The fastest machine would have been a quad or oct socket xeon.

might not be initially the fastest possible single core clock speed but ultimately will be the only machine from the era that could remain fast as time went on.

and or the only machine that could do several things at one time such as running a game server , playing the game , capturing footage , ect..... doing all those at once was pretty much not possible with single pentium 4's.

That's not exactly PC hardware though.

The Serpent Rider wrote:

That's not exactly PC hardware though.

it is if it's your personal computer.

I'm surprised how many people forget that they made faster machines even in those days. there's something nice about a machine from the year 2000 that can play crysis

Crysis barely makes use of multiple threads, just a bit better than all the stuff that came before. Even with eight of those year 2000 1GHz Xeons, you won't get the same amount of frames there as one double speed core. That's ignoring the GPU, which is at least as big a bottleneck for game performance, and they can always be choked further with higher resolutions and better filtering.

Those systems were an option ever since 2K came out, if you were ready to forgo driver support for the Vortex2, many other Win9x era peripherals, backward compatibility with DOS and such.

it is if it's your personal computer.

Not by a classification. That's not even workstation territory.

fsmith2003 wrote:

I am about to start a year 2000 era specific build. I'd like to get a consensus of which core components should be included for […]
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I am about to start a year 2000 era specific build. I'd like to get a consensus of which core components should be included for the best pc you could have built on December 31, 2000.

Motherboard: Socket 423
CPU: Pentium 4 1.5ghz
Video Card: Geforce2 Ultra 64MB
Sound Card: NEED SOME SUGGESTIONS (SB Live! Platinum???)

Well i think PC from the 1999 (including all parts) will be way more interesting, because back then everyone, or at least most people did say the world will end when the new 2000 year comes....
I have one PC like that all parts are before 2000 PII machine...

https://imgur.com/a/jUmfz

BitWrangler wrote:

Well "turns out" is what happened by the time it got enough fixes and the IE 6.0 SP1 update in 2002, which is basically the same time XP became usable. As released, it was nasty for at least 2 years, until fixes and driver updates got it under control. However, since you start having to do a lot of workarounds for speed, RAM size, USB, networking support for 98 as you get into 1ghz plus era systems, it could be nicer now with the full availability of updates.

That's the point. 😉 We're building retro systems today, with the full benefit of updates. No reason to let old bad memories keep you from seeing things with fresh eyes.

emosun wrote:

The Serpent Rider wrote:

That's not exactly PC hardware though.

it is if it's your personal computer.

I'm surprised how many people forget that they made faster machines even in those days. there's something nice about a machine from the year 2000 that can play crysis

Duallies were becoming more popular in enthusiast systems late 90s PII/III/celly through to dual opteron and P4 Xeons... I'd say anything in a desktop form factor "workstation" board was fair game, but server size boards are too much of a stretch.

BitWrangler wrote:

Duallies were becoming more popular in enthusiast systems late 90s PII/III/celly through to dual opteron and P4 Xeons... I'd say anything in a desktop form factor "workstation" board was fair game, but server size boards are too much of a stretch.

I'd say anything that fits into a tower is fair game.

Just dumb to state that a single pentium 4 is the best 2000 had to offer when it definitely wasn't. This is 17 years later , high end systems are fair game and ARE what was the fastest that could be offered at the time. I don't really care for this "i don't know anything about server/workstation hardware therefor it doesn't count" nonsense. and this whole "has to be in a desktop tower" nonsense as well. hand me a few select power tools and i'll make any server board go into a desktop tower. form factor concerns me zero.

Topic, best PC, not best computer. otherwise we can take this logic all the way to demanding you replace your favorite era systems with DEC Alphas, Itaniums, Power PC NUMA multiprocessors that fill a room and tell you to shut up and be happy, because you've got the best, never mind it's totally unsuitable for what you wanted to do with it, i.e. use familiar old x86 software.

BitWrangler wrote:

Topic, best PC, not best computer. otherwise we can take this logic all the way to demanding you replace your favorite era systems with DEC Alphas, Itaniums, Power PC NUMA multiprocessors that fill a room and tell you to shut up and be happy, because you've got the best, never mind it's totally unsuitable for what you wanted to do with it, i.e. use familiar old x86 software.

or we could change the topic title to "Best PC the year 2000 could provide if fast machines didn't exist"

whatever you need to justify recommending slow hardware I'm sure we could fix that title right up.

Really the only things I would be doing is playing games that came out in the year 2000. I already have older and newer computers. Nothing from after Dec. 31, 2000 will go on it. So with that being said, would a multi cpu machine be a bit overkill or are there games that could take advantage of it?

BitWrangler wrote:

Topic, best PC, not best computer

Tell that to luckybob.

fsmith2003 wrote:

Really the only things I would be doing is playing games that came out in the year 2000. I already have older and newer computers. Nothing from after Dec. 31, 2000 will go on it. So with that being said, would a multi cpu machine be a bit overkill or are there games that could take advantage of it?

Quake 3 is just about the only have the will use both cpu's, they're some flight sime that use dual cpu's as well.
How ever dual cpu's are about 5% faster when you maxing out one cpu. the second cpu still handles the OS and driver and so on.

At 1024x768 Q3 maxes out the top end GF2 cards, so any CPU of around 800mhz plus starts maxing the frame rate, so unless you wanna play in low res to prove a point, 1ghz 1.2ghz or 1.5 willy doesn't get you any faster. Also to see a benefit from a dually at that res you'd probably be needing to compare dual 700mhz vs single.

If you follow all the 2000 hype trains, it'd end up being:

Pentium 4 1.4GHz w/ 256MB RDRAM
Hercules 3D Prophet II Geforce2 GTS 64MB (this was the fastest and most favorably reviewed video card of the year)
Windows ME (this was more marketed to the consumer than 2K was and DOS gaming holdovers were still a thing as 2000 created a bit of fear for that earlier in the year)
Sound Blaster Live 5.1
40-60GB Maxtor DiamondMAX

Yes the Tbird is faster, but the tbird also had the heatsplodeinstability stigma so it's a rock and a hard place here (not to mention the VIA chipsets)

Forget about Q3. Think about building the rig in anticipation for Tribes 2, Giants and Duke Nukem ForeverBlack & White.

(technically a rig like this would make it as far as running HL2, FarCry and Doom3 "ok" years in the future, and be absolutely fine for the popular multiplayer titles Call of Duty, BF1942, UT2004, RTCW, SOF2, JK2 and MOHAA as well as the MMOS Everquest, DAOC, Anarchy Online, WWII Online, etc. You'd only really lose out on playing Splinter Cell and Invisible War had you not splurged on the Geforce3 a few months later, and going the Tbird route would keep you from playing Quake 4)

leileiol, So you would say the GF2 GTS would be a better card then the Ultra? Most reviews I have been finding show the opposite. What did the Hercules variety have that pushed it ahead?

leileilol wrote:

lso had the heatsplodeinstability stigma so it's a rock and a hard place here (not to mention the VIA chipsets)

Nothing wrong with VIA chipsets. I used them a lot back in the day and they were brilliant. Even on socket 370, the Apollo PRO 133a has better AGP performance then any intel counterpart especially the i815, and it shows in games and benchmarks (witch is why I swapped the Abit ST6 in my tualatin machine for a Abit VP6A, and it was worth the effort). As for socket A, VIA was the norm. The KT133 had a few issues like the PCI latency bug, but later chipsets like the KT333 and KT880 were superb.

My ultimate year 2000 rig would look like this:

Athlon 1266 + Cooler Master DP5-5K11
Abit KT7-Raid
2x128MB PC133 SDRAM
Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 7500 64MB DDR (aka radeon DDR)
2x20GB disk drives for RAID
Sony CD-RW (any brand really, but sony was well priced in my country in 2000)
Labway Xwave-6000 N6B (Yamaha YMF754) or regular Xwave-6000 with YMF724
Chieftec Dragon DG01 black + 3x 80mm fans
Chieftec 420DF PSU

Ahh, the year 2000... I was a teen back then. Unfortunately I was only able to upgrade in winter 2001, and couldn't afford the configuration listed above. I did get the radeon DDR witch I was very happy with, but as for the rest... got a 800 (or 850?) MHz Duron, stock cooler, cheap-ass matsonic motherboard, cheap-ass chinese case with no-name atx PSU, and had to keep the ram (196mb SDR), sound card (ISA OPL3-AX), 4GB HDD, CD-Drive and FDD from my K6. Basically I could only afford the CPU, mainboard, video card and a really cheap ATX case. I have great memories about that PC. The speed boost I got over my old K6-2 was incredible.

emosun wrote:

BitWrangler wrote:

Topic, best PC, not best computer. otherwise we can take this logic all the way to demanding you replace your favorite era systems with DEC Alphas, Itaniums, Power PC NUMA multiprocessors that fill a room and tell you to shut up and be happy, because you've got the best, never mind it's totally unsuitable for what you wanted to do with it, i.e. use familiar old x86 software.

or we could change the topic title to "Best PC the year 2000 could provide if fast machines didn't exist"

whatever you need to justify recommending slow hardware I'm sure we could fix that title right up.

Can you post an example of a "better" PC from the year 2000? I genuinely want to know.

I've used server grade hardware for a general use PC before and it tends to not be that great. Over complicated BIOS setup, compatibility issues with common add on cards, odd form factors that make it hard to find cases...

Just looking at the release dates of various SMP capable processors, I see that Netburst Xeons weren't released until May 2001, P3-based Xeons topped out at 1Ghz in late 2000 (and were Slot 2... yikes), P3 Coppermine topped out at 1133Mhz and lacks SSE2.

I"m particularly interested to hear about the 8 CPU machine that can take a GPU that crysis will run on, don't think integrated mach64 is gonna do it. Besides are you sitting there in 2000 thinking, "I'll sacrifice 50% of potential single CPU performance on current and announced games, just on the offchance that sometime in a few years I can run a multithreaded game a but faster." ??

leileilol wrote:

Yes the Tbird is faster, but the tbird also had the heatsplodeinstability stigma so it's a rock and a hard place here (not to mention the VIA chipsets)

Late in the year came DDR RAM and the AMD 760 chipset, now that WAS regarded as a bit pedestrian in some quarters, BUT careful tuning could really REALLY let it rip, it could run DDR over 333 speeds, not quite 400, but the RAM chips known to hit over 400 were around then also, and also not yet cherry picked to higher speed grades at the factory. So Thunderbird on a 760 board, samsung chipped DDR 2100, tweaked tuned and overclocked to the limit with the largest cooler of the day, and if money is not an object it doesn't matter if you had to go through 10 CPUs to pick the one capable of 9x175, 1575Mhz, DDR350, and that would have slaughtered anything Intel until 2.2Ghz+ Northwoods with DDR. The PIII-S could have got close on clockspeed on a 150 bus with SDRAM, which would have given a Tbird on KT133 a run for it's money, but DDR opened the gap.