I remember building one for a kid back in my high school days. It was running at 700mhz, had 256 of ram, a Geforce 2 GTS, a Soundblaster Live and a 30gig hardrive. I think he spent about $1500 for it all, I remember at the time it was a really hot system.

Yeah they were exciting back then. Very bug ridden though on the mobo side, with AGP issues and just general instability due to VIA chipsets and probably iffy quality. They were very sensitive to PSU quality, I remember. I had friends with them and read lots of reviews of course. But I've never actually sat down and worked with one myself. And it's not likely that I'll be running into one in the wild anymore.

I think it would be cool to get a mobo + CPU to mess around with. I've picked up just about every other CPU curiousity that I've wanted to get over the years. K5 PR200, Cyrix 5x86, K6-3+, Pentium Pro 1MB, Tualatin, Winchip 2.... 😀

I just need to find a cheap Athlon Classic 1GHz with mobo. That was a rather ground breaking CPU, being the first to get to 1GHz. Unfortunately they are rather sought after.

Here is one on ebay

cgi.ebay.com/AMD-1GHz-Athlon-K7-1GHz-Sl ... 1|294%3A50

Clock speeds aside.. I would saw the greatest triumph of the Athlon is Intel thinking "huh.. we might have some competition"