Greatest chipset of all time?

For me the Z77 because I've had it for 5 years and still gladly accepts all the new stuff I put into it. Looking to get quite a bit more life out of it too.
 
440BX forever

No other chipset will ever support the range of processor architecture (P2, P3, Tualatin), fab sizes (.35, .25, .18, .13) the range of speeds (233 MHz to 1700Mhz, 800% range) or will live as long (introduced in 1998, it ran processors fabbed as late as 2003 and lives on as the chipset emulated by most hypervisors, regardless of virtualized CPU)
 
Not the 440GX?

Well, basically the same thing but with updated memory support (up to 2GB).

The great thing about that era was there wasn't any price premium for "advanced" features. Dual CPUs, ECC, etc. was free. No fine grained market segmentation.
 
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When I had a MoBo with the 440BX, I bought a Celeron 300a to go with it. Change the FSB to 100MHz and I have a Celeron 450
 
And the best 440BX/GX motherboard:

Tyan Thunder 100
http://www.anandtech.com/show/115

(The article says "The size of the motherboard may be the discouraging factor of the Thunder 100 as it will only fit in the largest of ATX cases.", but in fact, it would actually fit in a Dell case of that era, which is a tiny ATX case by today's standards!)
 
440BX has to win due to the fact that it was a solid performer and remained relevant for longer than just about any other consumer chipset has. That's due to the fact that it was overclockable to 133MHz. Subsequent chipsets came out and had little to nothing on the old 440BX so it lasted a really long time. It also supported things like SMP, which made it versatile. Intel's had some other good ones over the years. The entire 4xx series was good. The i430HX, TX, VX, i440BX, GX, were all good. The early 8xx series kind of sucked with entries like the i820, but that series finished strong with the i875P.

It's actually easier to count the chipsets Intel has produced which either didn't offer a decent enough improvement over its predecessors, or were outright bad. Everything else is probably better than anything SIS, VIA, AMD or NVIDIA produced. That said, NVIDIA's nForce was excellent for a number of reasons. Were it not for the drivers and other platform issues, it would be a much stronger contender for the title of "Best Chipset" ever. While AMD and NVIDIA have had some decent chipsets from time to time, none of them stack up to the best Intel offered. Even when AMD had the better processor, Intel still had the better platform. It always has.
 
pbassjunk said:
Whatever was in the Abit BP6..
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That would be the oft-mentioned 440BX. I know, I still have a BP6 boxed up in storage.

There's a litany of reasons for the 440BX's legacy:
-As mentioned above, early 800-series chipsets from Intel were rather infamously crappy. You either needed expensive RDRAM (remember when Rambus was a major player in the market?) or had to put up with substandard SDRAM-based chipsets.

-The 440BX, at FSB speeds like 133 MHz, had the weird quirk of overclocking the AGP bus, but leaving the PCI bus in spec. This could enhance graphics performance if the graphics card was tolerant of the out-of-spec AGP bus speed; not all were, though.

-A typical 440BX board could, in theory, support anything from old Klamath/Deschutes era Pentium IIs up to the final Tualatin Pentium IIIs. That's a span of 233 MHz to 1.4 GHz, not even accounting for architectural improvements and SSE in the P3s!

Heck, you could run TWO of them with the right board - the aforementioned Abit BP6 being notable because you could do this with Mendocino Celerons (300A - 533) AND overclock them! (But Win9x didn't support SMP at all, so you had to run NT/2000, Linux/BSD/insert UNIX deriative here, or possibly BeOS.)

-It's not the final chipset to support full-fledged ISA slots (that'd technically be 865G/875P), but if you need 'em for sound cards suitable to DOS gaming or any other reason relating to esoteric expansion hardware, it's relatively easy to find 440BX boards with those slots. Anything later for Intel CPUs, and you're either looking at questionable VIA chipsets or expensive industrial boards.

NVIDIA's nForce2 deserves an honorable mention just for SoundStorm, though. They actually had the balls to do hardware sound acceleration on an integrated audio DSP instead of on the host CPU, and even made Dolby Digital Live! a selling point long before add-on sound cards could boast it. Sensaura's virtual surround tech was standard, too. It almost makes up for the loss of Aureal after Creative basically sued them into bankruptcy... almost.
 
NamelessPFG said:
NVIDIA's nForce2 deserves an honorable mention just for SoundStorm, though. They actually had the balls to do hardware sound acceleration on an integrated audio DSP instead of on the host CPU, and even made Dolby Digital Live! a selling point long before add-on sound cards could boast it. Sensaura's virtual surround tech was standard, too. It almost makes up for the loss of Aureal after Creative basically sued them into bankruptcy... almost.
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I miss my old A3D sound card, too...
 
Guarana [BAWLS] said:
I miss my old A3D sound card, too...
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Hey, I still keep a Turtle Beach Montego II (Vortex2) I found in a local shop in my retrogaming build. Works quite nicely in Win98SE like I'd expect.

I also keep around the old retail versions of Half-Life because Valve utterly trashed 3D sound acceleration in the Steam releases when they were porting it to Linux. That just feels like flat-out heresy to me when it used to be such a prominent A3D 2.0 benchmark, and the older Steam releases were at least close enough on a modern system with an X-Fi, CMSS-3D Headphone and ALchemy to warrant not throwing together a retro rig.
 
440BX, literally no contest not only due to its real world history but it lives on as the logical template for a LOT of virtual machine platforms. Still supported by almost everything because of this.
 
Aluminum said:
440BX, literally no contest not only due to its real world history but it lives on as the logical template for a LOT of virtual machine platforms. Still supported by almost everything because of this.
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Intel's had a lot of good chipsets over the years. The 440BX stands tall as one of the best ever produced. It's not good just because it was good, but because of the timing and how mediocre it's successors were. 440BX was the right chipset at the right time. It enjoyed a long life span and as you pointed out, it's got a legacy that's visible to this day even though it hasn't been the mainstream chipset choice for a decade and a half or more.
 
When I saw the title, first thing that came to mind was 440BX. One of the best things that I'm surprised hasn't been mentioned - rock solid reliability. You knew it was going to work, and work well.
 
I would vote for the X58 chipset. Almost 10 years now and It still can keep up in gaming.

Although I am biased.
 
440BX and sis 735
sis735 come out of nowhere and deliver top notch performance for low money.
440BX just lasted a long time and no competitor had as good a product. heck intesl next genreation chipset was even worse then good old BX
 
WhoBeDaPlaya said:
440BX and X58
/thread

680i is the chipset equivalent of herpes.
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X58 was indeed awesome but I still have to give the nod to 440BX. I couldn't agree more with your statement about the NVIDIA 680i SLI chipset. It's not only on the some of the worst motherboards ever made, but the chipset itself was absolutely fucking awful. Heat issues, power issues, delamination, USB problems, SATA issues, and ultimately failure.
 
If there was ever a chipset that would warrant waterblocking the motherboard, it'd have to be 680i/780i after everything I've heard. Small wonder why I didn't care about SLI when I built my Q6600 box.

However, I kinda wish I could've held on just a year longer in hindsight; I built it around a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3P 2.0 due to X38 being too expensive, and 45nm Penryn chips and P45 were just around the corner. PCIe 2.0 would've been a welcome improvement, as well as the option for a x8/x8 lane split across the usual two PCIe x16 slots instead of just x16/x4 on P35.

The thing is, when you've been stuck on the family's asstastic Compaq with an Athlon XP 1800+, 512 MB DDR-266 and a Radeon 9600 XT near the end of 2007, when Crysis had finally released and that system already choked badly on games like TES IV: Oblivion, can you blame me for not wanting to wait any longer? Let me tell you, "night and day" didn't even begin to describe that leap in performance. Even going from a K6-2 350 to similar Athlon XP builds to what I outlined above wasn't that big. Anyway, that's going on a big tangent, so let me get back on track.

I didn't mention the P35-DS3P 2.0 because it's a bit... quirky. Has a tendency to suddenly wake up from sleep mode without any user input, will sometimes randomly fail to POST and undo my overclock on what are normally stable settings, and 3.6 GHz runs a lot slower in practice than more modest 3.0/3.2 GHz overclocks for reasons I have not figured out yet. (MOSFET cooling or other power delivery-related parts of the board?) Sometimes I wonder if I'd have been better off with the Abit IP-35 Pro that had my eye at the time, though I recall it being out of budget.

So no, it's not the best... but it's far from the worst. It's just in that weird middle spot where it's unremarkable.
 
The 440BX is hard to beat. Personally I think I give the edge to nForce on the athlon system though. It actually made the athlon platform usable. Remember the shitty via chipsets that had issues with randomly corrupting ide hard drives? The sis chipsets sucked as well. It actually made the platform stable.
 
440BX without a doubt. Last real Intel chipset with ISA & SB-Link support so it was great for DOS through Windows98 while still being able to handle Win2K/XP if pressed. Add a slotket and get up to a 1.4GGhz Tualatin. I still have two of them today.
 
swatbat said:
The 440BX is hard to beat. Personally I think I give the edge to nForce on the athlon system though. It actually made the athlon platform usable. Remember the shitty via chipsets that had issues with randomly corrupting ide hard drives? The sis chipsets sucked as well. It actually made the platform stable.
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Without the nForce chipsets, I wouldn't have ever used the AMD platform, regardless of how fast it was.
 
Dan_D said:
Without the nForce chipsets, I wouldn't have ever used the AMD platform, regardless of how fast it was.
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Which is funny because for the intel platforms nForce chipsets generally were terrible.
 
Dan_D said:
Without the nForce chipsets, I wouldn't have ever used the AMD platform, regardless of how fast it was.
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I was in high school or just getting out of it and upgraded from like a p3 700 to a faster athlon using that crap via chipset. I had long had it hammered into me the importance of backups. I learned why then. Ended up upgrading to the nvidia board and then a fast athlon xp when funds permitted. I will say after all of that crap with third party chipsets on the amd side I stuck with intel once I was able to afford the next round of upgrades and never looked back.
 
Mchart said:
What generation was good? I had each generation and they all had issues compared to a standard intel chipset.
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The post I quoted was concerning NVIDIA chipsets being "generally terrible" for the Intel platform. I simply stated this was a universal truth and not a general one.
 
Dan_D said:
The post I quoted was concerning NVIDIA chipsets being "generally terrible" for the Intel platform. I simply stated this was a universal truth and not a general one.
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Yeah, it's early here.
 
I think nforce 4 was probably the greatest for me. My X2 4800 lasted almost 7 years in that platform. It was really the platform that gave birth to SLI (that I can recall) and SATA 2.0.
 
I had several 440BX boards from P2-266 all the way to P3-1Ghz and all were rock solid. Honourable mention to X38 tho 'cause I had a board (ASUS Maximus Formula) which ran a Q6600 OC'd with the FSB and RAM all running over spec rock solid and Folding 24/7 for just shy of 10 years before the board went.
 
Toconator said:
I had several 440BX boards from P2-266 all the way to P3-1Ghz and all were rock solid. Honourable mention to X38 tho 'cause I had a board (ASUS Maximus Formula) which ran a Q6600 OC'd with the FSB and RAM all running over spec rock solid and Folding 24/7 for just shy of 10 years before the board went.
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X38, X48, X58, and X79 were all excellent chipsets.
 
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