440BX or Apollo133 ? hear me out please.

[LoGo69]

Question: Which motherbaord, under my circum stances is faster: A-Bit BH6, or A-Bit VA6 (i have both atm)?
specs are as folows:
iNTEL Celeron II 800 (8x100) cDo stepping, 1.75v
Thermaltake Volcano 7
No-Brand slocket card
300W hyena PSU
Geforce 2 MX, PCI sound card, PCI network card, ISA Modem.

on one hand, the BH6 is the intel BX440 chipset (which everyone loves, but just hear me out as to which i shud use)
onthe other, the VA6 is Apollo 133, ive herd the bad mouth about its lack of memory bandwith etc..
on the VA6, i can easily do 8x133 because it supports 1/4 FS, and now i got a good power supply it shud easily do 140x8.
on the BH6, i have only done 8x112 because it doesnt support 1/4fsb, and going 124mhz/33mhz wouldnt prove very good for my cards would it?

so yes, i am faced with the problem of which one to use? arh, i was thinking teh VA6 to get higher FSB as my ram is PC133.
but is the BX440 chipset really that much better ?
and secondly, on the BH6 shud my celly use HIGH signal (in the softmenu II) on the BH6?
lastly did any BX440 chipset hav 1/4 FSB ?

 

[Monaco]

I would pick the Pro133 board in a heartbeat, just because of the AGP/PCI divisors it has.

You could probably get the BH6 to 124, it won't hurt anything permanently, but it will probably be rather unstable cuz of the high AGP bus.

The 133 also has the ability to run the RAM at +33mhz over the FSB, a nice little speed boost. That, plus liberal tweaking with WPCRedit, let me get my Pro133 system to the point where it beats a 440BX in just about everything, including memory bandwidth.

I have a Soyo SY-6VBA133 and an Abit BE6-II- runing the same components at the same overclocked speed, the Soyo is slightly faster at like everything.

IF you do not want to use WPCRedit to tweak the chipset registers of the Pro133, then stick with the BH6- even tho the Va6 might overclock higher, in stock form that chipset is a dog and always loses to BX.

So, if you want to tweak, than VA6 all the way, but if you just want to build it and be done with it go for the Bx, that's my opinion.

 

[LoGo69]

yeah i got WPCREDIT and WPCR(otherthing) and i had it tweaked, but i kept lockin it up and ****, coz my memory i dont thnik is cas2 or sumfin
i dunno, all i kno is its cheap non-ECC M-TEC PC133 256 module
so i shall switch to VA6 tonite then...any tips?
any programs easier to use them WPCREDIT? and WPCRSET (thats the other one!) ?? like nice windoze friendly ones?
or can u send me the lsit of ur setup ?
ICQ: 109906456
email : [email protected]

 

[DeepScience]

Got some ASIII from PB Tech for us mmm, 3g is really small.

I think the "high" setting is for 100MHz FSB and "low" is for 66MHz setting.

mmm, hey Logo what would be the FSB cycle period if the frequency is 100MHz?

 

[Monaco]

dude, when it comes to adjusting hex registers, WPCRedit and WPCRset ARE user-freindly It's just a complex operation in the first place, you can't really simplify it without ruining it.

I'll just tell you the tweaks I use on my Pro133 board- they may not work on yours!!

from WPCTset:
50h set to FFh
51h set to FFh
64h set to 12h
65h set to 12h
66h set to 12h
67h set to 12h
68h set to 41h
60h set to FFH

.............64 thru 66 control the RAM slots; 12h sets them for their fastest, most aggressive CAS2 timining, if your RAM ain't so good leave 64-67 out or tweak it a bit softer. I've left out some not-quite-100%-stable setings I use.

The other settings adjust the memory and PCI controller, and are all pretty safe. Biggest gains will come from setting register 50h to FFh- that controls memory interleave and some other good stuff.

Enable these 1 at a time in WPCRedit, to make sure they work. If you load them into WPCRset and it doesn't work, reboot into safe mode and set it to 'Stop' and try removing a few tweaks.

For more info on using these apps see www.viahardware.com, they have a decent tutorial of how to use them. I'd give you a direct link but they keep moving it around

DO you have a .PCR file for your chipset? if not I can give you mine, let me know if you need it.

 

[Monaco]

BTW- the 66/100 settings is for Pentium2 CPUs- some of them would unlock higher multipliers when you set that switch to "100"; it's supposed to change the state of the B21 pin on the CPU and tell it that it is running at 100mhz FSB when it's really running on a 66mhz. It didn't always work, but when it did you had a partially unlocked CPU.

Pretty much worthless nowadays: all Intel CPUS are 100% locked now