I just go see what's available most of the time. If Ebay's your thing, there are still plenty of Socket 370 boards available. Go have a look and see what your choices are. The TUSL2-C is well loved (I had one back in the day, and have a TUSL2-M now), so keep your eye out for that one. If you search for "socket 370 tualatin" you'll get a list of boards that are compatible with the Tualatin CPUs -- which is important if you want to go >1GHz. Sellers that list Tualatin support know what they have and may want more for it, but you can always develop a short list of boards and then put out feelers for those specific models.

SirNickity wrote:

I just go see what's available most of the time. If Ebay's your thing, there are still plenty of Socket 370 boards available. Go have a look and see what your choices are. The TUSL2-C is well loved (I had one back in the day, and have a TUSL2-M now), so keep your eye out for that one. If you search for "socket 370 tualatin" you'll get a list of boards that are compatible with the Tualatin CPUs -- which is important if you want to go >1GHz. Sellers that list Tualatin support know what they have and may want more for it, but you can always develop a short list of boards and then put out feelers for those specific models.

Yeah I looked on eBay before making this topic - Tualatin is cool but expensive. CPU + motherboard is like €100+ easily and they all seem to get shipped from Eastern Europe or Russia - or the US with massive P&P on top of the sales price. For a motherboard which might be on its last legs and a CPU that comes with no cooler, this seems a lot of money. It's too costly a gamble for me.

I had a bit of a think and decided to keep my slot 1 motherboard. I found old reviews and although the brand is unknown to me, it was a high end "prosumer" motherboard at the time so my worries of it being junk are unfounded. I'm limited by the CPU but since I got a Windows XP machine that can handle any game from 2001 upwards, I'll have to make do with the few games that don't like Windows XP yet don't run brilliantly on a P3 600Mhz (Outcast for example had issues with Windows XP but there are solutions for it AND that game required a monster CPU).

I've had to buy a lot of parts from Russia, Bulgaria, etc. Takes a while to ship, but I've had good luck so far. I think maybe those regions hung on to older hardware longer than in my own home turf, so that's where it can still be found. Though, there is plenty of stuff still kicking around in the homeland. It's just not online and catalogued for the taking. You have to go find it, or be lucky enough to run into it.

SirNickity wrote:

I've had to buy a lot of parts from Russia, Bulgaria, etc. Takes a while to ship, but I've had good luck so far. I think maybe those regions hung on to older hardware longer than in my own home turf, so that's where it can still be found. Though, there is plenty of stuff still kicking around in the homeland. It's just not online and catalogued for the taking. You have to go find it, or be lucky enough to run into it.

In Belgium and Western Europe in general, these older systems are pretty rare (finding even a 386 or 486 is damn hard) and I think you're right, Eastern Europe held onto their stuff for longer but I also think it's because Western recycling plans are very protective - you can't sift to stuff people threw out. A few months ago, I saw this PC being dumped at the recycling plant and asked if I could take a look inside, see if I could salvage memory sticks or a cpu. Answer: "no". All electronics are processed and the rare metals and other stuff is recovered that way and they get paid for that apparently. Which is odd since we pay something called Recupel to actually pay THEM to recycle it so they get money twice. But that explains why these parts are so hard to find - because it all gets recycled which is a damn shame.

You should see the prices Computer Recycling Centers are charging for CPUs here where I live. 486 DX2 66 for $100. Madness. I can't wait for this Retro PC craze to go away and prices go back to normal. I just hope all these kids who are picking this stuff up don't end up ruining it all.

rodimus80 wrote:

You should see the prices Computer Recycling Centers are charging for CPUs here where I live. 486 DX2 66 for $100. Madness. I can't wait for this Retro PC craze to go away and prices go back to normal. I just hope all these kids who are picking this stuff up don't end up ruining it all.

At least they sell it, most just work on weight, they Don't even have a clue what the parts are let alone try and sell it.

Funny thing is I prefer Slot based systems.
A Katmai 600 will be fine for most Win9x game's that doesn't like XP, and the few that don't are probably demanding enough to benefit from a cheaper socket 478 Win98 build then a Late P3

Likewise the isa slot means you can drop the P3 back to dos for the most demanding dos games, although admittedly your MMX PC shouldn't have any trouble in this area.

rodimus80 wrote:

You should see the prices Computer Recycling Centers are charging for CPUs here where I live. 486 DX2 66 for $100. Madness. I can't wait for this Retro PC craze to go away and prices go back to normal. I just hope all these kids who are picking this stuff up don't end up ruining it all.

There's a retro PC craze? If there is, I wouldn't want it to go away 🤣

But eBay is your friend - I bought a DX2 66 Overdrive CPU yesterday for €20 including P&P which is a good price. DX4 100 gets 3-4 times more expensive but meh, the performance benefit is like 10-15% so not worth it.