I think everything till socket 939 i can say its retro.. But how older how more retro it is.

s478/ 939 is retro to me. Though an early 775 chipset board with a P4/ PD might fall in that category too.

I usually don't touch anything newer than 486s.

Mmmm, tough question.
I'd feel vintage before ATX, and retro before Pentium4/the GHz barrier I guess.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

For me, anything from the Pentium 4 era and before is oldschool, while Pentium D/Athlon 64x2-era stuff is kinda borderline oldschool/non-oldschool. Anything from the Core 2 era on up is definitely NOT oldschool. 😜

As far as usability goes, I would argue that even though it was created during the height of the Pentium 4 era, the Pentium M is still a usable CPU for modern day to day usage, provided you don't do anything ridiculous like attempting to run Windows 7.

I'm running Windows 7 on a 1.6ghz Athlon Neo processor and it's not a problem. The only time I have issues is when Flash player runs. It's funny, because I had exactly the same issues with Flash player on my 1.67ghz Powerbook G4. The thing would heat up so much when running Flash that it become uncomfortable to hold in my lap but would be fine otherwise.

sunaiac wrote:

Mmmm, tough question.
I'd feel vintage before ATX, and retro before Pentium4/the GHz barrier I guess.

Yes oddly enough it is a tougher question than you'd think. But I go along with your simple summation:
Vintage < ATX
however I'd say Retro = P4 and under..

For me non-HT Pentium 4 and Athlon XP 2400+ and below. GPU wise anything Radeon 9800/Geforce FX 5900 and below is also Windows 98/Me worthy. P4 HT, Xp 2500+ on up, A64, and the other Direct X 9 graphics card lines meet Xp needs, and while I don't consider it "retro" I consider that stuff legacy hardware in its own respect.

Interesting question.

Anything dual core and PCI-E is out of the game of course.

Same with DDR memory and most of the AGP cards.

s478 / s754 / s462 systems are still being used as a primary computer by many users, even today - they may be outdated a bit, but with good software and at least a ~2.4 GHz CPU (or same class), a Radeon 9200 and 512 MB RAM, they are able to play 720p HD which is clearly a sign that they are not dead for the average public, meaning they cannot be called "retro". Maybe "old school".. but a better word which comes to mind would be "sufficient" - because of their value regarding everyday tasks and multimedia.

So back to the original question->

I would say

retro:
Intel Pentium III / AMD K6-III / AMD K7 processors
SD133 / RAMBUS
DX 7 VGAs
ZIP drive
DVD-ROMs above 6x speed
HDD capacity from 20 GB up to 60 GB / drive
SB 128
Windows 2000

cool retro:
Intel Pentium II / Pentium MMX / Pentium Pro / AMD K6 / AMD K6-II processors
SD66 / SD100
DX 5 - DX 6 VGAs, 3dfx
3.5" Floppy drive
CD-ROMs from 8x up to 40x speed, CD-RWs, DVD-ROMs up to 6x speed
HDD capacity from 3.2 GB up to 20 GB / drive
ISA
GUS PnP Pro, Diamond MonsterSound, AWE 64
USB 1.1
10 mbit ethernet, 56k modems
non-flatron SVGA
Windows 98 / Windows 2000 / NT 4.0

*: Somehow I can't call non-MMX processors between Pentium 100 and Pentium 166 "cool retro", but they're closer to it than to "vintage". Same thing with certain VGAs, like Tseng ET6000.

vintage:
from i386 up to AMD K5 / Pentium 100 processors
SIMM / EDO
VGAs up to 4 MB memory (ISA / PCI)
5.25" Floppy drive
CD-ROMs up to 8x speed and CD-Ws up to 4x writing speed
DAT
HDD capacity from 40 MB up to 2.1 GB / drive
SB Pro / 16 / AWE 32, GUS Classic / MAX, AdLib, PC Speaker
MPEG cards
coax, modems below 56k
AT
I / O cards
VGA, analog SVGA
DOS, NC / DOSNav, Windows 3.1 - Windows 95 Plus!

vintage premium:
EGA, CGA, Hercules, anything pre-386, back to 1983.

historical:
Anything pre-1983.

Last, but not least, there're the epic combos (like the P III Tualatin 1.4S + Voodoo 5 5500 PCI + Terratec EWS 64 XL + Yamaha CRW-F1 quartet, engineering samples and so on - I think you can imagine).
--------------------------

With time, these categories will change, but not so much. If this list would be the benchmark, I think the "historical" - "cool retro" range is quite eternal; maybe the P III-era will "advance" a level (backwards).

Any thoughts on this?

If It's not in a beige box, it ain't retro. 🤣

I suppose the P4 straddles the line. Early P4s seem somewhat retro now. But i915 P4s, with LGA775, Express slots, and SATA, seem definitely modern to me.
AGP is starting to seem retro, with the exception of K8 boards.
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.

With an older P4 or a K7, I'm hesitant to use the word "retro", and they aren't that old or hard to use with recent software. But they're getting into the gray area where using one isn't always motivated by modern-day practicality anymore.

orcish75 wrote:

The 440BX chipset has a max of 1GB, but I've never been able to run more than 768MB on a 440BX without stability issues.
Running Vista/Win7 on 768MB will surely force you to throw that PC out the window! P3 and below is retro for me.

From what I remember, when using unbuffered memory, the 440BX technically only allows 4 logical rows (so max of 512MB). Though many boards have no problem going well beyond that.
Going by the book, when installing 1GB, the Intel spec calls for registered memory only.

Any barf colored board is probably a good bet for retro status IMO as well.

bushwack wrote:

If It's not in a beige box, it ain't retro. 🤣

...and if it is not yellowed enough, it is not vintage... 😁

shamino wrote:

...I suppose the P4 straddles the line. Early P4s seem somewhat retro now. But i915 P4s, with LGA775, Express slots, and SATA, seem definitely modern to me.

I agree with this "mid-P4" cut-off distinction.

Let's say you're shopping an Asus P4S533 to run your agp V5500 paired with pretty much the max cpu you can throw at it. That's P4 retro in my book.

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

Another potential way to distinguish between eras could be:

Vintage = 16-bit and earlier
Retro = 32-bit
Modern = 64-bit

d1stortion wrote:

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

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

Dead Things wrote:

Another potential way to distinguish between eras could be: […]
Show full quote

Another potential way to distinguish between eras could be:

Vintage = 16-bit and earlier
Retro = 32-bit
Modern = 64-bit

Not bad. The simple answer is always nice. But is this formulation true? 16/32/64...

tincup wrote:

But is this formulation true? 16/32/64...

Well, it's far from perfect since the generational changes didn't happen overnight. There's some overlap going from 16-bit to 32-bit and then a pretty large amount of overlap when going from 32-bit to 64-bit.

But generally speaking, 80386 marks the advent of the 32-bit era. The transition from 32-bit to 64-bit is messier, with AMD doing it well in advance of Intel. But I'd be inclined generalize by saying that Socket 754 marks the dawn of the modern era for AMD, while LGA775 does for Intel.

I think this is too simple to be true.
According to this rule an Atom N270 or N280 from 2008 or 2009 would be retro because it doesn't support 64-bit.
Of course it is quite slow but hardly retro.

Anything after Pentium 3 isn't retro for me.