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Longest longetivity builds of the 90s

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First post, by vetz

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Lets say you had an almost unlimited budget in the year you bought/built a system in the 1990's which setup would last the longest while still be able to play newer released games satisfactory? It is easy to use all our hindsight when making this list, but here are my top three builds:

1. 1995 Pentium Pro system with 200mhz CPU, 64MB of RAM, AWE32 and a Matrox Millennium card, Adaptec SCSI controller (avoids problems with harddrive limits). Later upgrades Pentium II 333mhz Overdrive and Voodoo cards to go along with the Matrox.
- This build would easily bring you from early SVGA days in 1995 all the way into the 3D age in 2000-2001, 5-6 year life span!

2. 1990 486 DX-33 system. Later upgrade with an Intel Overdrive.
- Again a system able to take you from 1990 all the way up to the start of SVGA, around 1995 imo. If the DX4 or Pentium Overdrive works in such an early 486 board then it might last even a year longer to 1996!

3. 1998 440BX PII system. Mostly because later upgrades with faster AGP graphic cards and the Powerleap adapters (up to 1400mhz P3) made these systems able to work well until 2003-2004 On third place since it requires more upgrades than the other two systems to keep up.

So what do you think would have been the best investment in terms of longevity in the 90s?

Last edited by vetz on 2013-06-19, 22:18. Edited 5 times in total.

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Reply 1 of 81, by gulikoza

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I had a 440bx with p2-233 doing 3x100Mhz in '98 IIRC. Upgraded to p3-650 in 2000 (the graphics was upgraded from v1 to v2 and later TNT2 iirc). Was my primary machine until late 2002 when I changed it to Athlon XP. That would be about 4 years I guess, with the cpu, graphics (and ram, probably hdd as well) updates. Now my current machine beats that by far - a 2009 i7-920 with late 2008 ATi hd4850... But the above configuration (w/ AWE32 which was used previously before I had changed it with SB Live) is still serving as my retro machine 😀

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Reply 2 of 81, by leileilol

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1997 440LX PII 233 system - throw in a Riva128 and a Voodoo 2 from the following year and you're probably held well until 2002 when the really DX7ey games start appearing. Hard to believe Warcraft III originally targeted this kind of machine but in the end became far too slow.

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Reply 3 of 81, by Old Thrashbarg

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Some 440LX boards would also accept Coppermine Celerons (though you'd likely need a slotket with its own voltage regulator). With a Celeron 766 and an appropriate video card, you could probably even stretch it into the DX8 era with passable results.

Still though, in terms of overall longevity, I think the BX/GX would be the winner. Start with a PII and a dual-CPU capable board in 1998-99, and you can bring it up as far as dual Tualatins with a 5950 Ultra (I would say 9800Pro, but those didn't tend to like the 89mhz AGP speed that came with a 133fsb). That should handle most stuff that came out in 2005, as long as you're not going for high graphics settings.

Of course, that's assuming an unlimited budget for both the original system and the upgrades... Tualatins and Powerleap adapters weren't exactly cheap.

Also, with regards to the OP, one note about the Pentium Pro system: I think 5-6 years is a bit of an overestimate. That's not really a 1995 system, since the PPro was released at the very end of '95, and it really wasn't worth dealing with in a general-purpose desktop machine until the 440FX came out in mid '96. The first PPro chipsets were buggy as hell, and I don't believe many of the early boards supported PII Overdrives anyway.

Reply 4 of 81, by nforce4max

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The BX system that I most used lasted into 2007 as I wasn't playing modern games and it handled everything that I needed it for. Youtube ran well back then and the only thing that was in need was hard drives. Throw in 512mb or better and load up XP then all was set. The system that replaced it barely lasted into 2009.

On a far away planet reading your posts in the year 10,191.

Reply 5 of 81, by swaaye

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yup you can definitely get a lot out of 440BX. In retrospect I should have just ignored the Athlon era. Run a 440BX box until Core 2 🤣

Who am I kidding though. I can't resist buying stuff.

Reply 6 of 81, by NJRoadfan

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swaaye wrote:

yup you can definitely get a lot out of 440BX. In retrospect I should have just ignored the Athlon era. Run a 440BX box until Core 2 🤣

Who am I kidding though. I can't resist buying stuff.

I did exactly this. Ran my 440BX box from 12/1998 to 4/2008. Bypassed the entire era of crap hardware. I was tempted to replace the machine once in 2005. The upgrade was supposed to happen way before that but a series of unfortunate events happened.

-i820 fiasco and the lack of a proper 440BX replacement from intel
-Netburst CPUs that replaced it were slower than the P3s and lacked "teh snappy". I can't explain it, but P4s always felt sluggish to me.
-Athlon machines were quirky, some of the chipsets were horrible
-Overall build quality of motherboards and video cards declined a ton. Bad caps abound. I needed a stable machine

The machine was finally replaced with a Wolfdale 3Ghz Core2Duo in 2008 which I'm still using to this day. I blame Flash and YouTube's h.264 update. The same thing killed off my circa 2003 Powerbook G4 last year.

Last year I landed up having to build a i865 machine with a Northwood 2.8Ghz hyper threaded P4 to run an ATI All-in-Wonder 9600XT card for video capture. Somehow it turned out running faster than I remember, but I think the motherboard will need a recap soon (go figure).

Reply 7 of 81, by NitroX infinity

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I've never had one system last long without upgrades.
The first pc we had in the house got more memory several times, a bigger harddrive and faster cd-rom drive.
My Celeron 300A system from late 1998 got bigger harddrives, more memory and a new videocard.
The system that followed halfway through 2002 also got a bigger harddrive, more memory and several upgrades to the videocard.
My current system from November 2008 also got a bigger harddrive and a third-party cpu cooler.

I could have lasted longer with my Celeron 300A system by upgrading the cpu to a Pentium 3. But I didn't think of that for some reason.

Last edited by NitroX infinity on 2013-06-20, 17:29. Edited 1 time in total.

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Reply 9 of 81, by Hatta

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leileilol wrote:

1997 440LX PII 233 system - throw in a Riva128 and a Voodoo 2 from the following year and you're probably held well until 2002 when the really DX7ey games start appearing.

You think? 2002? I find Half-Life marginal on my A440LX with a 266 PII, and Voodoo 2 SLI. By 1999, you're really going to be wanting a CPU upgrade.

Reply 11 of 81, by swaaye

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If you ran a Tualatin Celeron 1500 on a 440LX board you'd have 990 MHz. 440LX is 66MHz. Some boards have 75 and 83 MHz overclocks but it may not be stable.

Reply 12 of 81, by leileilol

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And that spec I mentioned is only up to the startings of 2002. Of course you could push it a bit beyond by having tualatin and sticking a Radeon 8500 in there (and not a Geforce, purely for SmartGART compatibility reasons)...

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Reply 13 of 81, by duralisis

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Real world example here; I ran a PII-300 / 400LX based system with various upgrades from 1997 until approx mid-2003. I'd say that's a good run for something that didn't even support 100mhz FSB and never had USB 2.0 support. Gaming was pretty good up until the end when I couldn't acceptably run Quake 3 and some newer games. Key thing was upgrades though, I don't think anyone would have lasted a year on the stock config.

CPU: PII-300 -> Celeron 433
RAM: 64MB SDR -> 768MB
VID: Riva 128 -> TNT -> TNT2 -> V3 -> GF2
OS: Win 95 OSR2 -> WinME (lol) ->Win2k
HD: 6.4GB -> 120GB

Reply 14 of 81, by Anonymous Coward

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I think NJRoadfan sums up PC hardware of the first decade of the 2000s pretty nicely. It was so bad I wanted to cry. Things didn't really improve until the Core iX platform came out in my opinion. The Core2 CPUs were a huge improvement but the platforms were still really buggy.

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Reply 15 of 81, by NJRoadfan

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Anonymous Coward wrote:

I think NJRoadfan sums up PC hardware of the first decade of the 2000s pretty nicely. It was so bad I wanted to cry. Things didn't really improve until the Core iX platform came out in my opinion. The Core2 CPUs were a huge improvement but the platforms were still really buggy.

Part of the problem with the Core2 era is that the "best" chipset boards were only on the market for a short period of time. My main rig has a X38 board, those were only on the market for a short time in 2008 for some odd reason while the P35/Q35 boards were all over the place. I remember one of the hardware review sites saying that the X38/48 could be the next 440BX, so much for that. At least its been a stable platform for me.

Reply 17 of 81, by nforce4max

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My main gripe about the Core 2 era was that finding a Good board was so difficult especially with ddr3. The chipsets were often only average and worse they were a tad sensitive to heat. Last month I landed a thinkpad t500 (core 2 with ddr3) for only $75 and the newer ram does give it a boost over my other core 2 era laptops.

On a far away planet reading your posts in the year 10,191.

Reply 18 of 81, by Unknown_K

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I upgraded like mad in the 1990's but I think my P3-733 setup was the one I used the longest (upgraded from a BX chipset P3-333/66 FSB running at 400/100 FSB). Well one of those 2 systems was the longest build. Before that I would upgrade CPUs quite a bit 286/386/486/Pentium 1 era.

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Reply 19 of 81, by ODwilly

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Newbie here, my Pentium 2 system lasted from around 1997 to 2006. I was born in 94 (my dad was awesome!) Until my motherboard caught on fire. I swear that thing ran ever thing! I put the 32mb all in wonder card in my Pentium 4 replacement I got in 2011 (went with out a pc until then!!!) and i can vouch for that sluggish p4 feeling. Running a am3+ 990fx board with 4gb of ram and a Athlon iix2 i got for free now! felt nostalgic and bought a gigabyte 440bx board for $10 and i swear it still runs faster than the p4.

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