TELVM wrote:

d1stortion wrote:

... K10 is obsolete since fall 2011 😀 not for the better though

Does that mean Ivy Bridge will be obsolete in three months?

You got it. For Intel even both in a technical and consumer standpoint sence because their older products don't get cheaper at all until they reach EOL 😀 e.g. Sandy Bridge prices are higher now than in 2011

PcBytes wrote:

Anything after Pentium 3 isn't retro for me.

nicely put!... 😏

Great answers so far 😀

And of course there's no general rule for this, so I'm really excited to see how vastly the opinions differ.

Right now I like the 16/32/64 bit classification, which fits my (current!) personal standard pretty accurately.

I'm building a high end SocketA system, which seems almost too new and powerful to me, but the SoA platform is pretty old, it's 32bit and single core only.
The next socket, 754, isn't really much different...still uses DDR1 ram, no dual core but the CPUs are 64 bit and I believe there are a couple of PCI-E boards as well and with these small differences, it feels much more modern to me.

d1stortion wrote:

shamino wrote:

K8 was a revolutionary change and I still think it's closely related to AMD's present-day architecture. I'm not sure what the difference between K8 and K10 is supposed to be (or what happened to K9), but it seems rather insignificant compared to all the other "K#" iterations.

..."present-day"? Heh, never heard of Bulldozer I guess? K10 is obsolete since fall 2011 😀 not for the better though

I've heard the term but I thought it was just another core name, I didn't know it was considered separate from the K10 family. I should read up on it sometime, but I'm in doubt whether it's significantly different from K10 or maybe even the K8.
K5->K6, K6->K7, and K7->K8 seem like they were more major architectural changes than anything after that. Integrated graphics is a big deal though I'm not sure how much that really impacts on the CPU. I should read more about it, I haven't paid much attention to the newest stuff.

To me theres also the distinction of AT vs ATX. The more you go backward in time, the more things change (the switch from AT to ATX was a major one in my book) and the more retro something becomes. Clearly Socket A and Socket 478 are still quite capable machines in a way, but they are somewhat alien compared to modern machines:
-No 64-bit support
-An old-fashioned way to mount the cooler
-AGP (though a few S478 boards had PCI-e)
-Lack of PCI-e
-DDR1 (or even SDRAM/RIMM)
-No SATA (most of the time anyway)

But despite this, they can still be used as modern machines (though I found my Athlon XP 3200+ (upgraded to the max) to be too slow for using the web and multitasking and such), but not for playing modern games.

When a computer is considered vintage, to me roughly anything that's mounted in an AT case, is vintage (excluding those industrial AT P4/P3 boards).
And anything that predates the 386 is a class of it's own, that's even too old and non-standard in my book.
I personally hold the line at which computers can run AIX smoothly, and Athlon XP just isn't up to the task anymore (gameplay is choppy) while my Athlon64's can still (barely) play AIX at acceptable framerates.

In short:To me, retro is a gliding scale, there is no set point or date after which something is retro and something else isn't, but if there is a point, then to me Socket A and Socket 478 are retro-frontier-area right now.

shamino wrote:

d1stortion wrote:

shamino wrote:

K8 was a revolutionary change and I still think it's closely related to AMD's present-day architecture. I'm not sure what the difference between K8 and K10 is supposed to be (or what happened to K9), but it seems rather insignificant compared to all the other "K#" iterations.

..."present-day"? Heh, never heard of Bulldozer I guess? K10 is obsolete since fall 2011 😀 not for the better though

I've heard the term but I thought it was just another core name, I didn't know it was considered separate from the K10 family. I should read up on it sometime, but I'm in doubt whether it's significantly different from K10 or maybe even the K8.
K5->K6, K6->K7, and K7->K8 seem like they were more major architectural changes than anything after that. Integrated graphics is a big deal though I'm not sure how much that really impacts on the CPU. I should read more about it, I haven't paid much attention to the newest stuff.

It's in fact the first really new design since probably K7. Wasn't K8 simply the inclusion of the memory controller on the CPU and the usual minor fixes? If you read about Bulldozer you will quickly realize that it's pretty unique with "modules" instead of full cores. It's practically a server CPU design which they sell as a desktop CPU.

The lamest thing about BD is how it needs Win8 to work to its fullest. There even were Win7 patches for these CPUs which actually decreased performance and were taken down.

I think the key thing is difference between old and retro.

I’m building a Socket 478 XP based PC for old games a lot of the parts from redundant hardware from business’s, the fact that they are still chucking the last of this era stuff out means it can’t be retro, just old. It needs a few more years of being considered old and crap before being conceded cool and retro.

I think P3’era hardware has been out of mainstream use long enough to be considered retro.
OS wise, even Windows 2000 is still not uncommon for some low priority servers, NT4 or any Win9x OS I’d call retro now

chinny22 wrote:

I think the key thing is difference between old and retro. […]
Show full quote

I think the key thing is difference between old and retro.

I’m building a Socket 478 XP based PC for old games a lot of the parts from redundant hardware from business’s, the fact that they are still chucking the last of this era stuff out means it can’t be retro, just old. It needs a few more years of being considered old and crap before being conceded cool and retro.

I think P3’era hardware has been out of mainstream use long enough to be considered retro.
OS wise, even Windows 2000 is still not uncommon for some low priority servers, NT4 or any Win9x OS I’d call retro now

The oldest system I know of being used by someone is an LGA775 system and even that one rarely gets used anymore as the owner has a newer system now.

I wouldn't call XP a retro-OS myself, but the rig it's installed on can still be a retro rig. Heck, XP can be installed on a Pentium 3 and still run smoothly when not connected to the internet.

Socket A isn't cool anymore, been a long time since it was.
But anyway, I consider SA/S478 to be bordering retro as of now.
Theres even people using 9x on such systems, heck those for sure can(or could) be considered retro rigs.

Perhaps the real question is: When is a computer considered to be retro?
Is it a matter of function?
Is it a matter of weather the hardware is too old to be used in a productive environment?
Is there a set number of years before something is retro?

To me the best solution would be to see it in a gliding scale.

Anyway, it seems that most of us see P3's as retro with about half the people here viewing early P4's or Socket A as retro.
Also people seem to see a vintage computer as even older then a retro computer but the line between vintage and retro seems to be an even vaguer one.

the fact that they are still chucking the last of this era stuff out means it can’t be retro, just old.

With this I disagree. The fact that 486's are still used by a lot of machinery (like satellites for instance) doesn't make the 486 non-retro because it is still being used around the world somewhere so imo this can't be a basis for determining if something can be classified as retro or not.

Hardware doesn't become "retro" for me and neither do games. Either the hardware was of good quality and captured my attention when it was new and afterward or it did not. I keep things that allow me to play games I like in their original form. I dislike things that alter original games into inferior "versions", with worse or better graphics or sound. If it weren't for "retro" gaming being financially cheaper than modern gaming I probably would have stopped picking up games almost entirely sometime in the last ten years.

sheath wrote:

Hardware doesn't become "retro" for me and neither do games. Either the hardware was of good quality and captured my attention when it was new and afterward or it did not. I keep things that allow me to play games I like in their original form. I dislike things that alter original games into inferior "versions", with worse or better graphics or sound. If it weren't for "retro" gaming being financially cheaper than modern gaming I probably would have stopped picking up games almost entirely sometime in the last ten years.

You think like me. Gold is always gold, shit is always shit.

By the way, I'm feeling like a goddamned old man reading some of the stuff here and I'm just 19. Pentium 4 retro, seriously?

I always give my old computers to my mother so employees of my parents company can use them as office machines. My old Pentium 4 machine is there (I used to play Oblivion on medium settings on it) and my old 1 Ghz Celeron machine with 320 MB RAM (actually a former 633 Mhz, 64 MB RAM machine) and they are still happily being used. Windows 7 is useless, memory hogging piece of shit unless you need to play the newest games.

By the way, when it comes to productivity, a Mac Plus was tested to be better than a modern dualcore in terms of office use http://hallicino.hubpages.com/hub/_86_Mac_Plu … elieve_Who_Wins

As for browsing, well, I played tons of old online Flash/Shockwave games on my mom's office Pentium 100/32 MB RAM/S3 Trio system. She used internet banking on the exact same machine without problems, although Java loaded slow on that machine. That was in 1999-2004 As long as you are not visiting Youtube or Facebook, a very old machine is OK for browsing and doing things that are actually useful.

But to not go too offtopic, for me, everything older than my first "modern" computer is retro. That is, anything older than a 633 Mhz Pentium III based Celeron.

Anyways, Youtube is a shame. I viewed Nuttyprofessor on my Celeron 633 in 720x576 with less artifacts than "HD" Youtube videos.

For me , borderline retro Ibm compatible PC is :

PCI Graphics (Up to 32 mb)
up to 256 mb of RAM
Win 9X based os
any x86 based proc based on Socket 3 to 7 and slot 1. socket 370 is borderline couse of the tualatin xD (Except on a slot 1-socket 370 converter, then is just awsome xD) 😁
Any sound card uptil the CMI 8378.

everything else are peripherals 😁

Dream retro machine :

PCI 486 , 64 MB RAM , 512 L2 CACHE , WIN ME , USB PORT via PCI card , PCI SAVAGE 4 32 mb , 8 gb ssd drive ... and then tryin to play UT under S3 METAL and quake 3 B)

CPU: Single core pre Core Duo or Athlon 64 x2
Video: ISA, VLB, PCI or AGP with 256mb or less and released before GeForce 7, Radeon x1000
Any sound card made prior to the Soundblaster X-Fi

Graphics cards with less than 256 MB are retro? I then played Fallout 3 on a "retro" card (128 MB ATI Radeon X1600 in an Apple Imac from early 2007).

Honestly I just don't see anything "retro" about any PC above 1 Ghz.

m1so wrote:

Graphics cards with less than 256 MB are retro? I then played Fallout 3 on a "retro" card (128 MB ATI Radeon X1600 in an Apple Imac from early 2007).

Honestly I just don't see anything "retro" about any PC above 1 Ghz.

Some GeForce FX and Radeon RV280 and R300 cards were available with 256mb, and they are old enough to be retro. I would stop at GeForce 6 and Radeon x800/x850, though.

Pentium 4 and Athlon 64 are also old enough but I wouldn't go beyond that. That's just me, though. I'm sure others have different ideas where to draw the line.

For me any hardware or operating system that came before WinXP was released.

retrofool wrote:

For me any hardware or operating system that came before WinXP was released.

Essentially yes. We may quibble about Vintage vs Retro, but let's face it, rocking anything W2K or south is Oldskool, which, like it or not, is retro.

To me the newest that any thing I would consider "retro" is up to 939/478 using DDR1. Anything socket A is getting uncommon enough that only two or three machines turn up a month at the shop I work at. 478 is still common as dirt so I don't care much for it and socket 370 isn't hard to find unlike a AT style socket 5/7 systems.