Slot 1 Motherboard Testing for a Retro PC Build

“Everyone” knows that the Intel 440BX was one of the best chipsets ever produced and has since become the mold for hardware emulation.  What really amazed me is how good the memory controller really was on the 440BX compared to the competition at the time. 

As a side note “this”, the differences in performance across motherboards, is one of the major reasons why processor makers started to integrate the memory controller.  Not only did it reduce motherboard and chipset complexity but ensured that the processor would always have the best memory performance out of the box.  

Picking the “best” motherboard for the Primo Build was a tough decision.  On the surface I felt that the higher speed ATC-6310 with the VIA chipset was a wise choice as it offered more configuration options and faster hard drive support.  While the ATC-6230 using the Intel 440BX had a slower hard drive controller but offered better overall performance.

In the end I decided to go with the A-Trend ATC-6230 motherboard for this build and simply downgraded the CPU to the Pentium III 500Mhz.  This is a 100Mhz FSB processor and a good match for the PC100 SDRAM memory I have in my collection.  To offset the slow hard drive transfer speeds, I’ll be installing a SATA based RAID controller which not only will increase storage performance but also allow me to bypass the 64GB storage limit. 

My second reason for this decision was so that I could experiment with the ATC-6310 more on my test bench.  The motherboard already had native support for 133Mhz FSB processors but, for some reason, wouldn’t work with Coppermine.  I suspect this might be a BIOS limitation and something I could experiment with on the test bench.

I also have a Baby AT VIA based Socket 370 motherboard to experiment with and having the two boards side by side would make for some fun content.

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