I don't know what you've been smoking, but even THG showed the i815E was faster than the VIA (any Apollo version), and that the BX was faster than the i815E. So to say any garbage VIA beats the BX in any way, shape, or form, is nothing more than lies, hypocracy, and perhaps a bit of brand promotion. I've had hundreds of boards with just about every chipset imaginable, including (to my chagrin) some of those VIA chipset boards.
The one Intel chipset that VIA could beat was the lowely i820, and we saw what happened to THAT chipset!
The BX chipset is still the undisputed state-of-the-art chipset for performance freaks.-THG, June 14 2000
Oh, and <A HREF="http://www17.tomshardware.com/motherboard/20000611/i815-04.html" target="_new">here's some benchmarks to prove what I'm saying</A>, as if I wasn't already an authority on the matter! Of course VIA Apollo Pro 133A doesn't simply loose to BX, but does so by a rather large margin! Heck, even the simple i815 breaks it's back! Wow, talk about garbage!
Back in those days the VIA Apollo Pro 133A wasn't even compatable with a bunch of MY hardware, some of which was the most state of the art you could buy! Of course there was a fix, don't buy state of the art hardware!
So you have a slow chipset that does very poorly against the competition, has compatability issues, stability issues, and is basically just garbage any way you look at it. Now I do understand you wanting to rid yourself of that board, and I do understand that it has 4 slots, but this guy wants an HONEST ANSWER, NOT A SALES PITCH, SO QUIT LYING TO HIM!!!
And the P3B-F also has 4 SDRAM slots, supports ALL PIII CPU's (Even the 1400 Tualatin, simply by adding a cheap Slot-T adapter), and is equal in most ways to other top notch BX boards. So I'll have to stick with that as an HONEST recommendation.
Oh, and AGP4x couldn't give these chipsets any advantage over AGP2x, not even on the GeForce2 GTS, which was state of the art at the time (and thus often crashed VIA chipset boards).
As for UDMA 100, I have to admit that I did add an IDE card to my last BX system when I finally got around to using a drive (WD 800JB) which could exceed 33MB/s (my previous drives, UDMA 66 and 100, only had continuous transfers of around 30MB/s).
So unless he's running a state of the art drive, he doesn't even need the faster IDE protocols. And unless he's running a current state of the art card, he won't have much use for AGP4x either.
<font color=blue>Watts mean squat if you don't have quality!</font color=blue>