Nicht Sehr Gut wrote:
BTW, I noticed that there are now options to choose how the power supply reacts on some motherboards, including the classic "immediate shut-down".
Yeah, I've noticed that option, too, but I haven't bothered to set it that way. I guess I like the extra protection I get against people accidently leaning on my power button while I'm in the middle of Windows. That was a bad thing to do in Win9x, and the NT line doesn't really like it that much, either.
I still remember the time my step-niece did that to me in the middle of a game. I never did like her. Heh.
"Keyboard error...No keyboard detected. Press F1 to continue". Heh.
You'd like to think it'd be so helpful, but it didn't even bother to taunt me so. It just ignored me. 😀
Once gamers found out that they could vastly improve their Quake with a 3dfx card, things changed. Nowadays, home users *cough*gamers*cough* have a very large effect on the industry.
Well, see, I'm wondering... Does the average home user (who are often, admittedly, idiots) really care about PS/2? Would they give a rat's ass if their keyboard plugged into the same port as the rest of their junk? Probably not. They'd probably like it. It's easier. And they'd run out of USB ports less quickly (several of my friends have used up all they have). 'Course, they could buy a hub, but that cuts into bandwidth, if that's an issue, and not all things like hubs. Just another thought. 😉
Almost no business needs 3D acceleration, yet it's very difficult to find 2D only nowadays. The PCI capacity was well beyond that of ISA.
Oh yes. Quite true. But on that same token, most of them didn't even really need PCI. If video speed was important or they needed SCSI or something they'd want it, but otherwise it added little at the time except cost. That's what I'm saying. But they were better off in the end.
The only reason I bought DDR was that my "new" motherboard required it, and I almost didn't buy the motherboard because of it (although I was glad I did because it allows me to use UMBPCI.SYS). The price-to-performance ratio for DDR memory just isn't good enough. Yes, I'd rather have 1 Gig of DIMM RAM than 512 megs of DDR RAM (that's about the price difference right now).
I agree that when the AMD 760 chipset was the only viable DDR chipset on the market, the reasons to use DDR were minimal. It was only 10% difference. But that was 2 years ago, mind you. I haven't any comparisons of a more recent DDR chipset to an SDR chipset, so I can't intelligently guess the performance difference today, but I would venture a guess that it's significantly more.
But, to your bargin shopper, SDR is still king, assuredly. I see I can get actually 4x512MB ( each) of SDR for the price of one 512MB DDR module. Personally, I wouldn't know what to do with 2GB of RAM, though. 😁 I'll take my speed.
Yes, DIMMS will go away. So will DDR RAM. I know that DIMMS will go away sooner, but I would've gotten more for my money.
Yeah, and had they not gone to EDO, I'd have gotten more out of the 0 I spent on 4mb of 72 pin FPM RAM for my 486. Or my eight 1mb 30 pin SIMMs. 😀 And maybe I wouldn't have thrown out those 256K SIPPs I had lying around for no apparent reason.
True. Intel people were begging for DDR over RAMBUS.
I'd have never purchased an Intel system if they hadn't switched over. It just wasn't worth it, especially since it was lesser performing for so long.
Sure do. Still remember insisting on a 486 motherboard with a PCI and not a "VESA Local-bus" video slot. I knew that the VL-bus was a dead end because video was it's only real use, whereas PCI could be used for just about everything.
I'm afraid at the time I wasn't building my own systems, just tinkering with the guts a lot, and so I didn't ask the guy who built it. Oh well. It worked, and we never upgraded it much.
Also known as "How 3dfx committed suicide". Along with "people don't need more than 16-bit color", and "we'll abandon all the companies that helped us shoot to the top and try to beat all of them single-handedly".
Yeah, I really thought that was all pretty slick on their part. I had a friend who was a 3dfx zealot who tried to insist to me that his 16bit card looked better than my 32bit color, and that I would never see the difference outside of a still screen shot. And hey, all that banding could be gotten rid of with a spiffy filter, so what's the point? Riiiiiight... He eventually broke down and bought an ATi card after 3dfx died, but he still hates nVidia for their part in it. Fanboys. Sheesh.
BTW, you have to read carefully about whether or not your card is a "true" 4x AGP. I came across one that once said it was 4x compatible, then found out that only meant the connector. Apparently the cardmaker just presumed everyone was using a dual-voltage setup (and except for Intel, they were).
Yeah, a good point. What card was that, anyway? Since most manufacturers actually supported the 4x specs, I could only think maybe it was 3dfx or possibly those Kyro cards.
That's my basic pattern. 486-DX100 in 95, 486DX4-120 chip in '96 (wasted money), ABit BH6 with Celeron 300A (overclocked to 450 of course) in '98 (I think), K7S5A with an AMD Duron-900 in 2001 (sale at Fry's:both for and it used my older memory), and then finally a Shuttle AS40GT board with a Celeron (P4) 1.7GHz chip for (spur-of-the-moment purchase that actually worked out for me).
Yeah, okay, I have to admit that aside from that waste of cash for 100MHz to 120MHz, you do tend to spend a bit less than me. My 300MHz P2 CPU alone cost me 0+ back in '97 (though that really wasn't worth it, I don't know what I was thinking). And I paid at least 0 for each P3 500. My dually motherboard was about 0, if I'm not mistaken, and my IT7 cost 0 (about the same price as the 1.8GHz P4, actually). I've never been a bargin bin shopper, but I find the best deal I can for what I want.
[b]Woof. We're catching up with "Red Baron 3D" people.
Working on it. They've got us by about 20 posts, but we have them in number of pages because of the length of posts, I think.