Intel 440BX has been the king of Intel chipsets for a very long time. There are still many people out there using motherboards using the 440BX chipset which is also known as 'The King of Overclocking". It's one of the most successful chipset ever made or designed by Intel. That's because it has been around for a long time, enabling them to refine it, thus creating a truly remarkable chipset out of it.

Of course, there is no such thing as perfection. The 440BX chipset has been plagued by a few major flaws like the lack of a 1/3 AGP bus divider, making it almost impossible to overclock higher than 150MHz FSB and rendering bus speeds above 150MHz useless although boards like BE6-II offer up to 200MHz FSB. Anyhow, the realistic speed for overclockers is usually below 160MHz FSB.

Some other imperfection of the 440BX include the lack of UltraDMA 66/100 support, forcing the motherboard manufacturers to introduce external controllers like the HighPoint HPT366 or the latest HPT370 with RAID support. And the 440BX chipset also does not support AGP 4X although all new graphics cards are designed to support AGP 4X.

Intel 815

Introducing the next generation chipset - the Intel 815. By removing all the major flaws that were plaguing the BX chipset, the Intel 815 was born. It supports all the major technologies and features like AGP 4X, UltraDMA100 and 1/3 AGP bus divider, just to mention a few.

There are two variations of the Intel 815 chipset - the famous 815E with the very slow onboard Intel graphics controller and the newer and cheaper 815EP without the useless Intel graphics controller.