VOGONS


First post, by Skyscraper

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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.

Last edited by Skyscraper on 2017-02-17, 20:49. Edited 4 times in total.

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.

Reply 1 of 188, by Skyscraper

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Reserved for CPU stuff.

Last edited by Skyscraper on 2017-02-17, 20:28. Edited 2 times in total.

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.

Reply 2 of 188, by Skyscraper

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Reserved for motherboard stuff.

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.

Reply 3 of 188, by lazibayer

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Sometimes I wonder how Intel survived around the Millennium. Hyping on RAMBUS was a disaster, 820 chipset with RDRAM->SDRAM converter was a disaster, 845 chipset with single channel SDRAM was a disaster, and the biggest among all, the early Pentium 4.

Reply 4 of 188, by sunaiac

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I have all the slot A needed.
From 500 to 1000 athlon, from 700 to 1000 third.
Amd750 with or without super bypass and via kt133.

Just ask 😀

R9 3900X/X470 Taichi/32GB 3600CL15/5700XT AE/Marantz PM7005
i7 980X/R9 290X/X-Fi titanium | FX-57/X1950XTX/Audigy 2ZS
Athlon 1000T Slot A/GeForce 3/AWE64G | K5 PR 200/ET6000/AWE32
Ppro 200 1M/Voodoo 3 2000/AWE 32 | iDX4 100/S3 864 VLB/SB16

Reply 6 of 188, by Skyscraper

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sunaiac wrote:
I have all the slot A needed. From 500 to 1000 athlon, from 700 to 1000 third. Amd750 with or without super bypass and via kt133 […]
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I have all the slot A needed.
From 500 to 1000 athlon, from 700 to 1000 third.
Amd750 with or without super bypass and via kt133.

Just ask 😀

Great!

I have not really decided what benchmarks to use in the CPU scaling tests yet but I think the OS will have to be XP-SP3. Windows 2000 was my first thought but not everybody owns it so I think it's better to use an OS everybody has access to for general CPU and motherboard performance tests.

If I remember right the AMD 750 chipset is AGP 2X only and I would like to include some newer game/video benchmarks like Doom 3 and 3dmark03, luckily the VIA KX/KT133 chipset supports AGP 4X. I have access to pretty much all fast AGP DX9 cards but I would prefer to use something like the Geforce 7800GS or the Radeon X1950 Pro to avoid bottlenecking the faster Socket A CPUs.

If you own some fast DX9 AGP card then I will use the same card so we can compare apples to apples.

I think I will use a VIA KT600 chipset motherboard for the CPU performance scaling tests as it's single channel, should support all CPUs and should be performing more or less as other older VIA KTxxx chipsets.

Last edited by Skyscraper on 2017-02-17, 21:42. Edited 1 time in total.

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.

Reply 7 of 188, by kanecvr

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I loved socket A machines. My first "proper" computer (and by proper I mean actually up to date) was a 750 (or was is 800?) MHz Duron, sitting on a cheap chinese KT266 SDR+DDR Matsonic motherboard. It used a cheap-ass psu and case, since I previously had an AT form factor K6-II machine, and quite a few parts from the k6, including the sound card, the CD-ROM, the HDD, the FDD and my voodoo 2 cards for glide compatibility with older games, despite spending most of my cash on a radeon 7500 (radeon DDR) witch I was extremely happy with until I got a hold of NFS underground. I got the machine in 2001 - summer I think.

The PC was great good in it's original form - way way way faster then all my previous machines, and for the first time I could play everything, and most games at pretty high resolutions. I still ran win98 on it, since winME made it hard to get into DOS and I still played loads of dos games even in 2001. Everything was not pink tough. Off the bat there were a couple of problems - it was very very noisy - since I was using the absolute cheapest cooler they had in the shop - a small thing suitable really for a socket 370 cpu, with a 60mm 5000 rpm fan. It also got noticeably warm after playing for a while - and I'm talking about actually feeling warmth if you put your hand on the case side panel, in the area between the CPU cooler and the PSU. I replaced the cooler with a good 80mm aluminum part witch was a lot quieter, but shortly after the PSU gave up and fizzed + magic smoke. To be expected, since I spent something like 20$ brand new for the case + CPU combo. I replaced that with a much better 400W PSU made by a more reliable budget company, and also replaced the 4GB HDD I got from my K6 (chose to buy a good video card instead of a bigger HDD) with a 40GB maxtor (one of those slim drives), and also replaced the 192mb of SDRAM with 256MB of DDR.

After that the machine was awesome. Everything ran great, it was cool and very reliable - and it was used A LOT - at least 4 hours a day (gaming) and up to 12 hours a day in the weekends (didn't go out much 😜 ). Thinking back, it was actually impressively reliable for a machine made from budget parts (sans the PSU issue). Of course I moved on to faster Athlon CPUs, including the barton core (one of witch I managed to kill when installing the cooler). At the time it could run everything I threw at it, and I was really happy with the machine.

I finally got rid of it after I had won a socket 939 motherboard (gigabyte GA-K8NSC-939) in a contest at a romanian IT exposition, and parted the system to be able to afford an athlon 64 3200+ CPU. In it's last known configuration, the machine was running a 2500+, an epox nforce 2 (8rda3+ I think), 512MB of DDR400 ram, a geforce FX 5200 Ultra (the one with fast BGA vram running at something silly like 600 or 650MHz). Great machine. I still have the motherboard + CPU, as I've had the opportunity to get it back from the person I sold it to back in the day, but it went a bit wrong since then, and it acts a bit funny. Since I have a couple of working Abit AN7 boards witch are much better in general, I can't be bothered to do an in-depth diagnostic - but I bet the caps have gone off. The CPU is dead - cracked when he tried to replace the thermal paste. I still kept it tough.

Overall the K7 and socket A platform brings back memories of a better time - when a teenager with part-time income could afford to build a good computer out of mostly his own money, and play any game, run 3ds max and anything really. Inflation aside, I remember paying about 300 lei (3 million actually since they cut 4 zeroes off our currency in the meantime) for the radeon 7500 - money I'd made in about a month. In contrast, I had to work for 5-6 months to afford a voodoo 2 and a bit of ram in early '98?, and the GTX 1070 I have today cost me one month's whole paycheck (meaning I had to save for about 4.5 months and was broke after I bought it)... and regarding their capabilities at their respective tims the v2, 7500 and GTX 1070 are very similar performance-wise.

Last edited by kanecvr on 2017-02-17, 21:47. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 8 of 188, by sunaiac

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I have a 1950pro 512mb iceq turbo. Never tried it in such a setup thus.
No fast AGP geforce on the other hand.
I'm also not sure I can go beyond 384MB ram yet.
Will have to check.

R9 3900X/X470 Taichi/32GB 3600CL15/5700XT AE/Marantz PM7005
i7 980X/R9 290X/X-Fi titanium | FX-57/X1950XTX/Audigy 2ZS
Athlon 1000T Slot A/GeForce 3/AWE64G | K5 PR 200/ET6000/AWE32
Ppro 200 1M/Voodoo 3 2000/AWE 32 | iDX4 100/S3 864 VLB/SB16

Reply 9 of 188, by Skyscraper

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kanecvr wrote:

...

I still have the motherboard + CPU, as I've had the opportunity to get it back from the person I sold it to back in the day, but it went a bit wrong since then, and it acts a bit funny. Since I have a couple of working Abit AN7 boards witch are much better in general, I can't be bothered to do an in-depth diagnostic - but I bet the caps have gone off. The CPU is dead - cracked when he tried to replace the thermal paste. I still kept it tough.

Overall the K7 and socket A platform brings back memories of a better time - when a teenager with part-time income could afford to build a good computer out of mostly his own money, and play any game, run 3ds max and anything really. Inflation aside, I remember paying about 300 lei (3 million actually since they cut 4 zeroes off our currency in the meantime) for the radeon 7500 - money I'd made in about a month. In contrast, I had to work for 5-6 months to afford a voodoo 2 and a bit of ram in early '98?, and the GTX 1070 I have today cost me one month's whole paycheck (meaning I had to save for about 4.5 months and was broke after I bought it)... and regarding their capabilities at their respective tims the v2, 7500 and GTX 1070 are very similar performance-wise.

I still have my Abit KT7-RAID and my Thunderbird 1000 but I'm not sure I can identify my original Thunderbird among the other Thunderbird 1000 CPUs. Perhaps the others are newer steppings so I can identify the correct one that way.

The Abit KT7-RAID is in perfect shape, except for 22 bulging caps and a few non bulging ones that probably are just as bad. It seems I have stolen the chipset heat sink and fan to use on some other motherboard.

Abit KT7-RAID revision 1.01

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Last edited by Skyscraper on 2017-02-17, 23:28. Edited 6 times in total.

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.

Reply 10 of 188, by Skyscraper

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sunaiac wrote:
I have a 1950pro 512mb iceq turbo. Never tried it in such a setup thus. No fast AGP geforce on the other hand. I'm also not sure […]
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I have a 1950pro 512mb iceq turbo. Never tried it in such a setup thus.
No fast AGP geforce on the other hand.
I'm also not sure I can go beyond 384MB ram yet.
Will have to check.

I would be surprised if the KX/KT133 board could not handle 768MB which should be enough for benchmarking, XP-SP3 can be stripped of all unnecessary services to make some headroom. Most services don't make any difference for benchmarking scores even on older systems. I have tried to improve benchmark scores that way and never gained more than 0.1% - 0.3% but it is a good way to avoid running out of memory which do affect scores.

The Radeon X1950pro 512 should be perfect, we just need to find some decent drivers.

Last edited by Skyscraper on 2017-02-17, 22:17. Edited 1 time in total.

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.

Reply 11 of 188, by PhilsComputerLab

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I'm skipping Slot A alltogether and going straight with Socket A. I like this platform a lot, but more the earlier CPUs, especially all the Duron stuff. KT600 is the chipset of my choice.

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Reply 12 of 188, by sunaiac

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Skyscraper wrote:

I would be surprised if the KX/KT133 board could not handle 768MB which should be enough for benchmarking, XP-SP3 can be stripped of all unnecessary services to make some headroom. Most services don't make any difference for benchmarking scores even on older systems. I have tried to improve benchmark scores that way and never gained more than 0.1% - 0.3% but it is a good way to avoid running out of memory which do affect scores.

The Radeon X1950pro 512 should be perfect, we just need to find some decent drivers.

Haha, what I meant is that I may not have 3 256 sticks.
I think both amd750 and kt133 handle 768 😀

I think I currently use 10.2 on my fx55 xp3 setup housing the radeon.

R9 3900X/X470 Taichi/32GB 3600CL15/5700XT AE/Marantz PM7005
i7 980X/R9 290X/X-Fi titanium | FX-57/X1950XTX/Audigy 2ZS
Athlon 1000T Slot A/GeForce 3/AWE64G | K5 PR 200/ET6000/AWE32
Ppro 200 1M/Voodoo 3 2000/AWE 32 | iDX4 100/S3 864 VLB/SB16

Reply 13 of 188, by Skyscraper

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sunaiac wrote:
Haha, what I meant is that I may not have 3 256 sticks. I think both amd750 and kt133 handle 768 :) […]
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Skyscraper wrote:

I would be surprised if the KX/KT133 board could not handle 768MB which should be enough for benchmarking, XP-SP3 can be stripped of all unnecessary services to make some headroom. Most services don't make any difference for benchmarking scores even on older systems. I have tried to improve benchmark scores that way and never gained more than 0.1% - 0.3% but it is a good way to avoid running out of memory which do affect scores.

The Radeon X1950pro 512 should be perfect, we just need to find some decent drivers.

Haha, what I meant is that I may not have 3 256 sticks.
I think both amd750 and kt133 handle 768 😀

I think I currently use 10.2 on my fx55 xp3 setup housing the radeon.

That is the latest "AGP hotfix" driver if I remember correctly, it probably won't be optimal for older games and video benchmarks but that won't matter much as the scaling should still be the same for all CPUs.

I think it would be good to include Q1, Q2, Q3 and Unreal, all at 640*480 in the CPU scaling benchmarks as they are easy to benchmark and also 3dmark 2000 and 2001.

PC Mark 2002 and SuperPi are given but perhaps it's good to add a few more fast and easy benchmarks.

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.

Reply 14 of 188, by meljor

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Loved my duron 800 back then and all the later athlon xp's. Had the 1600+ up to the 2500+@3200+. I had the kt266a, kt333a and nforce2 ultra. Top stuff.

Today i own 2x a7n8x deluxe, 1x a7n8x-e deluxe, 1x a7n8x and 1x a7v333 together with a 2500+, 2800+, 3000+ 2x 3200+ and 1 barton mobile cpu.

The kt333 board i have because it is one of the fastest boards that can support 3,3v agp (for voodoo5).

asus tx97-e, 233mmx, voodoo1, s3 virge ,sb16
asus p5a, k6-3+ @ 550mhz, voodoo2 12mb sli, gf2 gts, awe32
asus p3b-f, p3-700, voodoo3 3500TV agp, awe64
asus tusl2-c, p3-S 1,4ghz, voodoo5 5500, live!
asus a7n8x DL, barton cpu, 6800ultra, Voodoo3 pci, audigy1

Reply 15 of 188, by candle_86

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Those where the golden days, I remember my first real computer, paid for it by working concrete summer 2002, Athlon XP 1700, FIC Motherboard, Geforce2 MX400 by Aopen (what happened to Aopen), 256mb DDR 2100, 15gb Hard Drive, Windows 98SE. I really enjoyed using that machine, it got stuck my lightening however and the onboard audio never worked agian, I borrowed my old Soundblaster 16 PCI from my now retired K6-2 system and it worked like a champ till it got sold (not my choice, my mom needed to pay rent and i was still a minor). Good times, in 2004 I got myself a nice Duron 1800 on an ECS KT400 board with 512mb of ram and a Geforce 4 MX440 and a 40gb hard drive, upgraded the CPU to an AThlon XP 2600 in short order, (my mom accidently spilled coke inside her computer and fryed it but her XP 2600 was fine 😁), and replaced the MX440 with an FX5200 Ultra. I ran that until I got an Athlon 64 3000 with a Chaintech VNF3 250 and a 6600GT

Reply 16 of 188, by melbar

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Skyscraper wrote:

I still have my Abit KT7-RAID and my Thunderbird 1000 but I'm not sure I can identify my original Thunderbird amomg the other Thunderbird 1000 CPUs. Perhaps the others are newer steppings so I can identify the correct one that way.

The Abit KT7-RAID is in perfect shape, except for 22 bulging caps and a few non bulging ones that probably are just as bad. It seems I have stolen the chipset heat sink and fan to use on some other motherboard.

Nice board. An Abit with KT133 chipset.
I have the same but the version without the raid-controller.

My photo is taken from last year before i've started to de-solder some bulging caps. I hope that this board will survive after the work...

hkSJIbC.jpg

#1 K6-2/500, #2 Athlon1200, #3 Celeron1000A, #4 A64-3700, #5 P4HT-3200, #6 P4-2800, #7 Am486DX2-66

Reply 17 of 188, by Skyscraper

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melbar wrote:

Nice board. An Abit with KT133 chipset.
I have the same but the version without the raid-controller.

My photo is taken from last year before i've started to de-solder some bulging caps. I hope that this board will survive after the work...

That's correct.

I have 3x vanilla Asus AV7, all rescued from electronic waste dumpsters. Even though the AV7 is also a KT133 board they never seem to have bad caps, Asus used the good stuff as at least all my 3 boards are still fine. I also have a couple of Soyo KT133 boards but they have one or two bad caps each.

I would like to use this motherboard but it seems to have a burned memory slot. I guess the "Anti Burn LED" fell asleep on its job. I only need one memory slot and I made sure there isnt a short in the slot after I took the picture, with luck the memory controller has survived. This motherboard is a dumpster find.

ECS Photon AF1 1.0 VIA KT600

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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.

Reply 18 of 188, by sprcorreia

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Well, I've sold almost all my Slot A stuff, but I still have a brand new Aopen motherboard and 3 or 4 Athlons. Maybe I can contribute too.
Socket A, I have quite a few CPUs and motherboards, including dual Athlon MP in 3 or 4 different speeds. Just need a recap.

Reply 19 of 188, by Oldskoolmaniac

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^Damn that's a sexy looking motherboard, just use the two slots then.

The socket A was my favorite, This was what I grew up with.

Im about to start building a gigbyte nforce2 pc with an all plexiglass case, I know... some will think the case is tacky, but I like it and that was my first pc build when I got my first job.

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