VX Motherboard. Is it cheap and nasty
Merv Hutley
Can anyone tell me if the VX PRO motherboard and the VX motherboard,
the same board. If so what is the difference (other than one may have
plastic fantastic chips)
Merv Hutley
Merv Hutley
Mathew Dredge
There is nothing wrong with a VX motherboard, I have just purchased one,
the performance is excelent and the features of the motherboard are nothing
to cry about (4 * 74 pin Simm sockets, 2 SDRAM sockets, ps/2 mouse,
Universal Serial Port (undocumneted) Infrared Port + More)..
Sure the more expensive mother boards offer a slight speed advantage, but
this is in most cases not noticable when doing everyday computer work..
--
Mathew Dredge
CSE (NZ) Ltd.
Software Developer
---------------------------------------------
E-Mail: mat...@cse.co.nz
Phone: +64-7-838 2010
Fax: +64-7-838 0977
CSE: http://www.cse.co.nz/
URL: http://www2.wave.co.nz/~mdredge
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Merv Hutley <ink...@nznet.gen.nz> wrote in article
<33e59213...@news.nznet.gen.nz>...
J. de Bruin
Merv Hutley wrote:
> Can anyone tell me if the VX PRO motherboard and the VX motherboard,
> the same board. If so what is the difference (other than one may have
> plastic fantastic chips)
The VX motherboard chipset is really the Intel 82430VX chipset,
sometimes called Triton III. Prior to the release of the '430TX, the
'430VX was the only Intel chipset that supported SDRAM. It is a
perfectly good chipset and several name-brand manufacturers, like
Asustek, make or made motherboards with this chipset. At the same time
as the '430VX was released, a more expensive chipset, the Intel 82430HX
(Triton II) also came out. The HX supported parity ram, and was able to
cache more than 64MB of system memory, whereas the VX only cached up to
64MB of RAM and didn't support parity memory. The HX was designed for
servers, while the VX was designed for home use. As I said before, the
one thing the VX did have, which the HX didn't, was SDRAM support. This
made the VX quite popular with the overclocking crowd.
VX Pro on the otherhand is a clone of the Intel chipset made by VIA.
Just read this article on the "Motherboard Homeworld"
http://web2.superb.net/motherboard/chipset.html, scroll down to the
section marked "The $69 Motherboard".
Unlike the VIA Apollo, the VXpro is cheap and nasty and is usually
bundled with only the lowest quality motherboards. Also watch out for
the HXpro, the clone of the Intel HX.
Bye...
g.h...@ukonline.co.uk
The VxPro motherboard is NOT to be confused with Intel's VX chipset motherboard (which isn't bad at all).
a) The VxPro does not have any voltage regulator heatsink at all, which makes it a tad(!) unreliable for most of the CPU's it purports to support (Cyrix M1 & M2 (MX), AMD-K6 (to 233MHz) and Intel Classic & MMX).
b) The VxPro PCI chipset is not recognised by Windows 95A or Windows 95B
(OSR2). Therefore a Standard PCI Bridge will be forced together with a
Standard Dual PCI IDE Controller, not good news in the performance stakes
(as well as excluding you from the pleasures of IDE Bus Mastering!)
Several other reasons but these are the main two.
Had four in the last seven days with three failures due to unreliabilty.
The only thing going for it is that it's cheap but then in this, of all industries,
you get what you pay for.
If you want the same on-paper spec. with good reliability at a reasonable price,
go for the TX equipped board from Spider at approx £70 (512k PLB, Ultra DMA,
USB etc. etc.). Tried, tested and good for the dosh.
Regards