Best Tualatin Socket 370 Motherboard?

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Best Tualatin Socket 370 Motherboard?

Difference between Asus TUSL2-C and CUSL2-C as far as Tualatin goes is several things.
- CUSL2-C does not have B-stepping i815 chipset. (Or not guaranteed to.)
- CUSL2-C does not have proper VRM circuit for Tualatin. VRM 8.5 spec is required. Tualatin uses a different and lower Vcore voltage than coppermine and earlier chips. Also Tualatin CPU uses a previously reserved pin as a VTT_PWR_GOOD outputs from CPU to VRM controller chip. AGTL is also lower by 1/4 volt. (There are some other minor differences.)
- Because the first two 'officially' make CUSL2-C not Tualatin compatible it's unlikely Asus updated the microcode in the BIOS to correctly ID and support a Tualatin.

Those socket adapters that let Tualatins work in Coppermine boards
- The cheap ones get around the pin and voltage problems but that's about it.
- The 'good' ones usually cost more than a good used Mobo+CPU.

In so far as the "III-S" Tualatins with 512k cache.
There are a lot of boards that hoot and hollar in ads about supporting Tualatin but if you dig a little sometimes you find in documentation ("Supported CPUs") that they only claim to support Tualatin with 256k cache or the Tualatin-Celerons.
I've found some will actually take 512k when it's not in the CPU list and others won't.
For example last week I got an Intel "Kittyhawk" board in (OEM for Gateway) and it seems to only support Tualatin-Celeron versions. Won't even boot with a PIII-S installed.

I've also run across i815 boards that have the proper B-step chipset but that still won't run a Tualatin (won't even boot with one installed) because the board is non-compliant in some other way.

You need to watch it on Mobo+CPU deals that have a non-officially compliant Mobo coupled with a Tualatin. There are several mods/hacks to get it to work that involve drilling out CPU socket holes or clipping pins on the CPU.

The best way to avoid problems is to find a board that 'officially' supports PIII-S.

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[gdement]

Re: Best Tualatin Socket 370 Motherboard?

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.

Yeah, power consumption is something I didn't consider.

[Topcat]

Re: Best Tualatin Socket 370 Motherboard?

supermicro P3TDDE, best tually board out there. Nothing better than dual tualatin-S CPU's. Even today, it screams as a server.

[Wizard]

Re: Best Tualatin Socket 370 Motherboard?

Even the TDP of pentium Duos are under 45W, I can tell this one I have (E2200) is not as hot as the preshotts. It's like 30-35W vs 74 or 81W scorcher (2.4GHz celeron or P4 2.66 both 533 fsb). :P

Cheers, Wizard

[gg1978]

Re: Best Tualatin Socket 370 Motherboard?

Asus TUV4X is quite decent too.. I've got one in my spare parts pile.. Doesn't have the 512M ram limit, but it's a Socket 370 via chipset, which nowadays works quite well with XP..

[zandrax]

Re: Best Tualatin Socket 370 Motherboard?

@ genosmm: as PCBONEX explained, the Asus TUSL is the Tualatin-aware version of the CUSL: VRM is updated and the chipset revision officially supports Tualatins. The boards share part of the bios code and supports all microcodes: theoretically you could plug your cpu into a Cusl with a good adapter (Powerleap or Upgradeware ones) which override the vcore delta or the A revision of the 815, in practice there is no real point in doing this unless you can only find boards not for Tualatins.
BTW, don't be mad about ram: P3s work fine with SDRAM and don't exploit the higher DDR bandwith (benchmark of the time showed an average 2% improvement by swapping SDRAM for DDR, which is negligible and equal to benchmakr error; OTOH Athlons showed a 20% improvement under the same conditions).

Zandrax

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Best Tualatin Socket 370 Motherboard?

I like the idea of DDR-Tualatin because it's easier (and cheaper) to get to 1GB-2GB than using SDRAM.
Never actually had a DDR-Tualatin board though.
Maybe it's just a 'cool toys' fascination. [Or is that fixation?]

I have 3 FIC FR33E-L and a FR33E that I originally got to use for thin clients but never put them to use. I use one when I need an ISA slot to test some card and to test drives or PC133 RAM. (ISA, LAN, and I think Sound were options.) With the right BIOS update they take a 1.4GHz PIII-S without a hitch and even report it in the start-up flash screen correctly. [Few people know these can take those CPU's. The FTP and HTTP sites have different CPU support pages. There is an error in one. The other page is older and doesn't mention 1.4GHz at all I if I remember correctly. In the errored page they list the PIII-S under Coppermine as a 1.4GHz 512k 133-FSB.]
The boards will take up to 1GB PC133 (only two RAM slots) of either high or low density and and it can be either or ECC or not. I -think- they can do registered too but I haven't tried.
- Make great all around PC133 RAM checkers even if they don't do registered.
All 4 came with MBZ in the VRM's (and most everywhere too) as original.
Each has only 4 craps [either S.I. or Teapo] at 1000uF 10v 8mm but none of those have failed. Will replace those if I ever put the boards to full time use.

Note: FIC FR33 (without the "E") can not do Tualatin as far as I know.
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[kc8adu]

Re: Best Tualatin Socket 370 Motherboard?

btw i have a tuv4x in my recapped board stack as an extra.
it had a mix of ost and rubycon on it,
can you guess what was wrong?
i have one of these in use with a p3s 1.4 as a linux based router.
overkill yes but cool and quiet!

[zandrax]

Re: Best Tualatin Socket 370 Motherboard?

I like the idea of DDR-Tualatin because it's easier (and cheaper) to get to 1GB-2GB than using SDRAM.

Do you mean you can plug high capacity PC3200 sticks? No purpose in doing this: early DDR chipsets don't recognize modules with capacity greather than 512 MB, the same for SDRAM chipsets (don't forget that such modules didn't exist yet when the chipsets got designed and 512 MB was a huge amount of memory back in 2001, such as 16 GB nowadays); even if you can find larger modules (e.g. 1024 MB sdram sticks), they're manifactured for later Athlon and P4 boards: P3 chipsets' addressing limits (chip density, # of addressing lanes, etc.) usually prevent motherboards to fully detect them (detect half capacity or simply hang at boot).
To be on the safe side, I'd look for 256 MB modules which are way more compatible than larger ones; 512 MB ones can be purchased if are surely compatible (or you can get a refund) while 1024 MB ones won't probably work.

Maybe it's just a 'cool toys' fascination. [Or is that fixation?]

I suppose "fascination" unless you can't live without these toys and you dream them every night

Zandrax

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Best Tualatin Socket 370 Motherboard?

Yes the capacity. Also USB 2.0 on a PIII w/o an add-in card.
- Who said early chipsets?

I've been running a pair of 512Mb ECC PC133 18-chip modules in one of the FR33E-L for a year. I use that one to wipe and format hard drives almost daily (when I'm home.) No problems at all.
- PLE133T chipset.
Chipset is capable of 1.5Gb but the board only has two slots.
694X is the same I believe.

Pro266 and CLE266 will address 2 x 1.0GB of DDR.

[kc8adu]

Re: Best Tualatin Socket 370 Motherboard?

i know that via 694 will see 1gb sdram dimms.
had a vp6 with 2x 1gb dimms that ran 24x7x365 as a server.
it never gave the slightest problem after i recapped it.
1gb dimms are not supported by the vp6 but they worked fine.
i suspect the reason they were not listed in the specs was that 1gb dimms did not exist at the time.the ones that i have are a double sided dimm with double stacked chips.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Best Tualatin Socket 370 Motherboard?

i suspect the reason they were not listed in the specs was that 1gb dimms did not exist at the time.

I agree.
This seems to happen a lot with P3 stuff that came out about the time the transition to P4 and DDR began. Mfrs didn't update their P3 info because they wanted to sell the P4 gear and extending the life of P3 wasn't in the best interest of their wallets.

Has to do with how the modules are configured. How many banks/module.

Besides Mobos I've also come across laptops that support more RAM than 'advertised'. I have an old Gateway laptop with a BX based chipset and the docs say 3x 128MB(384) max but 3x 256Mb(768) and 2x 512Mb(1Gb) works. [3x 512Mb might too, never had the RAM to try it with - or the inclination as max CPU was 400MHz on that one.]

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[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: Best Tualatin Socket 370 Motherboard?

sry for the epic thread necro dig but just posting these links to help ppl looking to build a "fastest pentium 3-s tualatin rig" or some such or for reasons of nostalgia.

List of Intel Pentium III Tualatin microprocessors
Socket 370
List of Intel Socket 370 chipsets
List of VIA Socket 370 chipsets
List of Socket 370 motherboards