Those Northwood Celerons were impressively bad. Jeez, I'd say they were even worse off than the original cacheless ones. Most people ran Win98 on their Covingtons, and 9x didn't take nearly as much of a performance hit as NT when cache size/performance wasn't up to par. But those Northwood Celerons were expected to run XP!

My PIII-S @ 1575 legitimately spanks the 2.6Ghz Celeron in pretty much everything: Far Cry, Doom 3, Painkiller, NFSU, Superpi, 7-Zip, 3DMark99-2003, the list just goes on and on.

It even outperformed the Celeron in pure x87 FP, now that was surprising.

Hmm.. worst build personally would be one that you turn from real nice to real crap by fudging a setting.

I built a S939 Athlon 64 3800+/2GB DDR400/GeForce 6800 Ultra to try and build a fast Win98/XP machine. After installing 98 with a 512MB stick, I limited the RAM with HimemX and reinstalled the 2GB. Windows 98 booted ok, so I proceeded to also limit MaxPhysPage to 512MB just to be safe. Instead of typing 20000, I missed a zero and limited Win98 to 32MB. After rebooting, any mouse click took 2-3 minutes to register and my hard drive got a swap file workout.

Being sleepy appears to be a more formidable foe than slow parts.

Worst CPU for me would be a Cyrix P166+. It is the only processor that I've seen burn out on its own when using a good heatsink/fan and without overclocking it

We had a Cyrix 6x86 P166+ with an ISA Cirrus Logic CL-GD5426 video card. It took a while to finally realize it was slowing things down and upgrade to PCI. I think the framerate of Duke Nukem 3D doubled.

The worst computer build I've ever had was my family's first home built. We called around to find a cheap motherboard and guess what we found. That build had a generic 486 motherboard built by PC Chips. The layout is an exact match to the board that's shown in redhill's article about the infamous fake cache board, the only difference is that our board had a socketed BIOS and socketed cache chips. I do not know if the cache was real, but it had the same anonymous chipset with the simple 3 letter code on it and a sticker to cover that up to look better. I didn't figure all this out until reading that web site 15 years later - at the time we were clueless.
It was chronically unstable, half the games I wanted to play were simply unplayable because it would crash them so much. The remaining games were playable only because the crashes were just rare enough that I could tolerate them.

A VIA SS7 + WinChip with a PowerVR PCX1 and a Rush and a bad WSS should be interesting. Even better with unpatched Windows ME on top. That way, you get all API (that are popular) support, CPU features (MMX+3DNow) support, and it's all bad hardware!

leileilol wrote:

A VIA SS7 + WinChip with a PowerVR PCX1 and a Rush and a bad WSS should be interesting. Even better with unpatched Windows ME on top. That way, you get all API (that are popular) support, CPU features (MMX+3DNow) support, and it's all bad hardware!

If you get a PC Chips board with the "TX Pro" chipset, it would simultaneously be a badly implemented VIA board and the worst "Intel" motherboard ever made. Or you could go with a Covington Celeron to see how no L2 cache completely bones performance.

leileilol wrote:

A VIA SS7 + WinChip with a PowerVR PCX1 and a Rush and a bad WSS should be interesting. Even better with unpatched Windows ME on top. That way, you get all API (that are popular) support, CPU features (MMX+3DNow) support, and it's all bad hardware!

I love the way you thought here, all the potential for greatness hampered by crap real life performance in one machine 😀

haha our first PC when i was a kid came with dos 4

an ibm ps/2 model 30 286 with 1mb of ram

i actually quite liked the shell it came with, a touch memory hungry but less so than windows 3.1 or quickmenu

ODwilly wrote:

How about a matx Skywell i5 build, one of the models w/o IGP (s?) 1tb ssd, 64gb of ddr4! . . .and have a pci Matrox g450 running Windows 7? Because there are proper Windows drivers for it.

I like my xeon e5 build as everything works right unlike much of the mess that people suffer with in the mainstream, small margins since sandy bridge and limited pic-e lanes meant that I didn't have much of an option. At least the cpu was cheap at only $109 (woot 12 cores 24 threads) paired with a $126 quad channel ddr4 board I think I did pretty good vs most budget builds. 😎

I can live with gimped clocks for a while till businesses start dumping their Haswell procs in mass after they upgrade to their 20+ core Broadwell monsters.

Standard Def Steve wrote:

Those Northwood Celerons were impressively bad. Jeez, I'd say they were even worse off than the original cacheless ones. Most people ran Win98 on their Covingtons, and 9x didn't take nearly as much of a performance hit as NT when cache size/performance wasn't up to par. But those Northwood Celerons were expected to run XP!

My PIII-S @ 1575 legitimately spanks the 2.6Ghz Celeron in pretty much everything: Far Cry, Doom 3, Painkiller, NFSU, Superpi, 7-Zip, 3DMark99-2003, the list just goes on and on.

It even outperformed the Celeron in pure x87 FP, now that was surprising.

A lot of those eventually ended up running Vista then later 7. :s

It'd have to be an Adlib Gold as a soundcard - not completely useless, but one of the most short lived products ever.

Hercules graphics card of course..

- anything with an AMD E350/E450
- anything with a NetBurst Celeron, especially with onboard graphics
- most Athlon 64 x2 builds
- most consumer laptops

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

- anything with an AMD E350/E450 - anything with a NetBurst Celeron, especially with onboard graphics - most Athlon 64 x2 builds […]
Show full quote

- anything with an AMD E350/E450
- anything with a NetBurst Celeron, especially with onboard graphics
- most Athlon 64 x2 builds
- most consumer laptops

The Brazos chips were fine for their intended purpose in very low power applications. They offered a step up from the Atom chips of the time and their highly limited GMA chipsets. Lots of them got shoveled into low quality 15" laptops where they didn't really belong, though.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

-most Athlon 64 x2 builds

What is wrong with the Athlon 64 x2?

Probably referring to the pre-Phenom Athlon64 x2 which needed a "dual-core optimizer" program for it

Any build that includes an Atom CPU. They are terrible at anything that involves a GUI or graphics of any kind, be it Windows or Linux. The only use I have found for the couple of Atom boards I have come across is as headless Linux fileservers.

stamasd wrote:

Any build that includes an Atom CPU. They are terrible at anything that involves a GUI or graphics of any kind, be it Windows or Linux. The only use I have found for the couple of Atom boards I have come across is as headless Linux fileservers.

Atoms are also good for firewalls (pfsense/ipcop/ipfire). Don't even need much RAM unless you want to run IDS/proxy.

clueless1 wrote:

stamasd wrote:

Any build that includes an Atom CPU. They are terrible at anything that involves a GUI or graphics of any kind, be it Windows or Linux. The only use I have found for the couple of Atom boards I have come across is as headless Linux fileservers.

Atoms are also good for firewalls (pfsense/ipcop/ipfire). Don't even need much RAM unless you want to run IDS/proxy.

Yes, I have openwrt on one. But anything desktop-related, forget it.

Atom CPUs are a great illustration of both the Grove-Gates Law and Wirth's Law (which are variants of each other). In the first, “The speed of software halves every 18 months.” This is sometimes stated as “What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away.” In the second, “Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is getting faster.”

So, you can choose which one to believe depending on your pessimism.

The real crime with the Atom chipset, though, is the intentionally crippled chipset.

leileilol wrote:

Probably referring to the pre-Phenom Athlon64 x2 which needed a "dual-core optimizer" program for it

That's exactly what I was referring to. The Athlon II was actually a good chip, since it was basically just a cost-reduced Phenom II. 😀