VOGONS


Reply 40 of 57, by PC-Engineer

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Top 1: Socket 3
it was like a pioneer, many inovations in a short time period, had the most quirks, but because of that the most experiences and the memories

Top 2: Slot1
cardridge CPU is something unique. The first real stable platform without quirks, with reliable PnP and sufficient 3D power. My first contact with WindowsNT (Win2k) and SMP - in my opninion, the first system with a useful combination for SMP (for regular consumer)

Top 3: S939
rock stable with nForce4, PCIe with SLI, 2 HT Channel, first platform for dual core CPU, fastest consumer platform on market for the complete time it was sold

Epox 7KXA Slot A / Athlon 950MHz / Voodoo 5 5500 / PowerVR / 512 MB / AWE32 / SCSI - Windows 98SE

Reply 41 of 57, by appiah4

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Socket 3, but to be honest pre-Socket7 can be really rage inducing at times.

Retronautics: A digital gallery of my retro computers, hardware and projects.

Reply 42 of 57, by mastergamma12

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Slot1/Socket 370

NNH9pIh.png

The Tuala-Bus (My 9x/Dos Rig) (Pentium III-S 1.4ghz, AWE64G+Audigy 2 ZS, Voodoo5 5500, Chieftec Dragon Rambus)

The Final Lan Party (My Windows Xp/7 rig) (Core i7 980x, GTX 480,DFI Lanparty UT X58-T3eH8,)
Re: Post your 'current' PC

Reply 43 of 57, by aha2940

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I started with computers when My dad bought an IBM 386 PS/1 PC. No idea about the model, it came with DOS 6.00 and Windows 3.0 IIRC. It also had a 4-window shell on startup, no idea if it was part of the PC or some software installed by IBM. On that PC I started playing my first games (Wolf3D, Test Drive, Death Track). Then, it was upgraded to an Acer 486 and after that, came a Pentium MMX 200MHz, with 32MB RAM and 6GB HDD which expanded a lot on my gaming options (could play NFS2SE, PoD, quake, hexen, heretic, even hexen 2 at 320x240!) so I'd say my favorite is socket 7. Pentium III (be slot 1 or socket 370) also have special place for me, nice memories of Quake 2/3, Half-life and Unreal/Unreal Tournament on the Intel's SE-440BX-2 and VC820 motherboards I had.

Reply 44 of 57, by Horun

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I like all the platforms from sock 775 all the way back to XT (EXCEPT genuine IBM XT and AT boards, all the clones were so much better)... but that is just my opinion. Do not have a true favorite.

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 45 of 57, by PcBytes

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Socket 1, Socket 3, Socket 7, Slot 1, Slot A, Socket 370, 462, and 478.

"Enter at your own peril, past the bolted door..."
Main PC: i5 3470, GB B75M-D3H, 16GB RAM, 2x1TB
98SE : P3 650, Soyo SY-6BA+IV, 384MB RAM, 80GB

Reply 46 of 57, by PTherapist

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I probably prefer XT up to Socket 7 in general. Hard to pick just 1 of those, my favourite would depend upon what I wanted to do, ie. era of games/programs I intend to run.

The majority of my collection consists of Socket 7 & above systems however. I literally only have 1 working representation of XT, 286, 386 & 486 machines. I'd love to build another 386, 486 & Socket 7, but finding AT cases or newer ATX cases that look vaguely period correct is the stumbling block.

Reply 47 of 57, by Cobra42898

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Tetrium,
Just wondering what your favorite uses are for your s370 rigs. i have some early HP pavilion rigs with the early s370 Celeron CPUs, but haven't found a use for them yet. I also have my d815eea2/1.0ghzp3 rig, which I love, but needs caps. Rock solid MB , just without the flashy OC options in the BIOS. That one will get set up exactly as it was i 2001.

Searching for Epson Actiontower 3000 486 PC.

Reply 49 of 57, by ODwilly

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I really like socket 478 now, as long as you have a board that didnt use garbage caps or has been recapped. So simple. For retro stuff Socket 7 and socket 4 for sure.

Main pc: Asus ROG 17. R9 5900HX, RTX 3070m, 16gb ddr4 3200, 1tb NVME.
Retro PC: Soyo P4S Dragon, 3gb ddr 266, 120gb Maxtor, Geforce Fx 5950 Ultra, SB Live! 5.1

Reply 50 of 57, by pixel_workbench

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LGA2011 not retro yet? I plan on keeping mine until it is, though, makes for a great WinXP and Win7 combo system.

Slot1 is my choice for mid to late 90s games, Win 98, Glide, and some late DOS games. Good combination of backwards compatibility and modern conveniences, and can handle a wide range of processors. Not a fan of weird and quircky boards, unless it's in a good way like those Asrock 4CoreDual series.

Socket A because that was my first real gaming system I built back then, and with a mobile Athlon XP it got even more fun. It made for a good early XP system, but can still accomodate Win98. Plus I like the ass kicking AMD was bringing to Intel's overpriced and underwhelming P4 at the time.

Socket 939 and LGA775 are fun to play with too, spanning the AGP to PCIE transition era, offering just enough backwards compatibility to make them interesting for Win 98/XP combo builds.

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Reply 51 of 57, by Katmai500

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It’s gotta be Slot 1 for me. Cartridge CPUs are just too cool. Intel vs AMD, the battle to 1 GHz, SDRAM vs RDRAM, early AGP + PCI + ISA.

Honorable mentions:
- Socket 5/7
- Socket 478
- Slot A
- Socket 462
- Socket 3 with VLB
- Socket 4

Reply 52 of 57, by waterbeesje

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1) Socket 1/2/3 486 for sure. You just gotta love VLB and it's quirks.

2) super 7. Taking the underdog from AMD to bully Intel slot 1 is fun!

3) dip40 8088 / V20 turbo XT. Just to overcome and stretch the limitations is pure satisfaction.

4) any 286/386, just fun to work with 😀

5) socket 370. Finally some 3D power.

6) ok, here slot 1 tries to get it's revenge on super 7.

7) socket A. All the power windows 98 can wish for and actually meets it's restrictions. (And with it slot A perhaps but I never had one)

Stuck at 10MHz...

Reply 53 of 57, by Tetrium

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Cobra42898 wrote on 2020-07-24, 13:28:

Tetrium,
Just wondering what your favorite uses are for your s370 rigs. i have some early HP pavilion rigs with the early s370 Celeron CPUs, but haven't found a use for them yet. I also have my d815eea2/1.0ghzp3 rig, which I love, but needs caps. Rock solid MB , just without the flashy OC options in the BIOS. That one will get set up exactly as it was i 2001.

My favorite uses of any rig is basically the conceptualizing, assembling of the parts and assembling the parts, setting up the OS and programs and gaming/benchmarking. And then seeing how it will perform.

Contrary to what most people here tend to do (which is to build a rig to fit a (list of) games they want to play), I build the rigs first and try out what will run on them afterwards 😜

The reasons why in the course of the years I gained a slight preference for s370 is because this platform offers a similar variability compared to sA, s3, slot 1 and (s)s7 while offering great stability and flexibility. It can host basically all versions of AGP thanks to the universal AGP slot many of these boards were fitted with, superb performance along with having a good thermal profile (unlike Athlon and Pentium 4) and excellent compatibility with sA cooling solutions so crappy Athlon XP HSFs could be turned into excellent and affordable s370 HSFs with relative ease. In addition, the lower thermal profile offers more flexibility in the need for cooling the system (can get away with more because s370 CPUs don't run very hot) and the s370 platform can much more easily make use of modern PSUs without the need for a beefy 5v rail.
And last but not least, back when I was collecting (or hoarding, take yer pick xD 😜 ) s370 was widely available and cheap.
All the factors above have made it a joy for me to work with this generation of hardware, offering a wider flexibility in being able to run win9x and winnt up to WinXP (though WinXP would have a harder time once the OS became more bloated in the younger iterations of WinXP, which I tried to circumvent my slipstreaming which was another fun project of mine! 😀 ).

All the other platforms I listed usually have a majority of the benefits I wrote down here, but to me, s370 is basically the best offer.
Slot 1 is almost as awesome, but is a bit more difficult with cooling solutions and CPU compatibility (Slotkets with full Tualatin support are not exactly growing on trees, so to say). s3 has none of the luxuries that ATX comes with, (s)s7 has for sure just as much variety in CPU support for instance, but lacks raw processing power and adequate memory support for the OSs I ended up using the most (WinME and WinXP), s754 and s939 have more limited CPU support and to me isn't as exciting, sA has the PSU issues with the 5v rail, s478 lacks universal AGP card support with its Intel chipsets.

All of the alternative platforms offer many excellent features which I truely love, but in the years I was preoccupied with this hobby, I noticed that s370 became THE platform that ended up being the most fun and rewarding for me personally.

The one downside that s370 offers would imo be the lack of free multiplier selection, as these CPUs will usually be locked (except ES CPUs and CPUs made by VIA that is).

And regarding the early s370 Mendocino boards, I tend to view them as roughly ss7 in performance, but without all the fuzz and coming with extra features such as 440LX/440BX excellent stability and being able to get at least similar performance using puny PC-66 SDRAM. To me, my Celeron 400 and my K6-iii/400 seemed so similar in performance, but the Celeron was arguably easier to set up (not that ss7 rigs are so notoriously difficult to set up as my build went without any major issues whatsoever) while offering very similar performance.
It's basically the Intel ss7 counterpart 😜
And I could put some of my slower PC-100 CAS 3 SDRAM in there and set the CAS latency to 2 😜
And my Coppermine 800, both Coppermines 1000, Celeron 800 and Tualatin 1400 all ran without much issues at all. The only rig that gave me some issues was the i820 Intel RDRAM board which features 3 RDRAM slots and this turned out to be an issue with the board itself (the board with 3 RDRAM slots was an actual engineering sample board while the one with 2 RDRAM slots was a standard retail board, so stability issues were to be expected there tbh). And I'm pretty sure I didn't even list all my s370 rigs here.

Whats missing in your collections?
My retro rigs (old topic)
Interesting Vogons threads (links to Vogonswiki)
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Reply 54 of 57, by Cobra42898

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Very cool, and well thought out.
For me, s370 is sort of an awkward teenager.
it's generally not easy to find with ISA as easily as a slot1 board, but lacks big cpu power to run some more modern things. my 1.0ghz did surprisingly well though for the years of overuse i put it through. Perhaps I just haven't given enough time to test them out. i have 3 between 400-600 (all celerons), but no niche to use them to fill.

i used ME for a few years as a main OS, its great as long as you leave the system restore thing off. i eventually went to 2000pro, which was infinitely more stable if less backwards compatible for games. Is XP too much for the lower ( under 7-800) cpus? i know xp is ram hungry as well, compared to win9x.

Searching for Epson Actiontower 3000 486 PC.

Reply 55 of 57, by Marentis

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I had XP running on a Duron 750 with 64 MB ram. That was in the time when nearly all my friends ran Windows XP.
Most of them had Athlons or Durons with approximately 256 MB RAM or even less.

That was ok for the first release without service packs and the eye candy turned off. But I obviously later replaced my system with an Athlon 64 with 1 GB RAM.
So I think that XP would work just fine on a P3 with 1GHz and 512 MB RAM. It won't be super fast but probably still run decent.

Reply 56 of 57, by Socket3

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Marentis wrote on 2020-07-26, 05:55:

So I think that XP would work just fine on a P3 with 1GHz and 512 MB RAM. It won't be super fast but probably still run decent.

I agree. Even SP3 runs ok on a 600mhz p3 with 512mb of ram. But despite XP running OK on said machine, it takes a performance hit when running games - the slower the CPU the bigger the performance penalty. As such I prefer to run XP on much faster platforms, LGA775 / Skt 754/939 onwards. My dedicated XP rig is a Q9650/GTX 280, but the slowest machine I currently run XP on is a dual pentium 3 @ 1.1GHz with 1GB of ram. I will be replacing it with windows 2000 in the future, since I never used win2k and I'm curious about it.

Reply 57 of 57, by StaffelGuard1917

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for me - 286 and P1. P1 as it was my own machine in the nineties and 286 as it's both really retro (16 bit) and capablae of many good games at the same time... I remember watching as a kid in school "elder boys" playing Death Track and Golden Axe in 1992 - since then 286 machines seemed cool to me...

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