First post, by Paar
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I've been seriously into old computers for about a half year now and by that time collected some nice hardware. At one point I have decided that my ultimate project will be to build several PCs around the best Intel CPUs - from 386 to Pentium 4. I have obtained 386 DX33, 486 DX4 EW, Pentium 233 MMX and recently Pentium III-S 1,4GHz and have an eye on one offer of Pentium II 450MHz. I am about to finish the PIII build and will be doing 486 build next but in the meantime I'm still trying to get other hardware as well.
There is one CPU that I cannot find at all and that's one specific Pentium 4. At first I didn't want to do P4 build at all as I have fallen a victim to common stories about it being power hungry, inefficient and simply bad. But then I've learn about Cedar Mill and my opinion changed in an instant. I want one! More specifically model 661 3,6 GHz, stepping D0. The problem is I cannot find any. Well I can find earlier steppings or 3,4 GHz D0 but those are not the ones I want. Unfortunately the 661 D0 is not anywhere, even not on eBay for some ridiculous prices. And I've been looking for months. Is that rare or do I simply have a bad luck? Maybe there is someone here on the forum that has a spare? 😀
There is one thing that you could help me with. I cannot settle on a motherboard that I will use. As I love small and compact PC cases I want to use Micro-ATX form factor. I currently own a board with 775 socket and 865 Intel chipset (with AGP slot) however as I want my build to be around year 2005/2006 I have hard time to aquire proper AGP card. And even it it's available it's PCI-E counterpart often costs a third of the price. So I want to you a board with PCI-E slot.
I have two offers now - Gigabyte GA-8I915G-MF with 915 chipset supporting DDR1 memories (of which I have several 400 MHz modules with CL2 latency). Good thing it supports Windows 98 which could be handy in the future (even though I plan to install WinXP 32-bit). The cons are it only supports SATA I 150 MB/s, which shouldn't be a major problem, and perhaps older PCI-E standard.
The second board is ASUS P5B-VM with G965 chipset supporting DDR2 800 MHz and SATA II 300 MB/s. I would have to find suitable RAM modules but when I've checked the best I can find are CL4 ones, specifically 4-4-4-12. The cons are there are no chipset drivers for Win9x and the board itself is not as good looking as the Gigabyte one 😁.
Do you have any recommendations?