As I said, I don't rate gaming hardware and rarely go near it if I can help it, there has to be a reason that it costs the same as a good workstation board but they somehow managed to get all this extra plastic all over the place... Makes you think the plastic is 90% the cost instead of a well thought out design... Also RoHS sucks.

I tried overclocking the Pentium to see how fast it would go, 215MHz on the FSB proved to be the limit which yielded around 3GHz but that was literally just a few minutes, I don't overclock machines that are used for anything important and even then, I rarely do it for ones that aren't.

As I said, the 754 versions of the 64 seemed to be better, I never attempted to use one as a performance machine so I don't know how they fare at that and I doubt it was their intended purpose so it probably wouldn't be a fair test, but as a generic desktop they worked well - I even have an Athlon 64 3200+ on some ECS board I bought as a cheap bundle years ago that I use as a testbed. It's lived a horrible life and still just plods along happily. I didn't expect much from it, so overall I'm happy with that one.

Core 2 Quad is the newest thing I have, I had hoped the Pentium could hold on until I got a replacement set up, but it didn't and the replacement is getting no nearer to being affordable. I'm thinking of giving it one last go once I'm done playing with film and maybe getting another synth, but if I can't scrape the money together in a few months I'll probably just get a last-gen i5 and make do with it, the performance boost should be ridiculous anyway I would have thought.

I'm into Socket 3 to SS 7 eras. My full rigs have those. Slot 1 and Slot A systems are also interesting. But that's it, later computers do not have that kind of mojo, imho...

I have one full rig with Socket 478 P4 1,6 GHz but that's only for testing different kind of hardware, P4...I kind of hate them 😁 They are just too common as well as Athlon XP's.

Durons are completely different then, there's something magical about them. Last week I bought Compaq Presario 5000 series. It's Duron 700. Upgraded it from 64 mb to 512 mb and NVidia Vanta LT to Connect 3D Radeon 9600 Pro 128 mb. Going to install SB Live and then it's ready to rock 😀 and there's even Windows ME in it so it's fun blast from the past...

smeezekitty wrote:

The graphics war is a different story. AMD is still keeping pace with NVidia in performance. Yes it takes more power to do it
but that doesn't really matter much. Also their 3xx series is claiming to help with power consumption. Personally I refuse to buy any new NVidia product
because I despise them as a company and the way they conduct business.

Can you share more details about despising nVidia?

It's the last platform shared by Intel, AMD and others.

That is a pretty cool thing to have both brands with the same socket.

Windows 7 on a socket 7...slow??!

Yeah... Hell slow... Just doing it for fun.

But that's it, later computers do not have that kind of mojo, imho...

Couldn't agree more.

P4...I kind of hate them

Agree with this too. Hot, slow and more common than dirt. What is to like?

Yeah... Hell slow... Just doing it for fun.

I do stuff like this too. People don't get why.
Like XP on a P2 with 192 RAM or 2000 on a 486 with 64 MB of RAM.

Just for the thrill of it.

Can you share more details about despising nVidia?

That don't hesitate to screw over the customer.

For example deliberately breaking hybrid PhysX for no good reason, charging $1000 for the Titan and $3000 for the Titan Z
is absolutely ludicrous. AMD largely put them in their place there. Now their prices are much more reasonable but they still suck.

They are also quite hostile to board partners. The people in charge are slimy and I just don't like them.

I am forced to become an "AMD fan" even though AMD doesn't make me happy sometimes (like dropping driver support for Vista)

This is an interesting thread indeed. My love is the Pentium 1 era, pre-AGP. So many things going on in hardware at the time and lots of new things happening in games. Not to mention the birth of USB, optical and magneto-optical drives.

My main box is also a Q9550. It serves me well and it is an OEM HP system. I found clues in this thread that led me to this http://www.overclockers.com/intel-lga775-pad-modding/

A 20% overclock of bus speed and CPU speed going from 333 to 400 is very tempting. The Q9550 (2.83-GHz) already scores a 7.3 in Windows 7 (I know it is not a true benchmark but it's a decent guideline for Windows performance) I wonder what it will do at 3.4-GHz? Very interesting. My machine is populated with DDR-2 800 so I should be set. I will admit I haven't taken the time to read about how Core 2 works with FSB and memory clock, although I am almost positive they are asynchronous anyway.

Edit: I meant the birth of optical burning

squareguy wrote:

This is an interesting thread indeed. My love is the Pentium 1 era, pre-AGP. So many things going on in hardware at the time and lots of new things happening in games. Not to mention the birth of USB, optical and magneto-optical drives.

The 486 through Pentium 1 did have a lot going for it.
Rise of PCI, rise and fall of VLB, rise of AGP, USB, popularization of CDROMS and the emergence of the burner as you said. Also 72 pin RAM, rapid improvements in GPUs, transition to widely available 16/24/32 bit color.
Big time in computing.

A 20% overclock of bus speed and CPU speed going from 333 to 400 is very tempting. The Q9550 (2.83-GHz) already scores a 7.3 in Windows 7 (I know it is not a true benchmark but it's a decent guideline for Windows performance) I wonder what it will do at 3.4-GHz? Very interesting. My machine is populated with DDR-2 800 so I should be set. I will admit I haven't taken the time to read about how Core 2 works with FSB and memory clock, although I am almost positive they are asynchronous anyway.

Unfortunately memory speed IS tied to FSB. Most boards have a divider that can be changed to keep the RAM from OCing too far but if you increase FSB the RAM does increase too.

Smeezekitty,

That is good to know. I should not have any issue with this box if I try it then. DDR2 800 is 400-MHz 😉

Edit:

actually i just downloaded CPU-Z and realized it is DDR-2 667. It is currently running the Q9550 as follows.

2.83-GHz, 333-MHz bus, 1333-MHz FSB, 533-MHz memory with 5:8 FSB:DRAM.

Might try it soon, unsure. Sorry I'm all done, not trying to hijack post.

F2bnp wrote:

Not too worry, Bulldozer is going away next year.

I was referring to GeforceFX, they're the Pentium 4 of video cards. 😀

I really love the Pentium right now. Still can find them, start of plug and pray (less jumpers than previous stuff, but still jumpers yay!) and still findable to some degree. The ONLY 486 parts I have ever found are a (dead?) Goodwill board, my dad's desktop ornament fried 486 OD and 66 dx2. AM2/775 is kind of fun right now because everyone is tossing and retiring them. I would enjoy 478 if it wasnt for the fact that while common, the stuff seems to always be horrible quality and/or worn out.

I find the mid 90s to be the most fascinating. At the time all I had access to was a family computer without any specialized hardware, but I had friends and relations with machines capable of MechWarrior 2, and I loved it. Now it's great to go back and really experience all the permutations of hardware acceleration.

That's also my favorite time for Apple hardware. I think the Power Macintosh line, and my favorite, the G3 (Beige, though a friend's family had a G3 iMac and it was cool at the time) were Apple's most solid, usable machines. Strange how Apple only does well when it does a good job of marketing bad hardware, and not vice versa.

The 386 era and then early to late 2000s. 386 because it was our first family PC, early to late 2000s because I had some of my best gaming experiences on a Celeron 1 Ghz and then a Northwood Pentium 3.2 Ghz.

Honestly, I LOVE the P4 for entirely subjective reasons. Morrowind with pixel shaded water, Oblivion, CS 1.6, Warcraft 3... I don't care for the "but AMD was more efficient", it was my first truly "kickass" PC when I was 11-13 and the only thing that ever angered me about it was the hard drive. Some people here seem to hate the P4 because they associate it with shitty Dells, well, I associate it with my childhood/puberty, I guess I have a similiar type of prejudice for the Athlon XP as I only saw it in action in really shitty school PCs.

For me, it is the 80's generation of hardware. Wich spans from 286 to 486 computers.
Actually more specific 286, 386 and 486 computers. Those are the ones that I have the best memory of.
That said, it is more or less a retro or nostalgia feeling. I just has a blast back then.

In terms of other type of hardware, like soundcards and such. We are a bit into the 90's.
I really like GUS and SoundBlaster cards. And I really like the VL-Bus.

So.... The best computer that I have ever had, and have the best memories of, are not an 80's machine.
It is a 486dx2 66 with full VL-Bus gfx and controller, and just a standard SB16 card.
That was the best machine that I have ever had. Besides that.
The 80's were the best in terms of overall hardware, both beige "Intel based" pc's and Commodore computers.

1997 to 2001 for me. Love them PIIs and PIIIs especially.

I'm partial to 2004-era hardware - specifically, the Athlon 64, Radeon X800 series, and Audigy 2. An XP machine built with these parts can run most any Windows 9x game at least as well (and often far better) than any period correct rig. It can also handle most next-gen games released through 2006, and DOSBox becomes a viable option at this point as well. Really a compatibility sweet spot, and just an exciting year in general.