Chipset Guide

As you can tell by the below Specification chart the Intel BX chipset isn't all that different from the 440LX chipset. The real division between the two chipsets is the 440BX's official support for the 100MHz Bus Frequency, a 50% increase in the clock of the system bus from Intel's previous standard, the 66MHz bus. 

Not only will this increased bus frequency bring us higher clock speeds, but it will also provide the users with increased memory performance due to the System memory operating at the 100MHz bus speed, in comparison to the conventional 66MHz setting. 

Of course, with overclocking, many Pentium II owners have pushed their systems to the limits making use of the 75, 83.3, or even the 92MHz bus speed setting on some LX motherboards...and as these tests show, the Pentium II is hardly affected by the higher bus speeds performance wise. 

The most dramatic increases in performance when dealing with Slot-1/Pentium II systems comes from an increase to the clock speed of the processor.  The reason behind this being that the Pentium II's high speed Level 2 cache is located on the P2 cartridge on a special dedicated bus, making its operating frequency vary directly with the clock speed of the processor, more specifically, the L2 cache on a Pentium II operates at 1/2 the clock speed of the processor. 

It is for that reason that running a Pentium II - 300 at 100 x 3.0 will not yield any significant improvements over running the processor at 66 x 4.5, since, in both cases, the L2 cache is operating at 150MHz.