VivienM wrote on 2023-10-02, 22:10:
Socket3 wrote on 2023-10-02, 14:32:If you're targeting period correct hardware, then the Best builds you can have are Athlon 1200 + VIA KT133A chipset board or a Pentium 4 1500 + Intel i850 chipset board.
Former owner of a s. 478 1.9GHz Willamette and an i850 board here. Would discourage the i850 platform, especially on socket 423 (which is the more period-correct of the two sockets here). Need RDRAM, four modules or two modules + continuity RIMMs, finding socket 423-friendly coolers may be a challenge, also wasn't there something about cases for the early P4? I remember seeking a P4-friendly case that my 478 didn't end up needing - I think 423 expected to have HSFs mounted behind the board in some weird way or something. Now, if you can find a full system, or least case/CPU/HSF/RAM/motherboard, that's a different story...
The only i850 system I own is a Dell Optiplex GX400, so I have no idea about the particularities of building such a machine. Regarding cases for early pentium 4's, the issue is lots of ATX enclosures at the time had the PSU sitting on top of the CPU fan - OK on a pentium 3, acceptable on a slow Duron, big no-no on a fast Athlon or a pentium 4, as the PSU would cut all airflow to the CPU fan - that's if it didn't sit directly on top of said fan blocking all airflow.
But yeah, finding socket 423 hardware is a pain in the keester, but I did mention period-correctness would be very expensive. The cheapest way OP could go about it is using an aforementioned 1200MHz Athlon Thunderbird, witch are not that hard to find or that expensive. From my experience the motherboards (VIA KT133A chipset that supports 133MHz FSB) are quite a bit harder to find then the CPUs, but they are around. Alternatively a placeholder board could be used until OP finds a period correct motherboard, like say a very common and cheap KT400. This matters little as OP did say he's not interested in period correctness.
VivienM wrote on 2023-10-02, 22:10:
How much better does a 1.5GHz Willamette perform compared to say, a PIII 933 with an i815 and some PC133 SDRAM?
Regarding floating point and memory performance, quite a bit faster actually. My GX400 with a 1.7GHz Willamete and 256MB of RDRAM outperforms my 1.4GHz Pentium 3-S by around 35% on average. Rambus and fast DDR makes a huge difference on Netburst CPUs, and the older socket 370 platform has other limitations as well.
VivienM wrote on 2023-10-02, 22:10:
I had a 1600x1200 LCD starting in late Dec. 2001 (you don't want to ask how much those cost back then), and I was always happy with the gaming performance, but I went GF3 Ti500 (which died less than two years in...), ATI 9800 Pro, then (now getting much outside the OP's time range) 7900GT and 8800 GT. IMO, that level of high-endness were the cards you wanted for 1600x1200. Switched to 1920x1200 monitors after that.... and somewhat late.
More for the OP's benefit, 1280x1024 LCDs were expensive until... 2004-5ish. And I think most serious gamers stuck to CRTs in part so they could go lower resolutions...
I don't think anybody who uses an LCD screen on a retro rig is taking period correctness into account, as it would be difficult and most of the time impractical. The first generations of desktop LCDs were dim and have noticeable ghosting compared to newer ones.
I prefer using a CRT whenever possible with older gaming PCs, especially DOS era stuff, as I dislike the way low resolution and 2D games look on modern displays compared to a CRT. I also try to match the size of said CRT to the resolution somehow, for example my 486 builds use a 15" CRT, while my newer say slot 1, socket 7 and so on PCs use 17" CRTs. On even newer builds that primarily play 3D games I usually go with LCD displays -I'm a fan of the Samsung Syncmaster 214T, I have two of these and I absolutely love them - but they're pretty hard to find. They are pretty old, first released in 2005. One o my monitors is made in late 2005 and the other in early 2007. They have a great sPVA LCD panel with a decent response time, 1600x1200 resolution, good contrast and brightness despite being CCFL backlit and come with VGA, DVI, S-VIDEO and Composite inputs. My second choice for LCDs is the Dell UltraSharp 2007 series. VA panel, decent response time, same inputs as the samsung. In fact the panel might be a samsung sPVA. These were released in 2007, but were made for quite a few years. One of my Dell 20" monitors has a 2010 manufacturing date on the back. It's even LED backlit. Don't know about the other two, I've yet to take them apart.
VivienM wrote on 2023-10-02, 22:10:
Question as someone who is about to pull the trigger on one such motherboard - in the practical category, what about the rareish boards with AM2 and the VIA K8M800 chipset? Seems to me like it's the AMD equivalent of the i865/LGA775 combo (i.e. plentiful/cheap CPUs but better-than-expected-for-the-time backwards-compatibility) with the additional benefit of using DDR2 RAM, yet I don't see those talked about anywhere.
I've never tried an AM2 board with the K8M800 chipset, but it should be OK for win98 if a lot bit overkill. I do however own a Gigabyte GA-MF3 and have managed to get win98 up and running on it using an Athlon X2 5200+ and a pair of 256MB ram sticks I took out of an old Dell Pentium D PC. It's not the most stable board in windows 98, and that I believe to be relating to the nvidia chipset drivers. Everything runs OK without nForce drivers installed, but the video card will be stuck in PCI mode witch does impact performance when using something like a 6800GT AGP. With chipset drivers installed I've had some stability issues in a few games. My hope was to use this board as a base for an all-in-one late dos-win9x-early to mid XP gaming PC.
It's an interesting board to play around with, but not something I'd use as a daily driver.
