In your opinion, Whats the BEST Slot 1 motherboard ever made?

The BX is the best chipset ever, and as such I would vote for the BE6II or P3B-F.

I will say however that for non bx boards, the P3V4X was a kickass board. Reliable, and unkillable. I love my P3V4X, and it is a great board. 3 years runnin now.

i still use my bh6, it's been through a 300a@450, 566@850, and now with a [email protected] (133fsb) which has been running for over 1 year now.

BH6, it's the best!

These are all good boards, but I think the best was(is) the ASUS
P3C-D. It used the Intel i820 chipset and was way ahead of its time in using RAMBUS ram. It's my second machine and is still running on dual 1.26 PIII-S Tualatins( Powerleap adapters ) at 155 FSB (1.47Mhz)and never misses a beat. The Samsung PC800 Rambus is trucking along at 930 Mhz. It's a great SETI cruncher. So goes my vote.

That's ironic, as SETI is the application that most clearly demonstrates the superiority of BX. My swiftest BX rigs crunched a WU in less than 4.5 hours, where a P3V4X,a P3C-D or P3C-2000 took well over 5.

I agree that the P3C-D was ahead of it's time, and also ahead of the time when RDRAM had anything to offer PC performance enthusiasts. The latency of the i820 single channel RDRAM implementation caused it to be the slowest of all P3 platforms, as the systems largely did not need the bandwidth it provided. The dual channel implemention on the i840 server chipset started to show some promise, but it wasn't until i850 was introduced for the P4 that RDRAM was the highest performing architecture.

P3V4X

Asus P3V4X all the way, I had my P3 800 running at 1064 with a stock intel cooler and for the last two years my sister has been using it in University. I got her some LL PC 133 Ram and it works great, put in a Radeon 8500 in it and she play Need For Speed Porche Unleashed all the time (porche fan).

Never ever had one problem with that board. I honestly believe it was the pest P2/P3/Celeron board ever

But thats just me KAM

larva, your points are well taken, but I believe the P3C series simply lacked at the time from a processor that could utilize it's capabilities. The Tualatin PIII-S processor seems to compliment the board much better that the older PIII's available when the board was introduced. The 512K L2 cache was not even available on the regular PIII and cache size does affect SETI moreso than say ram size. I 'm doing SETI units at about 3 hrs 45 min,
so you see what I mean. I have read about the latency issues, but in actual applications, I haven't noticed it to be of any problem. Being overclocked may also reduce these effects. All in all, it's been a solid trouble free board for me.

thecondor said:

I 'm doing SETI units at about 3 hrs 45 min,
so you see what I mean.

Click to expand...

The top P3-S time on the chart is 2.97hrs, and that was done on the i815 chipset. As BX is a tad bit faster than i815, it is clear it is a lot faster than i820. So, put that same chip on a BX board and it will do the WU's faster. A lot faster. Do you see what I mean?

I'm not saying your board isn't of high quality or hasn't served you well. What I am saying is BX will outperform it in every single performance metric with the exception of SpecViewPerf, and by substantial margins in most. If I had your board I would use it, but I would not recommend someone who doesn't have one to pursue it.

ABIT BH6...

larva, here are typical mem scores from Sandra. I can't recall seeing a BX this high. What kind of scores do you recall?

Well, seems I'm not OK to paste images. The scores on my P3C-D are
RAM int 1101 MB/s
RAM float 1091 MS/s


We also must keep in mind the question was what was the BEST board. That doesn't necessarily mean fastest. I was interpreting that as a combination of speed, reliability, and stability. My Soyo and Abit BX boards failed on me although the Abit has now been proven to be victim of the bad capacitor debacle.

haha..Whoa this thread is still here?

Intel is gonna have a hand full killing of the P3 architecture with people like us around...

You're right. It'l be a cold day you know where before I give up my
Tualatins.