People here yearn over Slot 1 CPUs and machines? How boring; nothing but computers which have the promise to run modern software but instead play chicken when it comes to anything greater than their era. I get that the cartridge look may be nice, but that's just aesthetic that gives off little tactical advantage.

elod wrote:

Could you please erase the parts of quoted messages that are not relevant to your reply?
Thank you!

+1

Fine, fine, fine by me... but once again, to restate my point, I also just don't see the point whatsoever of people going out of their way to dedicate to their adoration of Slot 1 nowadays; sure, you can remove the cartridges easily compared to pin CPUs, there is less problems with keying, and they may have some extra cache, but the heatsink trouble with more horizontal space being occupied just makes it a troublesome task.

There's a reason why Intel switched back to pins. The only reason why I used to keep a Slot 1 board around was because it had onboard SCSI-- now I threw it out because I can get Adaptec cards for cheap. Now I only have a PC 300GL with that kind of CPU. Only keeping it as well since I got it through a promise that I would do something with it; throwing it away would break it.

If this is still not relevant, I can move my discussion to a separate thread. Don't want to bring quarrel upon this place.

kazblox wrote:

There's a reason why Intel switched back to pins.

Intel and AMD used slots to bring the L2 cache closer to the CPU. They switched back to using sockets as soon as they managed to put the cache on the die.

debs3759 wrote:

Intel and AMD used slots to bring the L2 cache closer to the CPU. They switched back to using sockets as soon as they managed to put the cache on the die.

No, they actually wanted to put the L2 cache further away from the CPU (i.e. not on the same die as with the PPro) in order to have a higher yield. But they still wanted the cache to be part of the CPU, resulting in the Slot processor modules.

debs3759 wrote:

kazblox wrote:

There's a reason why Intel switched back to pins.

Intel and AMD used slots to bring the L2 cache closer to the CPU. They switched back to using sockets as soon as they managed to put the cache on the die.

Well, not really. They also wanted to copyright the SLOT. They couldn't copyright PGA, so to prevent AMD from fitting into Intel boards... Yes I know Slot A is just a backwards Slot1, but it was enough to keep amd off intel boards, and keep companies like VIA from making 1 chipset for 2 cpu's.

kazblox wrote:

People here yearn over Slot 1 CPUs and machines? How boring; nothing but computers which have the promise to run modern software but instead play chicken when it comes to anything greater than their era. I get that the cartridge look may be nice, but that's just aesthetic that gives off little tactical advantage.

Slot1 covered a large period, from the P2 233 to the P3 1.1Ghz. There is no point saying a CPU sucks running something greater than its ear, any CPU sucks when it's used for software that came years after.

Personnally a bit of my interest into old hardware is the about the aesthetics. I like nice pieces of hardware, mixing nice colours, full of chips... Slot 1 cartridges are pretty 😀

If you like slot-1, then Slot 2 will blow your mind. ^.^

I wanted to do a Slot 2 build at some point, but finding a motherboard for those cpus seems really hard

luckybob wrote:

Well, not really. They also wanted to copyright the SLOT. They couldn't copyright PGA, so to prevent AMD from fitting into Intel boards... Yes I know Slot A is just a backwards Slot1, but it was enough to keep amd off intel boards, and keep companies like VIA from making 1 chipset for 2 cpu's.

Slot A is a lot more than just a backwards slot 1. Mechanically they are similar, but the actual protocols going over those pins are quite different (SDR vs DDR for a start, but also shared vs point-to-point bus topology). Even if AMD had been allowed - and willing - to use the exact same slot 1 it's highly unlikely any chipset vendor would have produced a Frankenstein chipset that could handle both, just as no boards were made with Slot 1 & Slot A (even though you did see boards with Slot 1 & So370).

I'm not a copyright lawyer by any stretch of the imagination, but I would theorize it would set a president. Something where Intel can goto a court and say; "we made a change, and they are specifically copying us". The connector itself isn't the issue, but to set a specific point of comparison. Something to FORCE Amd to go their own path.

Just ordered a Compaq AP400 workstation for the decent amount of 20 €. According to the seller the PSU is broken, justifying the low price, but i´m looking forward to repair it.
Allways liked these Compaq professional workstations. While this is a dual P3 unit i still have a dual XEON P3 board i cannot test due to lack of the matching proprietary power supply.
This site from poland gives some pictures on the AP400 (the maintainer is probably vogoner himself):
AP400
As you can see the CPUs are mounted flat on the mobo, not upright and the AGP graphics board uses this proprietary low profile Compaq bracket.

eisapc wrote:

the AGP graphics board uses this proprietary low profile Compaq bracket.

Iirc it's not proprietary, it's called NLX and you have some variety, however your G200 seems to be one of the best options out there.

hard1k wrote:

eisapc wrote:

the AGP graphics board uses this proprietary low profile Compaq bracket.

Iirc it's not proprietary, it's called NLX and you have some variety, however your G200 seems to be one of the best options out there.

NLX is a motherboard form factor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLX_(moth ... rm_factor)

Yeah, you're right. But adding NLX into the ebay search for an AGP videocard produces correct results for this type of bracket. However it may be called in a more correct way somehow.

kazblox wrote:

People here yearn over Slot 1 CPUs and machines? How boring; nothing but computers which have the promise to run modern software but instead play chicken when it comes to anything greater than their era. I get that the cartridge look may be nice, but that's just aesthetic that gives off little tactical advantage.

I doubt many people here use retro hardware for practical purposes. Dosbox is practical. Retro hardware rarely is. Slot CPUs are a distinct product of their short life-time and thats what makes them attractive.

An alpha (ARM3 running at 33 Mhz) Acorn A5000, 4 mbytes of RAM, German RISC OS (3.19) and German keyboard, with its Acorn multisync monitor.
Very rare because it is German, and with even rarer German mags about the Archimedes and the RISC PC : thus, a great addition to my Acorn 32 bit collection.
An Amiga CDTV (unit only).
Both fully working and great shape.

Finally, the AGP holy grail for me, new in box.

Now I just need to find an X1950PRO AGP, and I can do my own GPU scaling tests with Socket A and Socket 754 single core CPUs.

Munx wrote:

kazblox wrote:

People here yearn over Slot 1 CPUs and machines? How boring; nothing but computers which have the promise to run modern software but instead play chicken when it comes to anything greater than their era. I get that the cartridge look may be nice, but that's just aesthetic that gives off little tactical advantage.

I doubt many people here use retro hardware for practical purposes. Dosbox is practical. Retro hardware rarely is. Slot CPUs are a distinct product of their short life-time and thats what makes them attractive.

Exactly this. They're desirable because of nostalgia and because they are different than anything that came before or after. Slot CPUs solved an engineering/cost problem (L2 cache integration) that was unique to their era. That makes them cool and interesting.

Also, a ton of great games came out in the Windows 98 era and Slot 1 machines play those games well.

kazblox wrote:

People here yearn over Slot 1 CPUs and machines? How boring; nothing but computers which have the promise to run modern software but instead play chicken when it comes to anything greater than their era. I get that the cartridge look may be nice, but that's just aesthetic that gives off little tactical advantage.

To me it's socket 7 that is that way, they "just" play DOS games faster than 486s, but lag for Windows 9x games that Slot 1 CPUs manage to run pretty well in comparison.

But I perfectly understand that people can prefer socket 5/7 over Slot 1, or 486 over socket 5/7 ...

Munx wrote:

I doubt many people here use retro hardware for practical purposes. Dosbox is practical. Retro hardware rarely is. Slot CPUs are a distinct product of their short life-time and thats what makes them attractive.

DOSBox is practical for early and especially mid DOS games, but not for late ones and not for Windows 9x. Basically, nothing's more practical than a well built Windows 9x machine to play windows 9x games right now. Virtualization ain't that good, emulation is still not good enough, and keeping patching games so they run in newer oses is time consuming as well, and patches don't always exist ... And modern windows doesn't always like old games very much (I remember some game making administrator mode to not work anymore after reboot). And also DOSBox don't emulate everything yet and some stuff still do not work under it even though the DOS PC emulation is much more advanced than the win9x PC emulation right now.

I'm nearly 20 years old, I've never seen a slot 1 until I was ~15 years old so right now I can't be nostalgic of that era (or anything before that either and yet I have 8088, 286, 386 and so on ...) but I still prefer them over DOSBox for games