slot 1 motherboard choices

[DavidA]

I have found conflicting reviews on Abit BE6, Asus P3B-F, and Supermicro P6SBA. Any info would be helpful. Thanks

[Nicely2k]

In my experience i have found ASUS to be the best of the lot, im running a 2200 on an Asus and its sweet. They are a wee bit expensive but u only get what u pay for.

Super Micro arnt bad, they done have the speed and bios features of the Asus but they compare well on a money basis (prob cheapest of lot). One thing to note they boot real slowly when u have any more than 1 PCI cards on them, found this with quite a few of their boards.

Abit are sound, good boards. Not very supportive of bios flashes if thats necessary, seem to react strangely and have had a few problems this way personally not my 1st choice.

Take a look at AOpen, not that frequently heard off but pretty dam good boards at a good price. The AK is worth the money

[ALS]

Choose Abit BE6. It has RAID on it plus supports Pentium 3 up to
850 MHz and +.
Realy good choise. I had it for a while, good performance. :)

[biglaker]

I have a P3B-F and although it has been a pretty good board, it is limited to 100 Mhz memory and a 33 Mhz IDE port speed. We have not tried overclocking our 450 Mhz processor. I have seen a number of people claim to get much faster processor speeds using a sloket (not sure I spelled this correctly) adapter. Don't know how stable the sloket is. I have used a Promise Card with this m/b to achieve much better hard drive performance. The only "problem" that we experienced with the board was when I first got it, it kept giving false overtemp indications and would then throttle the processor. Asus then put out an updated bios to relieve the problem. Biglaker

[deadkenny]

I would recommend the ASUS P3B-F. With the 'most recent' BIOS revision (1008.004 beta) it supports Coppermine processors up to 1.1GHz. Of course you can always get something like a Powerleap adapter to allow you to use Tualatin processors. Although the BX chipset doesn't 'officially' support 133MHz FSB, there is a setting for it, in fact there's even jumper settings for it. The other good news is that there is a 1:4 PCI divider setting, which means you can run the FSB at 133MHz and keep the PCI at spec 33MHz. That should increase your chances of successfully 'OC'ing' the chipset to 133MHz FSB. The bad news is there is no 1:2 AGP divider. The best you can do is 2:3, which means at 133MHz FSB the AGP bus is running at 89MHz. However, since the AGP on this board is limited to 2X, you have a good chance at running a reasonably current video card at 89MHz / AGP 2X. You certainly have a better chance of OC'ing the AGP bus in this scenario than hoping every card on the PCI bus can handle a PCI bus OC.

[biglaker]

Here's one person's experience with Powerleap and the P3B-F:
http://www.sysopt.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=100797&highlight=P3BF+and+powerleap

Here's another thread started by the same guy:
http://www.sysopt.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=100779&highlight=P3BF+and+powerleap

Not trying to discourage you, Deadkenny certainly has done more experimenting with the P3B-F than I.
Biglaker

[deadkenny]

You raise some excellent concerns about Powerleap adapters. Personally I would stick to slot 1 processors as a first choice. Second choice would be a Coppermine socket 370 processor on an ASUS slocket. Given the cost of an AthlonXP 1600 and a K7S5A board, the cost of a Tualatin and Powerleap adapter just can't be justified in terms of the performance.

EDIT: I also should have mentioned that you need version 1.03 or later along with the BIOS mentioned to fully support all Coppermine processors. Earlier versions of the board are limited to a minimum of 1.8 vcore, which is slightly higher than the spec voltage for later Coppermines.