First post, by weldum
- Rank
- Member
This is the third:
CPU: VIA C3 Samuel2 800 MHz, soldered in the board, running at 133MHz FSB
Mobo: Kobian KOB PLE133TFSMX
Chipset: VIA PLE133 Apollo
RAM: 512MB Dimm SDRAM PC133
Video: Trident CyberBlade i7 8MB shared
Sound: VIA 1612A AC'97
NIC: Realtek RTL8139 Fast
HDD: Fujitsu 10GB IDE
OS: Windows XP SP3
PSU SPI ATX
AOpen case
Later will post the rest...
Edit: here it is
History
Well this machine is a little bit special to me, it gonna be hard to describe it because i'm not a native english speaker, and there are so much words that i don't know, i will try my best.
my childhood was "plagued" of retrocomputing, but not in the way that most people had experienced. I'm 21 years old. When i had like 5 or 6 started the school, up to 12 or 13. In that school, the Computing Room had all sorts of old computers, from early 8088 up to a Pentium 2 with windows ME that played old musical videos, all the machines (except the P2) used Dos, Win 3.1 or Win 95, and had all sorts of edutainment games and old office suites. That was like the holy grail to me, but all of this was happening in as late as 2010, and I liked the idea that these computers were working that well.
When I started High School, the computers that used in that other place were all Celeron D Prescott-based with 512MB and Windows XP, in 2010. That was a sort of dissapointment because I liked so much the earlier computers, and these new had no fun, just Office 2007 and AutoCAD (Technical High School).
My first computer, one that I could use was an old P3 in a (pretty sure it was) PCChips board, that one had XP and 128MB of RAM, and ran like crap, past 2 weeks and the computer just didn't work more (it was the first computer that my dad used in his job), so my dad exchanged it for a Celeron D 315 with 256MB of RAM and a 30GB HDD, this was in 2008.
In 2009 this computer was upgraded to 768MB of ram total, a 160GB HDD and a "shiny" Geforce 6200 256MB, then, to me and my brother didn't care nor know what was better, also with that computer we had a lot of fun and nice moments and fights, very fond memories. Remember when we tried to run Unreal 3 on that machine, ran like at 1 or 2 FPS. In 2010 my dad, in an effort to stop fights for the computer bought to us a laptop, one for me and another for my brother, both identical, an Acer Aspire 4540 with an Athlon II x2 M300 (dualcore 2.0) 2GB of Ram and 250GB hdd and a Radeon HD4200, with this laptop (now dead since 4 years or so because of heat) had played some of the -to me- best games out there (Left4dead 1 and 2, Portal 1 and 2, all the Half-Life saga, GTA4, Crysis Warhead, UT2004 and 99, the FlatOut saga and more).
Sorry, I think I went far from the point of this post.
When entering High School and finding those relatively newer computers, I started looking to buy some computer for windows 98 or 95. That led me to MercadoLibre (like ebay or craiglist but in Argentina) where I find the first old computer that was true mine and which i bought with my own money. That computer didn't had anything special, it was an OEM Compaq mobo, with a K6-2 500 and 64MB of RAM, an VIA MVP4 with integrated ESS sound and Trident CyberBlade i7 video, but led to me experiencing installing and getting working DOS, Windows 3.11, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows XP and even tried to get Windows Vista installed, which of course didn't work, also was the starting point to discover linux, with Puppy linux and Damn Small Linux being at the top of my mind. Having no support for PAE was making me hard to find a working linux for this computer. Also led me to discover Plop Boot Manager, which i used to boot DSL from USB, that thing was blazingly fast with DSL.
Well this C3 machine represents my first K6-2 and my first adquisition in the world of old computers, also the time when i still was young, without responsabilities and worries, such good times.
Later will post the benchmarks.
Edit2: Benchs!
Now the games:
Unreal Tournament: Perfectly playable, everything at lowest at 640x480x16, it sure looks ugly but runs very near 30fps
GLQuake: 36.4 FPS, good performance out of bad GPU and processor.
Quake 2: very good performance, almost the same as GLQuake
Quake 3: ranges from near UT performance to unplayable, there are a serious bottleneck here.
Half Life: runs like UT, very playable and not that bad looking
Max Payne: Really low performance, lower than in the P2 466
GTA3: 1 or 2 FPS, actually i'm very surprised it runs, because it's hardcoded to start only when there are more than 12MB of VRAM.
In some cases, i was very surprised of the performance (half life, UT), but no one can expect much of this computer, especially when the components are intended for low power computers like laptops.
DT: R7-5800X3D/R5-3600/R3-1200/P-G5400/FX-6100/i3-3225/P-8400/D-900/K6-2_550
LT: C-N2840/A64-TK57/N2600/N455/N270/C-ULV353/PM-1.7/P4-2.6/P133
TC: Esther-1000/Esther-400/Vortex86-366
Others: Drean C64c/Czerweny Spectrum 48k/Talent MSX DPC200/M512K/MP475