First post, by Skyscraper
Welcome to the K7 thread.
There was some talk about creating a thread about Barton CPUs, let's include the rest of the family.
I will start the thread with my own experiences with the K7, this text will probably be moved from the first post at a later date.
I have mostly good memories of the K7, real competition in the CPU market was something new and I liked it. I bought a FIC SD11 Slot-A board with a 600 MHz CPU a month or two after the Athlons release back in 1999. I didn't need an upgrade at the time but I was fully omboard the hype train! Less than a year later I got an Abit KT7-RAID and a Thunderbird 1000 MHz which at the time was very pricey, I diddn't mind as I worked full time, earned good money and lived in an apartment with low rent, those were good times.
Shortly after the Willamette Pentium 4 2.0 was released I jumped ship again, this time it was because I got a good deal though my work. The Swedish state had a scheme to make Sweden a strong IT nation so if you bought a computer though work the state helped with paying a part of the cost and you paid the rest with untaxed salary. On paper you actually rented the computer from the state but after 3 years when you had paid at most a third of the value of the computer you would get an offer to buy the computer for ~$50.
Needless to say those were good times for computer companies and the computers sold with this kind of rent from the state pay with untaxed salary scheme were most of the time top of the line ($3000++) OEM systems. The system I "bought" was a Fujitsu Siemens Scaleo 800S with a locked down MSI i845 motherboard which I crossflahed with the non OEM BIOS, this was my first cross flash. Enough about the Scaleo P4, this thread is about the K7.
Except for helping friends and relatives with their computers I did not tinker much with K7 gear over the next 4 years until late 2005 when I got an Asus Nforce2 board with a Barton 2500+ from a friend I was helping upgrading to a socket 939 Athlon 64. Later I have messed with Thoroughbreds and Bartons but almost always using Asus Nforce 2 A7N8X motherboards. The Asus A7N8X series of motherboards was so common here in Sweden that by 2010 I had been given at least 3 of them.
I have somehow managed to collect a few other Socket-A motherboards over the last 5 years, I diddn't really realize just how many until today when I went board hunting in my storage units. It will be fun to test them all and see what they can do. I will start with doing some kind of CPU scaling test starting with the Duron 600 and working my way up to the Barton Athlon XP 3200+ using the same motherboard, memory, video card and OS-install.
Unfortunately I will not contribute any Slot-A results at this time as I do not own a Slot-A motherboard, only CPUs.
I will reserve a few posts and this first post will be updated or changed later with something more informative than me rambling about good old times.
New PC: i9 12900K @5GHz all cores @1.2v. MSI PRO Z690-A. 32GB DDR4 3600 CL14. 3070Ti.
Old PC: Dual Xeon X5690@4.6GHz, EVGA SR-2, 48GB DDR3R@2000MHz, Intel X25-M. GTX 980ti.
Older PC: K6-3+ 400@600MHz, PC-Chips M577, 256MB SDRAM, AWE64, Voodoo Banshee.