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Intel 430LX ("Mercury")

The 430LX was Intel's first Pentium chipset (at least to my knowledge). It was used on the original Pentiums, which came in 60 and 66 MHz versions. These were 5V chips and were used on the old socket 4 motherboards; they were obsoleted very quickly when Intel moved to their newer 90 and 100 MHz 3.3V processors running on socket 5 motherboards.

Feature-wise, the 430LX was a very plain chipset by today's standards. It included the PCI bus of course and support for up to 128 MB of RAM. There was no support for EDO memory (which was introduced in the Triton series). Cache chips were soldered directly onto most motherboards, and I believe the size was 64 KB, but I am not sure. The 430LX went the way of the dodo very quickly, as did the motherboards it used and the hot, slow first-generation Pentiums they supported. Today it is extremely difficult to even find any information at all about this chipset!

Next: Intel 430NX ("Neptune")

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