgins.com

Chubby

I was trying to save a few quid with that heatsink/fan on the old celeron. It worked too, never had a problem with the machine before and been to many lans with it. It was just a very very hot day. The apartment we were in had this big glass window/balcony thingy facing west so the sun was shining in all day. Anyway, have a globalwin heatsink/fan on the celeron2 so everything's fine. I'll get a p3 when when I think I need a faster chip.

Since we are on the subject of cooling. Anyone know where I can get a bigger heatsink for my creative geforce ddr? It seems to run very hot.

[This message has been edited by Chubby (edited 19-08-2000).]

sutty

Chubby you might want to take a look at http://www.ocshoot.com for heatsinks, also i think they have a report that the globalwin heatsinks can crack the chip that there on(you might want to take a look to be sure) i just looked by it and saw this don't know if its right or not. but they have got a report in there about coolers for cpu, graphics, and chipset well worth a looks.

---

Ciaran Sutcliffe
aka: sutty
[HIV]sutty
For a good time goto:
http://www.hotinternetvirgins.com

Gerry

Chubby, I use a heatsink from a p200, with an 80mm fan blowing over it and out hte back of the case. 486 fans are good too. Maplin electronics on jervis st have them. I'd advise you change the heatsink/fan asap as the standard one is a joke.