First post, by DonutKing
- Rank
- Oldbie
Just wondering if anybody has some cool hardware collections to share? I've started collecting CPU's.
I've been snapping up the odd ones I find on ebay, and I hit the jackpot on OCAU where I found a guy who was selling his own collection. I now have over 100 CPU's (including a few not shown that are still in boards)
Most of these should still work, the ones I've tried so far do. Some have bent pins but this can be fixed easily enough.
Here are the most interesting ones...
the one on the lower left is an Intel 6MHz 286, which is pretty uncommon because back then they seemed to be soldered onto boards or made by another company - eg I have a 286-12 board which has a 'Zymos' branded CPU on it.
I have 3 387DX's, and 3 AMD 386-40's which were the best 386 you could get. A few 486 SX and DX chips, plus a 486SX2-50. I haven't seen any other SX2's before. The Overdrive with the heatsink, on the top row is a DX4 with a voltage regulator built in; even though its a 3.3V CPU it is designed for 5V boards (thus the voltage regulator). The one to the right with the fan is a P54C better known as the Socket 3 Pentium Overdrive. This is the CPU that socket 3 was designed for, and is the reason why there is an extra row of pins around the edge of the socket when a standard 486 is installed. Normal 486's will fit in Socket 2, without the extra row of pins, and Socket 3 was provided purely for the P54C as an upgrade option. Unfortunately an AMD or Cyrix 586 type processor was normally faster if your board supported it.
also not shown- brand new 486DX2-66 overdrive, in sealed box.
Here's a heap of Socket 7 Pentiums plus a couple of 686's for good measure. I don't seem to have any socket 4 or 5 Pentiums, which are quite rare.
Here's some later model cpu's. In the center are various Slot 1 processors; Pentium 2's, 3's and the ones without the black cover are Celerons. The slot type processor was done to bring the L2 cache onto the processor package instead of on the motherboard. The Celerons started including L2 cache built into the CPU core so this design was soon made redundant. This is why the Pentium 3's moved to the Socket 370; basically the same processors but without being mounted on a big card. The fun part about this is that you could buy a 'slotket' adapter which let you run a Socket 370 processor on a Slot 1 board (providing your motherboard could recognise the CPU and handle its FSB speed of course). My 440LX board back in the day could only do 66MHz FSB so I could never upgrade to a 100MHz FSB CPU like a P3 🙁
The one in the center with the big heatsink is a Mendocino 300A, the legendary overclocker. The one on top is an original Covington with no L2 cache and was widely regarded as a dog, and wasn't sold for very long before Intel replaced it with the Celeron A.
On the left, the lower 3 are Mendocino socket 370 Celerons (Pentium 2 based) while the next one up is a Coppermine celeron (Pentium 3 based) and the top one is a Tualatin 1.2GHz celeron, basically the last revision of the Pentium 3.
On the top right are some Pentium Pro's, an Athlon XP 1600+ and a 3.06GHz Pentium 4 - the first model with Hyperthreading.
Finally we have an AMD K6-2 and a K6-3+
I've also got a couple of original 'Slot A' Athlons in the mail to add to my collection -they look just like the pentium 2/3's above. The original Athlon was the first consumer CPU to hit 1GHz. After this AMD scrapped the slot design and moved to Socket A for the Athlon 'Thunderbird' and Athlon XP.
I wonder if its healthy to have this many CPU's 🤣 maybe I need some sort of professional help
