Ok, i been thinkering with a special pc for a while. Basically its a pc composed of all parts owned in my pc at some point that i sold some 20+ years ago and came back as a trade in or simply obsolescence (the benefit of retaining the clients for a looong time i guess)

The specs:
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Athlon XP 2800+ Barton FSB 333Mhz
TT Silent Boost
MSI 745 Ultra (Sis 745)
Asus Radeon 9600XT 128MB DDR BGA with VIVO
2 x 512mb OCZ Gold DDR400 @ 333Mhz (Later replaced with 1GB Kingston DDR 400 for stability issues)
Creative XFI Xtreme Music
TT Soprano
WD 160GB Blue IDE
Deepcool 500watts Bronze
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The MSI 745 Ultra (this very same of the picture) was my first Athlon XP capable motherboard, bought in April 2002 and it was a dud (much like the ECS K7S5a), super unstable, very picky with memory, reverts to 200Mhz FSB every 3 starts. I put up with this bullshit for like 3 or 4 months until i found someone to sell it with the original 1800+ Palomino that came.
Fast foward 24 years and this MOTHERFUCKER its still slive ! i could certainly confirm that ALL the subsequent motherboards that i had in socket A died at some point (not in my hands)...but this! AAAAGHH!! so i did what other idiot would do and started to wasting time with this:
1) First changed 3 caps (surprisingly a very low amount for a motherboard that was in the middle of the bad cap era) and updated the Bios to solve the FSB problem
2) then started to investigate and to my surprise THIS is the first motherboard to hit the market with unnoficial support for Synchronous 333Mhz when using 2 of the 3 slots. A tweak from MSI since the 745 supports 266 FSB and 333Mhz memory. (The First official support was the KT333 a month later)
3) this was my last motherboard with integrated gameport, a nice bonus now since the XFI lacks one, the bios lets you disable the onboard sound and left the gameport enabled.

First tried a 2500+, seems fine. But i wanted more, tried a 2800+ and it works! (migh post on the cpu upgrade page of this motherboard since it says that it not supports more than 2500+) BUT i had to use 1 stick of ram, maybe a sign that the 745 ultra its at the limit. This got me thinking if it was worth it all the subsequent sidegrades and upgrades that i did until Q1 2006 when i moved to 939 (i had KT266a, KT400, KT400A, KT880 and Nforce 2 ultra).

Yeah, i learnt a lot with all this constant changes but seing all this left me with a feeling that i could just hold the motherboard and upgrade around her instead of just changing motherboards for the sake of it. I know that i would had left probably 15-20% of performance on the table compared with the Nforce 2 ultra (the final socket A for me was a 3000+ Barton 400). I feel that this motherboard its the equivalent of the b350 of AM4, capable of taking almost every processor on the socket (provided you had an updated bios) while lacking even modern features like USB 2.0 and AGP 8x

But who knows, maybe im thinking like this because i have other mentality now that im 40 and not a teenager anymore...