Best Tualatin Socket 370 Motherboard?

[genosmm]

Oct 05 I received a nonworking Compaq Presario 4409CL. Close inspection revealed liquid on some of the caps but no bulging as with my recent ECS motherboard.

Did a quick check of the power supply and it seemed OK. Even tried a working one with same result no boot.

At this time I searched if anyone else had posted the same problems with this Loretto (OEM of Lite-On TR 100) motherboard but found nothing.

Since then I have tested the memory, CD, Floppy and Hard Drives in working PCs and all work fine.

Have not tested the Celeron P3 1.4 GHz CPU because of the lack of a suitable mobo for it but am optimistic that it is also OK.

Am thinking of getting a Tualatin Socket 370 Motherboard and am interested in what you consider the best. Also interested in any suggestions or comments concerning this.

Thanks

Gene

[madmax_2069]

Re: Best Tualatin Socket 370 Motherboard?

it really depends on what you want to do with it.

there is dual socket 370 mobos with dual lans but no agp (pci and isa only), but they are around $90. or you could get one with a single slot with agp for $50.

[Wizard]

Re: Best Tualatin Socket 370 Motherboard?

Oh the Tualatin-S CPUs...I'd love to get my hand on one but alas. They asked WAY too much back then even 3 years after Intel creased production of these. For this reason I never had one. Skipped from PII-350 to Athlon 1GHz socket 492. Alll because of Intel's extreme prices.

Now I regard these Tualatin-S cpus as toy now since you can get plenty of choices on newer stuff for reasonable price. So long and a warning to Intel not to rip on us.

Cheers, Wizard

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Best Tualatin Socket 370 Motherboard?

Tualatin-S is awesome CPU.
Enough boys to make some noise and only needs 30-35 CPU watts to do it.

What are you doing with it?

i815 chipset based is limited to 512Mb RAM and single CPU.
Must be a B-stepping version of the chipset.

If you want more RAM or Dual CPU you need VIA or ServerWorks chipset.
These usually support 1 to 4 GB RAM.
Dual CPU boards usually have PCI-X 64-bit slots and using a single CPU and a PCI-X RAID card and Gigabit LAN are a great way to build a low power high bandwidth file server.

I don't know (or care) what SIS did for these (if anything).

A little known but really cool chipset for the Tualatin is the VIA CLE266 chipset.
VIA intended it for the Eden and C3 CPUs but it also supports Tualatin-S. Most CLE266 boards were built with embedded Eden or C3 CPUs (CPU soldered on) but a few 3rd party manufacturers gave them skt-370 sockets instead. These are hard to find with the socket but if you can find one they support PIII-S CPU's, have native (on-board) USB 2.0, and take up to 2GB DDR [and/or SDRAM depending on the board].
- Most of these are tiny boards (ITX, mini-ITX, uATX) intended for industrial, car computers, or HTPC but I have seen at least one full ATX. [If memory serves it was a Jetway board.]

.

[willawake]

Re: Best Tualatin Socket 370 Motherboard?

Am thinking of getting a Tualatin Socket 370 Motherboard and am interested in what you consider the best.

Asus TUSL2-C yaaaay https://www.badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=1765
but 512mb limitation is no good for these days

[genosmm]

Re: Best Tualatin Socket 370 Motherboard?

Thanks Everyone for your comments!

The P3 Tualatin CPU is from the Compaq Presario 4409CL I posted https://www.badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=986

I recently looked very closely at the its mobo but could not see any noticeable damage so hope the CPU is working. Am guessing it is a std not S model but have not even taken the heat sink off. Wanted to keep everything together until find a working mobo for it.

Am looking for a 1 CPU mobo and the rebuilt PC would be used for word processing and 56K Internet so no heavy graphics and 512MB limit is OK. Main thing is reliability!!! Am I asking too much???

Agree that it is a question of whether it is cost effective to get an old mobo.

After getting a few suggestions will start looking and see what is available.

Gene

[Wizard]

Re: Best Tualatin Socket 370 Motherboard?

You will do very well with this Asus TUSL2-C (this 815 board that supports any P3 cpus including any Tualatin CPUs).

Just that, a $150 can get you a E2200 2.2GHz pentium duo retail (includes a heatsink), 60 bucks Asus board and mushkin DDR2 800 2GB ram.

Cheers, Wizard

[willawake]

Re: Best Tualatin Socket 370 Motherboard?

well personally i use an 866 on cusl2 mobo in the office. VERY stable mobos the cusl2 and tusl2. but its not enough performance any more for me. even just p4 celeron 2.66 with 1gb ram is much more snappy and perfect for work. so i would say forget the piii series now.

i would say that the question is not if it is cost effective to get an old mobo but if you can presently afford the say 300 euro for an entry level current pc.

[Wizard]

Re: Best Tualatin Socket 370 Motherboard?

Yes, that's is the reason. While ago, boss needed to borrow my notebook is pentium M 1.6GHz and XP, 1GB to finish entering data for our work because his PC cannot cut the butter; PC is PIII 866 with decent ram and win98. This PC will be eventually replaced with a capable XP machine in mean time.

Cheers, Wizard

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Best Tualatin Socket 370 Motherboard?

A lot of people don't realize it but Pentium M CPUs are based on PIII-Tualatin and not P4 cores.
That's why they so damned good!
- Well, maybe not a 'lot' of people HERE, but you know what I mean....

I still prefer P3 to P4 when it's enough for what the system needs to do.

.

[zandrax]

Re: Best Tualatin Socket 370 Motherboard?

A Celeron 1400 Tualatin is a good cpu: paired with a decent graphic card (Ati Radeons or nVidia from Geforce 2 upwards), it's surely ok for browsing (Flash contents included), watching DVDs, running Office or Openoffice. Cost effectiveness depends on the amount of components you already own or can have for few bucks: do not spend more than $70-80 on old pieces because entry level desktops or netbooks are available for about $300, are way more powerful than a 7 years old config and have similar or lower power consumptions.

If you want a socket 370 motherboard, follow PCBONEZ's advice: look for boards with official Tualatin support (you don't have to buy an adapter); good chipsets are the Via Apollo Pro133A (aka 694X, uses SDRAM memory), Apollo Pro266 (good alternative to the 133A if you have some DDR sticks hanging around) and Intel 815 (SDRAM); second choices are the old but good 440BX, the Via Apollo Pro 133 (694Z: memory performance is disappointing) or the SIS 630 (one of few successful SIS chipset: had comparable performance with the Via and was slightly slower than the 815) while the Intel 810 is the one to avoid due to dreadful integrated graphic (you can't disable it and it is slow, even for that time standards). Broadcom Serverlet LE chipset is used only in server motherboards (e.g. the Intel STL2 and the Tyan Thunder LE), have comparable performance with the 815 and Via ones but lacks AGP (usually an ATI chip is soldered on the motherboard). The VIA CLE266 is an Apollo Pro 266 with an integrated graphic core and lacks an external AGP port too: this may force you buying a PCI videocard.
Last and least, the ALI Aladdin: performances were the lowest and it had a PCI timing bug which limits PCI bandwith to about 80 MB/s and really cripples performance. Even Via ones had a similar bug, but it was solved through bios updates, new drivers and the famous Via latency patch.

As a rule fo thumb, socket 370 Asus mobos with suggested chipsets are very good (TUSL and TUV4X series), then Abit, Intel (stable but crippled bios), Soyo, A-Open (at the time an average grade brand, now almost disappeared) and others.

Zandrax

[Scenic]

Re: Best Tualatin Socket 370 Motherboard?

the best Tualatin board (for desktop use) is the ECS P6S5AT (IMHO)


has 2x SD-RAM slots AND 2x DDR-RAM slots (!)
only the caps are the usual G-Luxon crap.. recap and its fine..

Max. 1GB (DDR- or SD-RAM)
5 PCI
1 AGP (4X)
ATA100 IDE Controller
Supports all Socket 370 CPUs except the old Mendocino Celerons (those black/silver ones which maxed out at (AFAIR) 533MHz)

mhh.. that baby recapped, with a PIII-S 1400 (512KB Server version), USB 2.0 PCI Card and 1GB DDR-RAM... yummy


anyways... the Server-Tualatins (PIII-S) with 512KB Cache work fine on most desktop boards.
i've built a pc for my mum using a MSI 815EPT Pro mainboard (intel i815 chipset... obviously..) and it works fine with a PIII-S 1133MHz even if MSI says that it doesn't support those (server) CPUs..
full 512KB cache is recognized..
RAM is maxed out at 512MB (2x256MB PC133 SD-RAM).
running Win2k Pro with lots of useless crap removed (with nLite)
this sys replaced her P4 1,8GHz (Willamette) with 640MB RAM.. and the PIII is much faster in everyday use than her old P4..
(and the whole sys uses max. 65W... the P4 used 135W when idling(!) )

[gdement]

Re: Best Tualatin Socket 370 Motherboard?

You guys are tempting me, but I recently decided against a Tualatin build.

I was asked to upgrade my niece's computer (still a young kid). I happen to have the ultimate P3 (1.4GHz Tualatin 512KB) just sitting around and really wanted to build her machine out of that. But when I realized she'll be playing "The Sims 2" the 512MB limit of i815 worried me.

Okay I can get a VIA board, but still with some subtle considerations, I decided it makes more sense to make it a Northwood 2.0GHz SDRAM instead. Boring, I know.

I benchmarked both setups and the performance is the same. Which doesn't say much about P4 SDRAM machines, but anyway equal is equal.

Subtle considerations:
- The P4 gets an Intel 845 chipset, Tualatin needs a VIA to have decent memory capacity. I don't think the late SDRAM VIAs are that bad, but I still think it has more chance of causing trouble than Intel
- The P4 offers AGP4X vs 2X on the Tualatin (VIA 694T is known to be glitchy at 4X).
- The P4 might be upgradeable to a faster DDR board without needing a reinstall (hopefully)
- nVidia 6x.xx drivers cause crashes on the P3, downgrading to 56.72 fixed it. I found some corroboration of that online. 5x.xx might be good enough, but I'd like 6x.xx to be available if needed
- P4 supports SSE2. That's becoming such an old standard that more software may start to care.

Those are all lame reasons. But I couldn't think up anything to speak in favor of the P3, so it lost. Still, I get a kick out of watching it match the P4 in testing.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Best Tualatin Socket 370 Motherboard?

But I couldn't think up anything to speak in favor of the P3, so it lost. Still, I get a kick out of watching it match the P4 in testing.

My thing is it uses ~1/2 as much power and that makes it a better choice for basic file servers, basic office machines, basic email/internet machines.
For example there is no reason to run a P4 in a NAS. Just don't need it.

Your app is concerned with supporting newer and possibly future games so that's a little different.

.

[genosmm]

Re: Best Tualatin Socket 370 Motherboard?

Wizard,

Thanks for the Asus TUSL2-C tip.

Have started to search and have these questions using a P3 1.4 GHZ cpu.

1. Will only the Asus model TUSL2-C work or can the CUSL2-C and possibily other versions also work if update the BIOS? Thought I read somewhere for some mobo mfrs that if update an older BIOS that the Tualatin CPUs would work with older mobos (think it was a HP OEM TriGem mobo)

2. Do you know of any OEM mfrs like HP that used the Asus TUSL2-C? Did a quick search using HP because do know that they did use Asus in some products at one time but nothing so far.

Gene

[genosmm]

Re: Best Tualatin Socket 370 Motherboard?

Zandrax,

Thanks for all the various options and their pluses and minuses. Will add to my search list.

Gene

[Wizard]

Re: Best Tualatin Socket 370 Motherboard?

You are not understanding what we were telling you:

Buy ATX motherboard like we recommended. It will fit in that HP case but need work on the port plate.

HP uses their internal models that Asus made for HP.

Secondly, buy a COA license XP CD, you can get geniune OEM XP COA and CD. The HP discs is chained to the motherboard's unique ID in mainboard and unique set of HP options parts.

Cheers, Wizard

[genosmm]

Re: Best Tualatin Socket 370 Motherboard?

Scenic,

Thanks for the ECS P6S5AT tip. Am guessing with the original bad caps there are a few dead ones around.

Did a quick search and found this on eBAY. http://cgi.ebay.com/ECS-P6S5AT-Socke...QQcmdZViewItem

Checked the store "Clearance outlet of one of the largest computer components distributor in US. Specialize in all optical and hard drives, motherboards, etc." Took a quick look and all the mobos I saw were "Refurbished" what ever that means. http://stores.ebay.com/NSI-System_Mo...QQftidZ2QQtZkm and tried to get more info but found nothing so far. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&c...22&btnG=Search

Has anyone had any dealings with them?

Gene

[genosmm]

Re: Best Tualatin Socket 370 Motherboard?

gdement and PCBONEZ,

Thanks for your comments. I too have been thinking about those things you both mentioned which is why decided to post.

Gene

[genosmm]

Re: Best Tualatin Socket 370 Motherboard?

Wizard,

I have found it easier to get the "whole PCs" because as mentioned these old P3 PCs are obsolete to most people so are available at yard sales for very little or are being thrown out for nothing.

Gene