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Fastest motherboard before atx

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gerrydoire

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Aug 25, 2008
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I have a very nice expensive AT style case here.

It will only take the AT type of motherboard, large or small.

The big question is, what is the fastest I can go, I have an AT style motherboard made by PC Chips, its a p2 400mhz, anyone know of
any motherboards that are faster but still old school AT class?

Thanks!
 
gerrydoire said:
I have a very nice expensive AT style case here.

It will only take the AT type of motherboard, large or small.

The big question is, what is the fastest I can go, I have an AT style motherboard made by PC Chips, its a p2 400mhz, anyone know of
any motherboards that are faster but still old school AT class?
Click to expand...

I know the Tyan Tsunami was an AT form-factor, with a Slot 1 able to take a Pentium III CPU. As I remember, it was a 100MHz FSB, so not the fastest P3s, but still pretty good for an AT form. Here is the page: http://www.tyan.com/archive/products/html/tsunamiat.html
 
Somewhere is a Pentium 4, Socket 478 Mainboard, but i can't remember the name of if. :(
 
ASUS had the P5A-B which could accept up to a 550mhz K6 and almost a gig of sdram. It even can be run on either the older AT power supply OR a newer ATX power supply.
 
Some of the later revisions of the Asus P2B-B could do 133mhz FSB, and could take a 1.4ghz Tualatin PIII with the right kind of slot adapter. There were probably other PIII AT boards that could do the same. That would give you similar performance to a ~2.2ghz P4.
 
NeXT said:
ASUS had the P5A-B which could accept up to a 550mhz K6 and almost a gig of sdram. It even can be run on either the older AT power supply OR a newer ATX power supply.
Click to expand...

I've got a P5A (ATX) around here somewhere with a 450MHz K6-2. It's not a bad board, as things go. Apparently, you can crank the FSB up to 120MHz, but I haven't tried.
 
Actually you can do 600mhz in the P5A, at least on the later K6-2+ and K6-III+ chips that were capable of hitting such speeds. 120mhz bus speed is a little touchy (I have a P5A and have tried it), but it seems comfortable at 112mhz. While it could take 768MB RAM, most revisions could only cache 128MB. That could be remedied by using either a + series K6 chip with the on-chip cache, or using one of the later revision boards (which, unfortunately, have some sort of bug that makes them incompatible with the + series CPUs).

For the OP, though, any PIII is going to be better than a K6, I wouldn't recommend even considering a Super7 board other than maybe out of curiosity to play with it. They're a bit of a PITA about hardware compatibility and stability, and the CPUs aren't very fast either.
 
Fastest motherboard before atx

I heard of people using 1 power supply for 2 or so motherboards. Where do you find dual atx adapters or did you have to custom make one? Thanks
 
TNC said:
Somewhere is a Pentium 4, Socket 478 Mainboard, but i can't remember the name of if. :(
Click to expand...

Another option would be an SBC and backplane that would fit into an (baby)AT case. I know of a Slot 1 SBC that has a 133MHz FSB, so able to do the high-end P3s. But I haven't seen comparable items at the moderate P4 level.
 
Distribution sites like that tend to have ridiculous minimum order requirements.
 
NeXT said:
ASUS had the P5A-B which could accept up to a 550mhz K6 and almost a gig of sdram. It even can be run on either the older AT power supply OR a newer ATX power supply.
Click to expand...

I remember that board. I used it to upgrade my brother's PC, years back...

I had the ATX version (the regular P5A) myself.

Anyway, your AT case apparently has some tremendous value to you, considering you're going out of your way to get a decent motherboard for it.

Care to tell us more about this special case? Is it made of stainless steel or some state-of-the-art carbon composite material? :p
 
I can see a great retro system idea with one of those P4 baby AT boards. I have a few stripped IBM XT shells that would be cool to put one in. I have a AT board with a 500mhz K6-2 thats in a case that was a Clone 286 already.
 
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