Tetrium wrote:

To me this analogy isn't true though.
Not having any PC that's more recent doesn't automatically make the PC non-retro.

Let me add a bit to that: I meant these people who still use such PCs as their main PC because they are perfectly capable of everyday tasks like browsing the modern web and latest OS. This is what makes them non-retro for me, the fact that one can still do actual today's things on them (even if not everything, but not everyone is a gamer for exanple). But I get what you mean...

Tetrium wrote:

Retro is a bit of a gliding scale and kinda dynamic.

...and also agree on the above.

I agree with most of you guys in that AGP and DDR1 is retro - and as some LGA775 boards use AGP and DDR1...

But as some of you said, I guess ultimately retro depends on your perspective.

By LAW:

It needs to contain at least something from 3dfx
It needs to be worth nothing, but cost a fortune
it needs to support 3,3v agp
it needs to have an isa slot
it needs to run 98se or lower
it needs to have 512mb ram or lower
It needs to be in a yellowing case
It needs to make a tiny bit more noise than you can handle
It needs to be even slower than it was in your memory
It needs to be recapped soon

Only then it's a true retro 🤣 🤣 🤣

Hahaha very true! And by your second point, LGA775 stuff today is not yet worth nothing, and doesn't yet cost a fortune. So it is starting to be the time to stock up on these parts, so that in 15 years' time they will be very rare and valuable, and you will have plenty of them!

I can already see it now - it will only retro then if it comes in a black case, with blue LEDs, doesn't have a USB type-C port, etc, etc.

I must really be old then, or not willing enough, to go with the flow. 🤣

To me, WinXP is not retro. It's just obsolete.
Anything that has native working drivers for Win9x, runs AGP and P4 are old enough to be retro in my eyes.

Starting from GF-6xxx and up era stuff, becomes non retro for me, and will be placed in the obsolete pile.

kanecvr wrote:

I agree with most of you guys in that AGP and DDR1 is retro - and as some LGA775 boards use AGP and DDR1...
But as some of you said, I guess ultimately retro depends on your perspective.

Exactly. I'll consider the Q4x PCIe + WinXP build retro because of the software that I'll run on it.

I think it's easy... there are older retro hardware and newer retro hardware.
It depends on every perspective, but when you look at the average perspective, a Voodoo or PIII is more retro than a 775 core 2 quad, looking at the median.

An example with old cars:
Where i live, every car which exeeds the age of 30years, then it will get the status of an "oldtimer". For 20years to 30years old cars, we speak of an "youngtimer".
At the year 2000, an oldtimer would be considered for example a 'Mercedes-Benz W 109' from 1970. (Now the next two years, in the year 2018, my first car (a Toyota from 1988) would get an oldtimer if already exists...)

Considering this rule...the 775 / 771 stuff will get retro after the year 2020... ( 😎 )

Regardless of opinions about this era of hardware it is wise to at the very least consider collecting some of the choice parts before supplies dry up and they become cost prohibitive especially the boards if you are into SLI. The procs will eventually become chicken feed cheap except for maybe an extreme edition here or there but overall in a couple of years people will start looking back at this era of hardware the same way people are looking at win9x era do now.

My grandpa still uses a Q9550 Dell Inspiron 530 micro tower with 4gb of ram, a geforce 9500gt and W10. Obsolete but so amazingly usables still.

for me, the borderline is a P4 (s775) system with AGP and ddr1, barely can run games above 2008.
even for viewing youtube you can struggled a bit (videos on 720P or above) 😵

My working PC is a C2Q9650 (s775), 8GB Ram DDR2, AMD Radeon 6970 1GB, Win10 and play many modern games at decent/good speed. 😊

Regards!

My 2 cents.To me retro is something that has seen a resurgence after a period of more or less being worthless or undesirable. So for a piece of hardware to be retro it has to be something that at one time was seen as more or less worthless by the majority and then afterward find's itself a cult following.

Now hardware actually being retro and using it for retro purposes are completely diffrent things as was previously stated.

Not even close yet, I recently played Civ VI on a Xeon E5450 and GTX 480 🤣

it depends,
Core 2 based stuff still is pretty OK for average usage, the 45nm ones are also not terribly inefficient at it; I could use a Q9650 as my main CPU for current software.
the earlier 775 (Pentium 4) Netburst based stuff I think already lost that, I couldn't really use one daily for current software.

SPBHM wrote:

it depends,
Core 2 based stuff still is pretty OK for average usage, the 45nm ones are also not terribly inefficient at it; I could use a Q9650 as my main CPU for current software.
the earlier 775 (Pentium 4) Netburst based stuff I think already lost that, I couldn't really use one daily for current software.

I'll Agree to that

Pentium D and back are useless for the modern world, and first gen Core 2 E4xxx and E6xxx are also getting to become useless, while Qxxx won't be for awhile.

.... there's actually a few games that refuse to run correctly on Win 10 anniversary edition and even windows 8 on modern systems (LGA1155 / Z77) but will run correctly on a LGA 775 gaming machine with XP or sometimes win 8, marking the need for such a machine. Here are some:

Carmageddon Reincarnation - a game from last year!!! - won't start on win 10 anniversary (nvidia Pascal driver or hardware issue) works fine on maxwell, ATi cards under win10, and pascal cards under win 8.1 - tested on i7 3770k / Z77 and Phenom II X6 platforms
Starpoint Gemini 2 - won't launch on win 10 (direct X 9 library related) - works fine on windows 8.1 / Phenom II X6 platform
Warhammer 40k Dawn of War II - crash to desktop on win 10 (games for windows live related) - works fine on windows 8.1 / Phenom II X6 platform
Fallout 3 Game of the year eddition - crash to desktop on win 10 (games for windows live related) - works fine on windows 8.1 / Phenom II X6 platform
Crysis (1) - no sound or garbled sound under win 10 anniversary (direct sound related) - works fine on win XP and some win 7/win 8 machines, tested on Q6600, Phenom II X6 platform
Earth 2150 - crash to desktop after a few minutes of gameplay (direct X 9 library related) - works fine under XP, tested on Athlon XP 3200+, Q6600 platforms
Darkstar one - crash to desktop after a few minutes of gameplay (unknown reason) - works fine under XP, tested on Q6600

It's funny how some rather recent games behave poorly on windows 10, but Total Annihilation, a game from 1997? will run flawlessly and with native widescreen support on old and new machines / OSes... I got the original version of TotalA to run on win10 out of the box - no patches, no mods, and it runs at 1920x1080 from the menu, witch is freaking amazing for such an old game.

I'm not gonna argue about the retro thing but longevity of Core 2 can't be denied. Q9650/E5450 @ 4GHz with a strong enough modern GPU is still pulling an average 60 fps in Witcher 3. That's incredible for an almost 9 year old chip!

The platform will always have a spot in my heart for offering still modern features and amazing OCing/value for it's time, and a last hurrah of the traditional northbridge/southbridge chipset design.

Socket 771 Dempsey-based Xeons are retro IMO, being the last of the Netburst architecture. They are also past the 10-year mark having release dates middle of 2006. Same applies to Socket 775 Presler Pentium Extreme stuff, past the 10-year mark. Pentium D also falls into retro IMO.

At the same time, Dempsey Xeons and Presler-based Pentium Extreme Editions are weird in that you can run them on more modern 771/775 boards, so the retro classification is almost in a grey area. Theoretically, you could run the Socket 771 Dempsey procs on a Skulltrail board, something I don't consider retro at all, although I've never seen anyone do this. You can also sticker mod them to run on modern Socket 775 boards. And of course you can run Presler Pentium Extreme Editions on any newer 775 board as well.

Early Core 2 stuff is so slow now I would consider them useless, but not quite retro... certainly anything Core 2 Duo would be unusable in modern use. The quad cores still have utility, but I would not use any of the 65nm stuff, the 45nm procs are so cheap and still perform quite well. With sticker modding you can run excellent Socket 771 Xeon silicon on 775 boards and overclock the shit out of them.

X5450s and X5470s are probably the best procs for this kind of use, definitely not retro.

The machine that I put together in mid 2009 is still my main rig. It's a C2Q (Q9550) on an Asus P5Q Premium (I think it's PCIe 2.0), has DDR2 4GB RAM, SATA2 mechanical WD Black drives, and an Asus GTX560 Ti. It's running Windows 7 32 bit. I also added an USB 3.0 I/O card, since mobo has nothing to do with USB 3.0. Tried adding SATA3 again with controllers, but that was not practical, so I returned back to mobo SATA2 controllers.

It has no problems with my daily needs (internet, movies, office things, video and photo editing, etc.). It might be a bit on the slow side probably (compared to what is hip today considering no SSD, etc.) but it's what I get used to for the last several years.

When it comes to games, I generally play "new" games when they are not so new anymore, so my newest games at the moment are Far Cry 3 and Crysis 3. I have no problems either with any of the games I play, although I'm sure I don't have 1000+ fps in any of them. 🤣

My latest purchase, Cryşis 3 is the only exception at the moment. This is purchased from Origin, and Origin client + Crysis 3 combo is the only thing that reminds me I have not enough memory. It's actually because of Origin client being (needlessly) so much a resource monster, and I still can play it well by terminating Origin client after launching the game.

In addition to this, my HTPC is based on a C2D (E8400) and I believe it will cover my expectations from an HTPC quite well for years to come.

So, C2Q (and in some cases even a C2D) is not old school or retro or something else, IMHO. They are just "old but good enough". They are Iphone 5s, not iphone 4 yet 🤣

tayyare wrote:

The machine that I put together in mid 2009 is still my main rig. It's a C2Q (Q9550) on an Asus P5Q Premium (I think it's PCIe 2 […]
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The machine that I put together in mid 2009 is still my main rig. It's a C2Q (Q9550) on an Asus P5Q Premium (I think it's PCIe 2.0), has DDR2 4GB RAM, SATA2 mechanical WD Black drives, and an Asus GTX560 Ti. It's running Windows 7 32 bit. I also added an USB 3.0 I/O card, since mobo has nothing to do with USB 3.0. Tried adding SATA3 again with controllers, but that was not practical, so I returned back to mobo SATA2 controllers.

It has no problems with my daily needs (internet, movies, office things, video and photo editing, etc.). It might be a bit on the slow side probably (compared to what is hip today considering no SSD, etc.) but it's what I get used to for the last several years.

When it comes to games, I generally play "new" games when they are not so new anymore, so my newest games at the moment are Far Cry 3 and Crysis 3. I have no problems either with any of the games I play, although I'm sure I don't have 1000+ fps in any of them. 🤣

My latest purchase, Cryşis 3 is the only exception at the moment. This is purchased from Origin, and Origin client + Crysis 3 combo is the only thing that reminds me I have not enough memory. It's actually because of Origin client being (needlessly) so much a resource monster, and I still can play it well by terminating Origin client after launching the game.

In addition to this, my HTPC is based on a C2D (E8400) and I believe it will cover my expectations from an HTPC quite well for years to come.

So, C2Q (and in some cases even a C2D) is not old school or retro or something else, IMHO. They are just "old but good enough". They are Iphone 5s, not iphone 4 yet 🤣

You should definitely try a budget SSD out. Even on SATA2 the speedup in everyday tasks is amazing, once you had a SSD you will never want to use a PC without one again.

I know what you mean and fully agree with you. My HTPC and daughter's PC both have SSDs installed on them, 120 GB cheap models but still the performance is amazing (even being both boards are SATA2).

But my HDDs in the afore mentioned rig are 1TB and more, out of necessity: three RAID1 arrays, 2 x 1+1TB and 1 x 2+2TB. I really have no budget for even a single 1TB SSD, let alone 6 of them, especially now, TL /USD exchange rate skyrocketed from 2.5 to 4 in a single year. 🤣