Because not many people bought them at the time. The nostalgia doesn't flow very strongly in their direction.

There are a few people on here with them. I have a ASUS K7M with a 1.0 GHz K75 that I throw together sometimes. It's pretty solid. The AGP is somewhat iffy though as was typical for non-Intel back then.

They are cool, but pretty rare. Plus, the early chipsets weren't anything special and the boards often didn't have ISA.

swaaye wrote:

Because not many people bought them at the time.

I agree. Good Slot-A Mainboards were difficult to get, reputable manufacturers didn't advertise them much or build many boards since they were afraid to lose good deals on the Intel chipsets. Pre-built Athlon boxes were rare, it was pretty much a DIY enthusiast thing.

AMD machines finally really took off with the introduction of Socket A mainboards and Duron CPUs. Because only then it was possible to build an overclocked gaming rig that could match a GHz Pentium III, for only half the price.

I am going to be building my system around a Gigabyte GA-7VM because I can get one at a good price.
I am looking forward to having an athlon system again.

I prefer to go with intel because that line is very straight forward because its fast enough for my needs, and you easilly can choose from the Pentium II line or pentium III line.. This platform gives a lot of different speed options, and these processors and motherboards are easy to get.. I dont think you always need to have the fastest platform to reach your goals. Back then it was very important to have the fastest machine.. Now days you only want to have the right speed to run most of the games on one system.. And SLOT 1 can easy transformed to Socket 370 with a slotcard, you really cant do on the AMD side.

So intel is more flexible to work with.

swaaye wrote:

Because not many people bought them at the time. The nostalgia doesn't flow very strongly in their direction.

There are a few people on here with them. I have a ASUS K7M with a 1.0 GHz K75 that I throw together sometimes. It's pretty solid. The AGP is somewhat iffy though as was typical for non-Intel back then.

That, and when the Slot A Thunderbirds finally released, the majority of them went to OEM's. Relatively few were sold at retail. The price premium for top of the range models combined with the availability of the Golden Fingers device, kept the high end ones from selling in great numbers which is why you hardly ever see one above 850mhz these days. I have both the K7 and T-Bird at 950mhz, but haven't been able to justify paying what people are asking for the 1ghz versions of either one. The difference in performance was so miniscule between 950 and 1000mhz that you wouldn't have noticed it anyway and would have saved a lot of money. Even the difference at 900mhz wasn't that great so you could have saved even more.

The Thunderbirds also REQUIRED a motherboard with the AMD chipset. VIA's Athlon chipset wouldn't work with the on die cache of the T-Bird. so if you had already invested in a board with the VIA chipset you weren't likely going to buy a new motherboard just to get the benefit of a T-Bird.

Robin4 wrote:

I prefer to go with intel because that line is very straight forward because its fast enough for my needs, and you easilly can choose from the Pentium II line or pentium III line.. This platform gives a lot of different speed options, and these processors and motherboards are easy to get.. I dont think you always need to have the fastest platform to reach your goals. Back then it was very important to have the fastest machine.. Now days you only want to have the right speed to run most of the games on one system.. And SLOT 1 can easy transformed to Socket 370 with a slotcard, you really cant do on the AMD side.

So intel is more flexible to work with.

That is true... for me this is a nostalgia thing. The P2-350 is not quite fast enough for what I want out of that machine, the 500Mhz Athlon will tick a couple of boxes.

sliderider wrote:

I have both the K7 and T-Bird at 950mhz, but haven't been able to justify paying what people are asking for the 1ghz versions of either one. The difference in performance was so miniscule between 950 and 1000mhz that you wouldn't have noticed it anyway and would have saved a lot of money. Even the difference at 900mhz wasn't that great so you could have saved even more.

I came across an eBay auction for a K75 1GHz that was only labeled with the part number. I snagged it for $25. The magic of ebay. 🤣

The cache was certainly a bottleneck but PC100/PC133 was another big one. It's unfortunate that there's no way to run a K75 on a DDR board.
https://web.archive.org/web/20020112042257/ht … ?article_id=138

The grand majority of Slot A machines that I've seen over the years have been OEM makes like Compaq. Even then, they aren't that common, and you're more likely to run across mobos and CPUs but not complete systems, and most of the Slot A mobos that I've seen do not have ISA. When Socket A started taking off (Durons and the like), Slot A was all but gone.

This reminds me, I've got a Slot A build myself that I've been meaning to get to for a while now, using an MSI MS-6191 with a 700MHz T-Bird Athlon and 256MB PC100 SDRAM. Really, all it needs is a case.