In terms of performance, the Tbird wins- just, and assuming you only need 512MB RAM.

In terms of desirability - the Tualatin wins hands down. More 'exclusive', if you count slocket & socket mod options much more choice in terms of platform, it runs cooler, has a less vulnerable core.

Of course back in the day I just ran a Duron because cheap and more than good enough performance.

Both are a pain in the ass.

On the AMD side, you have VIA, and their 686A/686B southbridge shenanigans. Along with high 5V rail consumption.

On the Intel Side, you have more limited supply because Tualatin wasn't their main product, along with the 8xx motherboard shenanigans because of Intels aborted love affair with RAMBUS memory.

Realistically you've got VIA on both sides, because i815 is useless.

You have a lot more choice than Via on both sides...

Tualatin native support (just the discrete graphics options, there's a bunch of integrated ones too):
- ALi AladdinPro5T
- i815
- SiS 635T
- Via 694T
(and then you can add all the BX & other boards that don't natively support Tualatin but will happily do so in practice after a socket/pin mod)

Thunderbird:
- AMD 750 & 760
- ALi Magick 1 (OK, this one plain sucks, but it's not Via)
- nForce 1 & 2
- SiS 735 & later-
- Via KT133&co

Personally I'm a big SiS fan, but tbh all these chipsets have their strong points & issues - what is best depends on what you want to do and how much you want to pay for it. The more exotic Tualatin options can be a pain to source, but pretty much all the Tbird chipsets are available widely and dirt cheaply at the moment. Via's 686 stuff is really only an issue with Creative SBLive using non-standard PCI extensions. If you don't want an SBLive, the issues are irrelevant.

And i815 useless? It's hands down clock-for-clock the fastest performing Tualatin platform with the best overclocking headroom. 160MHz FSB is acheivable with it. Only drawbacks are the max 512MB RAM (which is only relevant if you want to do period-incorrect stuff on it, for 2000-2001, 256MB would be high-end and 512MB nearing overkill) and lack of native ISA support, but Tualatin motherboards with other chipsets are also generally ISA-less. It's not a great DOS platform, but that's something it was never designed to be. It's also not the ideal WIndows XP platform, but by the time you're running software that is limited by the 512MB memory limit, that Tualatin CPU will also be a major bottleneck. For late Windows 98SE or early 2k/XP (which is period correct) it's a perfect match.

And i815 useless? It's hands down clock-for-clock the fastest performing Tualatin

It's not practical to use due to mentioned RAM limitations and lack of ISA slots. Also 440BX is still faster.

Also KT266A was released in 2001, which is hands down go to platform of that year, if lack of ISA not bothering you.

As a DOS fan I'd go with - the KT133/Athlon combo. If VIA is allowed for the P3 it would win. VIA is the key here because they had ISA supporting chipsets for both platforms.

Performance-wise they're quite similar clock for clock. Tualatin wins at power consumption hands down. Both are held back by the narrow SDRAM bus.

My permanent end-of-DOS build is a Tualatin P3S 1400 btw.

alvaro84 wrote:

As a DOS fan I'd go with - the KT133/Athlon combo. If VIA is allowed for the P3 it would win. VIA is the key here because they had ISA supporting chipsets for both platforms.

Performance-wise they're quite similar clock for clock. Tualatin wins at power consumption hands down. Both are held back by the narrow SDRAM bus.

Er, no they're not. Thunderbirds can run on any of the DDR platforms for SoA (even the later dual-channel ones), and if you go for an AMD760-686B combo you can get ISA and DDR. Boards with it were rare, but the Biostar M7MIA certainly did. That said, I'd consider SoA past the age of needing ISA. Yes, you *can* run DOS on it, but the added value over anything half the speed which would always have ISA is very limited under DOS. And tbh, if I have one ISA slot, I want more - which certainly wasn't on offer with this sort of thing 😉

If I were choose only from those two I would choose Tualatin. Performance wise Thunderbird and Tualatin are very close, but if you go with Intel chipset for Tualatin the platform will be more stable.

If I were to chose the best 2001 build I would go Willamete 2.0 GHz and RDRAM on i850.

Tell us what do you want to do with the build. Do you want just a "best 2001 build"? Or do you target some specific games?

If you want 2001 and you want to be 100% period correct you won't be able to pick Tualatin 1400 512k cache (PIII 1400s), but you can go with Athlon 1400... And you can go with what I recommended above: P IV with RDRAM. I know that PIV was a CPU with a bad reputation, but I think a lot of that bad image was due to motherboards that used SDRAM. PIV 2.0 with RDRAM was an awesome platform, expensive, but fast and rock stable. I would pick that platform any time over Tbird 1400 or even over Tualatin 1400, unless there's the need for legacy ISA and/or AGP2x (3V) support.

Definitely Tualatin. It's cool and fast.

If you can find a board based on the Apollo Pro 266T DDR chipset, I'd highly recommend getting it. Faster than i815, supports far more memory, and just as stable.