Cobra42898 wrote on 2020-07-24, 13:28:
Tetrium,
Just wondering what your favorite uses are for your s370 rigs. i have some early HP pavilion rigs with the early s370 Celeron CPUs, but haven't found a use for them yet. I also have my d815eea2/1.0ghzp3 rig, which I love, but needs caps. Rock solid MB , just without the flashy OC options in the BIOS. That one will get set up exactly as it was i 2001.
My favorite uses of any rig is basically the conceptualizing, assembling of the parts and assembling the parts, setting up the OS and programs and gaming/benchmarking. And then seeing how it will perform.
Contrary to what most people here tend to do (which is to build a rig to fit a (list of) games they want to play), I build the rigs first and try out what will run on them afterwards 😜
The reasons why in the course of the years I gained a slight preference for s370 is because this platform offers a similar variability compared to sA, s3, slot 1 and (s)s7 while offering great stability and flexibility. It can host basically all versions of AGP thanks to the universal AGP slot many of these boards were fitted with, superb performance along with having a good thermal profile (unlike Athlon and Pentium 4) and excellent compatibility with sA cooling solutions so crappy Athlon XP HSFs could be turned into excellent and affordable s370 HSFs with relative ease. In addition, the lower thermal profile offers more flexibility in the need for cooling the system (can get away with more because s370 CPUs don't run very hot) and the s370 platform can much more easily make use of modern PSUs without the need for a beefy 5v rail.
And last but not least, back when I was collecting (or hoarding, take yer pick xD 😜 ) s370 was widely available and cheap.
All the factors above have made it a joy for me to work with this generation of hardware, offering a wider flexibility in being able to run win9x and winnt up to WinXP (though WinXP would have a harder time once the OS became more bloated in the younger iterations of WinXP, which I tried to circumvent my slipstreaming which was another fun project of mine! 😀 ).
All the other platforms I listed usually have a majority of the benefits I wrote down here, but to me, s370 is basically the best offer.
Slot 1 is almost as awesome, but is a bit more difficult with cooling solutions and CPU compatibility (Slotkets with full Tualatin support are not exactly growing on trees, so to say). s3 has none of the luxuries that ATX comes with, (s)s7 has for sure just as much variety in CPU support for instance, but lacks raw processing power and adequate memory support for the OSs I ended up using the most (WinME and WinXP), s754 and s939 have more limited CPU support and to me isn't as exciting, sA has the PSU issues with the 5v rail, s478 lacks universal AGP card support with its Intel chipsets.
All of the alternative platforms offer many excellent features which I truely love, but in the years I was preoccupied with this hobby, I noticed that s370 became THE platform that ended up being the most fun and rewarding for me personally.
The one downside that s370 offers would imo be the lack of free multiplier selection, as these CPUs will usually be locked (except ES CPUs and CPUs made by VIA that is).
And regarding the early s370 Mendocino boards, I tend to view them as roughly ss7 in performance, but without all the fuzz and coming with extra features such as 440LX/440BX excellent stability and being able to get at least similar performance using puny PC-66 SDRAM. To me, my Celeron 400 and my K6-iii/400 seemed so similar in performance, but the Celeron was arguably easier to set up (not that ss7 rigs are so notoriously difficult to set up as my build went without any major issues whatsoever) while offering very similar performance.
It's basically the Intel ss7 counterpart 😜
And I could put some of my slower PC-100 CAS 3 SDRAM in there and set the CAS latency to 2 😜
And my Coppermine 800, both Coppermines 1000, Celeron 800 and Tualatin 1400 all ran without much issues at all. The only rig that gave me some issues was the i820 Intel RDRAM board which features 3 RDRAM slots and this turned out to be an issue with the board itself (the board with 3 RDRAM slots was an actual engineering sample board while the one with 2 RDRAM slots was a standard retail board, so stability issues were to be expected there tbh). And I'm pretty sure I didn't even list all my s370 rigs here.