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Best PC the year 2000 could provide.

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Reply 40 of 101, by firage

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The best system running the fastest CPU's on the consumer market can also be overclocked, which isn't too commonly supported on workstation and server boards. The multi-socket solutions are a little slower in single thread performance to start with, because their chipsets, buses and such aren't as tightly optimized for gaming. Other than the OS overhead, whatever that amounts to, they're strictly worse for all but a small handful of games available around 2000-2005.

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Reply 41 of 101, by dexvx

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A lot of sporadic comments scattered through many threads. I'm going to request a vogonwiki account to gather this data.

I think it would be helpful to have a 'best' system for years (e.g. 1998, 1999, 2000) as well as 'best' system for certain game launches (e.g. doom, quake).

Edit: Why do you need your real name and info to make a vogonswiki account 😐

Reply 42 of 101, by fsmith2003

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dexvx wrote:

A lot of sporadic comments scattered through many threads. I'm going to request a vogonwiki account to gather this data.

I think it would be helpful to have a 'best' system for years (e.g. 1998, 1999, 2000) as well as 'best' system for certain game launches (e.g. doom, quake).

Agreed. I know that the spread sheet exist but it has some holes. A wiki would be great.

Reply 43 of 101, by candle_86

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Best hmm

Athlon 1266 (these came out in 2000 not sure which board ran them however)
133mhz board
PC166 Ram 512mb of it
Geforce 2 Ultra

Reply 44 of 101, by SpectriaForce

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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???)

Just to play the devil; why do you want to build 'the best year 2000 pc'?

First of all this is quite a subjective statement. What 'the best' is depends on your demands (e.g. the games that you want to play). Benchmark scores of components differ per program or game.

Secondly, if you undertake this project with the components mentioned earlier, then you'll likely have to spend quite a lot of money on some highly outdated high end components like the graphics card and motherboard (the rest is actually fairly cheap) or have trouble finding them.

Thirdly, you'll also need a period correct monitor or flatscreen and surround set to really give you the 'year 2000 feeling'.

If I were you I would look in a year 2000 pc magazine and build a system that you like from the magazine.

I believe in mid 2000 my dad bought a high end Win98SE Packard Bell Platinum with a 800 MHz PIII, 128 MB RAM, 30 GB HDD, 15'' flatscreen and Diamond 2.1 surround set (not sure what the graphics card was though..). I can tell you that thing felt pretty high end and my friends must have been extremely jealous! It ran NFS Porsche 2000 super smooth maxed out.

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Reply 45 of 101, by soviet conscript

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Funny this thread should come up. I just built a PC like this mainly to test if the socket 423 was really as bad as everyone says it is.

QDI PLATINIX 4X socket 423 motherboard (kind of a oddball board)
1.5ghz Pentium 4 Willamette
Windows 98se
512mb RDRAM
Sound Blaster Live!
Geforce 2 Ultra

whole thing cost maybe $80 give or take. most pricy parts were the motherboard and GF 2 Ultra.
I just haven't settled 100% on hard drive. I have a 40GB quantum fireball plus @ 7200RPM on ATA-100 which I think is as fast as ide drives were in 2000.

any other hard drive recommendations? were the 15,000RPM SCSI cheetah drives out in 2000?

Reply 46 of 101, by BitWrangler

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I was trying to remember when the 32GB raptors came out, might have been the next year. But 7200RPM drives with 8MB cache by maxtor and WD were well regarded. There was always something more insanerer in SCSI though.

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Reply 47 of 101, by fsmith2003

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soviet conscript wrote:
Funny this thread should come up. I just built a PC like this mainly to test if the socket 423 was really as bad as everyone say […]
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Funny this thread should come up. I just built a PC like this mainly to test if the socket 423 was really as bad as everyone says it is.

QDI PLATINIX 4X socket 423 motherboard (kind of a oddball board)
1.5ghz Pentium 4 Willamette
Windows 98se
512mb RDRAM
Sound Blaster Live!
Geforce 2 Ultra

Very similar to what I’d like to do. How do you like this configuration then?

Reply 48 of 101, by soviet conscript

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I just finished putting it together literally 2 days ago or so and haven't had time to mess with it but I'm planning to benchmark it against my 1ghz P3 dell dimension as well as a 1.4ghz Tualatin rig and my 1.4ghz Athlon machine soon hopefully.

Reply 49 of 101, by dexvx

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I got approved for vogonswiki.

Wiki page below, but can be easily accessed via the main page. I'll probably add 1999 and 2001 next.

For the motherboards, they are mostly just as an example. I put them in alphabetical order and googled some motherboard roundups from Anandtech/Tomshardware and took the winners.

http://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/Year_2000_System_Build

Some notes about 'best of year', particularly this example. Pentium 4 launched November 2000 with the i850/socket 423 chipset. Although technically the Abit TH7 and Asus P4T are the same i850/socket 423 motherboard, they didn't launch until the year 2001. However, tracking every single motherboard launch is quite tedious, so I'm going to say that if they chipset launched (e.g. i850/socket 423), then having an OEM motherboard that matches is 'year correct'. The TH7-II (i850/socket 478), would be disallowed, obviously.

There are other components not listed:
* Memory, we know PC133 is available, but there were probably some overclocked PC150 variants. Time consuming to track down.
* Storage, I can pull up some old storage roundups, but it would be quite tedious. So I'm concentrating on the CPU/GPU/Motherboard mostly at the moment.

Let me know what you guys think

Reply 51 of 101, by dexvx

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@candle_86

Yes for single CPU. Year 2000 was quite strange in the sense that the dual CPU versions lagged significantly behind the single CPU. 2001 is a whole different story. The highest end single CPU was also available as a dual CPU solution.

Made a list here:
http://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/Year_2001_System_Build

Reply 52 of 101, by candle_86

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Honestly though not sure why 2000 is important, the big years in PC gaming, the two golden years are 1998 and 2004 I'd target those two years, and maybe 1993 and 2007

Reply 53 of 101, by slivercr

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candle_86 wrote:

Honestly though not sure why 2000 is important, the big years in PC gaming, the two golden years are 1998 and 2004 I'd target those two years, and maybe 1993 and 2007

Did you just pick the release years of Half Life and Half Life 2 for the "golden years" you describe? 😜

I don't think its a matter of overall importance in computing or gaming, OP just wants a 2000 rig for whatever reason.

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Reply 54 of 101, by candle_86

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slivercr wrote:
candle_86 wrote:

Honestly though not sure why 2000 is important, the big years in PC gaming, the two golden years are 1998 and 2004 I'd target those two years, and maybe 1993 and 2007

Did you just pick the release years of Half Life and Half Life 2 for the "golden years" you describe? 😜

I don't think its a matter of overall importance in computing or gaming, OP just wants a 2000 rig for whatever reason.

maybe, whats honestly better than half life 🤣

Reply 55 of 101, by appiah4

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Not sure if it will be of use or help to anyone but this is the hardware by year chart I made for myself some time ago, and I refer to it when putting together a build.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1fP6LcI8yUSS … -fgrSnpbVCbuCVE

I often go for builds that cover two year periods though, as usually either the GPU or the CPU, depending on the year, is a bottleneck.

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Reply 56 of 101, by clueless1

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appiah4 wrote:

Not sure if it will be of use or help to anyone but this is the hardware by year chart I made for myself some time ago, and I refer to it when putting together a build.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1fP6LcI8yUSS … -fgrSnpbVCbuCVE

I often go for builds that cover two year periods though, as usually either the GPU or the CPU, depending on the year, is a bottleneck.

Very nice chart, thanks for sharing it!

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Reply 57 of 101, by dexvx

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appiah4 wrote:

Not sure if it will be of use or help to anyone but this is the hardware by year chart I made for myself some time ago, and I refer to it when putting together a build.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1fP6LcI8yUSS … -fgrSnpbVCbuCVE

I often go for builds that cover two year periods though, as usually either the GPU or the CPU, depending on the year, is a bottleneck.

Certainly does help. I have references to two other places in the discussion part of Vogonswiki for the year builds. I also like to leave multiple vendor options just in case some fanboy gets pissed off. E.g. for 2001, your spreadsheet has Radeon 8500, but IIRC it traded blows with the GF3 Ti500.

I always double check if the dates are accurate. On another spreadsheet, they had the SiS 745 chipset available in 2001, but from my 10 minutes of research, it was actually soft launched in Jan 2002 and only available a month later.

Edit: In the spreadsheet @appiah4 linked, it's mostly correct. But in 2000 it has Tualatin Intel CPU, but that didn't launch until 2001.

Reply 58 of 101, by appiah4

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dexvx wrote:
Certainly does help. I have references to two other places in the discussion part of Vogonswiki for the year builds. I also like […]
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appiah4 wrote:

Not sure if it will be of use or help to anyone but this is the hardware by year chart I made for myself some time ago, and I refer to it when putting together a build.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1fP6LcI8yUSS … -fgrSnpbVCbuCVE

I often go for builds that cover two year periods though, as usually either the GPU or the CPU, depending on the year, is a bottleneck.

Certainly does help. I have references to two other places in the discussion part of Vogonswiki for the year builds. I also like to leave multiple vendor options just in case some fanboy gets pissed off. E.g. for 2001, your spreadsheet has Radeon 8500, but IIRC it traded blows with the GF3 Ti500.

I always double check if the dates are accurate. On another spreadsheet, they had the SiS 745 chipset available in 2001, but from my 10 minutes of research, it was actually soft launched in Jan 2002 and only available a month later.

Edit: In the spreadsheet @appiah4 linked, it's mostly correct. But in 2000 it has Tualatin Intel CPU, but that didn't launch until 2001.

Actually the 8500 came after the GF3 late in 2001 and traded blows with the Ti4200 which came the next year. The 8500 was way faster than the GF3 Ti500.

Tualatin in 2000 is not a mistake, the Celeron 900A, which is a Tualatin, was released in 2000. Granted, Pentium III as indicated would come later but the sheet is basically a rough guide for me. If you move Tualatin to 2001 then there is no year where a Williamette build makes sense 😉

Last edited by appiah4 on 2017-11-14, 22:04. Edited 3 times in total.

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Reply 59 of 101, by fsmith2003

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I like that spreadsheet. Easy to navigate and to the point. It would be nice to see some more specific processor speeds though for each of those years in addition to the names.