I think it is indeed outdated but still usable.

I think of anything from the era to be retro or at the least getting close plus a decade has past since it became dated after the release of the Athlon 64.

I consider anything without SSE2 support to be retro (or at the very least, not fit for today's basic workloads). A while back I was playing with YT's HTML5 player on an AXP based machine. When I tried full screen mode, the player actually warned me about the processor's lack of SSE2. It did work, but it resembled a quick slide show.

Windows 8/8.1 won't run on those processors either.

That hardware is best used with XP anyway.

It is a shame that AMD didn't get SSE2 into Athlon XP. It is a major issue. For example you can't put a modernish video card in and gain HD video and Flash acceleration because it requires SSE2.

I usually try to talk owners of old hardware like this into finally upgrading. It's not worth the money and time to try to upgrade it when modern stuff is so vastly faster and also so cheap. Plus XP is nearing the end of support and buying a OS license for a 10yr old rickety old box with iffy components (ancient HDD and perhaps bad caps) is dumb. 😀

I think Athlon XP is retro.
But after some evenings playing with both the Via KT400/600 platform and Nforce 2 I have to say that I dont like either platform.
KT400/600 is not nice at all.
Nforce 2 is better but my Asus Nforce 2 would not work with some ATI video cards that demand much power. It smoked my rare XP3200+ 2333@2425 with slightly above stock voltage without obvious reason when I tried a X800PRO AGP card.
The all 5V design is to blame I think. The PSU could defently deliver the power but the motherboard could not handle it.

Did the board have any bad caps? It shouldn't be torching hardware... People used to love that ASUS board. I definitely think you were a victim of bad caps, either due to age or the defective caps often used back then.

The motherboard is recapped by the previous owner with Rubycon caps and it looks to be in great shape so I dont think the boards age have much to do with it.
I have owned the board the last 4 years or so but I have only used it for benching.
It tops out at 1.85v cpu and 2.8v memory so it has never seen any real abuse.

The AXP is retro IMO.

Nothing technical about my reasoning, just my own personal cut-off point. Like 478 P4s.

@Skyscraper: Im running an Abit NF7 with a XP3000+ @2100MHz & a 9800pro without issue. But then it does have the 12V port for the CPU which would take some of the load off.

Forevermore wrote:

The AXP is retro IMO.

Nothing technical about my reasoning, just my own personal cut-off point. Like 478 P4s.

@Skyscraper: Im running an Abit NF7 with a XP3000+ @2100MHz & a 9800pro without issue. But then it does have the 12V port for the CPU which would take some of the load off.

The Radeon 9800 XT actually worked on the Nforce board. It was the X800PRO and the X1950PRO that made the system reboot during the nature test in 3dmark2001.
I still have two 3000+ and a 2800+ and a 2500+ Barton so its no huge loss.
The 2333 mhz 3200+ is still rare... It just dosnt work any more. No visual damage but It's expired and gone to meet its maker.

Its a loss for benchmark comparisons though since it could do 2600mhz@1.85v

When it comes to socket 478
All 400/533 fsb Northwoods are retro. The 800mhz Northwoods are borderline. The Prescotts will have to wait for retro status at least another month.

Well, back in late 2008 I sold my 4 years old PC: an Athlon XP 2500+ (Barton core) on an ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe, 2GB RAM, ATi Radeon All-In-Wonder 9800Pro (which went up in smoke shortly after warranty expired) and a 120GB Seagate SATA HDD.

The system changed two owners afterwards and is still in use today. What bothered me the most was the lack of PCI-E support for modern graphics cards. So yeah, I guess 10 years is enough to make it quite obsolete but it still feels kind of weird 😀

Half-Saint wrote:

Well, back in late 2008 I sold my 4 years old PC: an Athlon XP 2500+ (Barton core) on an ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe

Speak of the devil
I might aswell post some pictures of that evil murderer so people know how it looks.

Looks pretty retro to me.

Murder caps?

The ones around the AGP-slot look harmless.

The number of the beast is 3300uf

A friend's aunt was using a Barton + Abit NF7-S 2.0 setup up until early this year. Finally went out and bought a new laptop. I hope to get my hands on the old box at some point. I feel an attachment to it since I built it. 😉

To me Socket A and 478 are retro. A technical reason (for me anyway) is the lack of 64bit.

My main reason to say so is because these platforms are often used by 3dfx enthusiasts and 3dfx is considered retro. You don't see many 3dfx gaming rigs with Socket 775 or 754/939.

Skyscraper wrote:

Half-Saint wrote:

Well, back in late 2008 I sold my 4 years old PC: an Athlon XP 2500+ (Barton core) on an ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe

Speak of the devil
I might aswell post some pictures of that evil murderer so people know how it looks.

Those caps look fine to me - no apparent bulging or leaking.

I am a huge socket a fan, but would not direcly take an asus board even though the a7n8x-e is nice i would always prefer a proper board like abit nf7 or lanparty ultra b.
They are excellent asus always seemed to use a 2phase cpu power supply while others used 3phase or even 4phase designs.

I used Socket-A machines a lot and still have my old 3200+ system with a GF6800GT on a nForce2U, previously it was on a KT600. I can't complain, it runs without problems on either chipset. The KT600 eliminated the main cause of problems and has the new southbridge. The main reason to switch to the nForce2U was the support for SATA auto negotiation. Dual channel RAM also gives a slight performance increase, but thats in the percent range and can be shown only in benchmarks.

Still it has not retro for me and the point there is the software it runs. The Athlon XP runs usually WinXP and XP is still in use in a lot of machines (I know support will stop soon). It is running on most of the systems on my workplace and most application still run on XP. So an Athlon XP system is not yet in the time range where it gets hard to find a current running machine with a similar setup. For me the Athlon XP gets retro if Windows XP gets retro and applications start to require e.g. Win7.
Then if you power on the Athlon XP system you have an retro experience, since Windows XP quit the normal work environment.

And then there are always niches where there is no pressure to replace a system.

It depends on how you define "retro", but I'd say the Athlon XP is a retro CPU.

I don't really think Athlon XP is retro. Mainly because I built a few Athlon XP and Pentium 3 machines for various friends and family and some of them are still in use - all running Windows XP.

I believe they are obsolete but not really retro.

I kinda feel like Socket 3 and earlier is 'retro' but anything newer is merely obsolete, because Socket 3 tends to be radically different from any machine you see today. Socket 5/7 (and even some late Socket 3 boards) blurs the line a bit but anything after that feels a bit too recent for me - once you start getting ATX boards that use PCI and DIMMs, with onboard IDE, sound, network, video etc, and don't support external cache on the motherboard, you start getting too modern for my tastes. Most of this stuff is considered obsolete but there's still plenty of systems out there that use it - and most kids these days that tinker with computers will be able to at least recognize most of the parts and repair such a machine. Give them a VLB 486 though and they'd have no idea.

Of course its all personal preference. I've had discussions with people that think anything from the 90's is too recent to be retro.

I don't think I know anyone who still uses an Athlon XP as their everyday computer. I used a single core Athlon 64 myself until 2.5 years ago and that was pretty bad at the end. I still use Windows XP however. It has no problems running on the hardware that I currently use and is better than 7 in many respects.