Tom has a nice review comparing the different 133MHz solutions (Intel
440BX overclocked, VIA Apollo Pro 133/133A, Intel i810, i820, i840). The
BX section is particularly interesting:
http://www6.tomshardware.com/mainboard/00q1/000308/fsb-133-2-01.html
.. because the i448BX running at 133MHz beats ALL its competition, EVEN
the i820 with PC800 RAMBUS memory.
The only bad part of the "BX133" is the out-of-spec AGP bus. It turns out
that the 440BX has a /4 PCI clock divisor so at 133MHz the PCI bus still
runs within spec. However (as I've painfully learned) not many video cards
can survive a very high AGP bus.
.. although my old NVIDIA Vanta handled 95MHz pretty easily. :)
Also, almost all PC100 RAM sold today is CAS2 (that's
Column-Address-Select latency, or the number of clock cycles between
assertion of CAS and RAS). You can check this from your BIOS by setting
SDRAM latency to "SPD" (the tiny serial EEPROM on the DIMM which stores
the CAS setting).
If your PC100 RAM is 7ns or better (you can see the rating on the chips)
AND is CAS2, you can almost certainly run it at 133MHz (no need to buy
PC133 RAM, which isn't much more expensive, but if you have lots of PC100
RAM like me, you would not want to throw it away).
What this means is, you can still put together a bleeding-edge system if
you have a (good) BX main board and RAM. The only issue is the AGP bus,
but if you can survive with a Vanta or TNT2 (which can handle the
out-of-spec AGP) then you're set.
For a bleeding-edge 3d card, 3dfx at least will be releasing a PCI Voodoo4
so you don't need to abuse the out-of-spec AGP bus. AND it has open-source
Linux support. I prefer that to NVIDIA's closed-source solution.
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